Opinions In Social Media

14 Tips To Help You, Your Brand Or Your Business Get Started In Social Media

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:09:00 -0700

Are you looking for a few tips to help kick start your social media/networking experience? Here are 7 Do’s and 7 Don’ts of social networks that can hopefully help guide your social media journey in the right direction and because I couldn’t stop writing there is a bonus Do Not at the end.

Do go and join at least one social network right now and after creating your account sit back, monitor and discover how that social network works before posting or sharing any content. As author Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” So before you jump in and do something you may regret later you must first learn how the community interacts with each other and you must learn how to use the different features contained within that particular social network.
Do make sure to accurately and truthfully fill out your user profile including a real picture (or at least something that represents you) of yourself. This allows others in that social network to get to know the real you and will help them to trust you in the future.
Do spend plenty of time actively communicating and interacting with your community. Not only will you learn a lot from your community but you can also help your community by answering questions, sharing content and if applicable pointing them in the direction of your services/website/blog. A quote I enjoy that applies here is:
“A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”
-Chinese Proverb
In other words you can learn by watching but at some point you will have to interact, engage and participate in order to truly learn how to make the most out of social media.
Do spend time using the search features at whichever social network you are currently on to actively seek out and discover new and interesting individuals who you should friend or follow. You can’t have a sane conversation with yourself and in order to participate in meaningful conversation and begin to build a community you are going to have to go out and find those you wish to communicate with.
Do take the time to remove and block any spammers that may have latched on to you like the parasites they are. By taking the time and effort to block and report spammers you are helping the social networking sites become a safer and cleaner environment for all users. If spammers find a social network increasingly aggressive towards their tactics eventually they will leave to find an easier place to spam their wares.
Do make sure you share quality links and content from others with your community. Sharing useful and relevant content with your followers and friends shows the community that you are there for more than just self promotion.
Do realize that the internet and social networks are increasingly transparent and it is very easy to be found out as a fake or imposter. The best advice I can give to those wishing to use social networks effectively is to always be yourself and to pretend to be someone you aren’t. If you like hockey, show that you do, don’t try and fake your knowledge of football because you will fail. If you are a heavy user of curse words (maybe tone that down a bit) don’t censor yourself simply to gain a larger audience.

Do Not’s

Do not be afraid to try new social networks. They may only currently have a couple of hundred members but they could quickly turn in to the next Facebook or Twitter. When it comes to social media and social networks it is almost always more beneficial to be an early adopter rather than a late follower. At minimum by being an early adopter you will be able to secure your chosen username to help further your branding efforts.
Do not be offended if you follow or friend someone and they do not reciprocate. You should only be following or friending those individuals who you find interesting and relevant anyways and those who enhance or add to the quality of the conversation. If they don’t reciprocate the follow at least you are still getting something out of the relationship because they were someone you found interesting to begin with.
Do not fall into the spammy cycle of follow/unfollow or friend/unfriend simply to get a notification to them in hopes they will follow you back. This can be considered a form of spam and is highly annoying to the individual who you are trying to entice to follow you. Why not engage in relevant conversation with this individual instead? Chances are they will friend or follow you a lot quicker if they know you are adding to the conversation and not just trying to inflate your numbers.
Do not use a fake profile picture (such as that of a scantily clad blonde) to try and entice more friends/followers into following or friending you. This is a common tactic among spammers (especially on Twitter) and after being found out as a fraud you will almost certainly be blocked and/or reported as a spammer.
Do not solely use the social networks to promote your own blog/product/service etc… Self-promotion is a good thing but excessive self promotion will get you unfollowed or unfriended rather quickly. Instead of only self promotion try engaging with your followers in a real conversation, try helping by answering questions, ask a few questions yourself and yes even promote your products/services or site.
Do not stress out over your follower/friend count. Inflated numbers matter very little, instead what really matters is the quality of users and the quality of conversation that is taking place within your community. Strive for quality and not quantity.
Do not expect overnight success using social media. It is very difficult and rare to see a company, individual or brand jump into social media and instantly garner hundreds or thousands of fans. Instead work daily at growing your community and increasing your brand’s online presence.

Bonus

Try not to limit yourself to using only the web interface for whichever social networking platform you are currently using. There are plenty of high quality and free third party tools available for Windows, Mac’s and mobile devices that integrate many great features, combine many different social networks into one centralized place and can greatly increase your productivity and efficiency when using the social networks.

Are there any tips or guidelines I am missing that you could offer up in the comments to others who may be reading this post? If you liked this post or found it useful in any way, please leave a comment below or share it with your own community using the Retweet or Facebook icons below.

Control Who Sees Your Facebook Content With Precision

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:54:13 -0700

Recently I was asked by someone how they could share an image to their Facebook profile but limit the access on who could view it. This individual wasn’t a new Facebook user asking the question either,it was a daily user who had quite a lot of experience using Facebook and was familiar with most of the settings.

Within Facebook you actually have the ability to precisely control who sees which content you share and they have made it relatively easy to do so. After showing this experienced Facebook individual on how to properly limit access to those they determined could view their posted content I figured it may be a good idea to share this information with others who may not know about this valuable feature.

This guide will be broken into two separate parts: List creation and Content sharing and privacy controls.

List Creation

Depending on the amount of Friends you have on Facebook you may find creating the lists of people to be a time consuming chore but a necessary one if you wish to precisely control who you want to view your shared content. Do you really want your boss to see the pics from your Saturday night drinking binge? Chances are you don’t and that is why the creating the lists of people is a critical step. After the initial creation of lists and the adding of friends to lists is completed any friends you make after can then be added to your created lists.

After signing in to Facebook click on the Account tab on the right hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a drop down menu that looks like this:

Click on the “Edit Friends” link
You will now be in the Friends screen of Facebook. In the mid-left panel of the Facebook friends screen you will see this:

Click on the Friends link. This will take you to a screen where you are presented with a list of all of your Facebook friends.
On the right hand side of your friends you will see a drop down arrow labeled “Add To List” that when clicked will look like this:

This is the screen where you will create your new lists that will be used to group your friends into or where you will add your friends into Lists you already have created. As you can see I have Lists created for Family, Friends, Other and Social Media. SMS Subscriptions is a Facebook created group.
Since you will probably not have any Lists created place your cursor in the Create new list field and give a name to a new list that you would like this friend to appear in. One point to remember is that Friends can appear in multiple lists.
You can now go through your entire Friends list and either create new lists or add friends to existing lists. This is an important step that must be completed if you want to control who sees what you share on Facebook. Something to remember is that Friends can exist in multiple lists. For example you may work with your brother so he could theoretically be placed into a Co-Workers List as well as a Family List.

Content Sharing And Privacy Controls

Now that you have divided your friends into appropriate lists you will now be able to precisely control who is able to see the content you share on Facebook.

If you click on the What’s on your mind status update field or click on one of the many Facebook share icons you will see a lock icon and two buttons that look like this:
Click the lock icon and you will be presented with the following view:

From here you will want to click on the Customize link. This is where we begin to configure our privacy sharing options.
A new window will pop up and from here you will click on the field beside where it says “These People:”

Choose the link that is highlighted here called Specific people…
After selecting the link Specific people… the pop-up on your screen should look like this:

In the text field labelled Enter a name or list you can start typing the name of specific friends or Lists that you wish to share this content with. Like the rest of Facebook this field is auto-complete so don’t worry if you can only remember the first letter of a friend or list you wish to share this with. Alternatively from this screen you could choose to hide this content from specific individiuals or lists.

For example you may wish to share your birthday pictures with friends in your Family List so you would choose that list to share those pictures with. Perhaps you went out for your birthday and had a little to much fun but still want to share your pictures with all your friends except your co-workers. In that example you would choose to enter the List Co-Workers into the Hide this from field.

A critical point to remember here is that individuals can belong to multiple lists. So you may have a friend on your Co-workers and Family list so that individual could still see the pictures posted to family.

Now that you know the steps it takes to create lists and how to share content with only those you choose you should be able to precisely control who sees what content and avoid some of those embarrassing stories we’ve all heard about.

If you would like to learn even more about Facebook privacy features the fantastic blog All Facebook has an extensive guide on the subject: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/

If you liked this small guide to Facebook privacy please leave a comment below or feel free to Tweet or Share this post with those in your Twitter or Facebook networks by clicking one of the icons below.

The How, What And Why's Of Twitter Lists

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:42:46 -0700

In November of 2009 Twitter rolled out one of its newest features to the general public…Lists. Since the initial launch Lists have seem to be mostly forgotten. In case you are new to Twitter or unaware of what Lists are, they are nothing more than a self managed group of individuals focused around a central topic and placed into an appropriately name List.

In order to understand how Lists could be beneficial for your use we should first look at we go about creating lists from within the Twitter website.

Login to your twitter account
On the right hand side of the Twitter site below the search you will see your lists. Click on “New list” to create a new list.
After clicking on new list you will be presented with the following screen.

Enter a name for your list (something related to the users you will be adding to it) a description of what this list is about, the access level whether private or public and finally click create list.
To add users to your newly created list go the profile page of another Twitter user who you would like to add to the list. Click on the “Lists” button and you will see this:

Select the list you would like this user to be on and they will automatically be added to the list.
** You do not have to follow a user to add them to a List.
Repeat step 4 for each additional Twitter user you would like to add to your list.

Now that you know how to create your own Twitter lists let’s take a look at a five reasons to use lists and five types of lists you could create.

Reason To Use Lists

Tracking The Competition – If you are in an industry where many of your competitors are on Twitter you can create a new, private list (remember the choice given when creating a List from step 3) that only you will be able to see and access and because you can add them to a List without following them your competition won’t know you are tracking what they do.
Easy One Click Following – If you search the Twitter List directory Listorious you will be able to find a list in a niche that interests you created by someone you may or may not follow. After finding a list you want to follow you can then click on the Follow button and you will be subscribed and will be following that list of users without having to go to each one of them and clicking follow.
Trust – If you are unsure if you should be following a particular person because of spam or other concerns check there Twitter profile and look for the “Listed” below their profile name. Chances are if they are Listed on several different lists you can trust them.
Gaining More Followers – As you gain in popularity you will eventually be added to Lists yourself and as these Lists become followed you may gain followers from users who decide to follow the individuals who are on the Lists they themselves are currently following.
Easier To Unsubscribe Than To Unfollow – If you use lists to track and monitor a niche or an event the use of Lists make it is very easy to unsubscribe from the list once you are done tracking the niche or when the event is over by simply going back to the list and clicking unfollow. If you weren’t using lists and had went to each profile and followed them manually you will now have to go into your followers list and unfollow each user you had previously added to remove them. This of course could take quite a long time depending on how many users you had followed for that particular event or niche. Lists can save you time.

Types Of Lists

Location Related Lists – You can create a list of users from your City/Town/Province/State etc…and can keep up on local news and happenings usually before it hits traditional media outlets.
Connect With Fans Of Your Favorite Sports Team – You can create a list of those who are fans of your favorite sports teams. Use search.twitter.com to easily find those who are talking about your team and add those who are fans to your list. I currently run an Edmonton Oilers List where I keep track of fans of my favorite hockey team the Edmonton Oilers.
Official Employee List – Create a list of all official employee Twitter accounts and then share and promote this list so others are aware of who is officially communicating from within the company.
VIP Lists – If you are attending an upcoming event or are hosting an event create a list that contains the Twitter names of all those who will be in attendance. Share this list with all those that will be in attendance as it will help put a face to the tweet.
Peers And Experts – Create a list of peers and experts in your industry. Share this list with those in your industry to make it easier for everyone to find peers without having to go through the process of creating their own list.

Of course there are far more than five ways to use Twitter lists but hopefully these five give you a place to start.

Please leave a comment below letting me know how you are using Twitter lists and if you find this at all useful; consider clicking the Facebook icon to share it on Facebook with your friends or click the Retweet button to share it on Twitter with your followers.

Don’t Forget The “Social” Part Of Social...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:20:49 -0700

Don’t Forget The “Social” Part Of Social Media

Business and brands need to think of their social networking efforts as extensions of their physical/virtual stores. If someone walks into your store with a question do you ignore them? The same rules apply for social networks and social media, in order to be successful you have to be social.

Avoiding The Initial Social Media Mistakes

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:27:00 -0700

One of the mistakes that I’ve witnessed many new brands and individuals make when first entering into social media is their attempt to bring their old media way of thinking along with them. This traditional way of thinking and attempt to squeeze into a different medium will eventually lead to failure.

Instead of joining a social network, listening to the community and determining how that particular community works, quite often instead they will instead join and begin quickly aggressively pursuing the members of this social network with their look at me and buy this now message. The community whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other community will eventually turn its collective back on the brand as abuse will only be tolerated for so long.

What brands and businesses new to social networks should instead be doing is:

Join the social network using a real name or the business name
Upload a real picture of yourself or your product
Use the search tools to discover individuals who are already talking about you or your brand and friend or follow them
Listen to the conversations that are currently taking place and learn what is and what isn’t appropriate conduct on that particular social network
After gaining followers and have learned the rules begin to socialize with those in your network. It is after all called “social” networking.
Answer questions, ask questions and offer genuine help to those people who may be interested in your product/brand/business
Repeat

To put the above into perspective I present you with two very different scenarios:

You’re at a party and there is someone there who’s had far too much fun already and is harassing everyone he/she encounters with loud drunken talk and push behavior. Eventually he/she is dancing on the table and puking in the planter.
You’re at a party and there is an individual there who is walking around making small talk with all those in the room. He/she is asking questions, telling jokes, sharing stories and listening to what others around him are saying. This is an articulate individual who is facilitating conversation among the group and everyone seems to be drawn to him/her.

How do you want your brand/business to be remembered amongst the social networks? Do you want your reputation to be that of the loud drunk or that of the articulate well spoken individual?

The Great Blog CMS Showdown: Wordpress vs Tumblr vs Posterous

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:03:00 -0700

Although I have been extremely happy with the use of Tumblr as my blogging platform I can’t help but feel a little jealous of the Wordpress users and their never ending supply of free themes and plugins to enhance the look and functionality of their blogs. Lately I have been thinking of leaving Tumblr and going back to running my own self hosted Wordpress blog but in order to decide if moving my blog from Tumblr elsewhere would serve my needs best I decided to do a little pro and con comparison between the more well known blogging sites of Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Tumblr and Posterous.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is the commercial half of Wordpress.org and is a fantastic blogging solution for anyone looking to get into blogging. It gives users the power of the Wordpress CMS while taking away the hassle of upgrading the Wordpress software. The downfall of this system is it costs you if you wish to use a custom domain name or your own CSS for styling your site.

Pros

Easy to set up account (takes under 5 minutes)
Runs the powerful CMS Wordpress
Choose from 81 different available themes
Can activate the ability to use a mobile theme when users visit using a mobile browser
Widget support
Change themes with the click of a button
No hosting costs as bandwidth is covered by Wordpress.com
Free to use, unless you choose to purchase upgrades
3 GB of file hosting
No maintenance or upgrading of software is required

Cons

Must pay to edit the CSS of your theme at a price of 14.97 per year
Costs 9.97 per year to use a custom domain
Have to pay to remove ads from your site
Only Wordpress.com is allowed to run advertising on your blog. Only special case sites are allowed to run any advertising besides what Wordpress.com already runs.
Limited to only the themes they provide
Limited to using only the widgets that have been pre-selected by Wordpress
No plugin support
Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is the freely available open source software that powers many of the world’s largest blogs and while very powerful and customizable with its thousands of free and premium themes and plugins it does require that you have your own hosting and are comfortable either installing the software yourself or paying someone else to install and configure it for you.

Pros

Thousands of free and premium themes to choose from
Thousands of great plugins and widgets to enhance the usability and feature set of your blog
Open source so you can make changes to the software as you see fit
Easy to install on most servers. Many hosting plans include a one click install for Wordpress
Wordpress is more than just blogging software and can be used as a really powerful CMS
Can import your old blog into Wordpress with one click
Spam protection on comments from the Akami plugin
You can set up your blog to accept multiple authors
Automatic pinging
Large community and well documented so you can find answers to most questions quickly

Cons

Requires that you have web hosting
Must be comfortable FTPing files and creating a database on your host so that you can install the software
Some security flaws due to poorly coded plugins
Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
Must always ensure to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress to ensure your software contains the latest security fixes
Plugins must be upgraded to ensure they have the latest security fixes and features
Upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress could break your theme or plugins
If something goes wrong you are the site admin and must take care of the issue by searching for the answer

Tumblr.com

I currently host my blog on Tumblr and find it to be an extremely easy to use micro-blogging platform that is not only free to use but allows for a great amount of customization. The Tumblr admin panel is broken up into categories that make it easy to decide where to place your content but this simplicity comes at a price as you do not get storage space and the expandability afforded with Wordpress plugins is missing. Premium theme development seems to be missing with Tumblr as well making it difficult to find a developer willing to create custom themes for you.

Pros

Free to use
Account setup is quick
Custom domain hosting for free
Admin area is extremely easy to use
Theme support and template customization
Well written API
Great social media features such as Like, Reblog and Follow
No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
Auto-post to your Facebook and Twitter feeds
Hosted by Tumblr so no additional hosting costs

Cons

No built in commenting system
No file hosting
Can’t install or configure plugins for additional features
Have had speed issues
Not a large selection of freely available themes to choose from
Almost no premium themes to choose from and hard to find developers who do custom themes
To customize your theme you must be familiar with html/css/javascript

Posterous.com

Posterous describes themselves as the dead simple place to post anything and their claim is mostly true. Unlike other blogging platforms you don’t create an account but instead by simply emailing in your fist post an account is auto created for you. Again, unlike other blogging you post your content by emailing it from your email program of choice instead of creating it from within an admin panel. This is a unique and easy way to post content but unfortunately I also found it confusing after being used to using an admin panel in other blogging CMS’s. Posterous allows for theme customization but there are very few themes currently available and the lack of javascript support from within the themes is also an annoyance.

Pros

Create an account simply by emailing them
Auto-posting to a ridiculous amount of other services
Custom themes
Ability to have group blogs
Accepts almost any file you send to it and converts it to the most friendly web format
Creates iTunes ready podcasts out of MP3 files you send to it
Free custom domains
Ability to import from other blogging platforms
Hosted by Posterous so no additional hosting fees

Cons

No account creation instead an account is created when you email them. This was a little confusing at first and I think others may be confused by this as well
Expected to post by email instead of an admin interface. Found this confusing at first as well
Only 1GB of file storage
Very limited theme selection
No javascript support currently for themes
Must use the Posterous commenting system and can’t change to Disqus, Echo or IntenseDebate
Ability to auto-subscribe those in your email contact book to a daily digest of your blog
Post by web is limited in functionality and features compared to other services

This is by no means a complete feature list for each of these blogging platforms but I do hope that there is enough information provided to help new bloggers determine which blogging solution may be right for them. As with all blogging software you run the risk of finding out after the fact that don’t like the software after using it for some time and then you run into the issue of exporting your content out of the CMS and into a new CMS. This is the current position I am in as I decide whether or not a custom Tumblr theme is the way I wish to proceed with my blog or if it would be better to move back to a self hosted Wordpress installation.

Let me know in the comments below which blogging software you currently use. If I didn’t include the blogging CMS you currently use let me know the pros and cons of it in the comments as well.

Could Google Buzz Be More Than Just A New Social Network? Google...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:41:03 -0700

Could Google Buzz Be More Than Just A New Social Network?

Google launched its new social networking platform Buzz about five days ago and it appears Google has been listening to user feedback and has been able to close up some of the privacy concerns users had been voicing since its launch. Despite the fact Google has been attentive to its early adopters I am still not convinced that Google Buzz is a social networking platform and instead may actually be a real-time blogging platform.

Google has already built many blogging features into its Buzz service currently implemented by many of the other blogging platforms either by design or via a plugin system.

Features found inside Buzz that are similar to other blogging platforms include:

Buzz pulls in all your content from around the web (Flickr, Picasa, Reader, etc…)
With the major exclusion of Facebook Buzz is able to pull in most of your social graph
Buzz allows for long form content to be posted where Facebook and Twitter both have limits on the amount you can post
Built in commenting system
Built in sharing system
Built in upvoting system
Tight integration with its mobile platform

So, what would Google need to do to become a real-time blogging platform?

Allow customization/templating of your Buzz/Profile page
Ability to use your own domain instead of the profile url
Facebook integration into the connected sites
Text formatting tools like those already found in Gmail
Third party tools for posting

I don’t think it’s Facebook and Twitter that have anything to worry about as they have already reached a massive audience that will be hard to win over, but instead if I were Tumblr and Posterous I would be looking over my shoulder at the Google giant that is about to strike.

What do you think? Is Google Buzz a new social network or could it be more of a real-time blogging platform? Who should be most worried about Buzz? Is it Facebook and Twitter or Posterous and Tumblr?

To Succeed Online You Must Be Yourself And Be Honest With Your...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:06:10 -0700

To Succeed Online You Must Be Yourself And Be Honest With Your Audience

With the new web 2.0 social networking driven internet it is no longer easy to hide behind an avatar or fake profile. If you want to succeed in this world you must be honest and you must be yourself.

What's All The Buzz About?

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:08:00 -0700

Google has launched a new social networking platform heavily integrated into its webmail service Gmail. The new platform called Buzz is the latest effort by Google to enter into the social market. Google quickly began to roll the new service out to its current Gmail users and expects that all users will have the Buzz service within a couple of days.

As of this writing I do not have the Buzz feature integrated into my Gmail account but from reading the various blogs that covered the Google press conference this is what is known about Buzz:

Auto-following
Ability to change the privacy setting on shared content
Status updates delivered to your Gmail inbox
Ability to recommend posts to friends-of-friends
Twitter style @ replies
Integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader
View image thumbnails within each post
Real time updates

You can watch the Google Buzz demo video below:

Why Google Buzz Will Fail

Personally I think Buzz will be a failed product that Google will probably forget about in a year and here are my reasons why:

Auto-following – I can’t confirm at this point but I assume what Google means by auto-follow is that anybody you have previously emailed in the past with a Gmail account you will now be following/friending them. If this is how it is intended to work this was poorly thought out by the Google engineers. There are email contacts in my Gmail account that I have sent messages to once and never again. Why would I choose to follow these people? Google and any other company getting into the social networking business should not assume and/or automatically sign you up to follow other users. This type of auto follow is going to lead to artificial follower counts much in the same way as the Twitter suggested user lists did before they changed the format.
Facebook Is Missing - I couldn’t help but notice that during their demo video they mention integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader but strangely enough no mention of Facebook. How can Google Buzz claim to be truly integrated with other social networking sites when they don’t even integrate with the 400+ million user juggernaut that is Facebook? Oddly enough I see no mention integration with Google’s other failed social networking platform Orkut either.
The Name – Buzz seems to be a poorly chosen name and one that I and many other people already associate with another site. Yahoo currently runs a social news site called Buzz that you can find at http://buzz.yahoo.com and with Google now choosing to also call its social networking platform Buzz this may lead to a fragmented and confused internet audience.
Built By Engineers – I have looked at the Buzz profile page for a couple of users such as Mashable who have had access to the service. To be nice…it’s ugly. It’s a plain white page with what appears to be not customization. I realize Google is full of really smart and talented engineers who make a great search product but at some point you would think they could spend some of their billions on hiring some top notch graphic designers and usability experts to ensure they deliver not only a great looking product but one that can be used by your average internet user without help.
Cross-Posting – Will Google Buzz be able to post to all my other social network profiles or will it simply aggregate that information to be posted solely within Buzz? If Google was smart they would grant users the ability to post a status update to Buzz and then have Buzz cross-post it to all the users other social networking sites.
Email Only – Why did Google make the decision to allow access to Buzz only through Gmail on the desktop? I believe this will only work in confusing their users as most (including myself) thing of Gmail as an email destination and not as a social networking destination. Google is going to have a hard fought branding battle in ensuring that their users remember that Gmail is now more than simple email.
Nothing New – Google Buzz adds nothing new to social networking that hasn’t already been implemented better on another site. What incentive is there for a user to leave their current favorite social site and move their social graph over to Buzz?

One Reason Google Buzz May Succeed

146 Million Users – Gmail currently has 146 million users and each and every single one of those users will be getting Buzz rolled out to them in the upcoming days. If everyone of those Gmail users decides to adopt Buzz as their social networking platform of choice that mean Buzz would have 1/4 the amount of users as Facebook only days after initial launch.

From my point of view I think that Buzz will fail as it adds nothing new to the social scent that hasn’t already been done and this feels to much like an effort by Google to show that “Hey, we’re here too, look at us” instead of an actual push into social networking.

Please leave a comment below with your opinion on Google Buzz.

Do you think it will be a success or a failure?
Have you used it yet?
What are your initial thoughts?

For additional reading and sources of information I used please check out:

Defining Goals To Help You Achieve Social Media Success

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:23:43 -0700

By now many companies and individuals have heard the buzz around social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and are wondering how using social networking sites such as these can help their businesses and brands grow.

Still other companies and individuals have tested the social media waters by setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page; tweeted or posted an update or two and dismissed the whole thing as a waste of their time.

Lastly, we have those companies and individuals who have dived right into the social networking pool and have signed up for an account on every social networking site they can find. They typically move from social networking site to social networking site posting the odd status update on each of the different sites and generally lack a focus as to what they are trying to accomplish.

In order to be successful using the social media sites you can’t be a bystander wondering how they work, nor can you post a single update and never use it again and it’s probably not the best idea to sign up to every single site and hope that something sticks.

If your brand wishes to be successful in using the many social media tools freely available you need to not only research the tools that are available for you to use, but you also need to set goals for what you wish to accomplish when using social networking and social media.

Here are a few of the things I would coach individuals, business and brands on if they looking to discover if the use of social networks were right for them or if I was working with a company who was trying to refocus their energy into making their current social media campaigns successful:

Research – Start by researching the different social networks that are available for you to use, making sure not to limit yourself to only Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There are literally hundreds of other sites out there including: Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and many others.
Your research should include what types of sites there are, what type of content is allowed to be posted and shared (images, video, text), the different ways you interact with the site (web only or is there a third party tool you can use), how active the community is and if your users are currently using that particular social networking site.
Your research may uncover that although the community is large and very active the people you are targeting aren’t currently using that site (so neither should you at the moment) or you may find a small niche community full of the users you are trying to attract to your brand.
Time – Many people foolishly assume that social media will be a quick fix to whatever their marketing/branding problems may be. What they don’t realize is that in actuality there is a great amount of time, dedication and participation required in order to make social media successful for any brand.
Some of the questions you need to ask concerning your time and availability should include:
- How much time do you have to spend posting status updates, uploading videos, taking and sharing pictures and tweeting?
- Will you be the person solely responsible for your social networking efforts?
- Will you hire an additional employee to cover the social media tasks?
- Will a team be in charge of the social media?
Goals – Just like in life, in order to be successful in social media you need to set goals. Without goals in place your social media efforts will most certainly not be effective and you will not only be wasting your time but the time of the users you are trying to attract to the brand as well. Having set and defined goals in place will also help you to analyze and track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
Some of the goals you could set for your social media efforts include:
- Attracting X number of fans or followers
- Increasing brand recognition
- Distributing coupons/discounts on products and seeing a certain percentage of them used during purchase
- Attract new employees to the company
- Solicit product ideas
There is an infinite amount of goals you could set for your brand or business and it will be up to you to decide which goals are appropriate for you and your brand. Keep in mind that you must be able to either measure or track your goals to see if your efforts were indeed successful. The ability to track and measure the success of your defined goals is extremely important as it will help determine if the message your brand put forth was on target or if you need to improve and refocus your message to further increase the successfulness of your social media branding efforts.

Social media and social networking can be some of the best tools available when trying to establish a brand or when trying to breathe new life into an older established brand. It can provide a way to reach your customers, provide a platform to improve your products or it could be used to help sell your products but don’t expect any or all of this to happen overnight.

In order to be successful with social media you and your brand must be willing to put in the time, dedication and research needed to grow a community and you must set measurable goals to track and define your success.

If you are missing out on any of these parts you and your brand may still achieve success within social media but because you haven’t defined, measured and tracked any goals you may never know it.

Add A Share Button So Users Can Distribute Your Content...

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:56:35 -0700

Add A Share Button So Users Can Distribute Your Content Easily

With very little work and by simply cutting and pasting you can easily add a share button to your website’s content making it simple for your site visitors to distribute and share your content with their friends and those in their social networks. The easier you make content sharing the more likely your visitors will share your content.

Here are links to the few I mention in the video:

If you have any questions regarding how to set up any of the sharing buttons I talked about, please contact me and I’ll do my best to walk you through the set up.

Let me know in the comments what you think of this video, what I did right and what I may have done wrong.

** This was supposed to go up last night but I had issues with...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:46:00 -0700

** This was supposed to go up last night but I had issues with the video upload. The Oilers eventually lost in OT to the Canucks. Poor Devan Indeed.

In its current form I think that the weekly Twitter tradition of #followfriday or #ff is flawed. To make #followfriday actually useful again I think we should get rid of the listed names and instead offer up one follower and a reason why you should be following them.

That’s my suggestion for fixing #followfriday and I will be starting this upcoming Friday implementing this into my #followfriday.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the changes I suggested for #followfriday, if you will be participating or if you think I’m wrong and why.

I’ve noticed a trend lately where many users are simply...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:09:00 -0700

I’ve noticed a trend lately where many users are simply retweeting others messages and I’m not sure if this is because they are new to Twitter or are trying to gain new followers by simply retweeting. If you are only retweeting someone elses message how will anyone know what your message is? By speaking in your own voice and tweeting own message you will be able to connect with others and build your brand far easier.

What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to address? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Your social networking experience has very little to do with...

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:17:43 -0700

Your social networking experience has very little to do with your friend or followers count, instead it has more to do with the quality of content and effort you put forth in engaging with the followers, friends or fans that you do have. The more you put into social networks, the more you will get out of them.

Looking around I’ve noticed a lot of sites and...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:34:05 -0700

Looking around I’ve noticed a lot of sites and organizations that either aren’t using social media or aren’t using it effectively and so what I’ve decided to do each week is to provide my opinion on how a site could more effectively use the social networking tools we now have available to us.

For my first What I Would Do video post I have taken a look at the Liberal Party of Canada and their current battles with the Conservative party over the proroguing of Parliament. Instead of shelling out millions in print and television ads I offer a few alternatives that they could use to get their message across at a fraction of the cost.

Feel free to leave a comment below and if you are struggling in any way with social media or just want to brainstorm some ideas for your business please contact me by email, on Twitter or on Facebook and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

There's No Such Thing As Can't

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:22:48 -0700

Lately, I have begun to notice a startling trend that even I myself am guilty of from time to time. This trend is how often people use the word can’t. To me there is no such thing as can’t, instead what most people are actually saying is that they won’t or that they don’t want to try.

Take for instance my four year old son, the word can’t has slowly crept into his vocabulary and I have no one to blame but myself for it. Now quite often he will run up to me and say “Dad, I can’t do this” and I will respond with “Did you try?” and I will usually be met with the all to familiar answer of “No”.

How does he know that he can’t do something if he hasn’t even tried? How do any of us know we can’t do something if we have yet to try?

This year my goal is to strike the word can’t from my vocabulary. I am going to instead replace it with “I can do this” or “here let me try”. I personally don’t think I can fail if I stop thinking that I can’t and instead just try, because even if I am unsuccessful in what I am trying at the very least I will have learned something.

Is the word can’t holding you back from trying something new?

As a business owner it’s time you take control of your...

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:27:58 -0700

As a business owner it’s time you take control of your online presence by purchasing your businesses domain name and placing even a basic website online. It’s time to stop relying on the search engines to give you a listing based solely on your yellow page ad.

If you own a business that has zero online presence than this year your goal should be to let the world know what your business is, what service or product sells, who runs the business and what your hours of operation are by leveraging the many cheap and sometimes free advertising platforms online.

If you need help getting started let me know how I can help.

How Does Real Time Search Affect You?

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:06:42 -0700

In December of 2009 Google launched real time search integration that pulls in data from Twitter, blogs, FriendFeed and other sites and places this data on the first page of their search results to provide relevant and real-time search results related to your search query.

In October of 2009 Microsoft announced that they had made deals with both Facebook and Twitter that allows Microsoft’s search engine Bing to integrate status updates into the search results. Bing already allows you to search Twitter directly by visiting www.bing.com/twitter.

So what does real time search mean to you and your brand? Real time search is going to explode in 2010 and is going to mean everything to you and your brand. Think about it for a minute; now every time you update your Twitter feed, your Facebook status or your MySpace page your status update will now be instantly searchable within the search engines. No longer will you be forced to wait for the search engines to index your page before your content becomes searchable in the engines but now by simply updating your status updates on one of the major social networks your status update becomes instantly available to searchers.

Real time search combined with social networks work together to form a powerful tandem of tools that you can use to promote your brand and products. Real time search is set to become a game changing technology in 2010.

Although extremely powerful real time search is primed to be abused and this can also affect how you and your brand may be perceived online. Google is taking a huge chance allowing the real time search results to be displayed on its first page of results. If a topic becomes hot enough (such as the release of the Google Nexus) spammers can take advantage of this by simply Tweeting about the trending topic and including a link to their spam page and now this will be displayed on the first page of the Google results page. The spammer had to do zero work to get on the first page of Google.

What if a group of individuals or spammers decides to attack your product or personal brand using social networks? Search engines and Google in particular will now start showing these negative brand comments on the first page of their results. Without verification to whether the information being presented is true or not, other users searching on that topic will now be shown the negative search results about your product or brand. A simple tweet or status update becomes a powerful weapon that can start a public relations nightmare for you and your brand.

Whether good or bad real time search is something that can not be ignored as it is going to become more and more integrated into the search engines in 2010.

"I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:59:45 -0700

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

- Bill Cosby

2009: The Year Of Social

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:30:09 -0700

From an online perspective 2009 could be labelled as the Year Of Social as social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook dominated the online world and have begun to enter into the mainstream conscience. It is becoming clear that people no longer wish to visit a static page to simply be presented with a few choices. Individuals now want to engage, communicate, and most importantly they want to interact with the site and with others who may have purchased the same product as themselves.

The proliferation of social sites and the stream of real time data being created has made enough of an impact in 2009 that even Google and Microsoft have jumped into the market. The search giants have now begun to pull data from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and display it in real time as it relates to your search query. Google has taken this one step further by displaying real time data on the first page of its search results for many queries.

The days when people found what they were looking for by simply launching their favorite search engine, typing in a search query and pressing enter are no longer the only way to find what you are looking for and in fact it may not even be the best way to find what you are looking for anymore. Instead more and more people are now turning to their friends, family members and increasingly to their social networks to tell them what to buy, what movie to see, where the deals are and where the best service to be had is.

Word of mouth has always been the most effective way to market to individuals as nothing is as powerful an endorsement as hearing from ones own friends and family that a product or service is a must have. The problem in the past was that word of mouth never scaled as well as a television commercial could. That is to say a television commercial in the past could theoretically reach a far greater number of people than word of mouth could. What we are now seeing is that with social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook the word of mouth message can be scaled to a global audience that reaches even more people than traditional advertising routes ever could and at a fraction of the costs associated with old media advertisement.

So if 2009 was the Year Of Social, what is in store for us in 2010? For 2010 I see a lot more of what we witnessed in 2009 as more and more businesses and individuals begin to embrace social networks as more than mere fads. Much like in the early 90’s when commercials had a .com address affixed to the lower portion of the screen I think we will see companies attaching their Twitter address and Facebook pages to their advertisements.

Look for companies to reach out to consumers through social networks more and more to not only promote but to also gather feedback on products and services and to help consumers who may have had a bad experience with their product.

The world we live in is becoming an increasingly small and intimate one. It is my belief that in 2010 we will see word of mouth through the use of social networks become more important for us the consumer as we tend to trust recommendations from our friends, families and those in our networks far more than an expensive ad placed by a faceless company.

Businesses and individuals would be wise to adopt to this fast changing world before they are forced to accept it and are left forever behind.