Category Archives: Social Media

Use Google Reader as a delicious.com alternative

Consuming information

If you use Google Reader, you likely consume a lot of information through it via RSS feeds. Everything from news (BBC, NYTimes), sports, humor (ICHC, xkcd) to photos from your Flickr contacts, Twitter mentions and so on. Reader is one of my most important online web applications.

Consolidated contacts

And to pile on even more Google fanaticism (friends in college thought I worked for Google), all of my friends and family contact information are stored in Google Contacts. The best part about this is that my Gmail, Google Voice, iPhone and Address Book contacts are all pointing to the same place: Google. Some argue that’s a bad idea, but that’s another discussion. Point being: there’s no need for me to try and messily sync lots of contacts across multiple sites.

Google Shared items

Since Google now has public pages to display your ‘Shared’ items (through Google Reader, you can have one spot where you consume and share the cool content you find. In essence, you can help filter the signal from the noise for your contacts and friends.

Once you share an item, other people that ‘follow’ you will be notified of the new item. Awesome, I can read consume new cool things that my friends have filtered.

Replace delicious bookmarks altogether

If you visit your Shared settings page (Your stuff > Shared items > Sharing settings) and scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll notice:

Try the Note in Reader bookmarklet to share non-feed items from around the web.

Drag and drop the ‘Note in Reader’ link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar and suddenly you can ‘share’ content from all over the web. Friend linked to something cool on Twitter? No problem, just ‘Note in Reader’ and everyone else knows about it. Tags and comment come standard. It’s that easy.

Add Twitter Favorites to your site

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Hint: if you’ve never used Twitter the following won’t make much sense to you.

I easily annoyed by people on Twitter who ‘RT’, or ‘re-tweet’; they simply post an update that says exactly what someone else says, plus attribution. Frankly, answering the Twitter mantra “What are you doing?” with “this is what someone else smarter, funnier, or more charming is doing” seems inane. It’s poetic, though, in the sense that it’s a quick litmus test for people worth “following.” Alex has always been against this practice and suggested an alternative to RTs: favorites.

There are very few features on Twitter: updates, direct messages, replies, favorites, followers, followings. I charge everyone to use the favorites feature more often. In fact, there’s a site dedicated to finding the real good ones: favrd.

Point being: I’m a huge proponent of using the little star. I’ve started publicizing my favorites here in the sidebar of Mind/Averse and it took less than 30 seconds using WordPress. It’s really quite simple.

Add Twitter favorites with the WordPress RSS widget

Assuming you have a widget-friendly WordPress theme installed, simply do the following:

From the WordPress dashbord, Browse to Appearance > Widgets
Select the ‘Add’ button next to the “RSS” widget
Visit your Twitter favorites page and determine your personal RSS feed (view the page source if you’re stuck here; find the <link> tag with http://twitter.com/favorites/youridhere.rss)
Insert the favorites feed into your RSS widget, give the widget a title, pick your options, etc.
Save the widget and save the changes to your sidebar

Now everyone who visits your site can immediately find the tweets you find useful. You’ll get to be cooler, smarter, and funnier simply by association.

Other ways to integrate Twitter favorites

I can think of various creative ways for individuals and businesses to use Twitter favorites.

For example, if I were a company with customers sending @replies to me telling me how great I was, I may favorite those. I can then use something like SimplePie to integrate my favorites into my blog as a separate page of testimonials. I know 37signals uses ‘buzz’ from Twitter on their site.

Bonus: do the same with @replies

The @replies RSS feed is a bit different and uses the Twitter API and 401 authentication, not a custom RSS feed, for your replies. No worries, you can either pull the RSS feed from Twitter Search or you can do the same thing using the following syntax:

http://twittername:[email protected]/statuses/replies.rss

In theory, the API will include all mentions (any time @devinreams is included in an update, not just at the beginning of an update).

Ha, this is why they call me a social media pro.

Social media best practice: be authentic

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Jeremy Tanner tagged me: I need to chime in and tell the world, in all my infinite wisdom, what a “social media” best practice is.

Interestingly enough my knee jerk reaction was to say either:

if you call it social media you’re doing it wrong, or
just stop trying, FFS.

At least, that’s the way I’ve felt in the recent months. In fact, it’s a new rule for me on twitter. If you’re a self-proclaimed “social media” guru, then you’re not.

That leads me to my point: to be successful in social media (or any media, I believe) you need to be authentic. It goes back to one of my personal favorite posts: my thoughts on transparency and honesty. If someone is extremely active across a variety of services and trying to connect with so many people (Linkedin, twitter, pownce, etc.) it sends the message that you’re convincing me I need to listen to you. It’s like trying to advertise your product after building it and calling that “marketing.” The biggest way to fail is to reach out to as many people as possible just to broadcast to your followship.

Instead, be an authentic person. Just be you and the right people will find you. For instance:

Penelope Trunk, although a writer (its her day job to make uninteresting things interesting), is a geniune lady who will bare all and do her best to connect. I consider her the Britney Spears of the internet sometimes but she’s authentic and, thanks in part to that, has a tremendous followship; in both size and passion.
Gary Vaynerchuk, although a marketer (its his day job to get the message out to everyone), is a geniune guy who will talk to anyone and go out of his way to make them feel important. He’s a busy guy but spends most of his day just talking to people via e-mail, twitter, facebook, and so on. In turn, he’s built up one of the most popular video podcasts about a product that no-one had ever thought to look for online: wine.

There’s my thoughts on how to do social media the right way. Agree / disagree?

Tag, you’re it: noah kagan, Andrew Chen, Ramit Sethi. (original link)

Top three lessons from online communities

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I’ve seen, first hand, the challenges faced when trying to get a group of people together on the internet. I’m a member of a of a number of online communities. I’ve also helped found a few communities. They include:

9rules – a group I really wanted to become a part of, the best of the best content
yopos – something noah and I tried to start (coming again soon!): young professionals
Twenty Somethings – a group of attractive, witty, smart bloggers all in their twenties
Employee Evolution – smart professionals guest blogging about work, life, entrepreneurship
Brazen Careerist – the natural extension of EE, network of existing and new bloggers about the above
BarCamp/New Tech – online and offline, meetup with some local nerds
SXSW/CommunityNext – organized events/conferences around a community
AKPsi – offline, but 50+ college students with an interest in business (VP/President)
Two other college clubs – again, offline but a good look at how people interact

And I’ve done tons of observation of popular online groups (FlyerTalk, Zen Habits, Get Rich Slowly, I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Here are my top three lessons learned.

Existing community must already be strong

When I say strong you need to have an extreme amount of quality or quantity. A little of each will not be sufficient.

Employee Evolution and 9rules attracted people because of the high quality–they both grew very quickly. On the other hand, yopos sought out to do the same and, I admit, consistent quality wasn’t there (and we didn’t have the numbers either).

In college, AKPsi was one of the largest groups in the business school (100+) and because of that it kept attracting more and more people (network effect). Once our numbers started to drop off we had to quickly focus on quality or else we’d get stuck in mediocrity. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. We had generations of mediocrity in the group, as the numbers diminished even they left. By the end of my college career the group dropped to a quarter of it’s original size. The same happened with two other groups–when the strength dwindled, the community failed.

Without the quality or quantity it’s very hard to do anything. You could take five very talented people and create something amazing. If you have 100 people, odds are you will find some great, active, and interesting people worth sticking around for.

People always talk about meeting up, rarely do

It must be how we are hard-wired as humans, but no matter what your group is–people will want to meet in person. People will try to organize and coordinate these events but they rarely happen. Even in college, where we met as a group every week, it was challenging to have people commit to anything outside of something we’ve already structured for them.

Lucky for the internet there are groups like the SXSW coordinators who will put on an event for everyone to go to. But even with 9rules we never saw any official “get togethers” no matter how often it was brought up. I’ve seen the same start over at Brazen Careerist and I question what will come from the discussions (I have a good idea, though: nothing).

Some obvious exceptions to the rule are groups like BarCamp. These still usually require a big investment from one or two people (and that’s it). If you want something to happen you have to take the initiative yourself at first. Then, make sure you have the strong community to help in the future (see previous point). People usually need to see value first.

Now, the inverse of this is also true: people love to participate a lot in the beginning. Say you open up a forum: people will chat about anything and everything they think of on day one. By day ten they have less to talk about, less to reply to. The challenge here, depending on your group, is maintaining participation and having people come back (quality and quantity help).

There are key participants, focus on them

No matter where you go, one will notice the “key” players. Especially in a discussion environment like a forum. Within five minutes of surfing FlyerTalk it was clear who knew what they were talking about and was respected by the group. When I started yopos there were a few guys who were very eager and I didn’t have them time to focus on them and empower them to help with the community. Lesson learned.

CommunityNext had a ton of people show up and a lot of it was due to key figures. Get them involved, get them in your group and make sure people know about them. One of my favorite stories was watching Hiten Shah try to fix the wireless network at Stanford. People noticed him working on it and one or two people stopped and offered to help.

What about you? Do you agree or disagree? Have you learned anything worth sharing?

PS: I’ve been working on updating and consistent-ifying my look. Click through to devin reams and let me know what you think. Oh, and be sure to tell your friends about my services.

Why people are always wrong about Facebook

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People like Scoble still think Microsoft is going to drop something like $20 billion on Facebook. A site with maybe $0.2 billion in revenue? Yeah, okay. Aside from what I like to call the decimal-place-mismatch let me explain why Facebook is not worth that much and why Zuckerberg is not a billionaire.

We aren’t in a vacuum

There are many more variables to how Microsoft decides to drop $240 million on a “stake.” Sorry but you can’t just say “oh, that’s a percentage, let’s multiply it.”

I liken the situation to that of my friend who recently started a company and moved into 200 square feet of a 10,000 foot floor (for those of you playing at home, that’s 2%). A generous businessman owns 10,000 of empty space and is renting 200 square feet for, let’s say, $2,000/month. So can we say that each square foot is worth $10 and call it good? Sure. Wait, no–no we can’t!

Just like we can’t say each percentage of Facebook ownership is worth $150 million. Just like we can’t say Zuckerberg’s 30% puts him at $5 billion.

We can’t cross-multiply-and-divide because we should consider the fact that

My friend has the bathrooms all to himself
My friend can be as loud as he wants
He can throw a party in the space and not compete for the “prime” space
There is no competition for resources like printers, power, corner offices, etc.
The infrastructure is already there to support him and his growth

To keep up with the metaphor, Microsoft can do at Facebook what my friend can do in his new office space. The money ($14.75 billion) isn’t really there. Nobody went to Mark’s bank account and deposited a billion dollars. Microsoft assigned a dollar amount to a percentage–but that dollar amount is coming with more than a “slice” of the pie. So we can’t treat it like that. Stop doing that!

I know my point is simplistic but I’m a little annoyed (that this isn’t the first time we’re throwing around huge numbers at Facebook). This is why people like Sarah Lacey suck and why Scoble will never be one of those folks I ever listen to. Sorry to get personal but let’s slow down and think about this…