Extend your brand; Friendly social media URLs
It’s no secret that your social media identities really are an extension of your brand. They’re powerful (often revenue generating) assets that in some cases may generate more traffic than your website. If you’re a company or organization that’s very active in the social media world then it’s probably in your best interest to promote your various social media identities on your company collateral, website, business cards, etc. That said, several of the popular social media platforms have failed in making your content easy for people to access. Sure, twitter.com/webdes03 and facebook.com/webdes03 are simple enough, but I don’t particularly find “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-greene/5/576/4a5” something that belongs on a business card–and it’s certainly not something people are going to remember.
Luckily there’s a simple way to get yourself a friendly URL to replace that ugly one, and provide a consistent URL pattern to all of your social media identities. If your website is hosted with a company that gives you access to cPanel, Plesk, or one of the other popular hosting management tools, you can simply add a new subdomain and redirect it to the appropriate social media identity. Here’s an example of the process you’d follow to set this up using cPanel.
The Social Media Strategy
Melissa Woodard (@SocialMiss) made an interesting blog post earlier about the adoption of social media in the day to day operations of business. While some companies have embraced social media, others have a more casual approach to it. Some don’t quite know how to integrate the concept of social media into their business, and some still don’t quite get what social media is all about. Is social media hard to manage? No.
The plethora of cross-medium tools available today make it fairly easy for an individual (or team) to keep track of your social identity, but you do need to put some thought into it. Tools like Hootsuite can help you manage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. from a single tool (and support multiple users if you’re running a team of folks to help oversee your social media presence), but as great as Hootsuite is-it’s not going to hold your hand in making the right decisions with your social media identities.
Entrepreneur Video Series – Part 4
In this installment I share with you a talk from Clay Shirky on “how social media can make history”. Shirky discusses the effects of social media on society, the radical shift from other mediums to those of social media, and the increased transparency and connectivity of information that stems from social media.
Facebook Privacy & You
There’s been a lot floating around in the tubes of the internet lately about Facebook’s radical new Instant Personalization program and the new Open Graph protocol (and more importantly what it means for you and your privacy; or lack thereof). While I’m the first to bring up the value of social networking (especially from a business perspective), there has to be a line drawn where your information is protected, especially in a platform as big and powerful as Facebook. It’s even rumored [albeit through a third party] that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in privacy. The big question on everyone’s mind is of course, what this means for you as an end user.
Facebook started as a way to communicate with your friends, catch up with friends you hadn’t seen in years, and network amongst your peers. As the platform has taken off, the amount of personal information we all publish to Facebook has increased exponentially and simple pieces of information like your location, interests, and people you know provide an absolutely remarkable business opportunity for Facebook. Heck, I’d love to know who all of my customer’s business acquaintances are and what they like. A platform like Facebook is arguably the most developed targeted advertising platform in the world. As the years have gone on, there’s a clearly visible shift from the ease of protection of your data to the outright exploitation of that information for the benefit of advertisers, merchants and Facebook’s bottom line. Privacy controls are now far harder to understand than ever before, and with the Open Graph protocol it may not even matter if you’ve opted out or not (as your friends can still share information about you with “the network”).
Social Media & You (Yes, You)
There were a lot of interesting tweets swirling the tubes of the internet today regarding SEO, SMO, and the use of social media; leading me to pen some thoughts in a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for some time.
I work with a lot of clients who don’t really know what social media is, and step one is forming a real understanding. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media ‘outlets’ are fairly simple in concept; massive user base, massive audience, but yet oh so challenging to keep your content out there and in demand. Many small businesses simply don’t see the need (or are too out of touch to care about putting in the effort), but at the end of the day practical use of social media can revolutionize the way you do business, forging new paths for collaboration with peers and opening a truly infinite number of doors for new customers. So, how do you get your message out there, how do you make it stand out, and how do you leverage (free) platforms to better your business and your service delivery?
Flash Tag Clouds in SharePoint
So I was at work last week when one of my colleagues came over and asked about the ability to make a dynamic tag cloud in SharePoint. We had collected a bunch of ideas from the workforce and they wanted an intuitive way to display them all in a dynamic fashion. My first thoughts were of the cumulus WordPress plugin that I use here on my blog, and after turning to trusty Google I discovered that I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. We based our work off of this blog post, with of course a few tweaks of our own.
This of course emphasizes my points of the usefulness of and my discovery of jQuery as it uses some simple jQuery to access the SharePoint list data. We made our integration a bit cleaner by utilizing the jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services. We also used jQuery to fade the screen and display the tag cloud in a “floating” popup over the page content so we could keep it nice and big, positioned on top of the SharePoint page.
S60 Twitter Client; Gravity
It has taken me a long time to succumb to the fad of microblogging and use of Twitter, but now that I’ve started using it I’m quite possibly hooked. While the Twitter website is fairly lightweight, the mobile browsing of it, and submitting tweets via text lead me to look for a more streamlined approach to maintaining my Twitter account. Last night I went hunting for a S60 Twitter client for my Nokia E71. There’s several apps out there, but the most promising seems to be an application called Gravity. It does cost you $9.99, but there’s a demo for your enjoyment so you can be sure you want to part with that hard earned $9.99. Some of the nice features of Gravity include:
- All default Twitter capability (tweet, reply, retweet, DM, follow, unfollow, block, create favorite, search, etc.)
- Custom Audio alerts for timeline updates, replies, direct messages and searches
- Auto-connect configuration and auto-fallback to WLAN capability
- Access multiple accounts from one application
For a complete list of features, or to give the Gravity demo a try (or buy your own license), visit mobileways.de.