Social Media Tips and How-To's for Beginners

Welcome back to another Friday 5. Here’s this week’s list:

• Rearranging Your LinkedIn Profile. Christine Pilch, Grow My Company Blog. Cool new feature.
• How to Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page. Jesse Stay, Techipedia Blog.
• Forget Common Sense, Social Media Communicators Must Have Empathy. Shannon Paul, Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog.
• Social Media is not the Disease. Amber Naslund, Altitude Blog.
• The Twitter Guide Book, Mashable.

Photo by wryonedwards on Flickr.

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Once again, we have a Twitter epidemic. Spam accounts post tweets asking for action or promoting their links and they include as many twitter handles as they can fit. The pick big name Tweeple and little ones. Their strategy is that we will see them because they included, for instance @writingroads, and so their tweet shows up in my @replies tab.

Here’s what one of these spammer’s Twitter page looks like:

What can we do to stop this? Aside from getting out the pitchforks (and violence is never the answer), we can report them as spam for twitter. Just go to their page and look to your right:

Click on ‘report for spam’ and then Twitter will take care of it and their page will look like this:

Twitter users unite! This is a simple and easy action to take, you know, for the good of Twitterers everywhere!

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During a recent update, Facebook added a little security control for your wall posts. You could easily have missed it, but it’s the little lock icon just to the left of the Share button. This control lets you decide on a case by case basis who can see your post. For instance, you might want to let only your friends see personal information about you, but you could want to let Friends of Friends see your latest blog post (to drive additional traffic). This tool gives you the option.

Follow these steps:

1. Enter your update and add a link or other media as needed.
2. Click the lock icon and make a choice.

Your choices are defined below:

• Everyone: Lets all of Facebook see it. You probably only want to use this on rare occasions to share your post with the entire Facebook community.
• Friends of Friends: This lets your whole Friends list and their friends see your post. You could use this choice when you are publicizing something you want a lot of people to see.
• Only Friends: This is the default choice and lets your entire list of friends of see it. If you have set up separate groups of friends, you can confine it to a particular group by using the Customize choice (defined below). Otherwise it goes to your entire list of friends.
• Customize: This lets you confine who can see this post to individuals or groups you have set up. You may want to do this if you are posting about something that is only relevant to a certain group of your Facebook friends, but you don’t want others to see.

Click Share and that’s it. Your post will only be seen by those people you select.

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I have to be honest, this is driving me crazy. I totally get how novice bloggers and social media neo-phytes are missing the boat here, but big name bloggers are messing it up too!

If you look down towards the bottom of this post, you’ll find a fantastic green button that says ‘retweet’. The folks at Tweetmeme could not have made it easier for you to pop this on your wordpress blog and let people retweet you with one simple click. You can also click on the grey box to see who retweeted you.

But, sadly, most bloggers forget to customize the button, something that’s painfully easy to do. In fact, when you install it, you get directionals that tell you where to go and how to customize it/set it up. As a result of this missed step, when we click to retweet, the twitter post says, “RT @tweetmeme 10 easy step to total bliss: http://xyz.com”.

Do you see it yet? The missed opportunity? With a simple customization, you can make that tweet say, “RT @JohnSmith 10 easy step to total bliss: http://xyz.com”. Now you get the benefits:

• You get to see and track the retweets by clicking on your @JohnSmith (@replies) tab.
• You can respond to or thank those retweeters.
• People in your retweeters stream and across Twitter, will see your handle and what you’ve tweeted

It simply must be done.

1. Install the Tweetmeme plugin (fyi, you can now do this right from your dashboard, just click on plugins, add new and search for tweetmeme).
   
2. Then scroll down to the bottom of you dashboard navigation over there on the right side.
3. You’ll see an option (similar to the buttons that say ‘posts’ ‘pages’ ‘appearance’ that says ‘Tweetmeme’.
4. Click it and you’ll get to a page with many options, find the line that says, ’source’.
5. Type in the Twitter handle you want listed in your retweets.
6. SAVE CHANGES at the bottom of the page.

Please, for the love of Charlie – use the plugin so that we can share your information easily and PLEASE customize that button!

Come to think about it – check custom setting options for every plugin you install!

Image credit: Leeni!

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We’ve been on hiatus for awhile, but today, the Friday Five returns. We’ve reformatted a bit and we’ve added some brief commentary. Enjoy!

1. Seth Godin Talks about Being a Linchpin. David Meerman Scott Webinknow Blog. Must see interview.
2. How to Suck at Facebook. The Oatmeal. Hilarious.
3. Why Twitter is Shunning Celebrities. Pete Cashmore, CNN. Twitter puts fortunes behind relationship building.
4. Free marketing in 2010 ebook. The Conversation Agent Blog. Free ebook.
5. 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Know. New York Times. We’ve covered some of these, but good stuff.

Photo by Looking Glass on Flickr.

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Guest Post by Deb Boyken

Ron and Julie have been doing a wonderful job explaining the ins-and-outs of some of the established social media outlets, and there’s no denying the usefulness of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in building your business.

However, the world of “social media” does not stop at just a few sites.

The “big boys” of social media are huge and cover every topic, interest, and type of person under the sun. You can always find people to talk to, but there are many, many more who could care less about your freelance writing skills, or how fascinating your business conference was last week. They’re just there to talk about skiing, or turtles, or raising sea sponges for fun and profit. They don’t care about what you care about. Sure, you don’t have to listen to them drone on about the mating habits of box turtles, but why can’t they find their own place to play?

Which is exactly the point.

For just about every interest a person can have, there’s a social media outlet just waiting for them.

Let’s say you have some other interests, like, say, knitting. (This is a particularly easy example for me, because I am, in fact, very interested in knitting.) You’ve found other knitters on Twitter, and you have joined a LinkedIn group or two, but it’s not satisfying. You want to talk to people about your favorite hobby, and the “generic” sites just aren’t cutting it any more.

You can think of the big sites like a nightclub–busy and crowded with people from every walk of life. You might be lucky enough to find a couple people to talk to who have similar interests, but it’s not going to be the same as, say, a convention FILLED with people. This is exactly why the world has Star Trek conventions, and conferences for web designers, or women in media. They bring lots of people with similar interests together in one place to share ideas, learn new things, and just hang out.

Trust me, a knitter cannot blather on about different methods of turning a sock heel to a non-knitter for more than about 22.7 seconds before eyes start glazing over. But, if you get a bunch of knitters together? You can go on for hours.

Knitters have Ravelry.com for their most pressing social media needs.

Sure, there are lots of sites out there devoted to knitting. (You would be amazed how popular it is these days.) Knitter’s Review is one of the older sites and has a great forum for talking about knitting and spinning. But Ravelry is totally unique. There are message boards devoted to just about everything a knitter could possibly be interested in–from knitting topics to Green living, favorite tv shows local yarn shops, to cooking with crock pots. It also has a database of patterns and yarns so that, if you’re interested in any of them, you can see what other people have done with that yarn, or what the pattern looks like when NOT worn by a professional model. You can keep track of what yarn you have, and offer unwanted skeins up for trade or sale–and find extra skeins if you need just one more to finish the sweater you’re making.

Actually, Ravelry is kind of amazing. I’ve never seen a site quite so thorough, quite so perfect for its target audience. It’s more amazing when you consider that it was started by a knitter and her programmer-boyfriend, and is run now by a total, paid staff of four people (and lots of unpaid volunteers). The place is HUGE … but it’s all about knitting, spinning, yarn, and crochet. You can always find someone to talk to.

The point, though, is that special interests have websites and message boards just for them.

This means you can find lots of other people to talk about box turtles, car repair, baking, archery, or pretty much any hobby you have–but it doesn’t stop at hobbies. Are you starting a business? Want opinions on what a professional photographer should carry in his camera bag? Wondering how other bakers built a clientele? Social sites devoted to special interests have a wealth of information for people who do whatever-it-is professionally, as well as the hobbyists.

That also means that–by being a member of the community–you have access to potential clients, partners, collaborators, or customers. I can share links to my knitting book reviews on Ravelry to get traffic to my site. I can advertise, ditto. I can share knitting tips with other people to show my expertise and to demonstrate to potential clients that I know what I’m talking about. I can send messages and build a network with people who make their livings by knitting to make sure they know who I am … making it easier to sell my freelancing services. (With a light touch, of course, so as not to alienate anyone.) All while having fun talking about one of my favorite subjects.

Deb Boyken spends an inordinate amount of her free time baking, knitting, spinning yarn, reading, and playing with her dog, but mostly, let’s not forget, she writes. She writes about knitting at www.knittingscholar.com, writes about writing and freelancing at www.punctualityrules.com, and writes about more or less everything else at www.chappysmom.com.

Image credit: joathina

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Running a blog and managing your social networking sites is part of your job. That’s what I tell my clients. It’s a critical piece of the marketing and promotion and syndication pie. And if you can’t do it, you get help. You outsource.

But it’s a lot of work, they say. Yes. yes it is. And that work is really important. However, sometimes, life happens – and we simply have to take a step back. From our online participation, from our extracurricular activities, even from our work.

For regular readers and subscribers to this blog, you might notice that while we have a hefty backlog of posts and information, we haven’t been updating quite so much lately. Both Ron and I have run into some ‘life’ situations that put this blog that we love on the backburner. It pains us that we’ve had to do it, but in this online world – where we strive so hard to be genuine and authentic, to bring our very selves into the information that we share – we end up bringing the good with the bad.

It’s happened before, and the glory of having two of us driving this ship was that one of us could take over. But this time, we both got sidelined.

In essence, as my good friend, farmer and blogger, Susan Gibbs, just wrote – this is the ‘dark side’ of social media. (or one of them anyway – don’t get me started on SPAM). Essentially, this dark side illuminates the old adage, ‘women and children first’. But in our case, it’s ‘health, family and paying gigs’ first.

Still…we love this blog. We love the community we’ve created. So, we’re not going anywhere. We’re figuring out how to get back to our regular flow. (and we’re always happy to have guest posters, hint, hint, nudge, nudge). And we thought it was vastly important – in light of both our philosophies that being human is your most important job when engaging in social media – that we tell you what’s been going on.

Hey, while I’ve got your ear: are there topics, sites, terms, technologies that you’re wanting to hear about? Please let us know, and we’ll answer your queries!

We hope this finds you well…and thanks for being here,

Julie & Ron

Image credit: Scoobymoo

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I’m torn.

You see, I have these ‘friends’ on Facebook and these ‘followers’ on Twitter (and on and on) – that I really don’t fancy being connected to. I like to think that they’re nice people, but I’m not sure. (Can we ever be?)

So, my torn-ess comes from this: do I stay connected? or do I let them go?

For example, I’m not a religious person (which isn’t to say that I’m not spiritual – I was recently told that ‘I got soul’) and there are a few Facebook friends that constantly (5-10 times per day) update their status with quotes from the bible (I’m not sure which one) and the like. Now, this is their prerogative – but I’m looking at my Facebook feed to get information about the parts of the world that I’m interested in. Honestly, I don’t want my feed clogged up with revelations about what Mary would do.

After reading that, it seems simple, doesn’t it? The easy answer is, stop being their Facebook friend.

BUT, here’s the other side. I’m a freelancer writer. And social media has been integral to the expansion and success of my company for the sole fact that now roughly 15,000 people from around the world know who I am. A seed was planted, sometimes they send me business. It’s hard for me to shut doors – who knows if one of those ‘friends’ doesn’t have a big job waiting for me around the next bend – and then, suddenly, they can’t get to me on Facebook anymore?

A gaggle of women, aka ‘tweethearts‘, were featured in Vanity Fair today for their massive amounts of followers. They’re getting work and notoriety. But, what do they have to put up with? 30K+ followers and friends that fill up their airways?

It’s an interesting dilemma. Riffraff vs. quality. And I’m sure there are as many answers to it as there are people on Twitter.

Image credit: bcymet

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Guest post by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier

Most people have learned, by now, that it’s bad Netiquette to forward every little joke, picture, or whatnot to every person they know. It’s OK to forward those cute bunny pictures to the friends who will appreciate them, but just because your dentist is in your address book it doesn’t mean he or she needs to see it. But it took years before not sending mindless forwards was the cultural norm. Now Facebook, more than other social media sites, has become the new mindless forward.

Every application on Facebook seems to require access to my data, and every time you “become a fan” of something, Facebook wants you to spam everyone on your contact list so that people spend the maximum amount of time on Facebook being fans of things and using applications inside Facebook’s walled garden.

Maybe I’m a grouch, or maybe I’m connected to too many people (or both) but a few weeks ago my tolerance for getting suggestions to “become a fan” of things wore out. Maybe it was the small number of really persistent people who kept asking me to be a fan of things I already ignored. Maybe it was being asked to be a fan of completely irrelevant crap.

I know I ignored a few things I would have originally “fanned” just because I was getting too many damn requests. Whatever it was, I’m as sick of seeing “become a fan” as I was sick of seeing “FWD” in my inbox ten years ago. No, Bill Gates isn’t going to give $1 for every time an email is forwarded, and no, I don’t want to be a fan of “WIN NOW 10.000 FVCASH AND BUY EVERYTHING YOU WANT!EXCLUSIVE ZYNGA PROMOTION.”

I understand the give and take of building a “sticky” site and trying to make a business out of getting people’s attention. I fully respect sites like Twitter that strike a balance between providing a useful service and trying to build an audience that will enable a business model. (Whatever Twitter’s actual business model ever ends up being…) But Facebook is well over that line. The new privacy rules and the model of encouraging users to spam their friends and applications that want access to my data and hooks into my profile just to work…

Social media sites should be tools to enrich our real lives. Facebook can be used that way, but the site itself is geared to abuse of personal data and attention. Email’s functionality has been marred by intentional misuse by spammers. Facebook’s flaw is not only abuse by hostile parties — though it has a few of those as well — but that its very design is almost user-hostile. It actively encourages bad Netiquette and overreaching of personal data.

Surely Facebook could do better. Or maybe it’s time for someone to invent a more user-friendly site that encourages good Netiquette, conservative data access policies, and simpler and saner privacy policies.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.

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