Paul Owen from Owen Media published a nice piece today in Xconomy.com, asking if Social Media was a fad that is going away, or something really hear to say.  

Paul’s piece had a range of comments from other social media firms in town, so I don’t want to repeat everything here.  He did a nice job of grabbing insight from the agencies who specilaize in Community Management and outsourced Customer Support, while also getting input from more full service organizations.  

Our viewpoint over at Social3i is you’ll only see more commerce through social channels, not less.  There’s a giant blurring between “Wb” and “Social” now, so that they are really one in the same.

There’s another whole article on privacy to be written, but take that out of the mix and look at two companies that released product in the last week – Color and Zapd. Color has all the fanfare for the amazing (or outrageous) valuation.  Zapd made less noise but comes from a guy who’s launched a lot of startups in his day, Kelly Smith.  Both focus on instant content generation, and the packaging of such content.

Color takes the idea of friends, and flips it on its ear, turnign everyone in your proximity into co-authors with you.  Zapd lets you take those random photos and turn them into a web page in 60 seconds, so you can share not just the photos, but the whole story, all in the time it takes to in line buying a beer.

Combine these philiosphies with the GroupOn and Living Social commerce infrastructure, and you can see (well we think you can see) where this is all going.  Add in Facebook credits, more virtual currency, and One-Click purchase technology on the phone, and social becomes more than Facebook customer service posts and Tweeting back and forth at each other from the same party.

Anyway, check out Paul’s article, and if you think I said anything dumb, feel free to lay into me in the comments section.

In Marketing these days, it’s all about “Influencer Identification.”  As in, “How do I spend as little money as possible to reach the most important people who will say good good things about me?” It’s a simple srategy and hard to pull off.

On the flip side, there’s something you don’t see a lot of – the followup.  After spending all that time to get the early adopters to make referrals to the majority, many brands simply forget where they got their start.  That’s what makes this simple email from LinkedIn’s CEO so clever.

Dear Andy,

I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number 121884 in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.

We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site. 

When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world’s professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more.  

We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.

Now, this email did a few things for me.  I never really consider myself an innovator.  Occasionally an early adopter.  But I was #121,884 out of 100,000,000, and I needed to go into Excel to figure out that makes me in the top 0.122% of LinkedIn adopters.  Not just top 1%, but dang near the top 10% of the 1%.Telling me that little stat is a nice way of showing me some love without seeming insincere.

Maybe more importantly, it also makes me realize and remember that LinkedIn has been an important part of my online world for a long time.  I may not go there every day, and I may not currently use it as much as I use other services like Pandora or Twitter.  But I needed that gentle reminder that while I had fun flings with MySpace, Shutterfly, Biznik, Ning, WetPaint, Lala, Digg, Delicious, Foursqaure, Gowalla, and 100 other intrguing networks, LinkedIn has weathered all the storms, making it through both the good and bad times.  It’s never been the sexiest or most interesting site, but it’s always there, does exactly what it promises, and occassionally provides me little unexpected moments of joy. It’s slowly turned into that trusted friend that you can’t imagine life without – something way more valuable than those little daliances into the new and exciting things that always disappoint.

So it’s not often you get to say complimentary things about an old brand.  But I like LinkedIn’s nod to their longtime fans.

Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I’m having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.

There’s nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and – if you choose too (I haven’t yet) – grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page. 

There’s real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can’t decide if they should have different url’s, different Facebook pages, etc… This gives you a nice aggregation capability.

For personal branding, I can’t think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc… all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.