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It’s time to stop dabbling with social media

January 12, 2012 — 3 Comments

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a few groups of United Methodist Church leaders near Washington, DC to discuss how the church can best use their websites and social media tools to reach people more effectively.

My social media presentation was largely focused on the fact that Twitter and Facebook are no longer tools for churches to be “playing with”; they’ve become legitimate communication tools.  While most churches are doing fairly well with Facebook, Twitter remains a problem.  I’m hoping the tools I shared with them will help get things rolling.

Google+

Even though the sessions were only a week ago, my thoughts on Google+ have changed.  At the time, I said something like “You need to focus hard on Facebook and Twitter, and start playing with Google+ because you’ll need to be active there later this year“.  As it turns out, “later this year” is now.  The reason for the sudden shift is Google’s release of “Search, plus Your World”, which adds heavy Google+ integration into the search results.  Here’s a quick video showing how that works:

That alone should be enough to encourage you to get your organization on Google+.  But it goes further.  Try searching for “music” or “cars” and you’ll get a result similar to the shot below.  Notice the area that I outlined in red.

Notice that the red box is for Google+ profiles only; no Twitter or Facebook found there.  That is seen by some as anti-competitive, and perhaps it is, but that’s simply how it works right now.  Britney Spears trails a variety of artists on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, etc), but none of them are on Google+ yet.  As a result, she’s suddenly getting a lot more free promotion when someone performs a search.

For now, that area doesn’t matter much for your business, but it will soon.  For local searches, Google will almost certainly start showing businesses in your area instead of just generic industry-related results.  If you wait until that happens before you join Google+, you’ll be way behind.  Suppose Katy Perry sees those results and joins Google+ to get back in the game.  While she may catch up to Spears eventually, she’s already behind by 1.3 million followers.  How far ahead do you want your competition to get before you join the game?

Faces in the main results

Not only is that side bar relevant, but the main search results (in both personal and non-personal mode) are already full of results from Google+.  In many cases, those results show the face of the author of the post even if the post was made on their own blog.  For example, the below search for “google earth imagery january” shows my face next to the second result, because it knows that I wrote that article and it connects to my Google+ profile; and this is the non-personal results!

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

As much as I love Google+, I’m certainly not advising you to bail on Facebook or Twitter.  As I said at the beginning, those are legit communications platforms and your organization needs to be active on both of them.  For now, at least, all three are very important to your organization.

If you want to dabble in social media, there are places to do that.  Play with Pinterest (connect with me), play with Path, or play with any of the other new services popping up.  Pinterest may become more serious this year, but for now you can just poke the tires a bit.

I don’t have time

I hear it a lot — “not another service to keep up with!”, but it’s all about your mind set.  Instead of worrying about how you’ll have time for three separate services, just look at it from the positive side.  Now you have another way to connect with your customers, and this one will help you show up more frequently in the search results too.  It’s a win-win!

Once you get things set up, simply take 10-15 minutes/day to post your latest thoughts and respond to people that are talking to you.  It doesn’t have to be a huge deal.  If it takes longer than that to respond to everything coming your way, then your business is likely doing well and you can afford to spend more time working with those people (or hire someone to help you out).

Do you think any other services are worthy of the full attention of your business right now?  I can see LinkedIn being one for a few organizations, but that’s about it.  Agree?

In Facebook, Google+, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Twitter , , , , , , ,
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LinkedIn now has over 100 million members

March 22, 2011 — Leave a comment

LinkedIn announced today that they now have 100 million members on their site — very impressive! It’s small by comparison to Twitter (200 million) and Facebook (600 million), but quite huge nonetheless. According to their blog, they’re gaining an average of about a million new users per week.

Are you on LinkedIn yet?

What 100 million users looks like:

In Social Media , ,
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Unemployed? Some tips for job hunting online.

February 23, 2010 — Leave a comment

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.

In Facebook, Social Media, Twitter , , , , , , , , , ,
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Organize Your Digital Life 6 – Streamline your lifestream

December 14, 2009 — 14 Comments

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.

outgoing-lifestreamThe 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.

In Facebook, Social Media, Technology, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Reorganizing my lifestream

November 28, 2009 — 3 Comments

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?

In Facebook, Social Media, Technology, Twitter , , , , , , , , , ,
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Make sure you own your name in Google

August 18, 2008 — Leave a comment

What happens when you search Google for [your name]?  Do you like what you see?

Part of that depends on your name.  If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble.  For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.

Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name.  In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top.  In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100.  I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.

So how do you do it?  Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:

The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute.  The more you can contribute to each site, the better.  For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.

However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually.  Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).

In SEO , , , , , , ,
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