Spit-Shine Your Internet Reputation In 5 Easy Steps

Can I see a show of hands–how many of you folks have ever googled someone when you wanted to find out more info about them? I think we all have. But at the same time you’re googling others, others are also googling you–what are they finding?

Knowledge is power, so google yourself, and if you don’t like what you’re seeing know that with a tidbit work you can do one of those “extreme” (on subtle) makeover thingys with an arsenal of social media tools:

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How To Be A Solid Digg Citizen: Creating A Killer Social Media Profile

Yeah, that’s right–I bet when you signed up for Digg or any of the other social media joints that you just threw together your profile using minimal brainpower (I did too )

Well, Brent Csutoras over at Search Engine Land is preaching about how to create a smart social media profle, and he is totally spot on.

Here are some great digger profile tips, comin’ at ya:
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Using Twitter To Workstream

A workstream is a live updated record of work you’ve completed. When doing group work with remote colleagues, it allows you to keep track of what everyone else is doing. When working solo, it helps you keep track of your own productivity.

via

I’ve started by creating a top secret workstream on twitter that allows me to keep track of my time, and my progress on various inter-related projects and this is a great way to utilize twitter and it could be super useful in a social way if I actually had multiple members of a team working on these project but instead it’s just me. Maybe my next two person project I will utilize twitter in this unique way.

Developing A Facebook Application using Ruby on Rails

This seems really geeky to me but I think it’s a neccesary evil for some folks out there. A how-to on creating a facebook application on Ruby on Rails. That’s all I have to say since I’m not that geeky.

Facebook’s Personalization of the Internet

In the just concluded Facebook F8 conference, Facebook has announced to the world the next chapter in Facebook’s history: putting facebook’s social graph at the center of the internet. To the ordinary user, these new features that facebook announced, advertised as a “new way to personalize your online experience” may seem like simple features, but to those familiar with issues involved, this is the company’s first steps in becoming a very important pillar of the online experience. Before we dwell on the implications, let’s do a rundown of the these features.

Like for the whole internet
Facebook is re-focusing its publisher and developer relationships. Instead of Facebook Connect which doesn’t translate well to most users of Facebook, they’re implementing a well-know feature of facebook – a “like” feature for the whole internet. Partner publishers and websites can put “like” or “recommend” links to their contents, and this is connected directly to the Facebook users’ stream. Liked articles may appear in users’ stream. This will put an enormous data on facebook’s hands about the relevance of outside pages to the users.

Instant personalization
This is the more controversial feature that Facebook announced. What it provides is that when a Facebook user visits partner sites, the site can automatically personalize the experience for the user by looking at the publicly-available information that a user has on his account. This automatic sharing of personal information that you put on facebook to its partner sites can be prone to abuse.

Facebook is playing a delicate game of balance between the privacy of its users and its potential to become a central player in the internet.

F8 2010: Ultimate Facebook Conference

Anticipation is high for this year’s Facebook f8 conference. For those who don’t know what f8 is all about though it can be quite confusing as to why it is so talked about these days. The f8 conference is an event for “developers, entrepreneurs and innovators who are connecting people across platforms and defining tomorrow’s websites, applications and devices”. In short its a conference for everyone involved in the business of social media.

The conference, which is to be held tomorrow at the San Francisco Design Center at 635 8th Street in San Francisco, California will have three simultaneous tracks: the industry track, techniques track, open technologies track, and new tools track. Topics to be discussed under each track include:

Industry Track

• Facebook’s Growth – framework and tips
• Mobile + Social: Connecting the Dots
• Social Games: State of the Art and Next Generation
• From Idea to Successful Business – Evolving business models in the social web

Techniques Track

• Making Things Fast – On optimizing the speed and scalability of Facebook apps integration
• Basics of Integrating with Facebook
• Focus on Feed
• Designing for the Social Web – Site development and latest social plugins

Open Technologies Track

• Open Source PHP Development
• Tornado: Facebook’s Real-Time Web Framework
• Get Started Faster with Three20 – Building iPhone apps
• Fireside Chat about Open Technologies – Emerging standards

New Tools Track

• Not much information here but apparently new tools will have its own four sessions so probably there will be some new tools launched during the f5 conference.

As you can see in the next few days we can expect a glut of information appearing on blogs an on Facebook pages about stuff people learned during the f8 conference.

Facebook Quantifies Things For Marketers

Barry Adams, an online marketing specialist, reported yesterday that “Facebook is taking social media marketing seriously.” Apparently Mr. Adams got an email from Facebook containing useful information on all pages that he serves as an administrator. The email contained information such as:

-number of new fans
-wall posts
-statistics on the pages visited by fans

Obviously, this is an effort on Facebook’s part to get more information to administrators that they can use to quantify the activity on their pages. One of the biggest problems social media sites face after all is the lack of metrics to show online marketers just how well (or bad) their marketing efforts are going. What Facebook is doing is trying to bridge this gap by updating them on their page activity.

The statistics contained in the email is still a far from what marketers need to determine the ROI for putting ads on facebook and creating their own facebook page, however, it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, eventually they will come up with better tools to keep track of statistics and of course analyze the data. As Mr. Adams points out, is there a Facebook Analytics (ala Google Analytics) looming in the near future? Whether there is or isn’t, in the end it will still be up to the marketers to keep track of conversion rates coming from click from facebook. Aside from that despite all the measurable data it will still be impossible to determine just how many people really will look at an ad on facebook and have their brand awareness increased since not everyone who glances at an ad will click on it. Just shows that there is still a long way to go when it comes to having things quantified for social marketing.

Map of Online Communities

I stumbled upon (not via StumbleUpon by the way) the image below and thought it would be nice just to post something really light. Notice something missing? Might be my eyes but is Twitter not there? This might be an old sketch though specially since Facebook country is also given a pretty small land area. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Got this from Blog tips though they give credit to xkcd for the image. It says there that images found there use Creative Commons License. Just in case though, leave a comment in case of copyright issues.

Social Media Buzzing with Google’s Latest Product

Google is definitely not content with being the leader in the search industry but is bent on making an impact on the social media industry as well. They have Open Social, Real time search, and Social search … and now they have Buzz.

Buzz was launched just last February 9 but the Buzz section of my gmail has been BUzzing like crazy since then (excuse for the corny pun but it truly is buzzing!). For those who don’t use Gmail then you are definitely missing out on a great social tool that in essence collates everything from your social network and allows you to view them trhough your Gmail. Why Gmail? Because Buzz is built into Gmail!

Some of the things you can view via buzz are status messages, photos, videos, and links posted in Buzz. You can also import updates from your Google Reader, Twitter, Flickr, and PicasaWebs. You can also access Buzz by phone by pointing your phone’s browser to buzz.google.com.

According to Todd Jackson, Product Manager of Gmail and Google Buzz, “Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve.” Google Buzz is obviously, in their opinion, one of the solutions.

For businesses worldwide it’s time to start coming up with an action plan on how to take advantage of Buzz. Knowing how big Google is, it’s only a matter of time for Buzz to be one of the major social platforms that you just can not disregard.

Time Spent in Social Media Sites Soaring

If you have any doubts that the social media wave is here to stay then maybe Nielsen’s latest findings will make you a believer.

According to the Nielsen Company recent studies show that the time spent by people from U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy in social media sites have gone up by 82% compared to last year: up from an average of 3 hours per person to 5.5 hours per person. In addition to this the number of people (unique visits) logging in to social media sites has also gone up 242,039,00 to 307,428,000.

Australia leads in the average amount of time spent per person at almost 7 hours (6:52:28) while United States lead in the number of unique users at 142,052.

The trend is of course good news to social media marketers from all over but despite this good news it is good to remember to be strategic in your social media efforts so as not to waste your resources. Your strategy should not only include the choice of social media platforms to use but also the form of your marketing (good old ads, tweets, etc.) and the actual content of your ads. Make sure you continue to supplement your social media efforts with other marketing methods that work for you. Remember success in social media circles isn’t your end goal, your efforts in this area should mesh with the rest of your business strategy so as to get the best results possible.