Lifestreaming: The next social media frontier?

At your company, there's a good chance the folks in the C-suite are reading articles in Inc. or Fortune or BusinessWeek about social media. As a result, you may be feeling some pressure to start getting social.

Where you do start?

You may begin by telling your brand managers and digital teams to create a Facebook fan page or a Twitter stream. You don't know exactly what Facebook and Twitter can do, but you know you should be doing it.

However, something is stuck in the back of your mind: You know a piece is missing. Facebook may seem like great place to promote what you're doing, and Twitter is an easy way to interact with your customers in real time, but neither are as visceral as you'd like.

Farewell, status updates. Hello, lifestream. Live-tweeting is so 2009.

Most of the information we consume in this new media age is either presented in a traditional format (e.g. a newspaper Web site or blog) or a mishmash of data points (a la Twitter, the Wild West).

A lifestream streams your life, while a socialstream, according to Trae Blain over on the lifestream blog, streams other people's lives and conversations. If you think of a lifestream as a linear, time-based scrapbook, you'll see the benefits of lifestreaming immediately. It's a completely new way of gathering, documenting and syndicating information.

If you want to document what's going on with your company, if you really want to aggregate and present your message in a slightly more formal and controlled way that a microblog can provide, as well as document your conversations and other relevant Web content, perhaps a lifestream is the way to go.

This isn't to say status updates will disappear completely. Don't worry: Live-tweeting won't go extinct or obsolete anything soon. But just think: If you're at a conference, for instance, you might post some things to the lifestream and still have tweets as well for just short missives. There's a good chance you won't want every one-liner posted to the lifestream.

A lifestream is, among other things, more of a real robust, mobile blog than Twitter ever could be. Using either Posterous and Tumblr, you can post photos and text via e-mail or SMS. (Note: Here's a great comparison of the two services; Mashable did another comparison here. Here's a helpful post from ReadWriteWeb about lifestreaming.)

However, if you want to compile photos in one place, or post an audio or video clip in a more formal location, publishing it to a lifestream may be easier; your content can then be automatically posted on your social network(s) of choice.

For instance, I recently posted this group of mobile photos on my Posterous blog. Not only was I able to e-mail the photos straight from my phone to the page, but Posterous arranged them into a gallery...and then the photos were automatically compiled into this Facebook photo album.

And with lifestreams, you always have the flexibility to write more than 140 characters (a lost art, perhaps, in the age of microblogging).

Imagine if your company presented its news in a blog format. Now imagine if your site could be populated instantly by multiple, mobile authors who can post instant photo galleries, sound clips and video. With a lifestream, you can get a much better look at a particular topic, product or event, and you could easily trace the arc of that particular topic, product or event.

For instance, imagine you're demoing a new product at a conference. Your communications pros (or your agency, of course) can create compelling multimedia content -- in real time, mind you -- and you could engage your blogger partners and ask them to contribute to your stream in a real joint effort.

For agencies and their clients, I believe a lifestream, if used properly, has the potential to be a much better tool than a Twitter account used alone, which could then primarily be focused on customer engagement and customer service.

If your company is looking to be innovative in the digital space, it may be time to try something new. A proper lifestream could be the thing to do.

Have you or your company ventured into lifestreaming services like Tumblr or Posterous? If so, please post a link to the page as a comment.

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