The Warrior Dash looks like a very cool race.  A bunch of my friends ran it last year and had a great time, so I signed up as soon as I could this year.  I’m very excited about the race, but I’m very disappointed in how they manage their Twitter account; all talking, zero listening.

On July 13, they tweeted that registration was now open for the “Southeast” race next May.  They have 3300+ followers, over 800 tweets, and seem to use TweetDeck to handle most of it (indicating that they’re likely somewhat Twitter-savvy).

In the five days since that post, here are a couple of the questions that people directed to @WarriorDash:

• soleoblues @WarriorDash — Is your registration site experiencing issues? Friend and I tried to sign up earlier today and kept getting error messages. (link)
• JMAC1775 @WarriorDash any swimming involved in Mountain City, GA event? (link)

Beyond that, a few others asked questions of them but didn’t use the @ correctly.  A simple search would pull these in (which is a breeze in TweetDeck).  Here’s an example:

• marathonjohn Dear Warrior Dash, I’m trying to register for you, but your website won’t let me. Boo and/or hiss. Regards, jrs. (link)

How many did the folks at Warrior Dash respond to? Zero.  This isn’t a cheap race either ($40+ per person), so each tweet that helped these users would be worth around $40 to the company.  Want to earn $40/tweet? Apparently they don’t.

Going beyond those tweets, there are many others that are opening contemplating the race (“should I do it?”).  Jumping into those conversations should be a no-brainer as well.  They might not sign up, but being easily available to answer their questions would probably help quite a lot.

Keep in mind that these examples are just for the past five days.  Suppose that with proper support on Twitter, they could have gotten one extra sign-up per day; that seems quite reasonable, if not downright simple.  That’s $40/day in extra revenue, or over $14,000/year. Find a part-timer to work 5-10 hours a week answering Tweets — they’ll make some money for their work, and the organization will still come out thousands of dollars to the positive.

If you’re on Twitter, listen and respond; it’s not just a bullhorn.

Warrior Dash is a cool race, but needs to listen better is a post from: MickMel

Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but lately I’ve been finding a lot of organizations that have set up their Facebook presence by simply creating a new account for the business (or church, school, etc).  The process must be awkward…

First Name: MetroAtlanta
Last Name: ChurchOfTheRedeemed
Gender: Uh.. female?

I feel bad for these organizations.  They’re trying really hard to figure out social media, but they’ve made a very big mistake.  On Facebook, user profiles are for individual people only.  Period.  You have a profile, your mom has a profile and your friends all have profiles.  Businesses do not have profiles.

When Facebook finds these fake profiles, they delete them without warning.  The problem is that it can take months for Facebook to notice them, after which they’ve developed a pretty good following.  Once it’s been deleted, it’s back to square one.

Fortunately, Facebook offers two good options for any kind of business: Groups and Pages.  The differences between the two are slowly fading, but as a general rule:

Groups: Great for big events (“Winter Jam 2010″) or rally around a cause (“Heathcare plan is awesome/horrible”).

Pages: Great for organizations, businesses, churches, bands, etc.

In most of the cases of these unintentionally “fake” profiles, a Page is a far better solution.  If you’ve made that mistake, you need to fix it now.  Since you still have your profile intact (until Facebook finds it), you can use it to point your “friends” to your new Page.  Once that profile has been deleted, you’ll have no way to contact all of those people at once.

Your plan of action

It’s pretty simple.

1. Go set up your new page.  Start here and get it going.  Add your logo, fill in the details and start posting content.
2. Change any links that are pointing to your old profile to the new Page.  These are often links on your website, but could be link on other platforms, or even printed links on newsletters or flyers.
3. Log into your organization’s fake profile one last time and contact all of it’s friends to let them know of the new address.  Don’t bother them repeatedly, but send a message inviting them to become a Fan of your new Page.

That’s it!

Once you have your Page established, the amount of things you can do to promote your organization online is nearly limitless; Twitter, blogs, etc.  If you need any help, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Facebook profiles, pages and groups is a post from: MickMel

I have a number of friends who are unemployed, and I’m often sharing various suggestions with them.  I thought it’d be useful to them (and others) to summarize those ideas in one place.

However, I’m not going to show you how to find job openings.  You can use LinkedIn, Monster, HotJobs, Craigslist or any number of other services.  I’m simply going to show you some things that might increase your chances of landing an interview once you’ve found a job that you want to chase.  After that, you’re on your own!

LinkedIn

Studies show that 50-80% of employers use LinkedIn at some point in the hiring process.  Here are some specific things that you should look at:

Profile: At the very least, make sure you have an account with a completed profile (photo, work history, etc).

Status Updates: It’s important to post regular status updates so you can show employers what you’re interested in.  For example, some of my recent updates show my family life, social media news, information about the iPad, Twitter usability and things of that nature.

Use the second level: If you find an opening at a company you like, search for that company on LinkedIn.  If you have a decent sized network, there’s a good chance that someone in your “Second Level” works there.  For example, none of my connections work at Home Depot.  However, by searching for “Home Depot” I find that I have over 100 second level connections.  I can find the one that’s closest to the position I’m interested in, then find out who our common connection is, as seen on the right.  By doing this, I can have Roger connect me to Jim, and now I’m talking to someone inside the organization before I even earn an interview!

Recommendations: LinkedIn has a very cool “recommendations” system.  Ask some of your previous employers/employees/clients to write recommendations for you, which will help to enhance your profile.  Be sure to return the favor for them.

Control Your Search Results

I don’t have exact numbers, but we all know that many potential employers are going to Google you.  What will they find?  If you can take control of your search results, you can determine exactly what they’ll find.

The one catch is that you need to have a fairly unique name.  If your name is Jim Smith, it’s going to be difficult to dominate the search results for that phrase.  For many of us, though, you can easily take control.  Use my name for example (Mickey Mellen).  I have complete control over the first five results for my name, and solid control over 9 of the 10.

How is that done?  The simple way is to have active profiles on a variety of different social networking sites.  If you have active accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, those should rise to the top rather quickly.  How do you keep them active?  Read the next section to find out…

Ping.fm

I dicussed Ping.fm a few months ago, and the information there is still relevant.  Use it to post to a variety of services, and those services will slowly rise higher in the search results for your name.  This gives you a great way to have control over a large chunk of the vanity searches for your name, and will show potential employers the kinds of things that you’re interested in (keeping up with industry news, etc).

Once you have things set up, using Ping.fm at least a few times a week; maybe even a few times each day.

Create a custom URL on Facebook

Just a quick tip here — go to facebook.com/username and choose a short address for your profile.  This will help your Facebook profile rank slightly higher for your name, and give you an address you can use on your business card, resume, or anywhere that you think is applicable.

In my case, I changed from a horrible address like “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789″ to simply “facebook.com/mickmel“.

Use the same profile picture everywhere

As you get more involved in these various services, it helps if you can brand yourself a little bit.  By using the same photo on every site, people are more likely to recognize you.  Once I found a picture I was happy with, I spent a few minutes and created a variety of sizes of it.  Some of them include:

• 584×876 — Tall image, simply resized to a decent size
• 584×584 — Square version
• 133×200 — Smaller version of the tall image
• 90×90 — Small and square
• 75×75 — Smaller and square

I put those in my Dropbox folder, so I always have them with me.  Whenever I register on a new site, I can grab the size/aspect that works best for that site and keep rolling.

Don’t be stupid

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow.  Once you control all of the top listings for your name, don’t do anything stupid on your account.  Don’t bad-mouth anyone, post inappropriate photos, etc.  The level of sharing is up to you (some people share personal items, others don’t mention their family), but keep it clean and respectful.

Get a  better email address

When I was reviewing applications for my job at Mt. Bethel, I couldn’t help but take notice of their email address.  If someone submitted a resume with an @aol.com address, I started to feel a bit worse about them.  It didn’t affect who we ultimately chose to bring in, but it gave them kind of a bad first impression.

Lifehacker had an article a while back on this kind of topic.  While it likely won’t make or break you, every little thing you do can help.  Personally, I’d recommend either Gmail or a self-branded address (bob@smith.com), but there are a lot of good options out there.

A few other tools

If you’re a Twitter user, the folks at TweetDeck have a new product out called JobDeck.  It’s essentially TweetDeck with TwitterJobSearch tied into it.  Nothing fancy, but could be of value.

If you need help with your resume, CeeVee could be helpful.  There are a lot of online resume sites, but this one seems to have some good stuff going.  If you prefer a different one, please let us know in the comments.

Any other advice for those that are job-hunting?  Share your tips in the comments.

Unemployed? Some tips for job hunting online. is a post from: MickMel

This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

I’m finding one of the keys to being productive is to be able to take advantage of the small breaks of time during the day.  If you found yourself with 5 extra minutes, could you use them?  How about an extra 60 seconds?

Those small breaks of time can add up to quite a bit over the course of a day.  I have two main suggestions:

• Be able to do a lot from your phone.
• Keep things open on your computer.

:: Be able to accomplish a lot from your phone

I discussed this a bit in part one of the series (“get control of your email“), but it’s worth mentioning again; a good phone is worth far more than the initial expense.  During the day, many of your small breaks of time are found when you’re away from home.  Some examples:

• Waiting for your child after school/dance/sports
• Waiting to see the dentist/doctor
• Waiting for food to arrive at a meal
• Waiting in line for tickets/check-out

I’m sure you can think of many others, but that’s a start.  When I have extra time in one of those cases, I do one of the following on my phone:

• Process some email.  I don’t usually convert any into tasks (I leave that for when I get home), but I can read, respond, archive, delete, etc.
• Catch up on Google Reader.  I can knock some reading off my list, and “star” items for later if I need to read them more in-depth or write about them.
• Read some Tweets or catch up on Facebook.  You can access Twitter and Facebook from almost any phone.  If those are important to you, then this gives you a chance to catch up.

Right now the iPhone is still your best bet, but some of the Android phones (like Verizon’s “Droid”) are catching up really quick.  Ultimately, any decent smartphone will do the job for you.

:: Keep things open on your computer

If you find yourself with a spare minute or two, you don’t want to waste a chunk of that time opening programs, logging in, etc.  If possible, leave those programs open all the time.  When you find a spare minute, your tools are right at your fingertips and you can get things done.

The problem with this is that leaving too much stuff open can slow down your computer and cause other issues.  I wrote a long post about this back in January, but here are some tips:

• Leave it on. Don’t shut down every night.  Reboot once or twice a week to keep Windows fresh, though.
• Use a fast browser. I use Google Chrome 90% of the time, and Firefox for most of the rest.  They use less memory and run much faster than Internet Explorer.
• Clean up your computer. There are a lot of small (free!) things you can do to speed up your computer.  Here’s tips for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Mac.
• Buy more memory. RAM is dirt cheap, simple to install and will make a huge difference.  At this point, you should have at least 2 gigs in your computer.  If not, go get more.  Not sure what you need?  Go to crucial.com and use the “scan my system” tool.  They’ll tell you exactly what you have, offer some choices, and they’ll sell it at a fair price.  I use them quite a bit.
• Get a new computer. This is last on the list for a reason, but it’s worth mentioning.  If your computer is more than a few years old, you can get a new one that is much faster for $500 (or less).  It’s something to consider.

If you find yourself with a bit more time and you’re caught up on email/reader/etc, Chris Brogan has a list of things to do if you have an extra half hour.  It’s got some good tips to try to keep you ahead of the game.

What else do you do to take advantage of those small breaks of time?

This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 8 – Take advantage of the small breaks of time is a post from: MickMel

I’m seeing a lot of confusion about the new Facebook privacy settings and I’m hoping this post will help clear things up.

Here’s the short version:

• Facebook is encouraging you to make more things visible to “everyone”.
• Facebook wants to continue to allow Google to view the items that you’ve made visible to “everyone”.

This isn’t new — they’ve been allowing Google to index your public information for years. Don’t freak out — they’re not going to automatically index everything unless you’ve been careless with your settings.  Here’s what you need to check:

Go to [settings] –> [privacy settings] –> [Profile Information] –> Look at the items on the right side.  If they say “everyone”, then everyone can see those items.

Make the necessary changes on that page.

Next, go to [settings] –> [privacy settings] –> [Search].  This is where you can choose to “allow indexing” by Google.  People are upset about this, but it’s actually a good thing — this has been automatically turned on for years and you couldn’t do much to stop it.  Now they’ve added a checkbox so you can uncheck it to deindex yourself.

The semi-shady part is that Facebook is nudging people to make more things available to “everyone”, and therefore have more data appear in Google.  Just make sure you have your privacy settings correct and there’s no problem.

In fact, I highly recommend that you continue to “allow indexing”.  Why?  Well, what comes up when people search for your name in Google?  Wouldn’t you like to control that?

By allowing indexing, but then tightening up your privacy settings, you’ll allow your Facebook profile to rank highly for vanity searches on your name.  You want to control those top search results for your name.  If you’re concerned about your privacy, then make sure you control those top results in Google with a site that you can have precision control about what gets posted, rather than allowing some random site to have the first result for your name.  It’s an excellent solution.

I still think Facebook has been a bit shady with this, trying to get people to open more info to “everyone”, but it’s hardly the firestorm that people are saying.

About the new Facebook privacy settings is a post from: MickMel

This is the sixth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Whether you realize it or not, most of you are creating a “lifestream” of some sort.  Your Twitter updates, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and other assorted items are out there on the web in a haphazard fashion.  Getting that organized can be beneficial in a lot of ways.

For most people, there are two aspects of this that need to be tweaked:

• Posting updates to a wide variety of services, rather than having to update each service individually.
• Getting all of your various updates (status, pics, vids) to show up in one place.

:: Posting updates to a wide variety of services

I wrote a fairly comprehensive post on this a few weeks ago, which pretty much tells you what you need to know.  In a nutshell, I recommend that you use ping.fm to handle the bulk of your updates.  It takes some time to configure for the first time, but once you have it set up it’s a huge time-saver.  You can post one status update on there and it’ll post to all of your networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and about 50 others.  It’s superb.

For photos and videos, I’ve started using Posterous.  It’s a very popular micro-blogging tool that allows you to post new items via email, from their site, or using a mobile app.  It can be configured to post to a variety of services, to the point where it duplicates much of what Ping.fm does.  However, Ping can post to a lot more, so I confine my Posterous posting to simply images and video.

It may look a bit confusing a first, but check out the image below.  Depending on what kind of item I want to push out (on the left), you can see the path that it takes.  All of that really only requires setting up accounts on two sites (Ping and Posterous), assuming you already have accounts on the destination sites.

The only real downside to this setup is that pictures and videos don’t get pushed out to the “various other microblogging sites”.  It’s a small price to pay, since Twitter/Facebook are the main ones for me right now anyhow.

:: Getting all of your various updates to show up in one place.

This one isn’t as important to most people, but I’ve just spent some time figuring out the best way to handle this so I thought I’d share my findings.

My goal was to create a single page that would always pull in my latest “stuff”; blog entries, twitter posts, flickr photos, youtube videos, etc.  Here’s what I considered:

• storytlr: From what I can tell, this site did exactly what I wanted.  Unfortunately, they’re shutting down at the end of 2009.  Quite a shame…
• posterous: If I chose to push my status updates through Posterous, it would essentially contain my lifestream.  Some people do it this way and it works well.  However, I have a lot of other sites configured in Ping.fm that I don’t want to leave out.  Posterous is adding new features constantly, and it might fit the bill in a year or two.
• Sweetcron: This is a nifty script that you can load on your server.  It’s very customizable and you can do a lot with it.  I ran it as my lifestream for a while, but it seemed to have some issues (duplicate posts, broken videos, etc).  When I went to get a newer version of the code, I found that it hadn’t been updated in over a year.  It’s never good to hitch your site to an abandoned tool.
• Lifestream.fm: This had it all in theory, but the site seemed quite buggy to me.  I sometimes couldn’t add new feeds, things wouldn’t appear, etc.  Also, ideally, I’d like the lifestream to show up on my domain, not theirs.
• wp-Lifestream: A lifestreaming plug-in for WordPress.  It supports a large number of sources and integrates nicely into WordPress.

I tried all of them to some degree, and ended up going with wp-Lifestream.  Not only does it support the usual suspects, but it has a few neat ties to other sites (like Gowalla).

The result is my lifestream page. It pulls in:

• My latest posts on this blog
• My latest images posted to Flickr
• My latest videos posted to YouTube
• My latest Tweets
• My latest check-ins using Gowalla
• My latest posts on a few other blogs I write for

It’s certainly not perfect, but it works well.

What do you use for your lifestream?

This is the sixth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 6 – Streamline your lifestream is a post from: MickMel

This is the second in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

If you’re like most folks, you have a lot of websites to keep up with.  For example, here are some of the sites that I try to stay updated with:

• My first grade daughter’s teacher’s blog
• My wife’s blog
• My favorite sports team news
• Google Earth Blog
• Local News
• Humor (Dilbert, etc)
• Blog from our church
• Various tech blogs (TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc)

There are probably a lot of sites that you regularly check right now, but you do it by visiting each one to see what’s new.  That leads to two problems:

1. There’s nothing new and you wasted your time.
2. They had something new last week, but you missed it.

The solution is to start using a feed reader, like Google Reader.  You can tell it which sites you want to “subscribe” to, and they all show up in Reader.  Because it’s web-based, you can check Reader from any web browser and from most mobile phones.  Here’s a quick look at how it works:

Reader is a wonderful solution to help you keep with up a lot of sites.  However, that only tackles half the problem.  You probably also have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn and you try your best to keep up with them. Google Reader doesn’t handle those, but there are some great options.  A variety of companies have created software that allows you to easily keep up with your Twitter, Faceook and LinkedIn friends.

The options I’ll show below are all very similar.  They allow you to group your items into columns, and new updates appear automatically.  If you have an extra monitor (or an old laptop), it’s great to leave one of these running off to the side so you can see what’s new.

The columns can be almost anything you want.  You could have one to show Facebook updates, one to show Twitter updates, one to show Direct Messages on Twitter, one to show LinkedIn updates, etc.  Rather than visiting all of those sites, you can have the latest updates come to you.

Here’s some of the best programs for that right now:

• TweetDeck is the most popular right now.  It runs on both Windows and Mac and is free of charge.
• Seesmic has a variety of products and they’re innovating very quickly.  They have software for Windows and Mac, and they also have a web-based version you can use.
• Sobees is similar, in that they have a Windows version and a web version.  No Mac client yet, though.  This is currently my favorite application, but the others are close behind and it’s got a few bugs.
• Tweetie is a very popular client that is Mac-only.  It’s a simpler design (single column) and works very well.
• HootSuite a powerful web-based client that is growing in popularity.

I know that might be a lot to digest.  If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, here’s the simple answer: Go download TweetDeck and start playing with it.  It has a great mix of features and you’ll be up and running quickly.

Here’s a quick look at how to get started:

If you have any questions about any of this stuff, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help you out.

This is the second in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 2 – Keep up with the sites you care about is a post from: MickMel

Over the past few years, I’ve tried a lot of different tools to help myself stay organized.  Some worked, and some didn’t, but each one helped me get my life a bit more organized.

At this point, I’ve got a solid system worked out for dealing with all of the electronic cruft that shows up in my life, and over the next two weeks I’ll share those tools and techniques with you.  I’ll cover ways to get your inbox under control, be able to access any of your files from anywhere, keep your to-do list tidy, never fear a computer crash again and much more.

There are many tools out there to help you, but the problem now is finding the right ones.  Not only will I help you find the best tools, but I’ll show you how best to use them and how to make them work together.  Even better, almost every tool I showcase is free.

I started on Monday, December 7 and I covered one aspect of your life each weekday for two weeks.  Here’s what’s we talked about:

• Monday, Dec 7 – Get control of your email
• Tuesday, Dec 8 – Keep up with the sites you care about
• Wednesday, Dec 9 – Manage your calendar
• Thursday, Dec 10 – Organize your files
• Friday, Dec 11 – Organize your photos
• Monday, Dec 14 – Streamline your lifestream
• Tuesday, Dec 15 – Organize your tasks
• Wednesday, Dec 16 – Take advantage of the small breaks of time
• Thursday, Dec 17 – Get control of your finances
• Friday, Dec 18 – Capture everything else

Make sure you stay in the loop to get everything out of this series. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, or just have the posts automatically sent to your email address.

10 days to organize your digital life is a post from: MickMel

Lately I’ve had a hard time keeping up with what services cross-post to each other.  If I send a status update to Twitter, does it auto-post to Facebook?  If I send a picture to Posterous, does it go to Flickr? What about FriendFeed?  I had I set up so many different tools that I was losing track of things.  I spent some time today rearranging things and here’s what I’ve got:

:: Status Updates via Ping.fm

I’ve used Ping.fm for a while, and I love it.  I can send updates using their website or the Pingle app on iPhone, and those status updates go out to dozens of different services that I’ve configured.  I’ll still be using it for a lot of my status updates, but I’ve tweaked it a little bit.

I’ve set it to update my status on virtually every service it supports (and it’s a lot of them) except for Posterous.  I’ll explain why in the next item.

:: Media Updates via Posterous

I’ll be pushing all photo and video uploads through my Posterous account.  I used to use PixelPipe on my iPhone, but Posterous offers a bit better control.  I can easily send items to Posterous via email or by using their iPhone app, and they’ll automatically push them to various locations. Specifically:

Photos: To Facebook and Flickr
Videos: To Facebook and YouTube
Also, Twitter and LinkedIn will get notified of all new photos/videos

If I had set Ping.fm to send status updates to Posterous, it would then push them to Twitter and Facebook — which Ping.fm already does.  That would duplicate my updates on a few services, which is why it’s important to not have Ping.fm push to Posterous.

:: RSS Updates via TwitterFeed

I’ve been using TwitterFeed for a while to auto-tweet new blog entries from my various blogs to their respective Twitter accounts.  It works well, and I’ll continue doing that for now.

:: Google Reader –> Twitter via FriendFeed

When I’m in Google Reader, I can “share” an item and it automatically tweets it out.  It does this via FriendFeed; I have FriendFeed pull in all of my shared items, and then I have it tweet out those shared items to my Twitter account.  It’s very handy when I’m away from my computer on a cell (like at Disney).  A single click allows me to share an interesting story with all of my followers.

You could do a similar thing via TwitterFeed, and either method would work just fine.

So there you have it — my new system (for now).  I’m always looking to streamline things, so what do you do differently, and why?

Reorganizing my lifestream is a post from: MickMel