Aggre-great

One of my duties as a social media analyst is to stay on top of the latest developments in the digital realm. Naturally I am especially interested in those developments that have an impact upon social media and directly influence my day to day work. This means following my favourite writers who cover technology, social media (specifically), as well as a wide array of subjects that aren’t contextually related but often touch upon the aforementioned topics.

One of my favourite sectors to glean up to the minute information from is the music industry. That may sound like a barren pit to mine as the music biz’s archaic approach to digital is well documented and in the main considered to be one of the key factors in the fall of that industry of recent years.

This conception holds weight, but only if you consider the music industry to be limited to a small pool of corporations. The music industry is fractured and should not be grouped into one single entity when it comes to digital.

Yes, there are the giant monolithic majors that on the face of it appear to be laggards when it comes to digital (although I’m sure behind the scenes it is not so clear cut), but then there are also independents and unsigned artists who consistently impress me with their rapid uptake and integration of the latest digital developments. I often see practical implications of the newest platforms and customisations of existing ones first in this sector. It has always been a great resource for me as an analyst and a superb observation point / testing ground for learning how users react to and engage with the latest developments.

I personally regularly test developments through music related content as it is a topic that recurrently stimulates participation (enabling a test with real people). These learnings give me the confidence to advise clients how it may play out for them with a degree of practical experience under my belt (for example Facebook Pages iterations and Twitter best practice).

A music industry practical implementation that caught my eye recently came courtesy of a friend of mine recommending a fantastic looking aggregation service called Flavors.me (cheeky link for you David – http://flavors.me/davehaynes). It is a service that lets you create a light-weight but super slick website in less than 5 minutes. Perhaps that in itself doesn’t sound that innovative, but here the beauty is in the detail. I would say from my early trials this is already proving to be my current favourite aggregation service (aka Lifesteaming, Brandcasting), and one that I think will gain considerable penetration in the market if it continues on its current course.

Before I go into the ins and outs of Flavors.me it is probably worth explaining why someone would want use an aggregation site in the first place. As people’s tenure on the web increases, services get much more user friendly, and more attain that critical mass of users which makes individuals feel they are missing out if they aren’t participating too; most individuals have found themselves managing several web presences at once, be it Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or YouTube accounts.

They are usually all topically inter-connected and make most sense when viewed in totality, but in their fragmented form they don’t give visitors a holistic view of your digital activities. Kind of like trying to complete a jigsaw and finding there are missing pieces (had to slip a lame analogy in at some point, I do work in social media you know). Aggregating enables you to wrap all your content into one feed and consequently unify your presence online. It’s the perfect way to create a cohesive online identity.

Building your own website to aggregate content from your distributed presence can actually be quite a challenge and adds additional tasks to your digital to do list. I checked out a number of different vendors that offer this service, but most either required too much html knowledge from me, lacked the aesthetic ooof I desired, or constrained me into a very specific set-up (which didn’t suit my needs). This is where Flavors.me comes to the rescue. It solves the problems listed above and enables users to pipe all of their social services into one beautiful, super-customizable site.

One of Flavors.me big plus points is how user friendly it proved to be. To make a professional looking site there really is no need to have attained developer-level skills or understand a platform such as Wordpress and its coding inside out. A basic version of Flavors.me is available for free (without time restrictions).

This version is supposed to provide a taste of what Flavors has to offer, including essential fonts and layouts, customisable colour palettes, basic statistics, and up to four connections with RSS feeds and social services. You connect the different accounts you have on the web by simply authorizing Flavors.me to access the data of your accounts via oAuth. The same settings panel also lets you easily access the different customization settings like layouts, backgrounds, colours and fonts.

The full version promises to give users a more premium Flavors.me experience, with an extended font collection, beta layouts, a contact form, detailed statistics, metadata and unlimited services. I also particularly liked the ability to use your own custom domain (and actually buy one straight during the sign up process if you don’t have one) and get access to more detailed statistics about the traffic and visitors to your page.

To summarise, if you’re looking for an easy way to get a useful and desirable web-presence without the head-ache then look no further than Flavors.me. I see it being adopted by individuals and brands, as is a good, quick, slick alternative to more complex web builds.

Read more about the latest news on their blog http://blog.flavors.me or check out the video on their homepage (http://flavors.me/) for some inspiration.