The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, Second Edition

Chapter 22. Let the Conversation Begin (Interpersonal)

What's in It for You?

Interpersonal refers to the many applications and web sites in the social media ecosphere that allow us to communicate live and in real time on oneto-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many bases. Examples of one-to-one exchange are tools such as Skype, AOL AIM, GTalk, Apple's iChat, or something like Jott—with which you can leave notes and messages for yourself through the phone. One-to-many social media tools include Jott, Twitter (see Chapter 14, Thumbs Up for Microblogging), Yahoo! Messenger, Microsoft Live Messenger, and Doodle. Many-to-many examples are applications like GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Adobe Connect. So many of these tools are free and can significantly reduce or even eliminate expenses like long-distance telephone calls. Using IM and web conferencing eradicated the cost of airfare and hotels for many companies. Many-to-one could be considered page aggregators, with which the conversations of many different bloggers are compiled into your web page, or even Google Alerts, with which alerts about many different mentions of your search terms are sent directly to your personal e-mail.

Of course, this list is by no means complete; it's simply intended to provide a sampling of some of the wide variety and broad range of social media interpersonal tools. As with all of the other chapters' content, useful tools, and applications, the players are continuously changing. Many are being added, ...