Social Media Savvy

I posted a blog last year about how third party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck can really speed up your work. However, I was kind of surprised when I was at the Ragan Corporate Communicators conference last week when I saw that many people still were not using any third party clients to help them tweet.

For businesses and people who can't constantly tweet throughout the day, things like Tweetdeck and HootSuite are valuable tools.


HootSuite is another free tool, it allows you to schedule all the tweets that you want to run and it also provides a URL shortener right there as you are typing the tweet. It allows you to see metrics on your most clicked URLs and to me, the most important feature is the feature that allows more than one person to work with the channel. I work at a large company and we have more than one person operating our Twitter handles and this allows us to be able to see all of the tweets that each of us has scheduled and to divvy up work. I highly recommend giving HootSuite a try!

WebMD is coming out with a revolutionary (and I don't use that word lightly) site called Sharecare.

The site allows you to get answers to health questions from doctors, hospitals and a variety of specialists. It really brings the medical world to the patient socially, in a very active and responsive way. You can see questions and answers from other individuals, which creates a community element to it. A whole slew of partners have already signed on and it appears as if it is going to be a very powerful tool.

The site allows you to input a widget to the site with questions, if your site is medically based it may benefit from using this widget.




For more information, read the article on "Ad Age".

Sharecare Site

I had a post a couple months ago dealing with the importance of keeping your business and personal pages separate. Well, I think that I unfortunately need to go into detail about keeping your personal business personal!

If you are a business professional or have aspirations of becoming one your future employers and coworkers will search you out on the internet to find out more about you.

1. Keep your profiles PRIVATE. This takes actually going into your settings and making all of your items "friends only" and "private". This world is shrinking at an alarming rate, I would recommend avoiding any risk and really setting it to "friends only" instead of allowing even friends of friends to see it. You never know who your friends may know...

2. If you find a picture that your friends has up of you should not be up or you would no longer like it up, first ask them to remove it. If they are unwilling to remove it untag yourself. You should always try to have it removed because untagging yourself only limits users searching for your photos, if they are looking for someone else in the picture they may inadvertently find you.

3. Do not hesitate to stand up for yourself in polite ways. If someone has made a nasty comment about you, or even if a friend posts on your profile about how "totally wasted!" you were last night, DELETE IT. Do not worry about offending your friend! Take comments down, untag and remove pictures! This is your reputation, your own personal brand and you need to own and manage it.

4. Here are some general topics to avoid: drinking, drug usage, law breaking, sex, politics, relationships, and anything that you would not tell a future interviewer or boss.


Seems like it should be common sense, but to some they just do not realize how real this topic actually is.

Example:Fired after Twitter reads "Bored at Work"

Yesterday night Facebook went live with its "Lite" version, basically Facebook without the apps. This is great for businesses or individuals with slow connections or who are just looking for a different way to view Facebook. It has not, supposedly, been released to the whole world yet but Tweets are coming in from all over that claim that they see it and that it works for them.

Is this Facebook integrating with Friendfeed? No, probably not. Is this Facebook looking more like Twitter? Yes, a little bit.

It is simple, easier to use and stripped down.

Log in! Check it out!




Here is a screen shot that has been released showing what Facebook Lite looks like:

Tweetdeck is a dashboard that brings together a multitude of social media goodies. It allows users to integrate Twitter along side some Facebook and MySpace functions. It is iPhone friendly and is looking to make updating and being present on all social media sites more user friendly.

It allows a user to provide updates using Tweetdeck in one swoop instead of having to log on and manage all of the different tools in different browser windows.

It is free to download so go ahead and check it out, especially if you manage multiple accounts as a consultant. I would recommend creating different Tweetdeck accounts for different clients, just to keep them separate, so you go from having 4/5 things to check for each client down to one.

When you are acting on behalf of a brand in a PR capacity or as a representative be careful to keep business accounts, for Joe Smith the Social Media Consultant and then for Joe Smith the regular person. This helps keep your conversation relevant and allows you to use the tools personally and the way that you like to use them (for vacation photos on Facebook and so on). Your family does not care about your comments to your clients and more importantly your clients do not need to see the pictures of your nights at the bar or hear what you ate for lunch.

Everything that you post about, share about and write about online really shapes who you are and how you are viewed. Do not think that you can control these environments and that you will be able to keep it controlled.

As a company when you have representatives require for the accounts to be separate. This is important from a company perspective because you will have more control over your brand image and in the event that the representative does not work out they won't be taking all of the work that they have done with them because it is their own personal page. It is okay for an individual to be identified as being part of you brand but keep things tied to the brand. Meaning, it is okay for your rep to have a personality and be the face of your brand but try to keep it on your Company A account, not Representative Smith's account.

This may sound a bit confusing, so if you have questions feel free to email me using any of the links on the page.

Blippr is a new service that allows people to provide really short reviews about apps, music, movies, games and books. Users can select whether they love it, like it, dislike it or hate it and then they are prompted to write 160 characters explaining their rating.

This is an interesting mesh of the quick and short character limits of things like Twitter with the standard rating tools. People who use these types of tools are labeled "Critics", see my last post to plug in your population data to see what percentage are critics and would use a tool like this.

The most interesting feature in blippr for me is the app rating, this is a great way to see how apps are being rated and I imagine that it would make it pretty easy to spot trends before they go mainstream.

Being on blippr is addicting, it is so easy to offer a review that you might just find yourself clicking away! You don't have to be a member to see any of the content on the site or even to review, which is another step that makes it easy to use and it also means that the content pool is probably larger and much more of a mix of people of different adoption stages than if it was a member only tool that had to be logged into to use.