Over all, the online marketing community over-emphasizes on blogs as being the HUB of customer engagement…though, I admit – with good reason (as of now).
Hubs of the future, may not be centralized and could be a collection of third party sites (which will wax and wane in popularity). We are probably seeing the first indications of the move in this direction when we embed Fanboxes, Twitter feeds and Youtube videos in our blogs.
Traditional blogs (such as this) are too much of work for the average business, who given the opportunity, will jump on to easier ways to consolidate effort.
Today’s blogs could easily evolve to an effortless aggregate of micro-blogs (twitter) and FB updates/albums flicker, Youtube, Linkedin etc. Aggro-hubs!
Think paper.li on steroids and then some!
We could have apps that pulls it all together. Software that aggregates all the activity and displays them from one ‘Account’. An Aggro-hub would then be a page (or a series of pages) that contains all the content on third party social platforms, displayed as one entity.
This all kind of exists you say? With embeds etc…but wait, what about ownership of data?
Any such aggregation solution would have to include shared ownership of data with the aggregating ‘Aggro-hub Account’. A customer commenting on a corporate Facebook page may agree (revokable) to some of his data being passed to the corporate Aggro-hub for efficient service and/or loyalty rewards.
There is now sufficient precedent to sharing personal data in return for services – most of us are getting increasingly comfortable in allowing access between various social media accounts and apps.
It makes more sense for many companies to engage with customers on third party social media outposts of the customers choice. Today’s blogs are too primitive (die marketing echo chamber! ). They require skill-sets that are not always inherent in the makeup of many businesses. These blogs demand new skills and expertise (SEO, writing etc.) instead of being able to leverage the skills native to the business or the activities.
No wonder then that the talented photographer is able to generate better response on his facebook album than on his blog. If only he could leverage his Facebook success on his blog…effortlessly, without having to jump through all sorts of loops.
Instead of forcing businesses to do something alien to them (at an added expense), meeting them half way (with aggregated hubs) seems logical.
Of course these Aggro-hubs will also be indexable by search engines. Bi-directional flow of data between social networks and Aggro-hubs would eliminate expenses arising from duplicity of effort across channels too. If you are more comfortable with Linkedin Groups, that is what would be reflected on your Aggro-hub.
Any solution that works for personal and business accounts will probably win a huge following…the next big thing?
Somewhere out there, is/will-be a tech entrepreneur trying to make it easier for businesses and individuals to get their messages out while giving them more ownership over data. You agree that blogs are showing their age?