While trawling the Web we stumbled across this really interesting idea for a system that will let users integrate all their social networking accounts into one central point - Google Dashboard style.

I have been wondering when something like this was going to pop up ever since FriendConnect and OpenID started gaining popularity. You could say it’s the next logical step. This move to integrate our social networking activities into one place is being called "Distributed Social Networking" (DiSo) and the man driving the idea is long time innovator Marc Canter. Check out more about the DiSo Project here or take a few minutes and click through this presentation:    

I’m not going to get into how the DiSo Dashboard will work, go here for that, but essentially the vision is to have a place to “read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalise” the data for all your activities around the Web. 

I have to ask, however, if this would change the way we plan and execute Social Media campaigns? And what about the revenue that sites like Facebook and MySpace make from guaranteeing that there will be people viewing the ads on their sites?  Apparently Google, Facebook and MySpace are currently interested in the DiSo Dashboard, but I can’t see them letting go of their ad revenue that easily. As for other methods of marketing and advertising on Social Media sites, this could be a blessing. 

By way of explanation - if something like the DiSo Dashboard existed it would mean that all of your social networking accounts would exist in one place. This would mean that users could potentially be encouraged to use their total online presence to take part in a campaign across multiple social networks heightening the levels of interactivity and engagement - something that characterises all the best Social Media campaigns.  

For example take a look at the extra dimension something like the DiSo Dashboard would add to the already successful BMW Social Media campaign that was run on Facebook. The campaign invited Facebook users to colour in or graffiti the outlines of 1-Series cars. Right off the bat the campaign got the interactivity part right, but the thing that cinched the deal was that the campaign enlisted a core group of active social network participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun, transparent effort - participants spent, in many cases, hours personalising images of BMWs. Check out the campaign here.

Now the “graffiti your own BMW” campaign took advantage of the already popular graffiti app on Facebook, but  beyond a couple of people talking about the campaign on Twitter it was never able to spread beyond the boundaries of the Facebook network, purely because the campaign relied on a Facebook application. However, if the whole campaign existed within the context of the DiSo Dashboard it would have had the potential to spread much farther. For example users could have been encouraged to share their personalised BMWs with all their contacts on their Flickr accounts once they had customised them in the graffiti app - something which would be easy since all of your social networks exist in one place.

Overall this could mean that there is opportunity for brands to engage with consumers across multiple platforms using the same campaign, something any brand manager will like since it helps with the delivery of a consistent and coherent image/message. The dashboard just makes it easier for something like this to happen.    

There are obviously some hurdles and obstacles to overcome first - I can see data portability becoming an issue - it has also been argued that only the geekiest of geeks would use something like the DiSo Dashboard purely because they are the only ones who have enough accounts to make it useful. 

Either way the DiSo Project or something like it will happen soon, and it will affect the way brands market themselves on social networks... What do you think? Would you be interested in using a Social Media dashboard?