By Allan Maurer
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC—The next step in making social media more useful and less time-consuming may be applications that connect users to all their accounts or other users via a single application. So says Jake St. Peter, founder and president of Web development firm Coalmarch Productions.
St. Peter is one of more than 75 entrepreneurs, executives, and online experts from Google, Microsoft, Digg, Pandora, The Huffington Post, Meebo, Technorati and other top firms participating in TechJournal South’s Internet Summit Nov. 4-5 at the Raleigh Convention Center (see: www.InternetSummit for a full list of speakers or to register.)
St. Peter founded Coalmarch in 2003. The 12 employee company has about 50 clients currently and has worked for Bicycle Playing Cards and Ticketmaster, among other customers. The company specializes in custom programming, graphic design & online marketing. It is focused on developing open source technologies with open source content management system Drupal as its core platform. “We’re heavily involved in the local Drupal community,” he notes.
St. Peter is a board member of the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association. The association plans an “after party” at about the same time as TechJournal South’s Internet Summit, probably the night of Nov. 5th, to mark launching of the association’s Web site that Coalmarch has been working on.
St. Peter says Coalmarch has been working on creating search engine optimized Web sites based on the Drupal platform and integrating the sites with social media and helping its clients use them effectively.
“One of the things I’ve come to terms with,” St. Peter says, “is that social media applications are only as good as the person using them. You have to have a social persona who wants a group of followers and post relevant information about your industry.”
Doing so has advantages, he notes. “It allows an individual to become a thought leader.”
Also, he adds, “I’m a very social person. I’ve probably met 10,000 people.” But before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, he probably lost contact with 75 percent of them, he says. “Now I can keep up with them.” Now if he wants to find them again in six months, he can.
Like many social media users, St. Peter, who also bartends, says he has gravitated to one, in his case, Facebook, for most interaction. He doesn’t mind mixing his business and personal associates, he says. “I don’t care if my personal is mixed in with my professional. It’s who I am. Some of my best business relationships are also with people I know on a personal level,” he says.
He says he uses LinkedIn purely for business, however. “I’m on it because as a business person, I think you need to be there,” he says.
Twitter is also useful to a business he says, but notes, “It’s a vehicle. You still have to drive. It’s not like you load a Twitter page and the online orders pile in. You need a dedicated person to update it at least once a day.”
Twitter integrated with a company Web site does offer the advantage of getting SEO friendly fresh content on the site regularly. Fresh, first generation content is right at the top of the elements search engines use to rank sites, St. Peter says. “I tell people that rule one is to add first generation content to your Web site. If you’re not adding content, you’re fighting an uphill battle.”
What he would really like to see—and Coalmarch may build just such an app—is something that lets users manage all their social networking from one place, including connecting to others. When he meets people and gets their Facebook and Twitter info, it then takes more time than necessary to search for them and sign up to each individual social networking service, he says. “It would be great to have one serve that integrates them.”
Another service he uses that he’d like to see integrated with Facebook is Loopt.com. Using GPS technology, loopt allows you to locate friends from a map. Friends can give details about what they´re doing, making it easier to meet up.
St. Peter says he’s still waiting for his Google Wave invite, but he believes that integrating social networks and other Web activity is what it intends to do. “We have programmers reviewing its API information. We plan to integrate Google Wave on our client’s Web sites. We feel it may eliminate headaches for them.”
Online: www.coalmarch.com
Southeast Venture Conference, February 29 – March 1, 2012 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA – Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
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