Dancing About Architecture

How to be Everywhere in Social Media

Image by < ilian /> via Flickr

One of the most challenging things about being involved in social media is the number of tools you have to keep track of.  You have Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Linked In, You Tube,  Last.FM, MySpace, Identi.ca, Brightkite and many, many more.

So how do you keep track of them all and remember to keep them all updated?

The Puck has written an amazing article called Ten Steps to Being Everywhere in Social Media and it is well worth a read.  Through his article I discovered the site, Profilactic which has given me the great list in my sidebar containing all the places I can be found online.  It puts all your streams and that of your friends in one handy place, but unlike FriendFeed, you can not comment on your friends’ posts.

Also, I have found the AdobeAir application SocialAddict which pulls through the mobile version of 11 of the most popular social networking site and puts them into one handy desktop application.  I prefer Twhirl for using Twitter, but for my other sites this application seems pretty good. Maybe using this application I can stop losing so much karma on Plurk because I never seem to find the time to check in every day.

If you have liked what you have read, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Related Posts

• The Social Media Love-In
• Creating Fiction on Twitter
• Identi.ca: Will it kill Twitter?
• Using social networking tools to promote your blog
• The Value of Social Networking

The Social Media Love-In

Image via Wikipedia

Darren from Problogger held a Social Media Love-In at the beginning of this week where he encouraged all of his readers to post links to all the social networking tools that they use and to friend other comments.  It was a huge success.  Darren and his trusty assistant Lara then complied a list of 538 Problogger readers that use Twitter and has since done similar lists for StumbleUpon and Digg users.

My inbox has been swamped with notifications of people who are now following me on Twitter and Plurk and I have been having a great time checking out their blogs and reading their tweets and plurks.

Darren’s social media love-in has proven the immense power that social networking sites can have in connecting people with common interests. It will be interesting to see how many long lasting connections are made from this experiment and how many people will delete most of the people they added from their friends lists after the excitment has died down.

Related Posts

• Using social networking tools to promote your blog
• The Value of Social Networking
• How to be Everywhere in Social Media
• Creating Fiction on Twitter
• Identi.ca: Will it kill Twitter?

Creating Fiction on Twitter

Twitter is becoming well-known for being the place online where news about major events are broken. Andrew Sayer has taken this fact to a new level and has done an amazing mock up of what his Twitter timeline would look like if there was a global Zombie attack.  It is absolutely fantastic and even this small snipet creates a wonderful sense of suspense and you are left wanting to know what happens next.

This got me thinking, is anyone out there using Twitter either directly or in a pictorial form like Andrew’s mock up to tell a story?   So I started investigation and I found Twitter Fiction, who writes a stories, or as she terms it, microfictions in 140 characters.  Meanwhile over at MInific, they are collaborating 130 character stories and reposting them through a single Twitter feed.

I am sure there are many more people out there using Twitter to write fiction, so if you know of any please let us know.

Related Posts

• How to be Everywhere in Social Media
• The Social Media Love-In
• Identi.ca: Will it kill Twitter?
• Using social networking tools to promote your blog
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Identi.ca: Will it kill Twitter?

Identi.ca , which launched on 2nd July, is the new kid on the microblogging block. Unlike Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku etc, Identi.ca is a built using free software which means legally, you can go and take their code and run it on your own site which opens this service up to endless possibilities.

To differentiate itself from the numerous microblogging services already out there Identi.ca has announced some exciting features. Those features are; cross-posting to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc as well as having Twitter, Pownce etc messages appear on Identi.ca, Facebook integration, ability to upload images and videos and maps. Unfortunately, none of these features are live yet, but the site does promise that they are coming “soon”.

At the moment, Identi.ca is like a poor man’s Twitter, except unlike Twitter, it hasn’t fall over…. yet. The user base is very small and you can not yet search to see if your friends are already there. But if you hang out on the public timeline long enough, you will see everyone who uses the service anyway. Another annoying missing feature is the ability to delete your posts or “dents” as they are called. That means if you post something in error, it stays there for all eternity.

I guess I am being a little harsh on a service that is barely 24 hours old as Identi.ca does seem to have a lot of potential. However, it remains to be seen if Identi.ca can live up to the expectation of being a Twitter killer. If they are able to keep their system operational as their user base grows and implement all the promised features, they have a real shoot at superseding Twitter as the King of Microblogging Tools.

Have you given Identi.ca a try? What are your thoughts about it?

I can be found on Identi.ca at http://identi.ca/riayn/

I am currently testing out Posterous, a tool which allows you to post text, images and audio online via email, so stay tuned for my review on it.

Related Posts

• How to be Everywhere in Social Media
• The Social Media Love-In
• Creating Fiction on Twitter
• Using social networking tools to promote your blog
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Using social networking tools to promote your blog

Most people when they start a blog simply set up their blog, write some posts and then wonder why no one is visiting or commenting.  They forget that one of the most important ingredients for running a successful blog is marketing.  Marketing, however, doesn’t mean spending money on advertising as there are many free methods you can use to promote your blog.  This article will be examining how to effectively use social networking tools to promote your blog.

Blogging can be quite a solitary process and it is very easy to become egotistical especially if you have tasted some success in the early days of your blogging journey.  In the blogging world though, people who engage with peers, create conversations and promote the work of others can easily gain credibility and traffic on their blogs.  On the other hand, those who just focus on their own blogs and use social networking tools purely for self promotion will quickly lose respect. Therefore using social networking tools to promote your blog needs to be done with care as once you lose respect and credibility, it is very hard to regain them.

The two social networking tools I am going to focus on are Twitter and StumbleUpon.  There are many other tools out there but these are the two I use most frequently and therefore feel somewhat qualified to talk about.

Twitter - either you love it or you hate it.  However, many bloggers do not know how to use it effectively to not only promote their own blogs but to build up connections with other bloggers. Using Twitterfeed to broadcast your latest blog posts is a great way to let those who are following you that you have written a new post, however, if that is all you use Twitter for then you are going to quickly lose followers and credibility. No one wants to read your twitter feed if all it is, is an RSS feed.  To use Twitter effectively, you must stop focusing solely on yourself and start connecting with others.  Tweet about articles you have read and enjoy and ask questions of your followers and use their knowledge to write future posts. There is nothing a fellow blogger likes more than to see themselves referenced in someone else’s blog.  Yes, all bloggers do contain a healthy dose of ego. Also use Twitter to follow bloggers that you admire and watch to see how they use it. See what they do that works and what doesn’t work. Learn from their mistakes and replicate their successes. Most bloggers who use Twitter will have their details on their blog and if not, it never hurts to ask them.No one is going to get upset at you because you want to hear more about them.

StumbleUpon is a social networking tool that really teaches you the value of giving. If you just use it to “stumble” or “like”  only your own posts then you won’t get much traffic from it.  However, if you use it to “stumble” or “like” other blogger’s posts then you will quickly gain the reputation as a Power Stumbler.  Power Stumblers can generate an amazing amount of traffic for the blogs that they stumble.  I can hear you all thinking, “well, what is in it for me?”.  This where connections really count.  Form a group of like-minded individuals and stumble each others posts. You give them the gift of great traffic and they in turn do the same for you.   It is a true win-win situation.  Of course, if you don’t like the post, don’t stumble it, you don’t want to get the reputation of stumbling any old crap.   If you are new to the blogging world and don’t really know anyone, still get out there and stumble.  If the blogger also uses StumbleUpon they can see exactly who has stumbled their post and will most likely go and check out your own blog and if they like what they see, they will stumble one of your posts. Well I know I do that so I am going to assume that other bloggers do as well.

Creating great content is useless if no one is going to read it.  You need to get out there and promote yourself and your work.  The best way to do that is by connecting with other bloggers especially those who blog in your own niche.  Social networking is an easy way to get yourself known, but you need to take care with the image you are portraying.  Just as in real life, bloggers feel favourably towards those who do things for them or take the time to get to know them.  Get out there and start connecting with your fellow bloggers, the rewards are greater than just an increase in your traffic.

Do you use social networking to promote your blog?  What tools do you use and what successes/failures have you had?  What do you find works best for you and what has been a waste of time?

Related Posts

• The Social Media Love-In
• New Forum for Women Bloggers
• How to be Everywhere in Social Media
• Creating Fiction on Twitter
• Identi.ca: Will it kill Twitter?