I’ve been looking for ways to better distribute my business contact information to others without the use of the traditional paper business card. Sure, I have really enjoyed handing out my varied and conversation-starting Moo cards at events, however, I’m often caught without my cards and always wonder if people really have a good business card management system these days. I haven’t seen one of those old Rolodexes with cards that have slits in them to hold business cards in eons. Personally, I have all of the ones I’ve collected over the last year in a shoebox.
Since I’m all about making my iPhone as efficient and useful as possible, I’ve sought out apps and services to help me not only deliver my deets to others but also gather and organize theirs.
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I’ve been using ShareThis on my blogs and recommending it to my clients for a while now. I explain to my clients that ShareThis is a “passive broadcaster” of their content, giving their blog and web site visitors handy tools to email posts or articles to others, to easily blog about the content they are reading or to link to the content via any of over 30 social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Mixx and del.icio.us.
For a while now, ShareThis had only one direct competitor - AddThis.
When I first went to sign up for one of these services, it seemed pretty much six of one and half a dozen of the other when comparing the two. I went with ShareThis because I liked their button, not a very strategic decision-making process, but when two services are quite comparable, it really boils down to going with either other people’s recommendations or with your gut.
There’s a new kid in town, however, giving both ShareThis and AddThis a run for their money.
A vision of Grouptivity, according to the company’s founder Ankesh Kumar, is to make sharing web content more powerful than ever. Kumar says that while sharing via bookmarking sites and social networks is important, his company has found that so far 80% of site visitors still opt to share content via email. So Grouptivity facilitates emailing content - integrating with users’ email account address books - rather than trying to change their more common behavior. ShareThis offers similar email integration while AddThis focuses more on the publisher.
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I’ve been hearing a lot from fellow Web workers about their long-term clients who are resistant to change.
“They don’t want to start a blog,” one says.
“They are afraid of RSS feeds,” says another.
“They don’t even know about MySpace or Facebook,” declares yet another.
Are we all just too “into it” to remember that our clients are often way far away from it?
I’ve been lucky in the last year or so to have some clients who trust me implicitly to lead them down the right path toward enhancing and augmenting their online communications with social media tools. Others, however, dismiss it because it is just so far out of their realm that they would rather put off the discussion than try to understand the implications of a blog or a Twitter account to communicate their message. In some cases, I’ve been able to sneak in a few social media tools with positive results, however, I admit this isn’t very strategic.
Here are some things I’ve thought about or observed in terms of handling the reluctant social media client.
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Cocktail Match
Okay, confess. You work hard for hours on end, never budging from the keyboard, and then, you digress. You get distracted. You find a blog or a site or a Web app that is nonsense, that is fun or funny, that has absolutely nothing to do with your work.
Well, I’m here to say that you are not alone and to prove it, every month or so, I’ll post a new blog, site or app that will truly waste your time. I should know. Because I’ve been there and gotten sucked into the vortex of distraction and lost precious time. But I truly believe we need those occasional distractions or we will go absolutely mad.
Presenting…Cocktail Match
Adhering to the theory that “You are what you drink,” Cocktail Match allows you to create your own virtual bar (VBar) based around your cocktail preferences and invite friends to socialize. Talk about niche social networking. And I thought social networks for cats, dogs and hamsters was really niche.
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I’ve been working with clients to set up social media “satellite sites” as I call them to extend their brand and take advantage of the exponential power of social networking for reaching out to consumers. The question I hear time and time again is “How in the world can I manage all these social networks if I can’t even get to the rest of my work?”
I know we are all crunched for time. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I keep up with all of my writing and blogging, client projects and social networking sites. But I have found some cool “social aggregation broadcasting tools” that are making at least some of my tasks easier to handle.
What is a Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tool?
Okay, I have to admit, I just made that term up but I think it covers what I’m trying to convey. There are tools out there that help you aggregate your social networking sites for the purpose of broadcasting a message to more places with fewer steps hence Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools (SABT? lol!).
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Tags: social networking, Facebook, myspace, twitter, addthis, FriendFeed, social media, linkedin, Pownce, twitterfeed, tweetburner, twhurl, sharethis
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Sphere
One of the challenges of a constantly changing technology landscape is that nearly everything one recommended to clients a few years ago is not always desirable today. A few years back I was asked to help companies build web sites. Today, people want blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.
One of the benefits of a constantly changing technology landscape is that as a consultant, I can continuously grow my diversified list of services that I offer to clients adding new and interesting tactics. In the last year, I’ve been exploring virtual worlds and lately it has really been paying off as I’ve taken on new Second Life marketing projects.
More recently, I’ve been exploring custom social networks for my own projects and for my clients. With moves by major Internet sites toward a more open, “social Web” including Google’s new FriendConnect service that is currently in beta, I think social networks and virtual worlds will become more and more relevant to how companies and organizations communicate their messages and do business online.
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When people ask what I do, I usually say “I’m a writer.” But I do so much more than writing articles and posting content on blogs. Since I first got online in 1987, I’ve been using the Internet (or at that time, Bulletin Board Systems) for not only communications but for community building - for my own projects and for clients. Today, there are so many ways I’m building online communities and although the tools have changed over the years, the rules haven’t.
Here are some of my thoughts on rules of online communities:
1. You can’t own a community. A lot of people who start and build communities immediately assume ownership. They get lawyers to craft a Terms of Service that says that they own everything posted within a community. They set the rules in stone and police the community. While I understand why companies want to “protect their assets,” ultimately, online communities can be fickle and rebellious. They do not want to be owned. Trying to turn a community into a commodity is ultimately a recipe for failure. Read the rest of this entry »
There has been a lot of buzz lately around the term data portability. Recently web heavyweights such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Plaxo, and other online identity providers have been joining the Dataportability.org organization, but it’s unclear to most people what Data Portability is all about. This video seeks to explain the concept in layman’s terms. We encourage you to spread this video to your web working colleagues because of all the potential benefits data portability provides.
We’ve told you before about the pluses of having an online persona. I’m sure many of you want to have online personas, but the time involved might be too daunting. For example, who has time to keep Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, and Twitter up to date; and have any time to actually get project work done? To keep these services relevant to your professional life, they must be kept up to date. This is where data portability comes in to the equation.
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