How We Talk About Social Media. Reading Eric’s recent post about HelloTxt, I went back to some old files and opened up a presentation I gave last summer at BizJam Seattle and was treated to some entertaining content. At least, it was funny to me. I just had to laugh at the way I struggled to come up with compact, clear ways of categorizing and naming social media tools.
How easy it is to forget that everything we use and talk about every day now — just one year later — didn’t have a set of agreed-upon terms. I thought I’d share some slides from my old presentation to show how difficult it is to come up with ways to describe the tools that we use. I discussed what I called Social Media Aggregation Broadcasting Tools or SABTs. I defined SABTs as third-party applications that allow you to both aggregate and broadcast messages — or status updates — to your other networks. I divided those into four categories: ActivePassiveNicheIntegrated So here is how I grouped applications that were available last summer: Avi Joseph. Spammers Can Get Your Email Address from Google Profiles. 16 Apr 2009 Google Profiles: You can customize your Google Profile URL but it may also expose your Google email address to web harvesters. couch mode print story A word of caution for people who have their email accounts on Gmail and are planning to use a vanity URL for their Google Profile.
Vanity URLs are available across all Google Accounts but you can pick a custom username for your Google Profile (like this) only if your Google Account is not associated with a Gmail address. Gmail users have two choices – they can either continue using the default cryptic URL for their Google Profile (like this) or they can have their Google email username in the Google profile URL.
Now that may sound tempting because a URL like google.com/profiles/google_username is definitely search friendly and more easy to remember than google.com/profiles/121221 but before you jump, here’s a quick warning. Related: Get a @googlemail.com address. Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, a video from dwarthy.
Streamlining Your Twitter Feed - Groups to the Rescue. By Nathan Hangen – Follow him @nhangen. I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.
I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. The first thing we are going to do is take a single Twitter feed and make it manageable by using groups to filter the people you follow. 1. 2. 3. How to Use these Groups. Twitter Wants Distribution Deals, Not a Buyout - Bits Blog - NYT. Space Experts to Discuss Threat of Asteroid Impact | Astroengine. Imagine you’re an astronomer who discovered an asteroid. Happy days, you might be able to name it after yourself (99942 O’Neill has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?).
At first you feel little concern, after all, we are getting better at spotting near-Earth objects. But when you get news from another observatory that they had been tracking the same object weeks earlier, your interest is piqued. On the one hand, you didn’t technically discover it, but you did confirm its existence. Now imagine you are the president of a nation determined to stop the asteroid from hitting Earth.
Although I doubt we’ll ever be fully prepared to act swiftly and decisively in the event of discovering a civilization-ending asteroid, we can at least try. However, this isn’t your standard anti-asteroid meet-up. After all, there’s nothing worse than being blamed for turning a mountain of iron ore into a radioactive mountain of hotter iron ore when it impacts a nation you’re not particularly friendly with. Goodbye, Facebook. 14 Add-ons that make Gmail more awesome(ly productive) Gmail has been my email client of choice ever since I managed to get my hands on an invite years ago (ah, the days of Gmail-by-invitation-only, I’m just glad I never paid for mine).
I never really did much do pimp my inbox though, until now. Well, until Multiple Inboxes made it possible to prioritize my messages and turn even my inbox into a to-do list. Turns out, I can do a lot more than just this, as long as I download the right script. I decided to compile a list of the Firefox extentions and scripts that seriously pimp your inbox and improve on Gmail’s basic powers.
Productivity & Organization Add-ons Gspace: If uploading to Google Docs isn’t enough, you can use Gmail as a virtual online drive. EasyJobApplications: If you use Craigslist a lot to apply for gigs or jobs, this script seriously cuts down on the time-per-application you need. Which one of these are you using? Twitter Tips: Be Both Professional and Conversational - Business.
Like it or not, the emergence of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the ubiquity of the Web has blurred our personal and professional lives. This has been particularly true on Twitter, the social networking service where users share short messages with one another. Twitter holds inherent value for both your personal and business life.
As a business person, building a presence on Twitter helps you connect with customers and peers, and perhaps get feedback on your products and services. For your personal life, Twitter can create what social media experts call an "ambient awareness" for the people important to you in your life - while each message might not be hugely significant, taken in total people can piece together you as a person or at least see the things you value. But this inevitable blurring between the personal and professional life creates perils for Twitter users. Get Personal To Show What You Have in Common Know Your Twitter Audience. Goodbye RSS. Welcome Real-Time Web! | Stay N' Alive. Twitteronia vs. Status.net: The Battle for Hosted Microblogging. By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed) It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of self-hosted Microblogging.
I've written numerous times on LouisGray.com and my own blog about the benefits business can see by "rolling their own" microblog with their own brand, look and feel. Not sold on this idea? Read what I wrote earlier about the implications of ESPN running their own sports network, or even the company I advise for, TodaysMama.com and their recently-launched network for Moms, TodaysMama Connect (which has quite a community going now!). There is something to be said for a brand being able to have full control over the relationships and community they build. Status.net Evan Prodromou has been busy since we last heard about Identi.ca and Laconi.ca. When I chatted with Rachael Herrscher, CEO of TodaysMama, she told me Evan had given them several hours each month that they were paying for, to help them out with the install of their Laconi.ca instance.
Twitteronia. Digggate: Conspiracy Theory or Brave New World for Digg - ReadWr. Last week, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, coined the term Digggate in response to concerns of a potential scandal surrounding Digg, Google and the Diggbar. According to Sullivan, Digg is deliberately skirting issues surrounding the new Diggbar and consequently confusing and potentially misleading citizens of the Web. Andy Sorcini, long time Digg user and social media enthusiast disagrees. "I honestly don't believe that the Diggbar was conceived with any maliciousness toward stealing content producers link juice. I think the idea was to drive traffic to Digg, while at the same time facilitate access to Digg services from content producers sites.
" So, is the new Diggbar evil or will it be remembered as one of Digg's finest moments? As most of you know, Digg launched Diggbar last week. Since then, there has been much discussion in the blogosphere about the wickedness of the new Diggbar. And this is where our story begins. A Brief History in Framing The Evil iFrame. Short Term Contracts Ease Recession Jitters. Like most SEM shops, our business is an amalgamation of flat rate products and hourly work. It’s generally been our focus to procure longer contracts, usually 6 month to 1-year agreements.
We thought it prudent to evolve our model in preemptive reaction to these brutal economic times. Little did we know the unexpected gems of perspective we discovered. Q1 2009, in the teeth of a recession, we actually accelerated growth by increasing the mix of short-term retainer & audit-and-plan deals we cut. These short-term “intake” agreements are converting to long-term relationships at a high rate, making it the best of all worlds.
Dependent on time tracking methods and using a software adapted (hacked) from law firms, in November 2008 we re-tooled aimClear to increase the mix of precision planning, traffic, time tracking (1/10th of an hour increments) and decreasing the term of initial client engagements from 1 year to 3 month retainers. The hard work was well worth it. Inherent Challenges. Does Mashable have credibility re Twitter? Cartoon: Honey, Sit Down - We Need to Tweet - ReadWriteWeb. Are Your Writing Your Headlines for Google or for Twitter? While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver.
Now, instead of using the catchy headlines we once saw in print, or keyword-laden headlines that make Google giddy, we're now seeing headlines truncated to less than 140 characters, or even as low as 125 characters as the standard, assuming a short URL follows. For me, practically the only driver for the length of a headline is whether it easily fits in one deck for somebody using standard fonts in a browser. Given that practically every blog is publishing to Twitter in parallel with their RSS feed, the drive to keep headlines short is very real. Happy space exploration day. Noted astronomer Richard van der Riet Woolley once told Time magazine that human space travel is “utter bilge” and no one would put up enough money for it.
Five years later, he had to eat his words as Russian test pilot Yuri Gagarin blasted off to become the first human in orbit and make seemingly impossible science fiction into science fact. On the anniversary of his historic mission, countries of the former Soviet Union celebrate Space Exploration Day and honor the many men and women who followed in his footsteps.
It’s unfortunate that Gagarin died in a plane crash just seven years later and would never see a human walking on the Moon or tell us what he thought about spaceflight today. He might have been proud to see that his mission inspired countless kids born in the former USSR (including the author) to study about space and space travel in hopes of becoming cosmonauts, or at the very least, involved in exploring the vast realm beyond our world. Facebook Now Promoting. Facebook Now Promoting “Suggested” Public Profiles on the Home Page It was one year ago that Facebook started suggesting “People You May Know.” Now, Facebook has started suggesting businesses and brands you may like as well. Public profiles (formerly known as Pages) are now appearing in the “Suggestions” module on the top right side of the home page. In addition, business and brands are now mixed in with suggested friends on the “People You May Know” page.
For example, today I’m getting suggestions for popchips, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Warren Miller, Sarah Palin, George Lopez, and Depeche Mode. Getting included in Facebook’s suggested public profiles list could give a big boost to your public profile’s traffic. As always, you can track the popularity of growth of hundreds of thousands of public profiles on Facebook at PageData.
Sponsored Post Hands-On Social Media Training for Beginners. OutTwit - Use Twitter directly from Outlook. If you are a Microsoft ® Outlook ® user, you probably have it open all the time. Now you can have a fully-featured, powerful Twitter client at your fingertips without having to open any other applications. TwInbox seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook. It is a perfect Twitter client for any Outlook user, from a Twitter newbie to a business professional.
Follow @TechHit on Twitter to receive update notifications. Features Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook. Receive your Twitter updates in Outlook. Give us your feedback Why did we build TwInbox? TwInbox System Requirements Microsoft® Windows® Windows 7, 8, 10, 2008 R2, 2012 R2 (64 and 32 bit) with the latest Service Pack. Microsoft, Outlook and the Office logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Seth's Blog: The power of a tiny picture (how to improve yo. If it's important enough for you to spend your time finding and connecting with new people online, it's important enough to get the first impression right. If you use any online social network tool, the single most important first impression you make is with the 3600 to 5000 pixels you get for your tiny picture. In the social group I run, part of my job is to pick the featured members.
As a result, I spend a lot of time looking at little pictures. Here's one person's take on the things you can do to avoid wrecking that first impression: Have a professional or a dedicated amateur take your picture.Use a white background, or at least a neutral one. How Big is Facebook? Mark Ghuneim, (@mediaeater) is the Founder/CEO of digital marketing agency and technology incubator Wiredset and social media tracking service Trendrr. It’s amazing to think just a few short years ago the “interweb” was abuzz with the dominance of FriendsterFriendster reviews , YouTubeYouTube reviews was a simple beta test of cat videos, and the word tweet was only used to describe the sound of a bird.
Changes to the social web continue to accelerate, with new generations joining the party and new platforms changing the way we communicate. Few have grown to capture as much mindshare as Facebook. 7 Top Twitter Topic Trackers - ReadWriteWeb. 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends. Micro Persuasion: Bring Twitter Right Into Gmail with the Amazin. YouTube Adds Call To Action Tool for Nonprofit. Why I Suck At Twitter: Confession Of A Failure. What's Wrong with Facebook? When Strategy Fails to Meet Exe. Track Gmail Messages with Google Analytics. Opening Keynote by Guy Kawasaki: Twitter as a Tool for Social Me. Twitter Tweaks Its Title Tags For Better Google Juice. Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates.
ABC News: Using Twitter to Teach. How to Stand Out in a Blogging Crowd - Blogging Zest. Check Out ExecTweets. Social Media Marketing Budgets on the Rise. Twit-equette Rules To Remember. Why Every Company Needs a Social Media Policy. Facebook's Path To Ubiquity And Thoughts For Your Next Star. Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump I. The Future of Twitter: Social CRM. Feature. Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive: Is the social stream the new.
Hospitals and the Social Web.