Best Social Media Advice From This Site
I’m passionate about how certain strategies married to certain technologies allow individuals and companies to build things: reputation, trust, personal brand, community, relationships, and even marketplaces. My efforts to cover larger stories, tools, strategies, and more over the last several months have given you quite a bit to consider. But blogs are a tricky method for learning and reflecting. They’re like a running stream, and if you step out for a moment, a certain point in the stream will pass you by.
To that end, I’ve collected some links to the posts that I think might be helpful to you. Peruse these at your leisure. I’ve grouped them a bit for you. Feel free to pick and choose the topics that matter to you. I hope this proves helpful. If it does, please consider blogging a link to this post, and/or feel free to pass it on to any who might want more of this type of information.
There’s a lot here. Feel free to bookmark it for later.
Thanks!
Community Development
- Understanding Community Development Strategies
- Ways to Disrupt a Community
- Why Do Community Development
- Should Your Small Business Use Community Tools
- The Long Tail of Community
- If Communitites Are Just Marketing Pools
- The Magic of Including People
- Meeting People at Events
- The Community Play
- The Community Ecosystem
- How Blogs Improve Customer Service and Product Development
Social Networks
- Three Things LinkedIN Does Better than Facebook
- How I Use Facebook
- Things To Do on Facebook
- Facebook - Let Me See My Friends
- Fix Your Facebook Profile Now
- Facebook and the Social Graph - Who Benefits
- Five Things to Do on LInkedIN
- Considering Social Etiquette
- Social Networks are Your Local Pub
- Why Join Another Social Network
- Marketers in a Social Network World
- Real Live Human Social Networking
- Social in Real Space vs. Social Networking
- Making Social Networks Work
- Improve Your Social Network
- The Importance of a Human Social Network
- Three Untapped Values of Social Networks
- Five Things to Do at a Social Networking Meetup
Social Media
- Social Media Starter Pack
- A Basic Social Media Strategy
- My Social Media Toolkit
- A Sample Social Media Toolkit
- Participation- The Key to Social Media
- Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses
- How Big Companies could Use Social Media
- Social Media Inside the Firewall
- Social Media Power Secret - Listening
- Small Businesses And Social Media
- Social Media is a Set Not a Part
- Social Media for Your Career
- Help Someone Understand Social Media
- Social Media as Personal Power
- Snake Oil in Social Media
- Using Social Media to Meet People
- Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
- Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
- Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
- How I Use Twitter
- Deeper Twitter - Tuning Twitter for Value
- Newbies Guide to Twitter
- Twitter as Directors Commentary
- Twitter as an Advisory Board
Personal Branding
- The Power of Personal Leadership
- Slicing Time in a Face to Face Environment
- Brand Stories
- Some Quick Branding Tips for Individuals
- The foundations of Your Power
- Personal Scalability
- Personal Branding and Social Media
- Passion Drives Personal Brand
- Elements of a Personal Brand
- Challenges of Social Media Types in the Workplace
- The Value of Networks
- Scaling Yourself
Making Media
- Why Create Personal Media
- Whats Your Social Media Strategy
- Media Makers Next Steps
- Blogging Advice for the Next Level
- Expand Your Audience
- The Future of Microcontent and Hperlocal Media
- Why Bother Blogging Podcasting and Using Social Networks
- Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy
- Marketing Media Means Moments That Matter
- Using Social Sharing to Extend Your Message
- Performance and Your Audience - Blogging Tips
- Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
- Tagging and Metadata and Why Bother
- A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies
- Promoting Your Media
- The Power of Links
- 20 Blogging Projects for You
- Succeeding in Independent Online Media
- Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today
- Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
- 100 Blog topics I hope YOU Write
- 100 PodCamp Topics for You to Cover
I’m writing new stuff all the time at [chrisbrogan.com]. If you’re reading this for the first time, please consider subscribing for free. If you’re a subscriber, don’t forget to get the completely-different content published at least twice a month in my newsletter. And thanks for your attention and time.
Special thanks to Alexa Scordato for compiling this data on my behalf. It was a lot of work. Thanks!
Making a Business From Social Media
Who’s making a business from social media? Audio and video producers are, for the most part, scraping by, give or take a few notables (several of who are being paid from VC money). Bloggers are making money in varying degrees, depending on their advertising opportunities, or their opportunity for consulting. I’m going to leave the “entertainment” category out of this discussion for that reason (though you’re welcome to argue it back in). So, who’s really making a business out of social media?
Early Adopters: Advertising, PR and Marketing
First to market with actual paying jobs in social media are public relations and marketing firms. Why? Because if you squint your eyes, the tools are the same thing: a means for communicating professionally. Is that wrong? I don’t think so, provided we don’t lose ground with regards to how these new tools re-humanize technology-assisted communication.
Using social media for “viral” advertising is popular, but mostly because it’s low-cost, low-barrier technology that permits folks to get a message across through different channels. Will that last? I can’t see why we’d go back to $100,000 spots, when we can create the media and distribute it for free, especially where the world is shifting to those free methods, too.
Business Users
I’m not sure what department an internal corporate social media practitioner would fall into. Project management makes sense, because inside the firewall, these tools facilitate collaboration, status messages, data sharing, and other uses that would work well for facilitating projects. Product management and R&D might adopt the tools as well, but there probably wouldn’t be a pre-defined role for someone who simply knows how to use the tools.
Comparing the Two Most Likely Businesses
On one side, we have obvious jobs: PR, marketing, advertising. On the other, we have a potential role for daring companies, or a more likely future of an adoption of the tools by several people after receiving training from a more expert user. So, there are two options.
Which makes more sense? On one side, you have a mountain of communications companies hoping to adapt quickly. On the other side, you have businesses who aren’t as motivated to change their internal processes. But will there be a point where businesses take back their external arms for outreach to their customers? In a world where companies talk directly to their customers, the media, and prospects, will the business of communications go in-house?
Not Necessarily a Primary Business
We’re all jumping up and down and excited about social media and what these tools can do for us. WHAT, exactly, do these tools do for us that translates into a business directly? My answer: for lots of people, they don’t.
Looking for a career in social media would be like seeking a career in email. Instead, use these skills to cultivate another ability of yours. If you’re a salesperson, use social media tools to build leads, understand need, get the word out about your products. If you’re a nonprofit professional, you’ve already figured this out, and use these tools to aid in awareness, fundraising, communication, and more.
Instead of focusing on how these tools will become a career, focus on how you can equip others with these tools. THAT, I believe, is the business, in the short term. But even that will be the short term.
What do you think? Agree? Disagree? What’s your take?
Photo credit, Greg Westfall
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Social Networks- Time to Specialize
I’m looking at a new social network for writers called Protagonize. It’s a place where writers can come, register, add a picture, fill out a profile, type in the same stuff (granted, they’ve streamlined this a bit here), and then you can do the main core activities of the network:
- Submit stories or parts of stories.
- Collaborate on other people’s stories.
- Comment.
- Vote.
- Add friends.
It’s nicely made, has some reasonably interesting features, and if you’re a writer, it’s worth checking out.
And Yet
I want more. I want lots more. No, don’t come comment on my post and tell me that it’s coming. It’s not your fault, but here’s the thing.
We have the baseline functionality of account, friends, comments, voting, etc. That’s all done. There are hundreds of implementations of it. We get it.
At this point, I want someone to get smart like the ZLoop guys and figure out a centralized social networking profile repository that permits us to have multiple iterations, depending on the network.
For a site about stories and writing, I want MUCH more specialized tools. Maybe a floating ajax thesaurus. Could there be a visual storytelling tool that lets writers branch the story in multiple ways like a choose-your-own-adventure book? I want mark-ups and overlay editing features so that others can come in and give you edits and annotation to your stories.
For a site about music, maybe it would be different tools. Come to think of it, Flickr should buy Aviary and roll Picnik in tighter so that we get specialized tools there, too.
I think professional networks have the most opportunity in this regard. Businesses and professional organizations need tools that go beyond what LinkedIn have offered to date. We’re actually looking into that at CrossTech Partners, researching toolsets and building use cases for how professional networks can evolve.
If You’re Developing a Network
Don’t stop at the basics. Don’t just give me another place to make a profile and add friends. It has to give me much more than that before I care. And I think I’m speaking for the user base in general at this point.
Consider what might really make the software valuable and useful. Consider ways in which your targeted users might want to interact. Specialize instead of generalize. Give us VERY specific tools. What would librarians find interesting? What would educators need to take time away from their typical haunts?
And as for YOU, what do you want in your specialized social network? What can you imagine being a set of tools for growing out your human relationships?
Love your thoughts on some variations on the theme.
NTEN Rocks
The NTEN community reached out to have me as part of their “Ask the Expert” sessions. I told them I’d give them some blogging and social media resources. So, here you are, guys.
Social Media and Social Network Starter Points
Social Media Starter Moves for Business
Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today
Measuring Social Media Efforts
Oh, and I’m doing a newsletter too, if that’s useful.
On Managing A Community
I wonder how most organizations are handling the role of community manager. I’m curious where a community manager reports. Marketing? HR? Customer service? I wonder how organizations are justifying the cost, and what they believe the role entails for level of effort. How are companies using the role in either direction?
Depending on the organization, I imagine the role of a community manager would be different, so I’m going to walk through what the role might entail for a media and events company (like mine), and see what comes to mind. I could do the same for several other professions, but let’s start here. Want to follow along? You can help me refine it in the comments.
Strategy
My strategy for a community manager would be to accomplish the following:
- Develop an awareness center for our industry (so we can listen and know what the community at large feels).
- Build a non-marketing community outreach to deliver a voice for our organization to the industry.
- Engage the community we embrace, and facilitate learning and education from our organization’s perspective, and through relationships with other trusted organizations.
Reporting Structure
My company is a fairly flat organizational structure. At my office, a community manager would report in to me as the VP of Strategy & Technology. Why? Because I’m charged with setting the tone and the look and feel of the content for all of our events. To me, the role at my organization would be to help me build on the customer experience.
Duties
My community manager (and I’ll use the feminine pronoun to save both of us the “he or she”) would have accounts on the following platforms:
- Ning
- YouTube
- Google Reader
She would have responsibility to set up tracking and alerts for keywords specific to our industry, to subscribe to several industry blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and to subscribe to certain topic categories on YouTube.
She would comment on appropriate blogs. Not about our events, but about the topics at hand (the comments would at least have a URL back to her blog, so that’s enough self-promotion on that front). Listening and commenting would be the bulk of her first three months’ duties.
She would blog when she felt comfortable with the space.
If we decided to grow a Facebook or Ning community, she’d help facilitate good conversations there, too.
Measurements
I’d measure my community manager on the following:
- Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
- Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
- Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
- Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
- Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
- Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
- Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.
Success of the Project
I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:
- Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
- Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
- Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.
Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.
YOUR Turn
How would your organization incorporate a community manager? Where would they report? How would you measure their efforts? Do you see any flaws in my suggestions? Are YOU a community manager? How does this sync up with your world?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Starting Points for Online Presence
Getting started in social media might feel daunting. In considering what would constitute a “passport” for a would-be “web native,” I found myself adding more and more services to the list of things one might consider adding to their collection of applications and services to use.
Start at your own pace, and go as slowly as you need to for you to feel comfortable getting to understand all these services, but here is a list of applications and networks that I think you might consider joining and developing into your online reputation and presence platform:
The Basics
- Take a reasonably decent photo of yourself for an avatar pic. Size it to 100×100 pixels if you can. (most services want this as a default). If you’re shy off the bat, put something more fun than your corporate logo.
- Twitter - Be sure to add your nifty new photo. Then, if you don’t already have friends on Twitter, check the public timeline to see who’s doing something interesting, or check out Twitter Packs for some starting people to follow.
- WordPress.com Account - Even if you eventually choose another blogging platform, building a WordPress.com presence means that you get an OpenID account, a place to build a profile for lots of the popular blogging platforms (I recommend getting a Blogger/Google account for that reason, too), and also a potential “scratch blog” for putting up ideas that might not fit your larger presence.
- Facebook profile - There are millions of people using Facebook (and even more on MySpace). It’s a good place to build an account that tells people more about yourself, and as an outpost for your blog (add your RSS feed to Facebook through one of many 3rd party apps that will re-post it there), which all goes towards establishing your reputation online.
- YouTube account - YouTube serves millions of videos a month. It’s a great place to comment, to submit your own stuff to a larger audience, and/or to find points of interest. If you want more serious, better considered video hosting, try Blip.TV.
- Gmail account - which will give you access to Gmail.com, but also Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and plenty other useful services. I use Google Reader as my preferred news reader, and I use Google Calendar for ease of use of scheduling.
- **UPDATE** Google Reader for listening. Recommended by David Usher
Bonus Round
If you’re feeling like you want to participate even more, you’ll need these:
- **UPDATE** FriendFeed is a way to aggregate your presence and that of your friends online. Suggested by Ontario Emperor
- Digg and StumbleUpon and del.icio.us accounts - Use social bookmarking communities to share things you like, to find things you’re interested in, and to grow a social view of news and information.
- Upcoming.org for events to attend in this space.
- Flickr account - (which is technically now a Yahoo! account, as is del.icio.us.) This is for photo sharing, and gives you an easy place to put your pictures on the web.
- Skitch account - for screen captures, should you want to post a picture off your computer screen simply.
- PayPal account - for easy financial transactions used by many websites.
- **UPDATE** Plaxo for contact management. - Recommended by Susan Beebe.
Your Thoughts
There are certainly dozens more applications to consider, and this doesn’t count one’s primary blog, podcast, video property or otherwise. But I’m wondering if I’ve missed any “fundamental” sites that you’d recommend we add to this list, or if there are any that should come off. What’s your take?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, hji
What I Did This Morning Instead of Blog
There’s a lot more to social media than just blogging. To be active, we must be out there listening, commenting, contributing, communicating in other ways, and reaching the people who matter to us. One one side, that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time this morning. And I’ve been doing other things, too.
Inspired a bit by Andy Quayle’s What Did You Do Today post, here’s a bit of what’s on my plate (not counting family life):
CrossTech Media
I’ve been doing lots of stuff for CrossTech Media in anticipation of our upcoming ITEC Houston technology event, I’ve been working with Radian6 on a webinar/video series that we’re producing for a CrossTech webinar. I’m also trying to build interest and awareness of our new The Next Data Center executive briefing event, which I’m really happy about. I’m also building out events for later in the year (something about the future of work, and one about communications, and another about social software). I’m building speaking engagements now for New Marketing Summit, my event in Boston this fall. So, that’s a lot.
PodCamp
PodCamp Boston3 is coming up this summer. I’m in charge of helping raise sponsorship money to cover the venue, the wifi, the other stuff that makes a PodCamp happen. Christopher Penn and Whitney Hoffman and others do all the heavy lifting, but fundraising takes some efforts, too.
Book
I’m co-authoring a book soon with Julien Smith. We’re in the proposal stage, so I won’t say more. Book is the new “rock band” thing we say. “Oh yeah, I’m writing a book, too.” But it’s something that matters to me, so I’m putting what I can into it.
Social Media Stuff
Here’s a pretty busy bucket that I’ve run out of time to cover. But there’s where I spend a lot of time, too. What comes of this part is always interesting, quirky, sometimes business-actionable, and filled to the brim with humans. THIS is where the above stuff starts. Social media are the fields I tend, where I plant seeds, weed out things that don’t work, grow new varieties of relationships, and develop ideas that might or might not lead to business or a further sense of being helpful.
Later, I’ll cover what goes into all this, but start here. Think here. Start here. Think about how this is what social media does for individuals. Do you know that’s why my bosses hired me in and gave me a big role in changing their company? Do you know that my bosses (and I say that half joking, because I think of us as business partners with different percentages) talk to me about Twitter and Facebook and things like that every day?
If you’re passionate about social media, real business happens here, real connections and value happen here. Education happens here. It’s what you want to make of it, and it’s a powerful force for STARTING and MAINTAINING good things. It’s up to use to close what you do with it. But if you use the tools, at least you can start.
What are you doing today? How are you using social media to move the ball forward in your life? What are your challenges?
What BrightKite Does Well
BrightKite allows for a granularity of “friend” adding that I appreciate. I can add someone. I can add them as a TRUSTED friend, which means they get even more private info. And then from there, I can send their updates to a stream, to my phone via SMS, or to my email account. As social networks pile upon social networks, it’s time for you to start paying attention to the features that we’ll really need. Here’s a need:
I need for networks to start realizing a delicate social situation. It’s important that I accept people who know me from my blog and twitter as “friends” on a network, while still keeping them in the “small f” category of my life (until they grow into being more). Facebook doesn’t allow this. Hell, with Friend Suggest, it’s almost the opposite lately. I’m adding six-twelve new people a week that I don’t know, but presume I know from my blog or twitter or my friends.
What else do we need? We need a persona/profile that displays different values depending on the network. A service like ZLoop has an interesting service. They allow one to make several personas from one account, such that you can be a business version of yourself, a church version of yourself, and a friends version of yourself, or whatever versions you need to support.
What do YOU need in a social network platform these days? What tools do you need for the way you WANT to do work on these networks? You can start asking, you know. They need to start differentiating soon. It might as well be with your recommendations.
Screen caps made with Skitch
I am NOT Digg
The benefit of having a large following on Twitter is that if I ask for someone’s attention, or point them towards something that I think is worthwhile, it drives a reasonable amount of traffic towards whatever I point out. I enjoy pointing out the occasional post on a friend’s site, and sharing something I’ve discovered out and about. At other points, I really don’t mind putting up the occasional interesting link, or getting the word out for a friend who requests it from me. If you’ve ever asked me to get the word out on something, please don’t read this post and think, “Wow, I’ve really put Chris out.” This is for a certain minority of folks who’ve cropped up recently.
I am not Digg.
Digg is a mechanical platform that uses the efforts of a crowd of people to promote interesting links, and get traffic to the ones voted most worthy by the community. The key points in this definition are “mechanical” and “crowd.” I, Chris Brogan, am neither mechanical, nor a crowd.
As such, it’s sometimes hard (becoming harder) to keep up with the sheer weight of people requesting that I link things for them.
I asked the question in Twitter today, whether anyone could cite whether my pointing towards something was even useful, from a stats perspective. Most folks couldn’t answer, and several wanted me to test it out by pointing to their site. So, for the most part, some folks who have asked for this don’t even know if it’s making a difference.
Beth Kanter said that there was a 30-something percent difference in traffic on efforts where she used me to get the word out, so thanks, Beth.
Where it gets tricky is scale. I’m one guy, with at tonight’s count, just over 6500 followers on Twitter. I’m happy to put out the word on something amazing you’ve done, or something you think is really meaningful, or a cause that really needs doing. But please continue to bear in mind that I’m one guy, with a day job, and a lot of other projects, and a writing schedule, and two kids, and I’m not a mechanical platform run by the voting of crowds.
I think Twitter is a great tool for promoting what’s useful, sharing what has our attention, and driving awareness of causes and information that’s really important. I’m sure you do, too. While you work on growing your network by building meaningful relationships and sharing useful information, I’m happy to help you from time to time. Very happy to help.
But I’m not Digg.
College Student Twitters Arrest in Egypt
“Arrested.” That’s what 29 year old James Karl Buck sent from his phone out to the world via Twitter the other day. It seems Buck was snapping photos of a demonstration, and police collected him up and put him in jail.
It turns out that his message on Twitter caused his network of friends to reach out, call around, and get people mobilized to help. There’s tons more to the story.
Greg Barnett sent me a message on Twitter reporting this news article about James Karl Buck. Steve Rhodes from Twitter sent me the link to Buck’s website. **UPDATE: Buck is @jamesbuck on Twitter, and his Flickr photos are here. (All those updates come from @tigerbeat / Steve Rhodes).
What’s important about this story? Everything. Twitter has a powerful ability to move people to action, to deliver help where it’s needed, and more. If a messaging platform can free a man from prison, what else can it do for YOU?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
