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Three Ways to Make Social Networks Work for You

March 8, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

How can you get the most from social networks? There’s a lot more to it than posting photos and status updates.

Tune in to the Conversation
People are talking about you behind your back. Its up to you to find out if it’s good, bad, or otherwise. Search sites like Twitter for your brand, school or group and get a sense of what’s being said in real time (for example, here’s what people are saying about Trident Layers gum on Twitter). The conversations you tune in on will help you judge how current communications initiatives and goals are being received, and help you adapt your approach accordingly. If there is no conversation…then you have another problem on your hands.

Use Your Audience as a Resource
 Your fans already have a vested interest – they know your brand and product best. Solicit them for feedback and get new ideas and advice. Sites like My Starbucks Idea and Vitamin Water’s Facebook presence are examples of the ways you can solicit feedback and participation from your biggest fans and advocates.

Research Key Players
 Sites like LinkedIn give you a direct channel to connect to and learn more about people. These could be individuals you don’t know yet but want to, or people you’ll be interacting with in the future. LinkedIn can give you valuable information: who you know in common, professional and educational background, groups and interests. These points of reference can be very helpful in a fundraising meeting, job interview, or on a sales call.

Ambient Awareness and Connecting Online

February 16, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

What is ambient awareness? Here’s an example: right now you might know what your old college roommate had for breakfast this morning, even though you live 2,000 miles apart and haven’t traded emails or phone calls in months. And how do you know? You saw it on Facebook, in a tweet or a blog post. Social media has the power to keep friends connected and up-to-date on everything from vacations to favorite foods to new year’s resolutions, all without picking up the phone or penning a letter.

But beyond maintaining personal friendships, how might ambient awareness be useful?

It can help build community: Headmasters like Lee Burns of the Presbyterian Day School can communicate with students and parents using social media tools. By posting about a book he’s read and discussing how it relates to education, he gives the campus community the opportunity to join in on the conversation – both in person and online.

It can be a networking tool: these days, it’s not who you know but who you don’t know. Follow people in your field you respect and admire (read their blog or follow them on Twitter). Not sure where to start? Try sites like Twiangulate to identify those you aren’t following, but should be. Participate in the conversation by posting a comment when you have relevant thoughts and ideas to share. You stay informed about tools and trends, you build an online reputation for being an informed, engaged participant, and your interactions online may lead to offline networking connections.

It can promote a brand or initiative: companies like Coca-Cola are using Facebook not only to advertise their products, but as a way to spread the word about their philanthropic endeavors. You can use social media tools to augment your message for a new initiative, brand, product or goal, and interact with your constituents in a space they’re already invested in, keeping your fans aware of the latest info and updates.

Maybe all of this seems obvious, but it’s important to remember: social media lets you establish, build and maintain relationships in ways we were unable to easily accomplish before. Wield this tool wisely.

Thanks to Travis Warren of WhippleHill for making me aware of Lee Burns’s social media presence.

Social Bookmarks: A Useful Tool You Aren’t Using

February 2, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 3 comments

What is social bookmarking?

According to Wikipedia: a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. In other words: keeping track of stuff you find on the web, and making it easy for others to find. The key to all of this is tagging – assigning keywords to each bookmark to help keep them organized and easy to locate when you need them. Social Bookmarking hasn’t caught on like Twitter or Facebook. But it’s incredibly useful for keeping track of links, resources, blog posts and all sorts of things we come across on the web and think, “I need to remember this” or “I might want to refer to this later.”

Among the most popular sites for social bookmarking are Diigo and Delicious. Delicious allows you to save and tag bookmarks, connect with other users, and subscribe to individual users’ bookmarks with RSS. An example: Mark Greenfield’s bookmarks are an excellent resource (username markgr). Mark makes great use of tags and has more than 2500 bookmarked resources. Want to know more about Twitter? Click the twitter tag in his list and you’re set.

Diigo offers a full suite of tools to help keep tabs on your bookmarks, and share them with others – it’s ideal if you’re engaged in a research project and/or collaborating with others. You can highlight specific sections of a site’s content or leave comments for others to find. Diigo also boasts a group feature, which allows users to self identify and share links with others interested in the same subject. We’re planning to use a Diigo group as a resource for the attendees of the CASE Social Media and Community Conference (thanks to Joel Price, a member of our faculty, for setting it up).  It’s brand new, and we’ll start populating it with content in the weeks to come.

And that’s Social Bookmarking in a nutshell. Give it a shot. It will save you from many  ”now where did I read that?” moments.

Thanks Twitter, Facebook: How I Got News about the Eureka Earthquake

January 10, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m from Eureka, a relatively rural town of about 30,000 people in Northern California. For those of you unfamiliar with the foggy, green, quiet town where I was born and raised, here’s a map.

Saturday afternoon, Eureka was hit with a 6.5 earthquake. The majority of my extended family still lives in Eureka, and I was very concerned. Not only about the potential for earthquake damage, but about the potential for a tsunami (there was one up there in the 60s, and it killed 11 people). My sister and I weren’t able to reach our Mom and Dad right away; cell signals were dead and land lines were unreliable.

So how did I get details about what happened and how the town fared? From the Internet, of course.

But not from online newspapers. No, I got my info from my Facebook network and from Twitter:

Mind you, these posts are from Facebook friends who don’t even live in Eureka any longer, but they had spoken to their respective families. This at least reassured me that Eureka wasn’t underwater, or complete rubble.

Twitter gave me some other pieces to the puzzle as well, thanks to the #Eureka hashtag (search it now for ongoing info). Even Mashable was running a story that featured user @amyeureka’s Twitter photos of the aftermath.

Thanks to all of these, I was able to at least get some idea of the current status: no reported deaths, no tsunamis, no obliterated buildings. Just a lot of broken glass, toppled bookcases and broken chimneys. I could make a somewhat reasonable assumption that at least my family was alive, though maybe missing a few picture frames and glassware. And I wouldn’t have obtained that information from broadcast news or the paper.

The good news? I was finally able to make contact with my family: thankfully, the only casualty at Mom and Dad’s was a television.

Stuff I Use: Tools for Managing Social (and other) Media

January 4, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 2 comments

Managing and monitoring your online reputation requires keeping tabs on lots of different online spaces. Fortunately there are several free tools available on the Interwebs to help you. Here are some of my favorites:

Hootsuite: a free, web based tool for administering Twitter identities. I use it to manage several Twitter accounts at once, search specific keywords and hashtags, shrink URLs and schedule future tweets. It does all that AND supplies metrics on specific tweets (if it contains a url you shortened via Hootsuite). Overall, its a great tool. My only complaint is that in the past they’ve forced users to send a canned tweet telling everyone how great Hootsuite is. Annoying.

Google Alerts are a no brainer: a free, simple way to monitor new stuff that’s been posted to the web about a certain subject. First, customize the system to send you an email with results on a certain query (or queries – you can set up as many alerts as you want, but you’ll get an email for each one). You can search for a name, a school, a company, a product – anything. When that search term pops up in the latest relevant Google results, you’ll hear about it via email. You just decide how often you want to receive them. Google Alerts has been around for a while, but I still find it incredibly useful.

NetNewsWire. To keep up with blogs, news, and other sites via RSS you need a good feed reader (if you’re not clear on what RSS or “syndication” is, read more here). My favorite is NetNewsWire, a free client for the Mac (sorry, no PC version as of yet). By sorting everything into folders/categories I can quickly and painlessly sift through hundreds of feeds every day.

PC folks: No NetNewsWire should not mean that you give up on RSS entirely. I hear good things about Google Reader; give it a shot and let me know what you think.

And don’t forget: you can put the feed for this very blog in your reader of choice right here.