social media explorer

NOTE: Since this blog is only in its infancy (not appropriately skinned, etc.), I posted this on my PR blog, The Straight Pitch. It is an appropriate repost here, however.

There was a certain irony in The Straight Pitch receiving its first PR pitch Tuesday. While I suppose there is a nugget of hope in the back of my mind I might one day qualify as a blogger people pitch story ideas to, the notion never really crossed my mind since I help provide pitching advice to PR folks.

But Tom from AppSmash (he gave no last name) sent me a very short and simple email (pasted below for reference). Guess what? It worked.

AppSmash has developed a professional networking application for Facebook that mirrors some of the functionality we’ve come to enjoy about LinkedIn. It’s called “What I do” and like other Facebook apps, it’s fairly quick and easy to install and gives you an option to invite friends. Early adopters (I’m assuming) have a chance at an iPhone drawing by inviting 10 or more.

You enter your basic professional information, keywords for your skills, can enter more detailed info about your company, invite others and there you go. Your information is entered (as an optional feature) in the application’s directory of professionals. You can search for others via keyword.

Another pseudo-LinkedIn feature is the ability to write a personal recommendation for your friends. It’s just a single line dialogue box, but gives you plenty of room for a paragraph or so of text. You are able to recommend any of your friends, regardless of their having the app installed. The system says it has saved the recommendation in their system.

Overall, it’s a very simple version of LinkedIn — no real depth of information about users whereas LinkedIn offers unlimited job history, awards, etc — but useful in the Facebook environment — No reason to have a separate listing of contacts since you have Facebook friends, I suppose.

The AppSmash website has a social media-esque release about the application that has more company-based information. The link to the application add is here: http://apps.facebook.com/whatido/

And for the record, though I could be admitting to an easy sell blogger and was flattered by the outreach, the simple approach worked for me. Here’s Tom’s email that led me to this post.

Hi Jason:

I just read your post about Facebook, Paul Gillin, etc. Our company just launched a facebook app that makes business networking on facebook simpler. It is already growing quickly and we have an article coming out with CMP tomorrow.

If you have any interest here is our press release – http://www.appsmash.com/news.html

Tom
www.appsmash.com