Friday, June 3, 2011

Button mania

There have been two developments in the social media sphere over the last few days you might be considering if you need to grow your site traffic or your online reputation.


Both are similar pieces of functionality launched by Google & Twitter that you embed within your site and they mean bigger things for these two giants of the web (that I will explain in a series of small subsequent posts). But let’s be honest about what they are…. Buttons.

Everywhere you go on the web now, there they are….. buttons requesting you ‘Like’ the site, ‘Tweet’ and tell your personal or business contacts how much you like something, or further buttons to post this & that to a wall, blog post or some other social network.

Yup…. The pinnacle of web savvi-ness (if there is such a concept or word) is to have a site with a bunch of different buttons that look like virtual medals adorned across it. In fact, someone I know recently said that sites with all their buttons on are beginning to look like the side of war planes with their ‘kills’ stencilled heroically on their flank. (If you don’t believe me, just take a look at sites like The Huffington Post, where each article has an entire section on the page devoted to their social trophies).

As a concept you could even ask ”So where does it end?”. Perhaps you could get to a point where there are more buttons on a page than content. In some ‘Kenny Everett’ type comedy extreme, you would end up having a site where the numerous buttons scroll off the page, like unending medals given to an over-rewarded highly-decorated soldier.

Thank heavens for features like addthis.com which aggregate social sharing bookmarks into a single button.

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