If you are a Facebook user, you may have noticed a recent, quiet change. When someone comments on one of your posts, links, or other content, you get an email, as you always have if you keep the default settings. Only now, you can reply to the comment simply by replying to the email.
"Streaming" by Flickr user makelessnoise
This is an important change for Facebook, as it is an implicit acknowledgement that, while the Stream is an important place to share information, it is not the only place in which people want to share. Email remains, for just about everyone, the most indispensable communications tool. One of the pioneers of online civic engagement, Steven Clift, has long been almost a lone voice calling on organizations not to neglect their email strategy as they implement fancy social-networking strategies. He points out:
[N]ow that Facebook and Twitter have become so popular, they are now “streams” rather than reliable ways to reach the people who at one point said they wanted to “follow” you. People dip into the stream created by their friends and those they find interesting when they are thirsty
… often in their scarce idle time. They feel no obligation to drink from the end of the fire hose they have friended and followed.
He is absolutely right. This is the logical next step as people get used to “streams” as being a part of their digital life. In an earlier post, I’ve described a few of the nascent guidelines that people are beginning to follow when it comes to the Stream and the workplace:
When you are sharing something, if it is interesting but not critical, add it to the Stream (by sharing on Facebook or Twitter, for instance).
Don’t get upset if someone misses something you put in the Stream.
Try to reserve emails to people’s Inboxes for things you really need them to see or act on.
Facebook’s move to make elements of their Stream more usable form within email are thus a very good idea.
While I do not necessarily want to see every last thing all my friends and others have posted into the Stream, I do want to see if people are interacting with what I have posted or adding comments after me. Those actions are worth seeing in my Inbox and I do want to be able to act on them from within it.
Our workplace (and other) norms are shifting as we get used to the ubiquitous Streams in our lives. For instance, it used to be assumed that you saw all of your friends’ status updates. Now, as people have more friends and as the Facebook newsfeed has gotten a little more selective in what it shows, people have begun to call attention to the shared items they think are noteworthy. By the same token, more people are sharing ephemeral trivia in the Stream rather than clogging people’s Inboxes.
I wonder, in five years and some of these norms have established and settled, what they will be. I am also curious to see how pervasive the new norms will be — will Aunt Edna begin to use the Stream for LOLcats?
You can’t just “Tweet” your blog post and have it “go viral” and then sit back and watch your traffic counters start spinning.
You need to have a plan.
But there is good news:
If you are willing to do a small amount of work in building good habits, social media will help you amplify the reach of your work and position you for the most exposure.
Over the years I have written many how-tos and tutorials on how to do various things in social media. Now I have revealed my day-to-day social media practices and created a new eBook for just $9.95 that describes it all step-by-step.
Here’s a description:
The tips in this eBook are based on long, hard experience. I am using the well-respected e-Junkie system to handle fulfillment, and payment is through PayPal. All very smooth. I am a real person, I am not selling a get-rich-quick scheme, and I am not overpromising.
A lot of people ask me for advice in promoting their work in social media. Sometimes, it’s is pretty clear that people really are just looking for a magic bullet – they want something or someone else besides them to do their promotion for them. This eBook is not that. It is a daily plan of action with the exact steps you need to take.
Follow these steps and you will have good basic social media work habits . . . where you go from there is up to you!
A number of people have asked me lately to help them “figure out” social media. One problem with that is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Social media is really a dynamic ecosystem that contains many, many disparate parts. Some are interconnected and others are more standalone. The key, I think, is to figure out what your overall goal is and then try to make each part add up to the whole.
I am pretty intentional about how I use each of my social media channels, though I try to leave a lot of room for experimentation and change. (For instance, the way I use Twitter has changed from entirely personal to a mix of professional-personal). I try to always know why I am sharing something, where it is going, and how.
If you follow me in more than one channel, you may not necessarily see the background structure – it may seem haphazard. Even that is by design! It is all part of my Blob Marketing theory.
I thought one good way of explaining it all would be to catalog all my main social media outlets and talk about how I view them, what I use them for, and how they connect with other parts.
This list is incomplete, I am certain I will think of new connections between content areas that did not come to mind as I first wrote this. However, these are the essential items.
Think about your own social media footprint. What does it consist of? How do you use each piece? How are they connected? How intentional are you as you work it day-in, day-out?
My Blog – Main, daily source of all my key content
Orientation: More professional than personal
What I use it for:
Post daily articles (when I can manage it) containing thoughts on public life, leadership, new media, ethics
Main source of personal branding material
Archive for key ideas
How it connects with other channels:
I use Twitterfeed to automatically turn each blog post into a Twitter update
I use Networked Blogs to automatically pull each blog post into my Facebook Public Profile
I send a weekly, manually crafted email to a subscriber list using Emma for the mailing services
A way for people in Facebook to connect to me whom I don’t necessarily know
A place to share items of interest as an alternative to Twitter
How it connects with other channels:
I use Networked Blogs to automatically pull in blog posts into my Public Page
I occasionally will take a link I shared on Twitter and share it to my Facebook Public Page
Posterous – The spot where I host my fun and lighthearted resources
Orientation: Mostly personal
What I use it for:
Because it is so easy to post to, I use it as the main spot for my fun on-the-go photos and videos
Sometimes I will post a brief note (e.g., a recipe)
How it connects with other channels:
All items posted on Posterous automatically get turned into a Twitter update and get shared in my Facebook Profile
Sometimes I will re-share a Posterous link by going back to the original Posterous post and grabbing the link again (most of the time I just let it run automatically though; that is its beauty)
Picasa – Main place for photos I create and that I plan to use elsewhere
Orientation: Slightly more professional than personal
What I use it for:
If I write a blog post for which I am creating a photo, I use Picasa to host the photo
I use Picasa’s free desktop software for lightweight image manipulation (brighten, resize, sharpen, etc.)
How it connects with other channels:
There are lots of ways to automatically pull Picasa contenti into other streams, but I keep it manual – I just use it as a hosting place for my images that I then manually grab for blog posts
Flickr – Resource for Creative Commons images for blog posts
Orientation: Mostly professional
What I use it for:
I almost solely use this as a source for images to accompany blog posts
I used to be more active, but have found Picasa to be easier for me to use for day-to-day image work. If I were more of a prosumer, I might think differently, as Flickr has excellent high-end capabilities
When collaborating on a project that involves research, I will use de.licio.us to tag links and organize them
How it connects with other channels:
I used to have an RSS feed of some of my de.licio.us links that I ran as a widget on my blog, but I don’t anymore
So, there you have it. I know that’s a long list. In fact, it was a nontrivial job to collect it!
I am not saying my way is the only way, or even the best way. It is the one that is working for me. There are different, and better ways to use some of the tools. For instance, Chris Brogan collects interesting social media “case studies” and collects them under one de.licio.us tag.
How do you use your various social media channels? Let me know in the comments!
I was just reviewing things as 2009 draws to a close. One thing I was curious about was my Twitter usage. Like many of my friends, 2009 marked a year of significant ramp-up with all forms of social media and especially Twitter, which I first started using in March 2007. So, how do things stack up?
I do need to make progress on retweeting others’ material more, I was a bit disappointed to see such a low percentage. What does that mean? It means that, according to the analytics program, I do not share others’ work as much as I could. (Admittedly, it undercounts because it only counts instances of the phrase “RT” which is the convention on Twitter — but often I share material without using the RT term instead opting for “via” or “by” which I believe does not get counted.) As I have said many times, the essence of social media is sharing others’ work, so I need to work on that.
Tweetstats also gave me a rundown of the terms I use most often in my Twitter updates, which I plugged into Wordle to generate a nice word cloud. I was happy with what I saw:
What I Tweet About (click to enlarge)
See? The person I mention most is @andreajarrell — those who know me know why this is important! And those words “Thanks” and “Today” give me a nice sense of carpe diem.
Interested in getting ramped up yourself on Twitter? I have written a few how-to’s that might help:
I have been working on some simple tools for nonprofits and other organizations to use to get set up with social media. (You’ll see more on that later.) As I do that, I’ve been making lists — checklists, resource lists, and more. Some of those seem like they might be useful to share on their own.
"Twitter me this 119/365" by Flickr user SashaW
Lots of organizations get set up with a Twitter account and then say, “Now what?” So here are eleven things your organization can do to use Twitter effectively. These aren’t necessarily “best practices” and they certainly aren’t the only things. But, if you are hitting these bases, you can be fairly confident that your Twitter account is at a minimum at “respectable beginner” stage. From there you can grow it even more.
So, without further ado:
Use an avatar with a face or logo. This is the first and most important thing you can do once you sign up for Twitter. No one trusts, likes, or pays attention to a Twitter user who uses the stock “bird” image. Here’s what I mean. Use a logo or a head shot? It depends. If the account is the main account for the whole organizations, use its logo. If the account is for a manager of the organization, and there is also an organizational account, consider using a head shot. (Make sure the head shot has a “snapshot” feel and not a professional feel.)
Create a Twitter background with key information including Twitter names of staff. Under settings/design you can upload an image to use as your background. This can be worthwhile. Use an inexpensive image editing program (like Paint Shop Pro) to create a background that includes key contact information. Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) has a great example.
Create a Twitter list for your organization. If there are other staffers at your organization, create a Twitter list that lists all of them. For instance, here is the list of all writers for the Chronicle of Philanthropy who have Twitter accounts. That does two things. First, it lets people know who’s in your organization. It also encourages the followers of those people to click on the list (”Huh, Joe Blow is on this new list. Who else is on it?”) and find your organization’s Twitter stream.
Create and use a hashtag. A hashtag is just a word that begins with the pound sign: “#word.” In Twitter, people use them to mark subjects. For our blog about Rockville, MD, we created the #rkv tag to denote news about anything happening in (natch) Rockville. Now other people are using it too. This has created a community on Twitter, and also gives us something to monitor to find new and breaking information.
Find and monitor relevant hashtags. By the same token, in your field there are probably already hashtags that others are using. (For instance, #philanthropy.) It is useful to monitor those to keep up on what others are talking about.
Reply, retweet, answer – don’t just publish. Do not, do not, do not just use your Twitter account to publish blog posts or press releases. You will find it very difficult to gain followers that way. People want a human feel, they want interaction. Use the “@” symbol to reply to other Twitter users, add in light hearted comments here and there. “ReTweet” the posts of others. Social media rewards sharing, and it penalizes selfishness. How to retweet? Just add “RT @name” to the beginning of someone’s tweet!
Make your tweets retweetable. It is to your benefit when others share your content. Make it easy on them! Make sure your updates use punchy headlines, and are no longer than 120 characters, to leave room for others to add their own info when retweeting.
Create a spreadsheet to track over time, weekly or monthly: Followers, following, references, @replies, retweets. This can help you stay on track. It’s really easy to set up. It’s also useful to use Twittercounter to keep track of stats.
Use Tweetgrid to monitor your organization and space. There are lots of monitoring tools available, but Tweetgrid is my favorite and it’s free. Dead simple to use. You pick your layout, and then put a search term into each window. Tweetgrid creates a little real-time search on that term. Look for mentions of your name, your competitors, and keywords related to your space. For instance, here’s a grid I set up for myself.
Use keywords to decide whom to follow. Using the Tweetgrid you set up above, you can see who is using the terms you are searching on. Consider following them. Eventually, you will be following too many people to keep track of easily. Create Twitter lists of people who are the real influencers you need to watch.
Use URL shorteners. When you share links in Twitter, don’t use the full link. Shorten it first by using bit.ly or another url shortener. Why? Two reasons. First, it saves space (see suggestion #7 above). But — just as important — people tend to frown on full links because they are the mark of a newbie.
Watch this space for more tips for other types of social media, as well as more information on my upcoming eBook wrapping it all up.
As many of my readers know, each week I have an email newsletter that I use to update folks about my latest posts. (You can to sign up at this form.)
"sharing" by Flickr user platinumblodelife
But today it struck me that, while many of us are very active in social media, our newsletters are often not very social at all. They’re just vehicles for me to push my content to you. Yet, in social media, it’s all about sharing and using shared content to build relationships and trust.
So I decided to change strategies a bit, and make sure that within my email newsletter, I am still sharing the work of others. Here’s how I put it in today’s edition:
The essence of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is sharing – of your own work as well as that of others. Yet, for many individuals and organizations, our subscriber emails, like this one, remain avenues solely used for self-promotion.
How can I ask you to share this newsletter without doing the same myself? Why should this only contain my own work? Obviously, those are rhetorical questions.
From now on I will include some of the more interesting links and articles – by others – that I have posted in my various online streams over the past week. I hope that you might find one or two interesting.
Other Interesting Links By Others
Without further ado, here are some of the links I’ve shared this week:
Australian Telecom giant Telstra trains every one of its employees in social media use. They’ve made their training manual available. Read it at Mashable.
Community benefit organizations need to stop thinking “fundraising” and start thinking “financing.”Read it by Nell Edgington.
A highly successful blogger revealed that he is really a woman who has taken a man’s pen name. Before the pen name, she was scraping for revenue. After donning a male moniker, success after success rolled in. Read it at Copyblogger.
The Facebook data analysis team recently finished taking a hard look at the diversity statistics for the more than 94 million users who live in the United States. (Fun fact: There are more than 350 million users worldwide, making Facebook a larger “country” than the U.S.)
Ethnic Makeup Of Facebook Users
The data team dove deeply into the numbers and used a range of tools to make sure that they were doing their best to remove bias and error. The chief tools they used are statistical breakdowns of ethnicity and last names. Their report goes into detail about the methods they used and while one can quibble with things here and there, it appears overall reasonable.
The upshot: “We discovered that Facebook has always been diverse and that the diversity has increased significantly over the past year to the point where U.S. Facebook users nearly mirror the diversity of the overall population of the country.”
The graph illustrates this. The dotted lines represent the distribution of various (nonwhite) ethnicities in the overall Internet population, while the solid lines represent U.S. Facebook users:
From Facebook
You can see that each solid line is trending toward its corresponding dotted line — implying that the ethnic distribution within Facebook is moving, over time, to match the distribution of general Internet users.
Ethnicity Of Internet Users Vs. All Americans
Note that the Facebook analysis team is comparing their statistics to Internet users, not U.S. population as a whole. That raises the question, how do the Internet penetration rates map onto the ethnic makeup of the U.S.?
The answer is that with overall Internet adoption reaching 80%, Facebook’s statistics tend to roughly mirror the U.S. population that is online, but that the digital divides persist. That’s because Internet use does not distribute across the population in the same way for each ethnicity.
According to the latest data from the Pew Internet And American Life Project, penetration rates are higher among whites (80% of Non-Hispanic Whites are online) than among Blacks (72% are online) and Hispanics (61% online).
Internet Penetration Compared To Ethnic Distribution
In other words, White Non-Hispanics are slightly over-represented online, while other ethnicities are slightly underrepresented. Hispanics show the widest gap.
(Note that I am comparing households and individuals here, so the numbers aren’t precisely comparable, but they illustrate the point.)
The Real Digital Divide
While there are very real divisions in the United States when it comes to race and ethnicity, when it comes to the “Digital Divide,” a larger driver is economics and education (which itself is in large part driven by economics).
For instance, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 94% of college graduates are online, while just 72% of high-school only Americans are. And for adults with less than high school the online rate is just 37%.
And, while 95% of people who make more than $75K per year are online, the number drops to 62% for those who make less than $30K.
The suggests an interesting avenue for the Facebook team to pursue, which is a study of economic and education data as it relates to Facebook users.
If you listen to the people who are at the cutting edge of online popular culture, the future of the Web is being written in tiny micropayments, some amounting to fractions of a cent.
At Second Life's Hair Fair, a brand new hairstyle.
This is the world of “virtual goods,” items that are purchased and used in online social games, such as Zynga’s Farmville on the Facebook social platform. Indeed, Zynga’s CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, recently said, “with the popularity of virtual goods today, we are in the early stages of a new economy that could grow and shape the future of the Web.”
<. . . .>
Public leaders should take note for two reasons.
First, this is a tangible demonstration of the fact that, more and more, the borders between physical life and online life are crumbling. People spend real money to improve online-only experiences. They see their interactions in this space as just as real as their interactions face-to-face. Yet, public institutions and community benefit organizations too often discount what happens online as ephemeral. At a recent speech about innovating online that I gave to a national gathering of city officials, one big theme running through the comments was a skepticism that online sites were good for anything beyond message-delivery. Public leaders simply must get over this attitude.
Second, the power of the virtual goods market shows the potency of the shift our society has undergone. We live in a citizen-centric world in which the ability to customize is taken for granted. It is so fundamental to people’s expectations, that whole markets emerge and thrive based on the idea.
The public leaders and community benefit organizations who can harness these forces will survive and thrive. Look, for example at the Hair Fair, which takes place in the online virtual world Second Life. It’s like an online festival where users can purchase and compare new hairstyles. The most recent one earned its organizers over $8,000, and included a “bandana day” where all users removed their hair and instead wore bandanas in support of the charity Locks of Love.
As more charities and public leaders begin to understand this new space, we will see more of these kinds of partnerships. It may feel cutting edge, but it is already here.
I recently ran across a post of Larry’s in which he describes how social media is not only a useful communications tool — but how it can also help foundations do a better job of philanthropy.
So I contacted Larry and asked if he wouldn’t mind talking about it for a bit. Our sixteen-minute conversation was terrific, and touched on a number of interesting issues, including the groundbreaking Changemakers initiative.
I am proud to announce the launch of a major new initiative that I have been working on with a few partners. The formal announcement will come later this week, but I wanted to give a preview to my readers because I am so excited about it.
Today, we are soft-launching the new Washington Times Communities. This is a new social journalist network tied into The Washington Times.
Along with partners Jacquie Kubinand Joe Szadkowski, we have been working furiously for the past months to get this in shape.
My role was to help design the management structure for this new network and to add in what I know about social networking and blogging from my experience with various other initiatives. I am also taking part in the day-to-day management of the Communities.
What It Is
We think that we have developed something that is somewhat unique among these kinds of things. Many newspapers have “community blog” sections. (In fact, the The Washington Times had one, which this new initiative replaces.) These can have widely varying content quality, widely varying updating schedules, and are typically hidden from view and separate from the rest of the newspaper’s online space.
The fundamental problem for many news organizations is that these things are hard to manage and it’s hard to know what kind of quality you’re getting.
We have created a structure which we think makes the Washington Times Communities “manageable” from an organizational perspective while at the same time open enough to make it a real blog network. At the same time, we’ve organized it so that, from a reader’s perspective, it should be easy to find what you are looking for.
Each of these communities is led by a “mayor” who essentially curates the content for each community. Within each Community, there are between five and ten (for now) “neighborhoods.” Each of these Neighborhoods is a blog, with one author responsible for the content.
So we’ve created a hierarchy, where each of the community “mayors” is acting like the editor of a newspaper section or magazine, with each author having a specific “neighborhood” beat.
It’s all volunteer, we are not staff for the paper.
What’s Different
While we don’t claim that this is a revolutionary idea (after all, it’s a blog network, nothing earth-shaking), we do think it’s an innovation in how to approach something like this. There are a few things that make this different, in my view:
There is direct involvement with senior management at the paper. The paper’s senior managers take a personal interest in this, all the way to the top.
There is a direct tie to the regular online space of the paper. Content from the Communities will be featured on the main page of the Times. This means that there is a greater chance for the community content to be seen by the many millions of unique visitors to the Times’ front page per day.
The writers are handpicked. People have to be invited to take part as an author. We chose participants keeping in mind both quality of their work, potential for growth, and willingness to devote the energy it takes to promote the Communities through social networks.
There is support at every level. Individual authors are supported, mayors are supported by management. Authors support one another.
There is ongoing innovation. The initiative is committed to iterating and learning at a rapid pace so we can best improve it.
There is a constant stream of content. Every author is committing to a certain number of posts per week, so there will always be something new coming from the Communities.
I sincerely hope you will take a look, poke around, comment on a few articles, and give your feedback.
Like other blog networks, viral word of mouth will be key. You can help this initiative out immensely by sharing any articles you find interesting and by spreading the word. The Times management will be watching this closely and we want it to succeed!
Public Good, A New Online Space
Public Good
There’s another aspect of this new initiative that I am very excited about. You might have noticed above that there’s a Community called “Public Good.” I am in charge of that, and it’s an online space devoted to examining various takes on public life and community today.
I have brought together a terrific portfolio of authors, each who is writing their own blog that takes a different perspective.
Faith: The Flip Side, by Allison Addicott: How faith and politics intersect around the globe
Making Change, by Donna Rae Scheffert: About people who are getting involved in helping others and making a difference
Public Square Today, by Brad Rourke: What’s happening in public life — and why it matters (this is my column)
Teaming Up For Success, by Carla Ledbetter: People celebrating good things that happen through successful teamwork
Truth Be Told, by Carla Harper: Thinking a little deeper about our lives, our country and our values
Went West, by Sutton Stokes: A transplanted easterner reflects on culture, politics, and the pursuit of happiness from his new vantage point in the Rocky Mountain West
I know that many of my readers are deeply concerned with public life and thought leaders when it comes to many different aspects of it. I hope that you will get in touch to talk about ways that I might include your perspectives, perhaps by showcasing some of your work or through an interview or podcast, or through a guest post.
In this week’s edition of my podcast, 
Recent Comments