It's not just about blogging

Recently I came across this post at Technobabble 2.0 which linked to a while paper which tries to quantify the impact of social media. It calls it Distributed Influence.

While blogging remains at the center of social media, social media is increasingly being seen as lots of different tools like Twitter for microblogging and presence at social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. It also means photosharing sites like Flickr and YouTube.

In some way, it is a welcome development, as different people prefer to get their news in a different format, and while text remains important, building a personal context of the individual behind the blog is also important for a lot of people. That personal context is built by the photos and videos we upload and the ones we like. It is defined by the applications we access and ignore on Facebook. It is defined by the 144 characters and less we write on Twitter to answer the question "What are you doing?"

So if you are relying on only blogging to build your personal brand, I would suggest going a step further and look at other tools available. Remember there are no set ways you need to utilise these tools. You can make your own rules. Like this post illustrates on how Twitter can help your blogging. (Which I got from Anita Bora when she Twittered about it :-))

So what other things are you adding to your mix of social media? And if your organization is looking at social media to build either its employment brand or customer linkages are you considering the other tools? And now there are tools that enable you to work on all the different social networks seamlessly :-)