Untangling Social Networking Bridge Services

This post is a very preliminary stab at describing the use and untangling of Social Networking Bridge Services©. Very preliminary...

In fact this post describes the actual first pass at creating a strategy to simplify and automate the social networking efforts for the Joy of Sox Movie project. I'm sure that others who have tackled this before will probably know of a better way to do some of these things. I'd be glad to hear suggestions for improvement or other services that might fill the void better!

In the work being done for the client I had one goal. Make the clients blogging efforts be the primary source that feeds all the other SocNet efforts.

What are social networking bridge services anywho?

Simply put they are third party services that facilitate communication between the main social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. They also enhance functionality of the main social networks.

Here's the list of what was used in this strategy:

• TwitPic - Allows for uploading of photo's and binding to a Tweet. Enhancement.
• TwitterFeed - Will listen to your blogs Atom Feed and create Tweets with mini-url's to blog post. Bridge Service.
• iTwitter - MySpace Twitter module that allows Tweets to display in your MySpace page. Bridge Service.
• Facebook's Twitter import - Listens to your Twitter presence and imports your Tweets as status updates. This was set up through the projects Facebook page NOT an individual Facebook profile. Bridge Service.
• YouTube's Blog import - Import your blog postings into YouTube. Bridge Service.
  
• LinkedIn's Twitter Module - Allows LinkedIn updates to be posted as Tweets on your Twitter profile. Bridge Service.
  

Here's a graphical map of the strategy:


Of course being in the early stages the strategy has not achieved perfection. The main problem is that the Joy of Sox Movie Blog is not the only source of information intended for the social networks. So consequently if a post originates in Facebook, it posts to Twitter which in turn posts it back to Facebook. But so far this is only a problem for your humble narrator as he makes the post and subscribes to the page that in turn receives it from Twitter. Not a biggie by any means.

There are some obvious things that are not being used right now such as Facebook's Blog import via the notes function. This was a decision in the name of untangling the multiple paths of communication that all these systems are offering.
A clean path of transmission.

I think that if TwitterFeed grows to include and multiplex more input and output streams it could be the end all of feeding Social Networking Cross Platform Communication (did i coin a new phrase again!)

Oh and BTW, I think I'm the first to use the phrase Social Networking Bridge Service © , So there!

Your humble narrator.


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Content in the above posting is not meant to be the definitive last word on anything.
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posted by adam @ 12:56 PM 0 Comments

Facebook Page Promotion Pointers

Some things to consider with facebook pages:

A client of mine has put up and is building a following for their FaceBook Page. Some discussion about that got me to thinking (again) about a few pointers to consider when spreading the word of your page. See list below. Some are rehashed from previous posts, some are new thoughts:

• Make posts to your page in a slow steady pace. Don't dump a ton of updates at once
  
• Try to make your updates relevant for your intended audience
  
• Try to have some media as well (images and video are more interesting!)
• Try to word your posts, from time to time in ways that are a little inflammatory (if appropriate for your image and audience) . A heated discussion is better than no discussion
• Try to word your posts in a way that elicits a response. People need to be asked questions to get them talking and discussion and comments put the V in Viral!
• You should send out updates to blast info to your audience but also replicate the info sent on the FaceBook page itself. This keeps the page looking fresh, new info is automatically placed at the top so new visitors see recent posting dates and will be more likely to decide that this is an active page and worth joining. Ding!
• Another good reason for replicating on the page itself is that updates sent to your fan base lack a comment utility! Comments put the V in viral!
• Leave comments on your posts or try to have a network of friends that do it for you.
  
• Leave comments that try to elicit a response. The comment discussion is at the heart of the viral mechanics. This is when knowledge of your page grows beyond your circle of friends to your friends' circle of friends. Comments put the V in viral! Ding! Double Ding!!!
  
• It's also a good idea to talk about more than just yourself in your updates. If there's no human element for people to connect with then it just feels like old fashioned marketing and people get turned off.
  

More on the last bullet item. Look, we're all grown up here and if you hadn't realized it yet you should have: "Social Media" is the new marketing tool. but having said that the game is slightly different. When you do your marketing on FaceBook, if you just talk about yourself, your accomplishments or otherwise about yourself, quite frankly you'll be putting people to sleep.

I haven't decided on an exact ratio but from time to time you do need to throw in some comments that are just your opinions on a current event, even something as simple as the the weather. Maybe even try to rile people up. Since this is marketing under the veil of "Social Media" you need to show them there's a person behind the page or people will just get that old "marketed to" feeling and vanish from your fan base. It's important to appeal to events in peoples' lives so that they get that warm and fuzzy connection to you.

You can also apply the list above to twitter and MySpace marketing. I can't tell you how many times I've tweeted for a client, then had the thought: Oh, this is too many posts about ME (the client) and gone and checked the fan base only to find that 2 or 3 people have stopped following. Conversely I have tweeted about things not directly related to the client but when people see it they feel connected by the human element of the comment, check us out and start following. Ding!

Labels: facebook, optimnize, page, promote

posted by Adam Signore @ 8:29 AM 0 Comments

FaceBook Pages Analytics

FaceBook Pages have their own analytics you know!

I put together a FaceBook Page about a month ago for a local Boston band called Clutch Grabwell. If you like to go out to a club and come away with a little ringing in your ears, go see these guys. They are one of the most enjoyable bands I've seen in years. Their signature sound comes from a horn section that can reach in and rip your soul out. They like to mix it up with plenty of covers and do the most imaginative covers i have ever heard. Talking Head's "Burning down the House" or Alice in chains' "Man in the box" with screaming horns. Yeah

So what does that have to do with FaceBook Page analytics. Nothing! Just go see them if your in the beantown area.


Alright, alright. Well for you facebook page owners all i can say is check out the insights link if you have not done so yet. Click for full size image of the FaceBook Page analytics screenshot


The page analytics show you some interesting things about your audience that most analytics just cant, like gender and age. They also show you how well your media and content are being used. This is really invaluable info on how much excitement you generate.

Clutch Grabwell is a naturally viral topic as they have a well established following and have a lot of content to put up on their page.

You can use this information to formulate your strategy. In the case of this client we can see that if we can get the drinking age lowered to 13 we can easily expand out fan base in that demographic. OK, not the most realistic use of analytics, but i think you get the idea.

Make sure you check out your page "insights" and try to really think about how and why your FaceBook Page gets used. It will help you see more clearly what your doing well and not so well.

posted by adam @ 7:43 AM 0 Comments

Twits and Tweets

A little about this Twitter and social marketing thing:

A recent comment from a client about Twitter made me realize it was time to poke around that place and see how the "Social Marketing" worked over there. I mean I hope you guys realize that FaceBook, MySpace and now Twitter have become the latest rage in marketing to you!
FaceBook has smartened up. We "Page" makers can even purchase Pay Per Click advertising on Mother F. now, they have become the latest marketing powerhouse. Probably not what Mark Z. had in mind when FaceBook got created. Or was it ;-)

It's actually the way i like marketing best. In this brave new world at least, the golden marketing rules basically seem to be:

1) Keep the interactions real!
2) Keep the content relevant!
3) Talk about the ups and downs of your product (and maybe learn from it)
4) Let the customers enjoy your online identity with humor
5) Let them participate in the discussion that revolves around you
6) Don't just pitch yourself. Can you say boooring!

Even Coke has figured out how to do it correctly. They have the second most popular FaceBook page on the site with something like over 385 Trillion fans (or was that the US deficit $). They have a nice looking page with constantly update imagery and comments.

I made a comment about friend or fan quantity not equaling quality a while back and added "except maybe for Twitter". Well scratch that. In a nutshell the only difference between marketing on Twitter and FaceBook is that you do it all in sentences no longer than 140 characters. So what does that mean??

How it's done on these different sites:

Well on FaceBook you get to set up a neat looking page (which they change the appearance of randomly, thanks) and upload media, start or participate in discussions, list events, etc and wait and build up your fan base. Once this fan base is built up you can blast the whole group with announcements and keep the love alive.

With Twitter you get to (and have to BTW) do all those things. You just do it in said 140 characters. So one might ask, how do i upload my 200MB video if all i get is a little box that accepts only 140 characters?? Well one answer is FaceBook. Everything you upload there can be linked to. But have you seen the size of their links. ouch. I think most are about 200 characters long, so where's the room for the marketing message?

Well I'm glad you asked.

Thanks to a tweet from my SEO Mentor Jill Whalen at High Rankings I found out about a great short URL service called "Cligs". It's like tiny url but it gives you analytics tracking so you can tell how many people used your link. Yay. You can turn a huge link into a few characters and have plenty of room for your short, sweet and relevant comment.

A little wrap up:

I did an expirement and had some pretty interesting "short cycle" results. I found that if you search the topic your marketing on search.twitter.com, find really relevant results that you can @reply to and point out your clig url you can get about 50 hits in a day with about 10 minutes of work. Since this is taking advantage of the search on Twitter and activity happens at a fast rate, your reply will drop off the charts quuickly too. But the point is you can have a direct impact with little effort a day and get youself noticed. 50 hits/day X 365 Days = 18,250/year hits for 10 minutes a day. Not bad ROI and not a bad way to build that fan base.

That stratergy should be part of the bigger goal to do on Twitter what you do on FaceBook, build up a fan base. On Twitter your building up a "following". Same animal. Like the best practices of any social marketing you should do the following:

• Reply to only relevant tweets. If you reply to a tweet about someone not feeling well with a comment that points out your vacation web site, you'll get a resounding go F... yourself. If you reply to a tweet about not feeling well with a comment that is real and point them to this great site you know of with self help remedies for their ailment, you'll get a thank you and widely noticed. Maybe even pick up a few followers
• Worry about your Twitter reputation. That means talk about something besides your product. Talk about your life, be part of the "community" not just a marketer. That later will bore and annoy people. Actually contribute.
• Follow people and get people to follow you. This is one of the more important long term goals with Twitter (and the others). When you have a big following and you make that comment that mentions the wonderul web site with the self help books, your followers get it right in their Twitter homepage.
• Remember with all social marketing, put it out their as a friend not a seller of something. How would you feel about your FaceBook friends loading you up with a sales pitch??
  

Labels: facebook, myspace, social marketing, twitter

posted by adam @ 5:20 AM 1 Comments

Marketing in the brave new social site world.

Social Media, Social Marketing, Blah, Blah, Blah.....

This is a little byte about using FaceBook to market yourself. There's a little difference between FaceBook and other mediums. There's also a different attitude you need to have when you work this route.

Although marketing is always about reaching people who are interested in what you've got, and that will never change. The methods with social marketing are sort of counter intuitive to some. You don't ant to use a medium like FaceBook to blast as many unknown people as possible about your great new widget.

That's just social spam.

The idea here is the "tell two friends" method. And the pinnacle of using that method is to get FaceBook friends to comment on your shared links and posts (more on that later). The unspoken contract here is that you respect your friends, and your friends friends and their friends. So you don't treat them like a flock of sheep.

People come to FaceBook to get away from that.

In this medium (and on other social sites except maybe twitter):



There's some simple truth's you need to decide for yourself before you do the "Social Marketing" thingy:

• Is your new product or service really that interesting?
  
• Does it appeal to people emotionally?
  
• Are you prepared to be open to criticism on your efforts?
  

The wider the appeal the better you will do. I dabble in this for my Web Design, that's almost a waste. I only appeal to people interested in finding a web designer.

I also do this for a local Boston band, their appeal: anyone who likes music. aahh ha!

People won't be put off by status updates about a band they like. They will be about my Web Design Company blog postings. uhh oh.

So, anywho back to this thing about the pinnacle of the Facebook posting. Here's the deal kiddo's. For the "tell two people" thingy to work. You need your friends to comment on your postings.

Try to share your links and other posted items in a way that elicits comment. That is the viral hook to move beyond your "circle of trust" to the greater FaceBook world outside. Better yet, craft your postings so that people will want to share it themselves and tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on........

Labels: appeal, facebook, marketing, myspace, social marketing, social media, twitter

posted by Adam Signore @ 9:48 AM 0 Comments

The Portable Device Revolution

Here's a little post that has nothing to do with web design.

Unlike the masses who run out and buy an overpriced iPod and have it good from the start, I like to find the cheapest set-ups and see what it takes to get them going.

Hence, when i decided i wanted portable video too, buying an iPod or getting a Verizon cell phone was out of the question. I decided to focus on two of the most promising looking items with the lowest price tags:

• The Sansa Clip e280 - 8Gig MP3/MP4 player, $49.00 (refurbed)
  
• The Sony PSP 3000 - MP3/MP4/Skype/Internet Radio/Web Browser/ PSP games and Movies. $169.00 at BestBuy.
  

Hands down of course the winner was the PSP, but first the short review of the Sansa Clip:


It's a neat little unit. I don't think i need to list the pro's for an MP3/MP4 player with FM radio and a voice recorder, so here's the cons:

• If all your MP3 ID tags are not version 2 (IDv2) the player can get locked up and you need to go through a painful process to force the player to wipe the memory and reinstall the OS (yeah, i mean it, my jaw's still on the ground)
  
• You need to use a proprietary video converter that rotates the video 90Deg to fit the widescreen that runs from top to bottom. not side to side. Hence you watch a video holding the player on it's side.
  
• The now converted videos become useless on any other platform
  
• Unless you have superman vision, forget watching video's on this.
  

The PSP is pretty impressive. Being a Sony they had to find a way to give it a drawback and that would be the memory stick for memory expansion. But I found a way around that!!!!


The PSP 3000 is fairly cheap. It plays converted videos very nicely (but getting to a "converted video" is a learning process)
It has a mryiad of features that i like:

• The screen size is just right so us old types can enjoy video on it.
  
• It plays video games (umd)
  
• It plays movies (umd)
  
• It's an MP3 player
  
• It's an MP4 player
  
• It's an image viewer
  
• It has a fairly decent browser (even FaceBook recognizes the PSP and serves up a modified page)
  
• It does Skype flawlessly
  
• The internet radio is slick
  
• The wireless network set-up is pretty easy
  

The Cons:

• Memory stick (See my solution below!!)
  
• Your sort of left hanging for how to properly convert videos (A++ Solution)
  
• If you want to use poster files for you lists in the player make sure the image is named the same as the video, put in the same folder with the video and a width no greater than 160px! (thanks for not telling me that anywhere sony!)
  
• Memory Stick (sorry ;-)
  
• There's not a lot of movie selection for the UMD format, but with the MP4 player, so what??
  
• The internal speakers could get a little louder.
  

So tell me about this Memory stick issue????

Here's the problem. An 16Gig memory stick costs like $100 bucks. can you say OUCH!!!
An 16Gig Micro sd card can be had at Amazon for $35.00 bucks!!!!

Labels: ipod, mp3, mp4, playstation portable, portable, psp, sansa, video

posted by Adam Signore @ 7:41 AM 1 Comments

Email and the happy inbox

Here's a couple of pointers on issues I see from time to time. The first is an quick discussion on housekeeping and avoiding your inbox from outgrowing the space quota it's got. The second is a discussion to highlight a particular setting used most often by people who want to view there email account from multiple locations and have access to all emails (in the POP3 environment not IMAP).


Inbox health and you!

There is one main issue to consider with inbox's in general and that is exceeding your designated inbox limit. You might ask what that means and what happens then?

You inbox is typically given a quota in MB's that it can not exceed. Every email and every attachment takes up some amount of space (Kb, MB or beyond?). The total of all emails and attachments can not exceed the mailbox's size limit.


Well what happens if it does?

You will not be able to send emails but more importantly everyone who sends you an email will get an error stating the users mailbox is over it's limit. Unless they are diligent enough to keep resending it until it works, there's very little chance you'll ever see the email.

One of the main ways to avoid this situation is to delete email that are no longer needed or move them to locally stored folders.

If your shouting at your screen right now: Hey now Adam wait just a minute, I delete emails all the time!!! You've got a screw loose.

I might just have, but that's fodder for another post. But what I do need to say is: Until you have emptied your deleted items folder the emails have typically not been removed from your mail server! haha!

If you've been humbled and are moving on to the next point: What's a local folder?

Let's take outlook for example. If you look under your "Outlook Today" folder you'll see your inbox, sent and deleted items folders. Your inbox and deleted items folder might represent emails still on the server if you have a setting called "leave a copy of messages on the server" checked off. This setting is the crux of the next discussion BTW. If you right click the "outlook today-->New Folder" selection, the resulting folder will represent a local folder. Anything you move there is stored on your hard drive regardless of the above mentioned configuration. Multiple local folders are the best way to organize your emails and keep the server healthy.



Do you need your email account available at multiple locations?


The "leave a copy of message on server" configuration is the crux of making this possible. If you don't leave a copy on the server then you have downloaded it to a particular PC's hard drive. Once this is done it obviously can't be seen by PC's at your other locations.

There are trade offs with the capability of configuring for multiple locations the most important of which is the mailbox exceeding it's limit. The best way to avoid this and maintain usability of this type of environment is to do a couple of things:

• Whenever you move an item to any PC's deleted items folder... EMPTY IT to remove emails form the server. Multiple deleted items folders on multiple devices can spell trouble.
  
• Select one PC to be the repository for items that you will move to a local folder. A second option is to move them to a mobile device that can be synced with the repository. Failing to do this will result in the "I now I saved that email but where is it" or more commonly referred to as INISTEBWII syndrome.
  

Hopefully these discussions can help you avoid a bad situation that only your friends will tell you about, your customers shore wont tell you an email bounced!

posted by Adam Signore @ 6:47 AM 0 Comments