How to use social media?
How to deal with multiplicity?
I’m deeply puzzled - not that this is at all unusual.
There are lots of social media tools, and many of them link to each other. Like quite a lot of dabblers, I’ve ended up with a mish-mash of updates appearing in varied places. How best to use the wide variety of social media tools at my disposal? I’m coming to the conclusion I need to list and separate what I use - and how.
What do I use?
I’m trying a fair range of things. A fairly full list is below, sorted more or less in frequency of update.
Do I set my location?
Well, yes. Sort of. When I remember.
Largely I use microformats in twitter, as I indicated in Twitter - what it is, and how I use it.
I’ve also used Plazes.
I’m registered with FireEagle but no-one seems to be using that.
How do I update these?
On the web interfaces, often.
For twitter I’ve used and like both snitter and twhirl
For pownce, I’ve used a similar air client.
I’ve updated via voice on phone using Spinvox and by SMS to twitter. I’ve also used ping.fm both on the web and as a WAP client on my mobile.
Where are they aggregated/streamed?
Often, bits are currently fed one to another - meaning that twitter feeds to jaiku, which feeds to Facebook, which feeds to friendfeed - which is echoed back to Facebook. Which is cluttered, untidy, and very likely the sign of a grasshopper mind.
I currently have some life streaming services I’m playing with at the moment, friendfeed which though I like the interface doesn’t seem to pick up all that’s going on - and onaswarm which gives a nice feel for what’s happening in my area. I’ve also given soup.io a shot but I haven’t made my mind up about that yet.
Which way am I heading?
I think I’m going to bite the bullet and take out all the inter-tool updates, with the probable exception of twitterfeed which lets people know when I’ve blogged.
Then it’ll be twitter for quick “What I’m doing/thinking”; del.icio.us for those important bookmarks; tumblr for future blogging ideas or GTD Someday/Maybe, Facebook for contacts, flickr for photos.
I’ll - eventually - choose an aggregator, probably friendfeed as it seems to be gaining traction…
Maybe, then, people won’t see the same wibble in 4 places from me - and won’t that be an improvement?
What are you doing?
I’d like to find out what others are doing.
Are you more choosy than me?
Am I a grasshopper bouncing from one thing to another?
Please, let me know your solutions.
Partial Inspiration
This is also the first blog post I’ve tried following Chris Brogan’s guidelines to Writing Effective Blog Posts. How was it for you?
Picture Credit place light - on a a project -
Wikis, social networking and Facebook
Wikis
I’ve written before about wikis and the intranet, and how I saw advantages in their use.
My colleague Sandy - who has the patience of a saint - sighs, and explains that scalability and control are a bit more of an issue when you have 100k users rather than 30.
I counter with Knowledge Management working better when you have involved Communities of Practice, pointing out that wikis are ideal for those and we go round again.
I was interested to see Abigail Lewis-Bowen’s view at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum which suggests that
“it’s important to provide Wikis and Blogs only after processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are well established. If the right people are publishing to the right place on the Intranet, and there is good editorial workflow and governance, then the Intranet is sturdy enough to add an open, less-structured layer of content.”
Basically, if your intranet functions OK, go for it; require authenticated log-in, provide good how-tos and link the formal stuff to the “under-Web” [lovely coining by Paul Miller in his Trends for 2008]
Social Networking
Still lots of interest at work in:
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what this is (yes, I know you know, dear reader, but I’m still working it out; so have patience).
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what can we get from this - and an interesting term I hadn’t heard before - Social Capital. I mean, I now know it’s been around for years, with the first cite being around 110 *years* ago.
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how we can facilitate it - what tools, what processes?
I think it’s partly culture, partly tools, and partly process.
As part of my Personal Development Plan(PDP), I’d decided this was a key area to understand and try and utilise. My company’s culture encourages us to drive robust PDPs. I’d found a range of tools - each new one pointed to by posting on previous tool, and learned from them. The process is the bit that is currently blocking wider acceptance of this; how do you measure the value. As long as nobody starts talking about a business model I’ll be happy.
I’ve had Facebook for a while, but following the irritation I - and a number of other friends - had been feeling with Vampires, “funny” videos, LOLcatz I removed FunWall and SuperWall. I update my status via Twitter - and so do many others, and am currently using Twitter more - but I still use Facebook.
It’s still a nice application for seeing what your friends/colleagues are doing and provides a way of managing the various contacts - true, I want to be able to escape from the walled garden - but that looks like it’s coming.
I’ve been able to build
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online relationships with the people I’ve “friended”
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knowledge of Web2.0
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understanding of some of the tools
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links with people I’d never have heard of…
JP Rangaswami says
“The information that flows through a social network exists in three dimensions. One dimension is time, past, present and future. A second dimension is number, one to many. A third is movement, static to dynamic. When I share my contact details with another person, I am providing static, present, one-to-one information. When I share what I am intending to do with a whole community, I am providing dynamic, future, one-to-many information.
The motivation to provide information is, at least in part, driven by an expected value of the information coming out of Facebook. And one other thing: the comfort level of providing, to a community, what is essentially private information.
Generation M and their successors are comfortable with sharing their past actions, current state and their future intentions with the community they belong to; they’re comfortable with sharing changes to states and intentions as well. They do this because they believe new value will emerge from that sharing. Collaborative, communal value, shared value.”
I think that’s fair - and I look forward to how we’re going to use “Facebook for the Enterprise” to leverage the social capital we’re looking for.
Twitter, tweets, twerps and now twivers
Doc Searls in another interesting post posits that part of the reason for the success of Twitter is the contrast between live vs. static and light vs. heavy
I think I agree with that; I can dial up or back my interaction with it. I follow some pretty heavy twerps and don’t find it too hard - as I turn off my SMS notification for them - but I get to see their funny/clever attention getting stuff online - and focus on the twits more closely.
As an aside, I also *love* how fast the twit/twerp meme has travelled and some of the kickback it’s received…
… and lots of the fun with twitter is how fast you can check what’s arousing ire by a quick terraminds search.
I’m still learning with this all the time - but I love it (rather more than my mild regard for Facebook). I haven’t had to unfollow anyone yet…
Web 2.0, blogging, wikis and OpenID
Work’s been pretty busy the last few weeks leading up to the holidays (and I’m now on holiday till 7 January, hurrah!
I’m continuing to talk with my colleague Sandy about how we could show used for more stuff in work in the Web2.0 area - trying to avoid the old work trap of “Here’s a solution.Now, let’s find a problem it might fix.”
We’ve now actually got a WordPress implementation at work, and I’ve been blogging there, too. Mostly about my previous views as to why a wiki *might* be a useful adjunct to an intranet.
I’ve been using twitter a lot more, and am currently feeding jaiku with twitter…
I’ve open a Backpackit account with my WordPress OpenID, and tried to do the same with QDOS - failing miserably.
Lots of Web 2.0 bits
Since I started using Facebook regularly, the most interesting things I’ve found are:
- blog posts written by others, that lead me to find out more about what’s happening in the internet area (OK, I’m failing to avoid saying Web 2.0)
- bits in people status feeds that make me think “I wonder what that is?”
Some of the things I’ve found recently (yes, I know they’re all probably old hat)
Twitter - letting folk know your presence/activity
Jaiku - another presence/group/blogging monitoring thing, with the ability to add “channels”
Spinvox - does voice to text stuff, but lets you update Facebook/twitter/Jaiku by phone, which is fun
Tumblr - which allows you to rapidly add links, quotes, text, photos to a stream - and you can add channels, too. I use it for grabbing links, which I RSS to my blog
Tabblo - a photo/text/story/printing site - lets you *easily* bring photos in from Flickr and fairly easily from Picasa; let’s you produce interesting photo displays that you can print as PDF; locally; for free …
Picknik - which lets you edit *online* phots on your PC, Picasa, Facebook, Flickr. Very nice.
Pandora - recommends - and plays - music for you based on characteristics of music that you’ve indicated you like. Lots of fun, and works differently to last.fm which I also use
I think I’ll probably edit this as I recall/use more bits ‘n bobs.
