Social Media Portal

It seems that when you move in the circles of early adopters one thing comes across very clearly “early adoption is not early enough” and by this I mean that we all seem to want the next step and go to great lengths to try and facilitate it. This is good, it pushes boundaries and gives others the ideas to push their own products that ultimately lead to mass adoption of that product. It also means that you don’t have to build it yourself and can use products and tools that have already had the time invested in development.

One thing that’s been on my mind for a while is geotagging and the presentation and sharing of geotagged material. Since working with Christian Payne (@Documentally) I’ve produced a few mashups that present information in a single portal. We’ve worked together to refine what information is required and how we might display it graphically. Ultimately, my company Fish Media has been involved in some of the more technical code aspects and that’s lead me onto thinking of defining what it actually is.

The Social Media Portal Concept

Here are some options for creating a central point of interest (or micro site) to help document an assignment or event. We like to encourage the use of Social Media to amplify and document events and we’ve leveraged existing third party widgets and embeddable code to create a Social Media Portal – a one-stop-shop to keep up with the event.

The process:

• Register or use an existing domain name and setup hosting for the new Micro Site.
• Design and build a layout to tie in with your existing identity.
• Embed media from different Social Media third party sources:
  • Flickr – for photography.
  • Twitter – for status updates.
  • AudioBoo – for live audio recordings.
  • Posterous – for blog posts.
  • Gowalla – for location log-ins on a Google Map.
• Add Facebook share (like) buttons and Twitter share buttons to enable re-amplification.

Once the portal is live, you will:

• Upload photos to Flickr and they will appear on the Portal.
• Send live audio to AudioBoo discussing the brief and they will appear on the AudioBoo map and Flash widget.
• Create Posterous blog posts and links will appear on the Portal. The latest blog post will be embedded.

This allows you/your company to use the site to create a buzz about the journey and encourage the use of Social Media to amplify it.

Take a look at:

• www.storymaking.net
• www.experiencebrittany.co.uk