The Outside In Social Media Strategy

I've been talking a lot on this blog about maximizing your site's distribution via social media river services like Facebook and Twitter. 

And there are LOTS of folks working on this.  In just the past few weeks, Socializr, Digg, Lunch.com, and my employer RateItAll, to name a few, have announced tighter Facebook and Twitter integration.  Spymaster is an even more pronounced example of a service that is uber-optimized for Twitter distribution.

The idea here is pretty simple - find ways to push, or help your users push, your site's activity out into the larger social media rivers, with the hopes of driving clicks back to home base.

Let's call this the Inside Out strategy.

But what would happen if we we flipped this strategy on its head?  What if in addition to optimizing your site's activity for distribution on Facebook and Twitter, you tweaked your service to accept content from activity within those services? 

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

- a blog comments service in which you could post your comment on Twitter or your Facebook status
- a polling app where you could create your poll via a tweet
- a social game where points are earned via activity on Facebook and Twitter (Spymaster incorporates a bit of this)
- a rating app where ratings could be published via a tweet or status update

Outside In is not a new strategy.  There are plenty of examples out there - Posterous posts are created via another app (email) and aggregated on Posterous.com.  The vast majority of content on FriendFeed originates on other networks.  The appropriately named Outside.in pulls in blog posts from around the web that have a hyperlocal slant.  Mahalo's QA site has a scraper that pulls in questions (any question) from Twitter (sometimes against the will of the originating site), and the defunct Edgeio was an early pioneer in aggregating classified ad listings.  All of these services refused to restrict the content publishing piece of their service to their own domain.

Other than Friendfeed, which doesn't really count as it's story agnostic, I haven't seen any services gain traction by coming up with a standard to accept content via Twitter or Facebook statuses:

e.g. #poll What's the best blog? #1 Sexy Widget #2 Widgify #3 Sprol

The main hurdles to overcome would seem to be A) The simplicity of the posting format; and B) the character limit.

I expect to see some folks try though.

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Other than Friendfeed, which doesn't really count as it's story agnostic, I haven't seen any services gain traction by coming up with a standard to accept content via Twitter or Facebook statuses:

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I'd love to hear more about a rating app. Can people submit ratings via tweets as well, for example?

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Thats a smarter way to accept only authorised submission.. good to know..

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But what would happen if we we flipped this strategy on its head? What if in addition to optimizing your site's activity for distribution on Facebook and Twitter

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Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!..
again... thaks

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