100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club. Branding one’s self in an online environment built on entropy and go-baby-go is difficult at best, and impossible if you forget to take your happy pills. If you like this one, please don’t hesitate to stumble, blog, digg, bookmark, and otherwise promote the hell out of this. Listening Build ego searches using Technorati and Google Blogsearch Comment frequently (and meaningfully) on blogs that write about you and your posts Don’t forget the conversations hiding in Twitter (use Summize.com) and Friendfeed. Home Base Home base is your blog/website. Passports Passports are accounts on other social networks and social media platforms. Outposts Build RSS outposts on Facebook. Content Create new content regularly. Conversation Commenting on other people’s blogs builds awareness fast. Community Face to Face Promotion Become a StudioPress Affiliate
e-barcelona.org Fòrum de Cultura, democratitzem la democràcia A Quick Guide to Social Bookmarking This is the first post in the series A Quick Guide to Collaborative Media Tools. The purpose is to give an introduction to tools that are helpful when doing collaborative work. The first post is about social bookmarking. What’s the problem? This risk alone is reason enough for you to start saving your bookmarks in a way that is safer to you, but also storing them in a way that might benefit your co-workers. This post is about collaborative and social bookmarking. How does it work? Isn’t tagging painful? Personally, it took me about a year to come up with a tagging system that I managed to remember. Finding your personal ontology takes time and I suggest that you write down (on a post-it on your desk or desktop) the tags that you really want to base a library on. Why? Being part of the bigger picture – the ambient awareness You’re not alone. The flipside of this ambient awareness is, of course, infostress. What happens when these services shut down? UPDATE! Image credit: pengrin CC:BY-NC
Lifestream.fm / Stream your life! Social Media Monitoring and Analysis with SM2 from Techrigy Do you know the process your customers take to buy and connect with you? Their journey is often filled with many steps, stops and starts. What you do to help them along the way makes all the difference in gaining a competitive foothold. Taking action to improve the experiences your customers have within that journey can convert them from shoppers to customers, and then to advocates. Too often customers don’t ask for what they want, and rarely do they behave in the way you expect them to; however, they are telling others directly in social media. Taking this view of your customer’s world lets you make better informed and faster decisions about value propositions, brand strategies, and, more importantly, how to engage customers.
Shyftr 10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop I’m fed up with Photoshop and its one billion rarely-used features. How about a simple photo-editor that’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars. Fortunately, there’re tons of web-based photos editors popping up. Most are crap, but some are promising. Check out these free web-based Photoshop alternatives: Arguably, Picnik is the most popular web-based photo editor. Very polished interface. Part of the Aviary suite of creative apps, Phoenix also offers layers and compositing. Adobe was a little late to the web-apps game, but this is a pretty good first try. Nice, simple, and clear interface, with no ads at all. flautR offers a cornucopia of image tools, boasting thousands of photo effects. Another ad-free editor. Hmm… looks like Pixenate was “inspired” by Pic Resize. Another simple interface. An example of how ugly these apps can get. Let me know if I’ve missed any other good ones. If you liked this post, please bookmark it on del.icio.us.
35 Ways to Stream Your Life - ReadWriteWeb It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. Lifestreaming apps generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend's lifestreams (or both). Are there any we missed?
Design Disease - Professional Blog Design Rethinking Community Documentation by Andy Oram 07/06/2006 A new era is halfway here, and nobody has recognized its impact--even though we've all participated eagerly in its arrival. The way we educate ourselves to use and program computers is shifting along many of the same historic lines as journalism, scientific publication, and other information-rich fields. People say casually, "I find my information about using computers by searching online," but few have asked how that information gets online, or how it changes the way they use their computers. Why are people writing this information? I care about community documentation for several reasons. Community documentation has swept up so many talented people and accomplished so much that I've decided to join in and help it flourish. A Definition I use the term community documentation for anything generated by developers and users (mostly amateurs in the field of writing) that helps people use their systems. Much of this documentation is: Fast-changing Interactive Free Ad-hoc
Beyond Blogs Three years ago our cover story showcased the phenomenon. A lot has changed since then In the frantic news biz, where stories go stale overnight, one of our old articles is behaving very strangely. Year after year it continues to draw swarms of online readers, more than holding its own against up-to-date fare. Oddly, while technology races ahead, our story remains frozen in time. The year was 2005, and the story was "Blogs Will Change Your Business." But in the helter-skelter of the blogosphere, we wrote, something important was taking place: In the 10 minutes it took to set up a blogging account, anyone with an Internet connection could become a global publisher. Following our own advice, we ended the story by linking to our new blog, Blogspotting.net. Turned out it wasn't quite that simple. What to do? So here goes. But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. But there's an upside to the loss of control. But hold on. So. What changed?
lifestreams - your life live PodCamp Boston New Media Social Media Conference Participatory Media Literacy / Participatory Media Literacy Guide To This Site's Contents Welcome to Participatory Media Literacy (Home)BloggingWikiRSSSocial Bookmarking, Tagging, Music/Photo/Video SharingPodcastingVideo BloggingDigital Video ResourcesDigital StorytellingMashupsChat: Channeling the BackchannelTransliteracyForecasting: Thinking long term, developing foresight Participatory Media Education Resources Recent technological changes have made much wider social changes possible: Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and ubiquitous Internet access made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population. The technical power of many-to-many communication networks amplifies human social networking capabilities [abstract][pdf].