It’s no secret that I’m big on social media and networking services. If you know me or my story then you know I come from a retail management background. I managed stores of all sizes, from high volume discounters (Phar-Mor before the crash) to smaller specialty chains like BlockBuster Video.
And much of what I learned about product merchandising and cross-reference marketing in those days has been the backbone of my success online.
Unlike many of my peers who hated the part of their jobs that included dealing with customer service and would have preferred to just keep shoppers moving like cattle, I loved that part of the job. Meeting people, talking with them, helping them. Even the day when a crazy lady spit soda all over my shirt in protest of Phar-Mor (I never did learn what exactly she was protesting), I was able to make friends and laugh about it with the cops who carried her away.
So of course I love all of the new online venues that are sound and useful for people to connect online. Not just because I like being social, but also because as a marketer there’s nothing (imho) better than direct connections with the people that are my potential clients. Getting personal insights into their needs, desires, behaviors… it’s a bottomless gold-mine if used (and never abused) wisely.
I’ve recently discovered Retaggr, one such service, and I’m really blown away by it. Basically, Retaggr acts as a hub for your online identity, and allows your online profile to become portable across blogs or other social sites.
With a Retaggr account, anytime you post a comment (or posting on your own blog), or place a tag (or get tagged) on an image of a Retaggr enabled site–your profile is automatically attached to it.
To see this in action, just click on that little blue info-bubble next to my name in this link: Scott Bannon
Now that I have a Retaggr profile, anytime I leave a comment on someone’s blog (if they’ve enabled their blog for Retaggr) that blue info-bubble will appear so that my profile is connected to my comments.
Also, anytime I might mention someone here in a post, if they have a Retaggr profile, it will be attached to their name so that readers can get a better ideo of who I’m talking about.
But what I really like is having the profiles attached to the comments I leave. I’m always reading other blogs, and the comments that get posted on them, and all the time I think “hey, that person had something interesting to say”, but because they didn’t add their URL (or don’t have a personal web site to add) to the comment I can’t see what else they have to say about other topics in other places. With a Retaggr profile though, I would be able to see where else that person is participating in discussions online and could then follow along or even join in. In other words, blog comments with Retaggr profiles aren’t anonymous or random in nature anymore.
And since blogs are the foundation of Web 2.0 and online social networking, the fact that Retaggr specifically targeted blogs and blog comments from the start as they have impresses the heck out of me.
There’s enough platforms online for connecting and conversing, too many now in-fact and the conversations are getting thin and disrupted because of it. Centralizing everything you’re involved in with a single profile account like this is a huge step (in my opinion) of pulling everything together in a more orderly–yet still extremely portable–fashion.
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Tags: networking, retaggr, social media
