There seems to be a lot going on in the way of social media integration these days; with Facebook’s recent announcement of API extensions and new i-frames which have been rapidly popping up on websites. Now today, LinkedIn has added a "Follow Company" feature to its website. It will be interesting to see how quickly the volume of Followers rises on company LinkedIn pages. LinkedIn has a “Companies You May Want to Follow Box” on the Companies homepage.
But I wonder if having Goldman Sachs as one of the suggested companies is a marketing ploy devised to create conversation amidst the media blitz about Goldman Sachs facing lawsuits? I’m not sure I would want to announce a new tool and highlight a company suffering negative media attention! I'm not sure I’d want to wrap my tool with negative sentiment. I clicked F5 to review my browser a few times and it seems that currently the suggest companies that show on the page are in rotation.
On April 30th, Starbucks added yet another Social Media feature. Starbucks Card Holders (like me) can now manage their Starbucks card from their Facebook profile. I tried it out and while its cool, hopefully it will evolve in it usability. I had hoped that by connecting my Starbucks card to Facebook I would not need to remember my Starbucks account credentials – and would automatically be connected to my account via Facebook. But that’s not how it works. I can use Google Chrome to save the password, but when I return to the Starbucks Card tab on the Starbucks Facebook page, I still land on the “Getting Started” landing page and then have to log in again. As you can see in the above pic, the page isn't rendering perfectly - at least in Chrome. Unfortunately there is still no way to access this part of the Starbucks Facebook page from my Blackberry Curve via the Blackberry application or the Facebook mobile site. Starbucks is soon launching an additional feature for this application to let your friends add credit to your Starbucks card. Cool! Now you really can give your friends coffee via Facebook. I’m curious to see how this works and if there are restrictions by region. My Starbucks card is registered in the UK. So does that mean if my friends add Starbucks credit from outside the UK they will have to pay a foreign transaction fee or will they be able to add in their own currency? Ah…the wonders of the convergence of Social Media and Globalization!