Zoom Out for Bigger Picture

Social Reef: An Industry Perspective

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Jeremiah Owyang is a social media analyst for Forrester Research. Basically, he takes a big-picture look at the social media industry and advises investors and others with stakes in the game. I've followed his Web Strategy blog for quite some time. It is very good at providing a view of what's on the horizon, as well as clarification (through numbers!) of trends and what's really happening in the social media world.

I found this slide show, while kinda cute (really, did I just say 'cute'?), gives a 3D element to understanding what the world looks like from 30,000 feet. (Like being able to see the layout of a large city from an airplane window.)

Jeremiah says he created to slide show to explain his job to family/friends. He appears at the end. Most likely, your organization is invested in the technology (content management) described on slides 11 and 12 to run your web site. I pretty much operate as a starfish (slide 15).

Enjoy with a helping of "This helps paint the big picture, but I really don't have to understand everything here."

Edit of Side Note:

While posting Jeremiah's "Social Reef" presentation, I noticed another "big picture" moment in the sharing options available on the Slide Share page.


If you select "More", there's an additional line of options. This is STILL just a sampling of the big ones. All the places where you can share this particular bit of digital content with friends, family, colleagues, readers... and the world at large. Just as I've done with this blog. It's overwhelming, even for those of us who think about social media all the time.

What you can see here, though, is that five are listed at the very top. To get to the rest, you have to click the "more share options" link. For Slide Share users, those are the five that REALLY matter. Being that Blogger and WordPress are both blogging platforms (you need to choose one of the two), these are the four platforms I recommend any company/organization start with in beginning their journey into social media.