1. 1 day ago 

   14 Tips To Help You, Your Brand Or Your Business Get Started In Social Media

   Are you looking for a few tips to help kick start your social media/networking experience? Here are 7 Do’s and 7 Don’ts of social networks that can hopefully help guide your social media journey in the right direction and because I couldn’t stop writing there is a bonus tip at the end.

   Do

   1. Do go and join at least one social network right now and after creating your account sit back, monitor and discover how that social network works before posting or sharing any content. As author Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” So before you jump in and do something you may regret later you must first learn how the community interacts with each other and you must learn how to use the different features contained within that particular social network.
   2. Do make sure to accurately and truthfully fill out your user profile including a real picture (or at least something that represents you) of yourself. This allows others in that social network to get to know the real you and will help them to trust you in the future.
   3. Do spend plenty of time actively communicating and interacting with your community. Not only will you learn a lot from your community but you can also help your community by answering questions, sharing content and if applicable pointing them in the direction of your services/website/blog. A quote I enjoy that applies here is:
      

      “A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”
      -Chinese Proverb

      In other words you can learn by watching but at some point you will have to interact, engage and participate in order to truly learn how to make the most out of social media.
   4. Do spend time using the search features at whichever social network you are currently on to actively seek out and discover new and interesting individuals who you should friend or follow. You can’t have a sane conversation with yourself and in order to participate in meaningful conversation and begin to build a community you are going to have to go out and find those you wish to communicate with.
   5. Do take the time to remove and block any spammers that may have latched on to you like the parasites they are. By taking the time and effort to block and report spammers you are helping the social networking sites become a safer and cleaner environment for all users. If spammers find a social network increasingly aggressive towards their tactics eventually they will leave to find an easier place to spam their wares.
   6. Do make sure you share quality links and content from others with your community. Sharing useful and relevant content with your followers and friends shows the community that you are there for more than just self promotion.
   7. Do realize that the internet and social networks are increasingly transparent and it is very easy to be found out as a fake or imposter. The best advice I can give to those wishing to use social networks effectively is to always be yourself and to pretend to be someone you aren’t. If you like hockey, show that you do, don’t try and fake your knowledge of football because you will fail. If you are a heavy user of curse words (maybe tone that down a bit) don’t censor yourself simply to gain a larger audience.

   Do Not’s

   1. Do not be afraid to try new social networks. They may only currently have a couple of hundred members but they could quickly turn in to the next Facebook or Twitter. When it comes to social media and social networks it is almost always more beneficial to be an early adopter rather than a late follower. At minimum by being an early adopter you will be able to secure your chosen username to help further your branding efforts.
   2. Do not be offended if you follow or friend someone and they do not reciprocate. You should only be following or friending those individuals who you find interesting and relevant anyways and those who enhance or add to the quality of the conversation. If they don’t reciprocate the follow at least you are still getting something out of the relationship because they were someone you found interesting to begin with.
   3. Do not fall into the spammy cycle of follow/unfollow or friend/unfriend simply to get a notification to them in hopes they will follow you back. This can be considered a form of spam and is highly annoying to the individual who you are trying to entice to follow you. Why not engage in relevant conversation with this individual instead? Chances are they will friend or follow you a lot quicker if they know you are adding to the conversation and not just trying to inflate your numbers.
   4. Do not use a fake profile picture (such as that of a scantily clad blonde) to try and entice more friends/followers into following or friending you. This is a common tactic among spammers (especially on Twitter) and after being found out as a fraud you will almost certainly be blocked and/or reported as a spammer.
   5. Do not solely use the social networks to promote your own blog/product/service etc… Self-promotion is a good thing but excessive self promotion will get you unfollowed or unfriended rather quickly. Instead of only self promotion try engaging with your followers in a real conversation, try helping by answering questions, ask a few questions yourself and yes even promote your products/services or site.
   6. Do not stress out over your follower/friend count. Inflated numbers matter very little, instead what really matters is the quality of users and the quality of conversation that is taking place within your community. Strive for quality and not quantity.
   7. Do not expect overnight success using social media. It is very difficult and rare to see a company, individual or brand jump into social media and instantly garner hundreds or thousands of fans. Instead work daily at growing your community and increasing your brand’s online presence.

   Bonus

   1. Try not to limit yourself to using only the web interface for whichever social networking platform you are currently using. There are plenty of high quality and free third party tools available for Windows, Mac’s and mobile devices that integrate many great features, combine many different social networks into one centralized place and can greatly increase your productivity and efficiency when using the social networks.

   Are there any tips or guidelines I am missing that you could offer up in the comments to others who may be reading this post? If you liked this post or found it useful in any way, please leave a comment below or share it with your own community using the Retweet or Facebook icons below.

Comments

2. 2 days ago 

   Control Who Sees Your Facebook Content With Precision

   Recently I was asked by someone how they could share an image to their Facebook profile but limit the access on who could view it. This individual wasn’t a new Facebook user asking the question either,it was a daily user who had quite a lot of experience using Facebook and was familiar with most of the settings.

   Within Facebook you actually have the ability to precisely control who sees which content you share and they have made it relatively easy to do so. After showing this experienced Facebook individual on how to properly limit access to those they determined could view their posted content I figured it may be a good idea to share this information with others who may not know about this valuable feature.

   This guide will be broken into two separate parts: List creation and Content sharing and privacy controls.

   List Creation

   Depending on the amount of Friends you have on Facebook you may find creating the lists of people to be a time consuming chore but a necessary one if you wish to precisely control who you want to view your shared content. Do you really want your boss to see the pics from your Saturday night drinking binge? Chances are you don’t and that is why the creating the lists of people is a critical step. After the initial creation of lists and the adding of friends to lists is completed any friends you make after can then be added to your created lists.

   1. After signing in to Facebook click on the Account tab on the right hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a drop down menu that looks like this:
      
      Click on the “Edit Friends” link
   2. You will now be in the Friends screen of Facebook. In the mid-left panel of the Facebook friends screen you will see this:
      
      Click on the Friends link. This will take you to a screen where you are presented with a list of all of your Facebook friends.
   3. On the right hand side of your friends you will see a drop down arrow labeled “Add To List” that when clicked will look like this:
      
      This is the screen where you will create your new lists that will be used to group your friends into or where you will add your friends into Lists you already have created. As you can see I have Lists created for Family, Friends, Other and Social Media. SMS Subscriptions is a Facebook created group.
   4. Since you will probably not have any Lists created place your cursor in the Create new list field and give a name to a new list that you would like this friend to appear in. One point to remember is that Friends can appear in multiple lists.
   5. You can now go through your entire Friends list and either create new lists or add friends to existing lists. This is an important step that must be completed if you want to control who sees what you share on Facebook. Something to remember is that Friends can exist in multiple lists. For example you may work with your brother so he could theoretically be placed into a Co-Workers List as well as a Family List.

   Content Sharing And Privacy Controls

   Now that you have divided your friends into appropriate lists you will now be able to precisely control who is able to see the content you share on Facebook.

   1. If you click on the What’s on your mind status update field or click on one of the many Facebook share icons you will see a lock icon and two buttons that look like this:
      
   2. Click the lock icon and you will be presented with the following view:
      
      From here you will want to click on the Customize link. This is where we begin to configure our privacy sharing options.
   3. A new window will pop up and from here you will click on the field beside where it says “These People:”
      
      Choose the link that is highlighted here called Specific people…
   4. After selecting the link Specific people… the pop-up on your screen should look like this:
      
      

      In the text field labelled Enter a name or list you can start typing the name of specific friends or Lists that you wish to share this content with. Like the rest of Facebook this field is auto-complete so don’t worry if you can only remember the first letter of a friend or list you wish to share this with. Alternatively from this screen you could choose to hide this content from specific individiuals or lists.

      For example you may wish to share your birthday pictures with friends in your Family List so you would choose that list to share those pictures with. Perhaps you went out for your birthday and had a little to much fun but still want to share your pictures with all your friends except your co-workers. In that example you would choose to enter the List Co-Workers into the Hide this from field.

      A critical point to remember here is that individuals can belong to multiple lists. So you may have a friend on your Co-workers and Family list so that individual could still see the pictures posted to family.

   Now that you know the steps it takes to create lists and how to share content with only those you choose you should be able to precisely control who sees what content and avoid some of those embarrassing stories we’ve all heard about.

   If you would like to learn even more about Facebook privacy features the fantastic blog All Facebook has an extensive guide on the subject: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/

   If you liked this small guide to Facebook privacy please leave a comment below or feel free to Tweet or Share this post with those in your Twitter or Facebook networks by clicking one of the icons below.

Comments

3. 1 week ago 

   Avoiding The Initial Social Media Mistakes

   One of the mistakes that I’ve witnessed many new brands and individuals make when first entering into social media is their attempt to bring their old media way of thinking along with them. This traditional way of thinking and attempt to squeeze into a different medium will eventually lead to failure.

   Instead of joining a social network, listening to the community and determining how that particular community works, quite often instead they will instead join and begin quickly aggressively pursuing the members of this social network with their look at me and buy this now message. The community whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other community will eventually turn its collective back on the brand as abuse will only be tolerated for so long.

   What brands and businesses new to social networks should instead be doing is:

   1. Join the social network using a real name or the business name
   2. Upload a real picture of yourself or your product
   3. Use the search tools to discover individuals who are already talking about you or your brand and friend or follow them
   4. Listen to the conversations that are currently taking place and learn what is and what isn’t appropriate conduct on that particular social network
   5. After gaining followers and have learned the rules begin to socialize with those in your network. It is after all called “social” networking.
   6. Answer questions, ask questions and offer genuine help to those people who may be interested in your product/brand/business
   7. Repeat

   To put the above into perspective I present you with two very different scenarios:

   1. You’re at a party and there is someone there who’s had far too much fun already and is harassing everyone he/she encounters with loud drunken talk and push behavior. Eventually he/she is dancing on the table and puking in the planter.
   2. You’re at a party and there is an individual there who is walking around making small talk with all those in the room. He/she is asking questions, telling jokes, sharing stories and listening to what others around him are saying. This is an articulate individual who is facilitating conversation among the group and everyone seems to be drawn to him/her.

   How do you want your brand/business to be remembered amongst the social networks? Do you want your reputation to be that of the loud drunk or that of the articulate well spoken individual?

Comments

4. 3 weeks ago 

   Could Google Buzz Be More Than Just A New Social Network?

   Google launched its new social networking platform Buzz about five days ago and it appears Google has been listening to user feedback and has been able to close up some of the privacy concerns users had been voicing since its launch. Despite the fact Google has been attentive to its early adopters I am still not convinced that Google Buzz is a social networking platform and instead may actually be a real-time blogging platform.

   Google has already built many blogging features into its Buzz service currently implemented by many of the other blogging platforms either by design or via a plugin system.

   Features found inside Buzz that are similar to other blogging platforms include:

   • Buzz pulls in all your content from around the web (Flickr, Picasa, Reader, etc…)
   • With the major exclusion of Facebook Buzz is able to pull in most of your social graph
   • Buzz allows for long form content to be posted where Facebook and Twitter both have limits on the amount you can post
   • Built in commenting system
   • Built in sharing system
   • Built in upvoting system
   • Tight integration with its mobile platform

   So, what would Google need to do to become a real-time blogging platform?

   • Allow customization/templating of your Buzz/Profile page
   • Ability to use your own domain instead of the profile url
   • Facebook integration into the connected sites
   • Text formatting tools like those already found in Gmail
   • Third party tools for posting

   I don’t think it’s Facebook and Twitter that have anything to worry about as they have already reached a massive audience that will be hard to win over, but instead if I were Tumblr and Posterous I would be looking over my shoulder at the Google giant that is about to strike.

   What do you think? Is Google Buzz a new social network or could it be more of a real-time blogging platform? Who should be most worried about Buzz? Is it Facebook and Twitter or Posterous and Tumblr?

   • Tagged:
   • Social media
   • Buzz
   • Google
   • Twitter
   • Facebook
   • Social Networks
Comments

5. 4 weeks ago 

   To Succeed Online You Must Be Yourself And Be Honest With Your Audience

   With the new web 2.0 social networking driven internet it is no longer easy to hide behind an avatar or fake profile. If you want to succeed in this world you must be honest and you must be yourself.

   • Tagged:
   • facebook
   • twitter
   • Web 2.0
   • Advide
Comments

Learn everything you would ever want to know about me and more here: About Me

Like hockey? Check out the hockey social news network: IceColdNews.com

Connect

Following

Tumblr