In Daniel Scocco’s article Are Social Networks Like the Fashion Industry? at DailyBlogTips, Daniel presents an argument on whether social networks are like the fashion industry where one social site becomes popular for a period of time and then everyone moves on to something new and cool, and then – rinse and repeat. Daniel asks, “Are we looking for something that will add real value for our lives, or are we just following what everyone else is doing?” As I started to comment on Daniel’s article I realized I had switched over into book mode and not short comment mode. So I wrote this blog post.
Being Cool with Social Networks
(Tongue-in-cheek) Well, duh, we all want to be cool, and being involved with the latest social networking site(s) will definitely make you the life of the party. If you look at social networking in the context of being cool, then yes, it will make you cool in the short term. 🙂 Again, tongue-in-cheek. Some people in your life might think you’re cool because you stay on top of the new things happening online and they count on you to keep the coolness going so they can benefit from your coolness. Again, t-i-c. Thanks for letting me indulge.
Using Social Networks for Your Blog
Another context you can benefit from using the social networking sites is building traffic to your blog, promoting your blog posts and gaining subscribers. People might click on your profile at a social site to find more about you. I know I do it and I subscribe to new blogs that I find interesting and valuable.
If you’re a commentor at blogs, you are engaging in a social network. Maybe for a while and maybe for a long time or maybe even sporadically. Who knows. And, if you’re interested in the responses to a certain blog post, you can subscribe to that blog post’s comments. Blog comments are a social network.
When you’re a new blogger, you’re taught to go find other blogs in your niche and comment. This gets you out there and involved with everyone else in your niche. It provides a sense of community by getting involved.
Remember, blog comments can be auto-emailed if you subscribe to them. There are also services to manage your comments at blogs. Like comment management, there are also services to manage the messages you send to social networking sites.
One way to blog, is to write a weeks worth of posts on the weekend and then time those blog posts to go out during the next week. While the blog posts are automatically being published for you, you can then spend a portion of your time during the week socializing on your social sites, including commenting at blogs and forums, etc.
Staying Organized When Using Social Networking Sites
What some folks ask is, “How do I keep up with all this socializing?” One way to start thinking about all these social sites is to not think about them. Just get them out of your head. But know that they exist and you have one place to go when you want to manage them.
If you’re a follower of Getting Things Done by David Allen or some derivative of GTD like LEO’s Zen to Done, you’ll know that getting things out of your head is one of the matras. If you join a social site or two you’ll have to manage it. “Shoot, another thing to think about. Geez!!”
One way to help is to use a Social Site Messenger or SSM for short (I just made that term up so don’t think it’s an industry standard). If you want to send a message to one social site or multiple social sites like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, and on and on…, you could certainly use a service like Ping.fm (in beta), FeedTweeter or Posty. If you try Ping.fm you can use the beta code “pingbewithyou” without the quotes (as of 7/13/08).
A way to manage all those sites is to create a bunch of tabs in Firefox that all automatically log you in to the social networking sites you belong to. Then save all the tabs as a group like you can in Firefox 3 and when you need to visit each site, open your Firefox 3 browser and go to that bookmarked group and select “Open All in Tabs”. This will get you logged into your social networking sites as quickly as possible and allow you to efficiently work with them on a schedule.
Note: Keep in mind, if you use a service that sends one message to multiple social sites, those messages could show up in sites like FriendFeed and BlogCatalog. These sites have the capability to display messages from the other social sites that you belong to. So for example, you could see the same message multiple times on your FriendFeed account. Which isn’t too pretty.
It’s Just Not Right!!
Now, some folks might think sending one message to many social sites is not right because it shows that you’re not really involved with that site. Ultimately, you’ll want to spend some time at those sites if they are appropriate for what you’re doing with your blog or whatever reason it is for you to be involved in social networking sites.
Besides, if you equate social networking to going to church, the club, a monthly group that meets every Thursday night at the local restaurant, or any other gathering where people are for any topic that you’re interested in, you’re socializing in a network at multiple social networks.
The Value of Social Networks
The value in all this, whether sites come and go, is what you give and what you get from it all. Like a church or any other organization that you receive valuable information for free from, you also give of yourself to that organization as well. Like cleaning tables and plates at a church social function. 🙂
I wrote 21 Terrific Tweets to show just a small sampling of what you can get out of Twitter tweets. This was at a time where I had just started following folks on Twitter.
Others have connected with folks to do contract work.
Use Summize to extract data you’re interested in or want to keep an eye on.
New found friends that you actually call on the phone or send stuff to and from through snail mail.
Hooking up with someone clear across the world where you probably will never go but finding out more information about that place by the folks who live there and are also on the same social networks as you are.
One could certainly start a blog based on the information provided in tweets and Summize. It’s loaded with valuable information. Yes I know, “But Bill, you can find that information elsewhere.” I don’t know man, you can find a lot of stuff using the advanced search capabilities of Summize and in short order too.
Like any other non-virtual network, networks come and go. Give the value and take whatever value you get from it.
Social Networking and a Wrap-up on Mindset
So what’s the mindset when you’re using one of these services that sends one message to many social sites? Five points to help you with your social networks and not getting overwhelmed.
- Don’t think about it, just get it out of your head so it doesn’t become a mantra of “I have to do this, I have to do that on this and that site.”
- Social networks are like any other non-virtual network – church, clubs, restaurants, etc.
- Send one message to multiple sites of your choice.
- Visit your multiple social networking sites using one browser with multiple tabs.
- Designate a time of the day and amount of time you spend at those sites just like commenting at blogs, forums, etc.
Use compete to keep an eye on the popularity factor of these social sites to help you decide what direction you’d like to go with social networking. Maybe you use all of them or maybe you use one or a few of them. Whatever you do, the moment you create it, manage it. Create the simplest management plan for that site that fits your processes and schedule.
As far as being cool, if you want to be on top of the Twitter action, then check out Twitscoop. Twitscoop:
Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger… You can also input a twitter username in the search box to track a conversation.
I don’t think if these environments as a cool place to be. They are interesting to be involved in, to watch, and to watch which ones fall to the wayside over time. With help from TechCrunch, you can keep an eye on which ones join the infamous deadpool.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this search engine for social networking sites.