Although a blog is the best social media construct for the creation of personal branding and messaging, the broader professional population is challenged by the writing and time commitment demands to develop a well trafficked blog. One year ago, blogging was essentially the defacto standard for developing an online voice. With the massive adoption of micro-blogging applications like Twitter (and many others), a professional doesn’t need journalistic skills, just the  ability to type out interesting soundbites and converse as if on an IM. Finally, social media aggregation applications like Friendfeed and SocialMedian now track every participant activity – blog posts, bookmarking, Twitter feeds, etc. – and displays the activity in a time line. In essence, this is a complete record of one’s online identity and message.

New social networks will leverage the feed aggregation features that Friendfeed introduced to replicate the conversational nature of “commenting” on comments that characterizes Friendfeed. For example, a real estate brokerage site might include a stream of relevant Twitter feeds being shared by their agents (see mockup image to the left). These comments would be specific to the housing markets: new open houses, new sales data, local events, and would not include any of the “what I had for lunch” detritus. A Tweeter can parse the relevant comments to be included in the feed stream by tagging with a hashmark (#) identifier, which Twitter’s search engine can identify and incorporate into a feed. For example, Social Median participants who want to add their Twitter comment to the Social Median comment stream can add the hashtag #sm to their Tweet.

Conclusion: Feeds are nothing more than content syndication systems that can be embedded into any website and make that website an extension to any social network relevant to its message.