Hot on the heels of MySpace Apps launching a couple months ago, Social Media applications are fast becoming the norm. The LinkedIn applications look like they are more focused and controlled than the direction MySpace and Facebook have gone. At launch yesterday, these Applications were available on LinkedIn:

1. Reading List (Amazon).  Extends your person profile by sharing your reading list.
2. Box.net Files (Box.net).  Share important files.
3. Company Buzz (LinkedIN).  Provides a feed of Twitter activity on your company.
4. Google Presentation (Google).  Share PowerPoint files.
5. Huddle Workspaces (Huddle.net).  Secure online workspaces for collaborating with connections.
6. WordPress (WordPress).  Synchronize your blog with your LinkedIN profile.
7. BlogLink (Six Apart).  Synchronize your blog with your LinkedIN profile.
8. SlideShare Presentations (SlideShare).  Check out presentations from your connections.
9. My Travel (Tripit).  See where your connections are traveling.
10. LinkedIn Polls. While in the video below, it is not currently available on the site. Not sure what the story is here.

So initially they have 3 apps to feed content to your profile, 4 sharing apps (slideshows, books, files), a travel log, and an online workspace app. The least interesting to me is the travel log, but I can see a big future for all these directions.

I tested out the Reading List and WordPress apps first and found it to be a very seamless process with them both. I had the Stratius Blog feeding into my LinkedIn profile in less than a few seconds. Follow the link to see for yourself, or view the screen grab below of how it integrates into your profile. Very clean, very simple.

The Reading List app is pretty cool. Once it starts to get populated I can see it being really interesting to watch what your connections are reading and it could be a very powerful book promotion tool if the right person lists your book. Another blog app, BlogLink allows you to feed/read all the most recent posts from any blogs listed on your connections’ profiles. It automatically follows these blog links and populates the RSS, without them having to use the app as well.

Apps on Facebook, MySpace and other Social Networks are great fun, but on LinkedIn we are talking pure business and money. And this will mean money for LinkedIn as well. With all this new content, the increased time spent on the site alone will be a huge boon. More people will begin to use their LinkedIn profile as a portal into the business world instead of just an occasional tool. I expect this to also motivate some unique technologies, that may have gone undeveloped on other networks.

Here is the Youtube video from LinkedIn announcing the launch.

What applications or companies would you like to see added on to the above list?

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“Sharing links to articles and other content, very often for promotion, is the priority of sites within the Social Linking Sphere.”

Let’s take a closer look at Social Linking (see some example sites), as our first featured sphere of the Five Spheres of Social Media.

As first to market in many respects, Digg has dominated this sphere for some time. Online users looking for breaking news and/or to promote their own websites have made Digg renowned for both. The goal of Digg, and other similar sites, is a system of community identified newsworthy content. News is submitted, voted on and the most interesting stuff (hopefully) rises to the top. People will, naturally, work any system like this and try to ensure their content is deemed newsworthy in order to drive traffic and/or awareness where they choose.

With these somewhat conflicting goals, things have shaken up recently at Digg and other sites as they choose to crack down on their users for gaming the system. With some big users on Digg leaving for other sites combined with the natural growing competition within all of Social Media today, many other options have jumped onto the radar for those looking to explore Social Linking.

StumbleUpon, for one, has taken Digg’s model and made it more accessible with their famous Stumble Bar that embeds in your browser. It gives you easier access to interesting, community filtered content and more choices about what categories you explore. Stumble is arguably the second biggest player in this field. Beyond the first two, the field is a little more murky, with players like Mixx and Reddit gaining market share and even Yahoo getting into the game with Yahoo Buzz!.

As we delve deeper into each of the spheres, we plan to survey the Social Media community in an effort to help us better identify trends and increase everyone’s insights into these subjects. If you consider yourself a Social Linking maven, please help us kick things off by participating in the The Social Linking Survey. It is made up of 8 simple, multiple choice questions questions about which Social Linking sites you use and how you view them.

Have further questions about Social Linking? Please share them with us in the comments. We’ve got you covered.

The “Who We Watch” series will be an ongoing showcase of some of our favorite blogging, web 2.0 and social media influencers.

Guy is a hockey playing, Web 2.0 thought leading, venture capital funding, Hawaiian Mac lover.

Paying attention to Guy’s insights is a good move for anyone in business, especially if you live in the venture capital, social media or Web 2.0 spheres. I first started paying attention to Guy because he was a Mac lover (he has worked for Apple on two occasions) and is a uniquely talented speaker. He is the rare type of speaker that can simply powerful ideas into easily digested portions. Listening to him speak is a great investment of your time. He will encourage you to step outside of the traditional box and look for new solutions and new perspectives.

Guy is currently Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital fund. He also sits on the a few tech company boards, including SimplyHired.com. One of the cooler projects he is involved with and one of his most recent is Alltop.com.

Alltop is aggregation central. They list the best blogs on any given subject, from Poker to Poetry to Politics and beyond. Alltop is young, but it is growing fast, currently at around 250 topics. It has been described as a virtual magazine rack.It is a great resource for broad research. It is not the best tool to answer a specific question, but if you want to explore a topic on a larger scale, it is perfect.  This makes it ideal as a resource for researching blog posts.

Some of Our Favorite Wisdom from Guy:

• How to Suck Up to a Blogger
• Mantras vs Missions
• Guy’s Golden Touch
• The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint

Guy is successful because of the way he approaches business and problem solving. He simplifies complex concepts and reduces them down to their basic building blocks. In today’s online world, where 100 new theories on business pop up everyday, it is refreshing to read Guy’s steady, common-sense take.

Be sure to check out Alltop.com. If you notice, by the badge in our sidebar, The Stratius Blog is lucky enough to be listed on Alltop in Marketing and Social Media. Help us thank them by visiting and exploring their site.

Image Credit: Brad Fitzpatrick

Why We Watch Guy Kawasaki:

• Creative problem solver
• Uniquely talented speaker
• Social media super influencer
• Always working on cool projects

Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes, was released today.  Tribes speaks to the culture of community, connection and what it means to be a marketing leader in today’s wordl. Seth always has amazing insight on marketing, so I expect Tribes to be no exception.

The audio book is available for free, although you have to download audible.com software, but I think that is worth it. More to come after we read or listen to the whole book.

“Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.” - Seth Godin’s Blog

Worpress adds another jewel to their crown.

WordPress acquired PollDaddy this week. We recommended PollDaddy in a post on crowdsourcing back in August. We like both companies as they both offer free, quality online services that promote Web 2.0 interactivity anyone can use. With this purchase, we thought it was time to take a closer look at some of WordPress’ recent purchases of other small startups.

• Gravatar - Universal avatar service (aquired 10-18-07)
• Intense Debate - Threaded commenting (aquired 9-23-08)
• PollDaddy - Embeddable polls and surveys (aquired 10-15-08)

WordPress is looking out to the periphery of their industry and buying small niche companies that can add value to their product and diversify their service offerings.

This type of buying has worked out well for many companies in the past. Ebay recognized, a while back, that a little spin off company name PayPal had popped up as a product of their success. They moved to aquire PayPal, integrated it well within Ebay.com and benefited from PayPal’s increased usage across the internet.

Other ompanies, like Google and Apple, follow the same pattern as a matter of efficiency. They recognize that in today’s open online world, any kid in his garage or dorm room can have the next big idea, and usually does. Or, as it was in this case with PollDaddy, two guys from Ireland. Below is a sample of one of the Polldaddy polls. This one has a basic style, but there are many other looks and options available.

Gravatar and PollDaddy have already been integrated into the base WordPress platform and Intense Debate is soon to follow. I think all three add great value to WordPress and, similar to their anti-spam technology Akismet, all three offer them the ability to provide each service through other blogging platforms. This extends WordPress as a leader in their industry’s technology and gives them even more ways to reach more users.

Are there any other blogging related services out there that WordPress should be buying?

How do you describe Twitter to a new user?

Image source: Hubspot Twitter Webinar

Understanding exactly what Twitter is and what its benefits are is a difficult task. This graphic compares Twitter to 4 other well known online services and notes how it is different from each.

Twitter is like a blog except is it is only 140 characters
Twitter is a status update except it is viewable in lots of places
Twitter is like a giant chat room except you choose the people you follow
Twitter is like instant messaging except it’s public & archived online

What comparisons make sense to you? How do you describe Twitter to potential new users?

UPDATE: Great post on the Webinar over at Pistachio, even a shout out to Stratius, thanks.

UPDATE: Webinar now available here

Great video, exploring the complexity of the social web.

Barack Obama speaks to a crowd (April, 2008) about how his campaign has benefited from the expanded use of social media. He credits the social media with organizing his volunteers, specifically in Idaho and Kansas.

Supporters gathered together “on whatever social network they were using… they just started organizing.”

He praises the efficiency of social media in saving time and money and its ability to connect people. He even alludes to the fact that government should learn how to better leverage social media tools.

Video by VallyZen.com

A presidential campaign is one of the most complex marketing and advertising engines around. They touch every channel of media, every vertical measured in detail, and invest in every part of the country. So decisions to spend in certain niches are very deliberate. The McCain Campaign has clearly made search engine advertising a priority.

Attack ads on both sides fill TV, radio and Youtube, as McCain’s superior use of PPC (pay per click) search advertising flies under the radar. PPC can make or break a lot of online businesses and the McCain camp has been out in front on search ads since early in the primaries.

John McCain is outspending (by 2x) Democrats Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton on issues as well as buying his opponents’ “brand terms” - iReport, April 2008

Both candidates have focused less on issue focused keywords (health care, economy, etc.) and focused more on keywords that deal with the opposing candidate. Within this trend, McCain ads are getting more clicks. On Google Adwords, McCain focused ads get around 250 clicks per day compared to around 150 per day for Obama.

One McCain ad displays when searching for “Obama for president?” It asks the searcher “Why not learn more about John McCain for president?” and links to the McCain website

According to data from the Google AdWords website, advertisements targeted to users searching for “John McCain” on the Internet, cost nearly twice as much as those targeting users searching for “Barack Obama.” - Politico

This presidential race is in new territory when it comes to utilizing the web. I imagine who has used it better will not be a clear picture until after the election is long over. Right now, both campaigns can claim their own wins.

Read more:
McCain winning Adwords fight, Tech Republican
McCain vs. Obama in paid/organic search, Search Engine Land
Increased issues keyword buying, Adweek

Clearly defining segments of something as complex as the Social Web is a bit like trying to explain how men and women think; half of all people will most likely disagree with you. But will that stop us? Never.

This list is not definitive; It is, however, a great resource for showing our clients the complexity of the social web and where different opportunities exists.

So without further ado, here is are the 5 Spheres of Social Media, by the Stratius Group.

Networking

Publishing

Linking

Interactive

Niche