Supernatural Agency is a virtual company. Both of us have full time jobs at Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Mike works at a hosted email company called BlueTie and I have recently joined Techrigy as Director of Marketing. We run Supernatural in our ’spare’ time, (not a lot of that) which fits our business plan of no customers, no employees, 8-10 hours a week of work.
Techrigy is a social media search and discovery company. Our SM2 service allows brand marketers and PR pros to track conversations and sentiment across blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs like Twitter and other social media in real time. As a domain owner, entering this vast universe of user-generated content (UGC), brings up something very interesting. This social media eco-system has millions of participants, members and users and very little of it rests on unique domains. In fact it is an entirely different iteration of the web. Nothing is static, communities form and dissolve constantly, opinions and ideas spread way too fast for conventional search to index and track, and these trends and memes can make or break a candidate, a product or a reputation overnight.
Unlike sites on domains, social media resides in a sphere of reputation that is fickle at best. Concepts like the social graph which (as I interpret it) attempt to map where you and your ideas reside in a three axis grid, are not fixed- they change as relationships change. Other concepts like semantic search attempt to understand the context of a query so they can improve the relevancy of results, the never-ending Holy Grail of search.
As you might understand the challenge of marketing this new universe of ideas is both irresistible and daunting. It took me months to be able to write the sentences above and feel that they made sense to me. Now I have to explain them to others and help them see why they should care about what people are doing and saying in that universe. Pretty cool or should I say Dyson?