The Social Media Scripting Framework has been published now for several weeks and the feedback that I’ve been collecting so far it’s been quite positive. In fact, I’ve learned a lot from the conversations that I’ve had with some of you and I am pretty confident that we are going to see interesting evolutions on future releases thanks to your contributions. Therefore, I would like to start thanking you all for help and support.
However, it is time to start explaining some concepts more in detail and showing up more complex examples. So, let’s start with the challenge: let’s run a Social Media Campaign from PowerShell!
Defining the scope …
For the purpose of this exercise, we are going to define our “project” as a broadcasting campaign run by someone that needs to know the exact impact of the activities that have been developed:
- under the scope of that campaign
- in the Social Media channels — namely, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — that will participate on it.
In order to achieve it, we have to capture the metrics associated to each post that gets pushed on these channels as a result of every action of our broadcasting campaign. In other words, if there is additional activity on them we need to be able to ignore it and identify those posts that strictly belong to our campaign.
Continue reading …
It’s been a while since my last post. And there has been a reason for it, actually. I’ve been working on a new project, the Social Media Scripting Framework: a PowerShell-based environment that abstracts the complexities of modern Social Media Channels from the PowerShell command-line.
There is not question that Social Media Technologies have opened the door, not only to new ways of interaction and relationship, but also to new ways to evaluate and measure them. However, after looking at the current ecosystem of tools and solutions for a while, I’ve observed that many of them, and sometimes all of them, follow similar structural patterns. For example:
- Form factor: SaaS delivered through the web. This, actually, is a very convenient way to provide a service while hiding the complexities to the consumer. But, unfortunately, this virtue is at the same time the main drawback. More often than not, our SaaS provider only focuses on a discrete set of functionalities and forces us to look somewhere else to fill in the gaps. At the end of the day, we end up with a collection of web services that we try to “orchestrate” by means of some sort of “digital craftsmanship”.
Continue reading …
Sooner or later we all end up having our own instance of a Social Media mashup. Our Interconnection Map will, hopefully, fulfill our needs and evolve with us and with time. However, no matter how complex it is, it will only address our more basic integration or automation needs.
The attention economy and relationships in the on-line world are heavily driven or influenced by the content we share. Unfortunately, content curation can be very time consuming. In other words, if we have to fight for audience attention, it is very likely that we start pushing our available resources to the limits:
- maybe we are focused on some knowledge areas, but let many others uncovered.
- perhaps we don’t cover some topics deeply enough.
- we may not have so much time and don’t update quickly enough.
- maybe our network and social influence is limited.
- …
Additionally, everyone has the ability to deploy his own mashup in order to automate his social activity. So, unless you start paying for automation services or come up with a very clever Service Interconnection Design, at the end of the day, almost everyone is more or less on the same situation.
The question is, then, if there is any strategy that we can explore in order to make a difference.
Continue reading …
