Managing Your Socal Media Presence

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Managing Your Socal Media Presence

Feb
2011

Have you spent what you believe to be lots of time developing up your social media identity, but feel like you’re not seeing results? Or maybe you never have time to blog or update your Facebook or Twitter accounts? While setting up your social media connections is certainly a necessary jumping off point, the most important way to make these resources work for you is through careful and regular management. Like all marketing you you pursue, you have to create a path and a plan. Here are a few simple ideas to make sure you are getting the most out of your social media presence:

1) Be consistent! Set aside a little time each day to check in with your social media links. Blogging once a week will do more good than blogging everyday for a couple of weeks and then doing nothing for a couple of weeks. Regular posts attract readers and new and varied content helps your site feature highly in search engines.

Blogging: To Get the Most, Self-Host

Feb
2011

With so many well-designed free and easy blog hosting services out there (Blogger (BlogSpot), TypePad, etc.), it can be easy to be lured into using a network-hosted site instead of self-hosting your own. But, especially if you are promoting your business, the benefits of a self-hosted blog are numerous and important.

Using a self-hosted blog versus one that is network-hosted is roughly analogous to owning versus renting a house. When everything is going smoothly it doesn’t much matter if you rent or own, but if something goes wrong or you want to make a change, being a homeowner allows you much greater flexibility and security. Specific to blogs, a network host has the ability to censor your content and may shut down your site and delete its contents without warning if they see fit. More likely, if a network host experiences technical problems or terminates their service, your content may be lost and unable to be restored. You are also always at the mercy of your network’s policies and terms of conditions. Even if you find them agreeable now, they may change in the future and content you stored on their site may be very difficult or impossible to retrieve and move elsewhere. A self-hosted blog allows you to moderate your own content indefinitely and back-up your entries much more reliably.

Book Review: The New Social Learning

Sep
2010

Recently I finished reading a copy of the book from authors Tony Brigham and Marcia Connor entitled, The New Social Learning. For an avid and staunch user of social media tools like me, there might not be a heck of a lot of revelations in the book, but for the person just exploring or getting more familiar with these tools, it serves as a tremendous resource.

The book’s main theme centers around the notion of learning and how social media applications are bringing collaboration and useful tools to Internet users worldwide. It’s not just classrooms being impacted by the social web, but companies large and small. People can tap into their social networks for a host of information and deploy cloud-based tools that change completely the way businesses and organizations operate and even communicate. Users aren’t tethered to one computer and organizations are now afforded a collective intellect that’s only a few mouseclicks away, and people can work with one another from points all over the globe.

Will Shopkick Dropkick Foursquare?

Aug
2010

There’s another neato geolocation player entering in the game very soon, and it’s easier for consumers to take advantage of the incentives merchants can set up. The standard has been for mobile app users to “check in” to receive perks and discounts, but Shopkick’s app works by subscribers simply walking through the door. Another added punch? They have forged some incentives with some partner stores and the model allows “kickbucks” to be used for Facebook credits and purchasing songs off Napster, to name a few. They’ve drummed up $15M in their recent round of financing and apparently Macy’s and Best Buy are interested in the potential; the latter hosted a preview in their San Francisco store, with more stores to follow soon. An Iphone app is poised to be ready by the end of August, with the Android app following shortly after.

Do you think apps like Foursquare have any need to be concerned? Moreover, do you think smaller or boutique merchants will get the hang of it? Even in my tech-savvy town of Boulder, Colorado, Foursquare has (sadly) only experienced luke-warm stickiness with them. Mobile users are running all over the city, checking in and rewarded with — silence. Why is that? My experience shows that some are *just* getting an idea of the power of Twitter and Facebook.