Social Media Tips and How-To's for Beginners

After learning about the work of author Clay Shirky recently, it occurred to me that open source and social media have a lot in common; mostly the human desire to help one another with no expectation of a return.

Read my full story on DaniWeb.

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• Clay Shirky on people power and “cognitive surplus” (e1evation.com)
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Sorry, I missed last weeks, folks, but it was a busy one and the Friday 5 needed a week off. This week we look at some fun, interesting and informative links. My favorite is the NYT recently banning the word ‘Tweet.’ It could help explain why newspapers are dying in the US when old media is dictating to its writers not to use a word that has become part of the common social media vernacular.

LinkedIn is about to upgrade its group sharing tools, which should be welcome. I haven’t had the opportunity to see them yet, but I look forward to the changes. In other news, when the Idaho attorney general tweeted (oh my I hope the NYT language police don’t come after me for using the word Tweet), about an imminent execution, it raised yet another issue about what’s appropriate on Twitter. Nobody would have questioned him texting a reporter who then reported the news, so why shouldn’t he communicate directly.

Twitter started placing ads inside the Twitter stream on the web site and one writer wondered if it marked the end of Twitter as we know it. I’m not so sure, but it’s a compelling post.

Finally, we have a couple of nice how-to posts from Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media who explains some content SEO tricks and Chris Brogan, who explains the advantages of using Google Wave for Collaboration.

Anyway, here we go with this week’s links:

• ‘New York Times’ Bans the Word ‘Tweet’ – The Awl by Choire on The Awl.
• Tweeting About an Execution: Why Not? – Matthew Ingram on GigaOM
• Toy Story 3: The Beginning of the End For Twitter? – Matt Cheuvront on Life Without Pants
• 9 SEO Mistakes Businesses Make with Content – Lisa Barone on Outspoken Media
• Catch the Wave – Chris Brogan on ChrisBrogan.com

Photo by Moe on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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The other day I clicked a link posted on Twitter by my friend and colleague, John Blossom (who is president of Shore Communications, Inc. and the author of the book Content Nation). Instead of a traditional blog post like this one, I found myself on Google Buzz. I read Blossom’s post (an analysis of the web access capability in the new Barnes and Noble Nook) and decided to respond. From then, on I was drawn into an interesting discussion, all taking place inside Google Buzz and updating me in Gmail.

You can enter Notes in Facebook of course (as I wrote in Facebook: Writing Notes) and have an online conversation, but what I like about Buzz is that I get an email with Buzz updates and I can respond right there without explicitly opening Buzz to do it. Each time the Buzz gets updated, I get a new email with the entire thread. You can also get email responses with Facebook, but it is not smoothly integrated into the email experience as Buzz is (because Google has the advantage of owning both the email and social networking tools).

The entire Buzz email conversation is threaded so you  aren’t getting a bunch of separate emails, and if you get annoyed, you can mute the conversation and you won’t be bothered again.

Blossom has embraced both Google Buzz and Google Wave, and his work has encouraged me to look at this more carefully. If you dismissed Buzz after the initial, well, buzz, then you should give it another shot. It provides an interesting forum for debate and discussion, one that I hadn’t really considered until I saw Blossom’s use of the tool.

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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Social media floods us with so much information. So is it helping us filter the information or contributing to our attention deficit? Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Read my full post on DaniWeb.

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Welcome to the latest installment of the Friday 5. Facebook was still trying to get out from under the cloud of bad publicity regarding its privacy tools this week. The update was an improvement, but still needs a lot of work to simplify it even further. In yet another bizarre episode, however, the San Francisco Weekly explains the strange insignia spied on Zuckerberg’s hoodie.

Meanwhile Facebook and Yahoo! announced a deal to play together, while  Twitter announced a new link policy it will implement over the coming months. In a bizarre announcement, Viacom, the owners of MTV, basically put a gag order on its employees regarding personal blogging. Not sure how well that will go down with the courts, but I guess we have to wait and see.

Not quite as dramatic as a Zuckerberg meltdown, but still another interesting week in the ever evolving world of online social media.

• Yahoo! strikes deal with Facebook in bid to be the ‘largest social network’ in the world, Emma Barnett, Telegraph UK.
• Twitter to Change Links and How They Are Displayed,  Ben Parr, Mashable.
• Zuckerberg’s Bizarre Facebook Insignia Revealed, And What It Means, Alexia Tsotsis, SF Weekly.
• Facebook hopes new privacy page can quell unrest, Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld.
• Viacom/MTV Issues Intense Employee Gag Order, Basically Takes Ownership of Blogs, Thoughts , Joe Coscarelli, Village Voice

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For the last several days, Twitter has been slow or non-responsive frequently throughout the work day. If you use the web site, you get the cute picture of the fail whale and you are told the site is unavailable at the moment. After using Twitter for years, this is just getting old. Twitter has to find a way to deal with the number of users once and for all. The Fail Whale is just not cute anymore.

Twitter, like Facebook, isn’t just any service anymore. For many users it’s a legitimate business tool and if you’re using it for business, you need it to be available. Any cloud service is going to run in into problems from time to time, and if it were only on occasion, it wouldn’t be a problem, but this is chronic. Lately, we seem to be losing Twitter several times a day.

For those who say, it’s a free service, and I should just deal with it, I can’t accept that. If Twitter wants to be a grown-up, serious service, it has to behave that way. If it requires revenue, I’m sure many of us would pay a small monthly fee if it meant we were guaranteed up time. As it stands, this constant issue is long past fixing.  The fail whale is no longer acceptable. Time for Twitter to just work.

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A new white paper, Social Media:  Business Benefits and Security, Governance and Assurance Perspectives (downloadable PDF), published by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) does an excellent job of outlining the rewards and risks for companies participating in social networking on the open web. It clearly outlines the benefits of participating in online social networks, while providing straightforward ways to manage possible issues associated with these activities.

I highly encourage any business that wants to learn about the risks and benefits of social networking on the open web to download and read this 10 page white paper.

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