Social Media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable user generated content into a genuine, peer-to-peer portal of constant discussions affecting the awareness, involvement, and overall direction of the brands we represent. Staying connected with friends, followers, and fans becomes increasingly more difficult due to the rapid expansion of networking channels. See above the “communication vortex”, many of the channels through which people share information on the internet. 

Real-time dialogue is fueling connections and perceptions in the statusphere, blogopsphere, online communities, and the social web in general. This chatter will only intensify and increase as it forces a new kind of Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM). 

Before the boom of social media, to comment on online content an individual would go directly to the source to post their response. Now, comments at the source are competing against comments in other online communities. Instead of formally responding with a blog post, many people now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update. One blog post can spark a widespread response in the respective communities where someone chooses to RT, favorite, like, comment, or share. These options decrease the possible success for attentive SCRM, and increase the need for a unified communication platform.

Keeping your loyal followers happy with timely responses and answers can be a crucial part of a relationship. They are the people who contribute to your brand essence. However, a timely response can be even more valuable for negative feedback. Damage control is a vital brand management tool that can be utilized fully when tweets and comments are centralized in one inbox. With a single home base for all forms of communication, success will be in the hands of the brand, and not strewn across the social web abyss.

I am a mobile professional who recently accepted a big corporate job. I also juggle many ventures outside my corporate life (for fun). That’s not unusual; but joining this company has made my communications go from bad to worse to just plain ugly. 

I already had three email accounts and a few chat accounts to have quick interactions with people I work closely with. Joining a multi-national company added another email account to the mix. They use Microsoft Exchange as a mail client, presumably because they are big and find it difficult to adjust to new, better applications.

I also use an iPhone and since Apple assumed no one using an iPhone would work for a company so archaic they use something as old as Exchange 2000, the software is not compatible. So I can’t get my work email on my iPhone. 

I also try to keep my corporate and personal lives separate and use two laptops. On my personal Mac laptop I have iCal as my master calendar. And on my work Mac laptop, to talk to Exchange, I have to run Entourage. The plan was that built-in Microsoft Sync Services is supposed to synchronize my Entourage calendar and address book with the Apple equivalents. Alas, I quickly discovered that Microsoft’s sync services are broken beyond repair. There went Plan B.

Plan C, MobileMe, was foiled because my corporate network blocks access to the MobileMe site. Don’t ask me why. Corporate IT also blocks all instant messenger clients so if I want to keep in touch with people through chat I have to set up my personal laptop (next to my work computer) with the work-provided cell-phone network card. If I want to see my personal email accounts I can do that on that same personal machine.

So I have to use two different client applications to see email.

I have to manually double enter all appointments if I want to keep a single master calendar of work and personal appointments. I have to run a separate laptop with a cell phone connect card to use any instant message clients. Yet another client (the browser) has to be used to see messages in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Work wanted me to get a second work-only phone. I refused on grounds that I’ll develop a back problem from carrying around so much hardware.

The frightening thing is that my story is not unusual. Many people that work for large companies face exactly the same things.

This is not progress. We can do better.

In a recent article by Silicon Alley Insider, Nicholas Carlson stated that Twitter has over 11,000 registered applications, siting a tweet by Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Many of these apps are in development and not yet available but this is still a significant number. There are reportedly 52,000 apps built just for Facebook. And these apps aren’t going unused; according to Facebook.com statistics, every month 70% of all Facebook users engage with applications developed on its platform. 

Developers are motivated to create apps by shortfalls of a platform’s native features. The “wisdom of the crowd” is, after all, much greater than that of a single team of developers. The add-on features developed on APIs create a more holistic service offering but why are we trying to make these original platforms something more powerful than they are? 

It seems as though we are collectively reaching for an interface that can do everything we want it to. There is no longer a sustained awe or simply contentment after most new platforms are released. Software releases follow a slight variation of this pattern: Anticipation, Excitement, Frenzy (at the moment of release), Skepticism, Disappointment, Development, Growth. Of course there are always outliers, but, what does this pattern tell us about what we’re looking for in our digital lives? There’s no answer to that question because we each want something different. The issue is that the average user isn’t fluent in programming language. Someone needs to do for APIs what WordPress and Tumblr have done for blogging: a platform that translates code into something the average user can understand and manipulate. Then everyone can turn platforms like Facebook and Twitter into the applications of their dreams.

One cumbersome task of the highly connected lifestyle is keeping track of multiple online identities without wasting valuable time. We are all guilty of skipping from website to website to enter usernames and passwords, many times hitting the “Forgot password?” link. The creators of Pageonce have come up with a solution for this issue. Personal Productivity Assistant enables users to manage more than 1,000 different identities through their Blackberry or iPhone, with security provided by TRUSTe, McAfee Secure, and VeriSign.   

One of the biggest implications is that users will not have to load their smart phones with individual apps because Pageonce has the ability to keep track of travel, finance, social, utilities, e-mail, Netflix, and shopping information from one platform. Screen shots on the Pageonce website show applications for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The interface seems easy to navigate, an important quality when offering to simplify users’ lives: http://bit.ly/3UhYr. Alas, Pageonce is not relying on an advertising model for revenue. Instead, the price that users pay will depend on their service provider and usage.

Pageonce is a timely offering because as people become more mobile they also become more reliant upon web-based services that require individual accounts. The creators of Pageonce clearly understand that people are searching for simplicity in their digital lives; one place that will give them control over all their interactions with the promise of security.