Ahead, warp factor 6!!

Remember the days of playing Pac Man on your Commodore 64? Sigh. Those were simpler times. Yes, I had a pager longer then was deemed cool and I was admittedly one of the last of my friends to join Facebook. That said, like many people today, I’m trying to keep abreast of what is going on in the world of technology to stay competitive in the workforce. I have jumped on the preverbal technological bandwagon, hee, haw! I’m stumbling my way through a complicated web of technology that is constantly in a state of flux. I want to take you on my ongoing journey and would love to hear feedback on your adventures in using technology!! Be brave, my fellow tech-warriors!! Ahead, warp factor 6!!

New! The Social Media Monthly Magazine

There is a new magazine on the block and it’s called The Social Media Monthly. That’s right. It’s about the digital world of social media and it’s delivered in print format. Shaking your head? Print, OMG, no! Social media is a wildly dynamic world or restless users that demand mealtime solutions. This magazine Can this magazine survive given the restless users of social media that demand online, real-time solutions.

Editor and publisher, Robert Fine, feels that print is not dead and that “electronic media hasn’t quite replaced all of the intimacy you can get with a printed book or magazine” and social media is not an exception. Initially, the word intimacy might come across as a trifle hokey, but from curly myself up on my couch while flipping through the magazine while stopping to feel  each page to rolling it up under my arm on my way to my local coffee shop, I got! I understand what Robert means when he associates magazines with intimacy.

There are some tactile and interactive features in their launch issue that are a value-added feature for its readers. You can peel off a reusable wall decal on the cover and peel a card off an ad, visit CherryCard and donate 10 cents to your charity of choice.  Many of the ads take a minimalistic approach and most include a QR code in hopes of getting users to interact with the brand.

I put on my critical hat and feel that the article on Empire Avenue takes up a disporporionely large about of space–nine pages worth! That said, if the numerous parallels the founder draws between their Social Stock Market and Facebook and Twitter are accurate, maybe the length of the article is warranted.

The following are a sample of articles you can expect to read in the magazine’s launch issue:

• Shifting social media into social transformation.
• Data and context – The road to good decisions.
• Looking for a job? Get on board with social recruiting or get left behind.
• Brand advocacy in a socially networked world.

A selection of contributors include Tonia Ries – founder of Modern Media and The Realtime Report, Rory Cooper–Director of Communications for The Heritage Foundation and Duleepa Wijayawardhana– founder of Empire Avenue’s.

The article that really pops for me is Data and Context – The Road to Good Decisions by Shelly Krammer and Wendy Scherer that stresses the importance of understanding context to frame data and writes that “data combined with context is powerful” and concludes that “data is where it starts, context is the midpoint [and] great decisions are what follow”. The buzzword to take away from this article is clearly context.

Robert’s goal for The Social Media Monthly is to “create something that… you’ll look forward to receiving in your mailbox every month” and for this social media sponge, that magazine has done such that. It is the first magazine that I’ve read from front to back, including the advertisements!

What have you heard so far about this magazine? Do you think it will be successful? Are you planning on subscribing to this magazine. I would love to hear from you!

Guest Blogger: My Lonely Year In The Blogosphere

My guest blogger Suzanne Rico who used to be the morning news anchor for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, made a life-changing decision with her family and in the words of this talented writer of Walking Papers, she and her husband are “now 21st century nomads on a quest to discover what should come next – for our kids, our marriage, our finances and our sanity”.

I quit Botox cold turkey on a smoggy Friday morning last year after I suddenly lost my job as KCBS-TV’s morning news anchor in Los Angeles. Feeling both liberated and scared (and in the mood to make rash decisions), my husband and I rented out our house, sold our cars and traded a comfortable city life for a low budget, long-term trip around the world with our two little boys. I opened a WordPress account to blog about what I hoped would be a “Motorcycle Diaries For Middle-Aged People With Kids” kind of journey. If I write it, I figured–and write it well–readers would come.

Nine months later, practically the only one who reads my “Walking Papers” blog with any regularity is my mother. When I posted My Argentine Angels Drives A Compact Car about rushing my five-year old son to an emergency room on Christmas Day, she commented “superb!”  And when I wrote Natural Born, Stuffed Animal Like Killers about nearly getting flattened by an angry hippopotamus, she complimented my “wicked wit”, but if I’m so fabulous and funny, where is everybody?

Perhaps my blog is lost in cyber space because I am a social media moron. I don’t promote “Walking Paper”. I don’t post everyday. I don’t Twitter it, Reddit, or Digg it. To me, the difference between a pingback and a trackback is as confusing as the old “chicken or the egg” conundrum. I’m even a Facebook virgin, fearing this potential time suck after watching my former co-anchor invest hours each day promoting his blog. I know this resistance to social media is like driving Fred Flintstone’s stone-age car on a modern day freeway; it might be unique, but it will never get you anywhere.

One night in Peru’s Valley Of The Incas, a thick mist creating ghosts at the windows of our small pension, I did try to educate myself. WordPress suggested “tags” so I read up and then chose words like “travel, adventure, mommy blog, parenting, and unemployment”. My readership spiked–by a few and recently, I stumbled upon StumbleUpon, and took the time to upload my posts, but so far, I’m the only one who has stumbled upon them. I clicked the little “like” icon on each one, feeling both embarrassed and hopeful, as if I were trying to win a high school popularity contest.

Being currently unemployed, I have no real excuse for being a social media moron, but between planes, trains, buses and rental cars–between dodging a terrorist scare in Turkey and nearly having a fist-fight with my husband at The End Of The World–I barely have time to upload one post a week, much less learn the tools to promote them. I am mystified at what qualifies as a good blog; one day, while reading Freshly Pressed, I clicked on a blog about writing only to find the post was a link to a famous author’s writing tips—something that probably took five seconds to upload. This feels like cheating to me. I’m no Sylvia Plath or Heather B. Armstrong, but I work hard on writing stories that only family and friends read.

So here are my questions for the experts—bloggers who have been sharing their message longer and more successfully than I: is there space in the blogosphere for someone who is not passionate about social media? If you write it well, but don’t promote it, will people ever come? Is content still king or do clicks rule?  Or do both? I freely admit that I don’t really understand what defines a good blogger (but I do understand why The Honey Badger gets five million views), and only blame myself that Walking Papers is about as popular a destination as Siberia in February.

On a sweaty afternoon in Brazil, both kids finally sleeping after coming down with a mysterious illness we prayed was not Dengue Fever, I expressed my frustrations to my husband Ethan; my blog, I complained, is like the tree that makes no sound when it falls in the forest because no one is around to hear it.

“Maybe you should just scrap blogging altogether and get really proficient at playing “Plants Vs. Zombies,” he suggested. “Then your oldest son will think you are even more of a goddess than he already does.”  Ethan is trying to help me temper my life-long need for achievement and external approval—not an easy task when your ego was formed in front of a television camera and though I knew this was a gentle reminder that my blog should be a pleasure and not a pain in the ass, quitting didn’t sound like such a bad idea. It would be a relief to stop checking my dismal stats—and worrying that the reason people don’t read “Walking Papers” is not because I’m a social media moron, but because I just don’t write it that well. I appreciate any feedback you can provide.

Image: cbenjasuwan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Related articles

• The Importance of Guest Blogging (ariherzog.com)
• Travel guest bloggers invited. (blogavenues.blogspot.com)
• How to Be Successful with a New Blog (ronmedlin.com)
• 7 Habits of Professional Bloggers (problogger.net)

When is the Best Time to Tweet?

Scenario: it’s Sunday at 3pm and your in the mood to tweet. Fingers are crossed that lots of your Twitter followers are online and ready to receive your tweets with open arms, meaning a desire to retweet or send you an @ mention and whatever other goals your business / personal site requires. The point is if you’re unsure of whether your followers / key followers are online, aren’t you just shooting blindly at the Twitterverse hoping for a bite?

I used to use WhenToTweet.com to find out the best times to tweet depending on when most of my followers were using Twitter; however, I noticed that even though the number of people following me on Twitter was growing, my stats were not changing. I contacted the site owner and he told me that there is a cache on the result that is permanent, meaning that you will be always be served your old result.

I turned to the impressive forum at Third Tribe Marketing. Its member are made up of  social media professionals: the industry’s heavy hitters. Susan Giurleo pointed me in the direction of the most impressive article on the subject I’ve seen to-date called When is the best time to tweet? written by Christopher Spenn, USF social media marketing prof. If your goal is to get people to retweet yours tweets, Christopher gives you a recipe to find out when these key people are on Twitter. If your focus is on consumer engagement and conversions, he recommends using Google Analytics to answer this question. What if you don’t have people retweeting your tweets or you’re rightly concerned about excluding potential retweeters? Read on…

In comes StumbleUpon’s URL shorter su.pr. Is it worthwhile to abandon bit.ly and Hootsuite? Judge for yourself. Here are the facts: su.pr not only works to get you more traffic, it lets you know what the best times are for you to tweet, broken up by each day of the week. Not to shabby for a URL shortener. BTW, su.pr and Hootsuite let you pre-schedule your tweets, meaning you tweet when it’s convenient for you.

Editorial note: I’ve just discovered a tool called Tweriod that lets you know when your followers are using Twitter and what the best time to tweet is. The one drawback is that is takes 1 to 2 hours to get the search results. I think it’s worth the wait! What do you think?

Not ready to leave the comfort of your favourite URL shortener just yet. I searched the net high and low get you more answers. Although I found some sources that were divided on the subject, teetering on the brink of being labeled an over generalization on the subject is this: Monday’s are crap for tweeting, Tuesday to Friday’s between 10 to 2pm is golden (relevant if your tweeple are in the same time zone as you), Thursdays and Fridays are prime re-estate to get Twitter-happy, and avoid tweeting between 3 to 5 on weekends.

Time to pass the talking stick to you. What have you discovered about optimal tweet times? I love getting feedback from my readers and look forward to hearing from you!

Photo credit: ViteVu

Is Your Relationship Strong Enough To Withstand Facebook?

Courtesy of my talented guest blogger Jennn Fusion

Divorce lawyers report that social networking sites like Facebook are largely to blame for the tremendous spike in divorce rates and extra-marital affairs in recent years. Facebook was cited in 1 out of 5 divorce filings, one lawyer told the UK Telegraph. Similarly, Mark Keenan of Divorce-Online.com reports 20 percent of all divorce petitions contain references to Facebook. “The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Long gone are the days when suspicious spouses need to hire private eyes to track, spy and dig up evidence of infidelity. Nowadays, you just spend a few hours combing through wall posts, pictures, new friends and comments. If you’re really wily, you can decode your husband or wife’s password and read inbox messages too. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers went so far as to say 81% of their cases over the last five years involved social networking “evidence” of cheating.

It’s unfair to blame social networking sites for divorces because, as a Facebook spokesperson put it, “Facebook doesn’t cause divorces, people do.” Yet, it’s easy to see how the transparency inherent in social media can get people in rocky relationships in big trouble. In one case, “My marriage is over,” wailed a spouse in her Facebook status,” prompting other friends and family members to reach out to her (completely unaware) husband with concern. In another case, a woman going through a custody battle claimed to be sober, when dated pictures of her drinking at parties clearly showed otherwise. A divorced man claimed he had no money to make his alimony payments – yet his ex-wife discovered pictures of a new BMW posted on his Facebook page. A married man left the fact that he was married with children off his Facebook profile, while he emailed old flames from college – a big faux pas in his wife’s eyes, who later hacked his account and messaged these potential threats to her marriage.

As TIME Magazine put it, the number of divorce lawyer clients turned social networkers has resulted in “the kind of semipublic laundry-airing that can turn aggrieved spouses into enraged ones and friends into embarrassed spectators.”

Do you have any stories where Facebook has effected someone relationship?

When Social Media and Work Collide

Courtesy of my talented guest blogger Jenn Burton

Social media has broken down barriers and given outsiders an inside look into other people’s lives. You can see your old classmates’ wedding photos. You can read a note from a nurse at your doctor’s office. You can see pictures of your boss’s 50th birthday party. You can see which pages your client “Liked” this week. It’s so invasive, isn’t it? Yet, we love it. We can’t help ourselves.

A site like Facebook so easily becomes a sort of journal – a place where we can vet any of our thoughts, opinions, experiences, photos and videos to see what others think. Generally only our closest friends write back, so it can be easy to forget just how many professional contacts and “lurkers” are watching what you write. It’s easy to forget that, even when you’re not at work, you’re still being judged by your work standards. This is the problem that a number of professionals are facing as their employers get hip to social networking.

For example…

On April 9th, 2010, four staff members at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, California took photos of a 60-year-old, nearly-decapitated stabbing victim and posted them on Facebook. He died shortly after the photo was taken. This incident was a gross violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects patients’ privacy.

Individuals working in the healthcare industry are now allowed to discuss a patient by name or physical description. It is certainly not permissible to post any confidential pictures or videos related to their work. They cannot give medical advice via social networks. And while they cannot go to jail or be fined up to $25,000 for complaining about their jobs, healthcare workers should be mindful of who might be watching what they write or they may wind up unemployed.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Police Department is also concerned about how the expansion of social media’s popularity among officers might affect their business. One officer was demoted to desk duty when it was discovered he had posted a photo of a sword-wielding suspect on his social media site.

Police departments are quickly making official policies to deal with activities that may reflect poorly on their squads. For instance, the Albuquerque Police Department prohibits officers from showing uniforms, patrol cars, badges or anything that identifies them as police officers on their personal social media sites. This ruling came after an officer who shot and killed a perpetrator listed his occupation as “human waste disposal” on Facebook. Officers were told they should assume that anything they post on their personal pages should be seen as a direct reflection on the police department and that violators can and will be fired if they do not heed this warning.

What do you think? Do employers have a right to dictate what can and can’t be posted on personal Facebook pages? Have you seen any questionable material posted by a so-called “professional” recently?

Can You Buy Your Way to More Targeted Followers?

Image via CrunchBase

Perhaps the number of Twitter followers you have are growing at a turtle’s pace and maybe said turtle has injured its foot, thus slowly down to a mere shuffle.

Truth be told, as I lower my voice to a whisper, with a little bit of the greenback, you can promote your account to a targeted audience, meaning one that decides to follow you based on interest in what you have to say.

Twittercounter: You get more follows, either on a monthly basis starting at $65 per month or a one-shot deal starting at $245 and you can expect to received over 500 followers for purchasing the basic package, but results will very. The site boasts at being the #1 Twitter stats site and is powered by Twitter. Twittercounter tracks stats for over 10 millions users = jaw drop, so you will receive some stats to monitor your progress.

TweetFind: There are three separate kinds of packages you can use to promote your account on TweetFind on a monthly basis for$30 or $40 per month and on a yearly basis for $19 per year. Each option advertises certain claims, such as getting indexed by search engines and displaying up to 10 keywords for $19 per year. You may not see a significant gain in followers, so if you decide to go with TweetFind, try a monthly package, before committing to a yearly package.

Twiends: Lets you follow and be followed by working on the credit system. When you follow someone you get credits. Your credits decrease every time someone follows you. You can target people to follow based on similar interests / country and a ‘twust’ score, which gives you an indicator as to the quality of the account. You can also purchase one-off credits that start at $29.95 or a subscription package that starts at $6.95 per week. You can get a significant amount of followers this way. There is also a way to get many ‘Likes’ on your Facebook fan page. Twiends state that they adhere to Twitter rules. There is one very good reason not to use this service. Chances are that the majority of people following you are there to gain followers, not because they are interested in what you are tweeting, rendering your follow list virtually useless, however, if your only goal is to boast to others about how many followers you have, this option is for you.

Featured Users: You can purchase banner ads at Featured Users if you believe your followers are on their sponsored site. This allows you to create banner ads to promote your Twitter account. Banner ads start at $40 and lets you know how many clicks your banner has received.

All of the above sites allow people to follow your tweets, based solely on interest except Twiends, where everyone, there dog and maybe the odd cat will follow you, even if they are not interested in receiving your tweets. This is a key difference that will effect how useful / effective your Twitter account will be in achieving your personal and professional objectives.

At the end of the day, quality content and dialogue are very important factors in attracting and engaging your followers and keeping them interest, but just because you build it does not mean that they will come.

On to you, what other sites can you promote your Twitter account for a fee? Do they adhere to Twitter rules? Do you think it is ethical to advertise your Twitter account? My hope is to stir-the-pot, sort of speak and get a healthy debate going. I can’t wait to hear from you!