Ian Hughes is continuing his personal investigation into how being socially networked can be of value to direct marketers.

So, it’s month two of my bid to  find a value to the whole concept of ‘staying connected’: I am working to extend my Linked-In network, keeping my Twitter as up-to-date as I can and working on my Facebook.

The challenge here is not just to get as many connections as I can, but also to try to work out the financial models that might work for us as direct marketers.
It has been interesting in both worlds.

Let’s talk about issues of staying connected first. I am doing my best to keep everything up-to-date. I Tweet once a day, at least, although @DominicDuffy and @empg are out-Tweeting me by at least 50 per cent. For me, Tweeting is something I do on my iPhone, so it is never far from me.

There are two issues with Twitter. Firstly, you have to remember to do it, and I am too busy living my life to Tweet about it. But, I am working on the principle that if I exercise my Tweeting fingers often enough, it will come naturally to me. The second thing is I realise I don’t have a knack for connecting things. To Tweet well, you need to read an article and then think ‘Right, I’ll Tweet that’ and do it.

My brain isn’t wired that way.

Facebook is my social network. It’s a place for friends and family.

When my daughter sang at the recent ‘Prom On the Close’ in Bristol, I posted the video on YouTube and linked to it from Facebook – it got 70 hits in 24 hours, which shows the click through is pretty respectable.

And then there is Linked-In, where I have been trying to help sort out a reunion using a Forum. This seems to be pretty respectable but, again, it’s a bit like a muscle, you have to remember to exercise it. But I am going to keep this up.

So what about the commercial side of all this?
Well, as a direct marketer it seems clear to me there is a value to Facebook, at the moment.

We ran some test campaigns for one of my companies targeting people on Facebook and, with a bit of fine-tuning, we were able to get a conversion cost similar to Google. Which is pretty respectable.

Facebook allows me to target people with specific interests and in specific demographics and the Pay Per Click technique works because I only pay if they like my ad.

On Linked-In, the model seems different: there are ads on the site, but my suspicion is that Linked-In will make its money out of added value – such as by allowing you to connect to someone you know but who is not an immediate part of your network using ‘In-Mail’.

Twitter? Frankly I can’t see a commercial model for this at all.

In the long term, there are two things at stake here:

Personality and privacy
Firstly, in order to make this all work for you, you need to be the sort of personality that wants to be connected – a more extrovert personality. You also have to be able to take a fairly ordinary life (as mine is) and turn it into something ‘interesting’ . . . and do it every day.

In this reality TV-driven world, it seems everyone thinks they can be a Z-list star. In fact, the very fact that I write for DMI probably qualifies me for ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here!’ But is my life interesting enough for Twitter? No. And Twitter really relies on the power of connection. It is a classic case of Metcalfe’s Law: ‘The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2).’

Secondly, I genuinely think there will be an enormous data privacy backlash: Doug Sacks (page 12) wrote in his DMI column back in May about privacy and the ‘Twitter’ generation.

Indeed, the recent revelation that the new head of MI6’s wife published pictures of him in Speedos has been described as a ‘sartorial misjudgement’ by commentators. It’s just dumb and it shows people don’t understand the implications of protecting their privacy.

I know enough real spies to realise you need to be very careful about what you publish about yourself. It’s not the one piece of data, it’s the connections between data.

So, if the only way to stay interesting is to publish stuff about yourself and the only way to stay private is to … well … not, you have a paradox. Add on the difficulty of commercialising all of this and it leads me to believe that all the big social networks are just beta-tests for something else.

If I only knew what that was I would be a very happy and rich man . . .

I am going to stay connected until I work it out. You will be the first to know . . . then I am out of here!