Social Media Guru 2006
Back in 2006 I remember talking to a client about the trials and tribulations of blogging for business, and as with most executive bloggers his greatest concern was time. Did he really have enough time to deliver the type consistency a first rate blog needed? Truthfully he didn’t, so we set up a multi-user blogging system to distribute the “blogging-burden”. This way my client’s company could post on a daily basis with out any one person dealing loom ‘n’ doom of the dreaded blogging-deadline.
sabbatical 2010
Fast forward to 2010 and I found myself in a simliar conversation, but this time it centered around Social Media. With the introduction of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc in addition to her existing blogging duties, my client began to see large chunks of her day being gobbled up by the multi-headed beast known as Social Media Marketing. So on top of her already daunting daily duties as the Marketing Director, she began to feel the burden of a marketing interns everywhere, spending her many a morning updating the company’s various social media properties.
So her “Ask” was; “How do we engage all of our Social Media Properties with out me having to spend hours engaging each one, one at a time?”
Luckily I had gone through a similar situation when I returned from my 365 day sabbatical from the world of consulting. As I began to rebuild my Social Media presence I found myself spending hours be-bopping around my various account; Post on Twitter, wander across they virtual way to check out my Facebook feed; than bounce over to LinkedIn message my contacts, etc, etc, etc. So being the mensaian social media marketer that I am, I set about finding an application that would allow me to update my status boxes across the board while taking in all the info my networks had to offer. What I ended up with was a mashup of Ping.fm & HootSuite.
ping.fm's networks
Wonderful simplicity. Ping.fm is a simple and wickedly useful service that enables you to manage your status updates across 50+ social networks at once. As you become a citizen of more and more of the social media sites updating all of them can be incredible time drain, but in using ping.fm you are able to post one single update in Ping.fm and the update is automatically sent to all of the social media sites you earmarked during the Ping.fm set up process.
The draw back to using a service like Ping.fm is you run the risk missing out on the emerging conversation that happens outside of the service. This is where the fantastic service HootSuite comes in. HootSuite, a social media dashboard, allows users to manage their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and Ping.fm accounts through a singular interface. The company bills itself as “The Professional Twitter Client” and from my mountain top view, I have to say it’s not only the best “Twitter Client” around but the best “Social Media Client”.
Multiple Network Views
Hootsuite allows you manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with its integration of the Ping.fm API it allows you to stay on top of virtually every social media site you’d care to join. What’s even sweeter is you have the ability to grant access to multiple editors, to any of your existing accounts. This comes in handy when you have a corporate Twitter or Facebook Page account and would like to grant you members of marketing team posting privileges.Additionally HootSuite provides tracking information on your tweets, and multi-stream viewing of all your various networks.
Combing HootSuite and Ping.fm displaces a lot of the temporal concerns with Social Media Marketing and allows for consistent messaging across all of your social media networks. So take the sting out of keeping your network up to date and get signed up for Ping.fm and Hootsuite today. Of course once you get setup should you need any help with that ornery Social Media Marketing gives a shout, the Bedouin is back from sabbatical.
Twitter | BD1Interactive | 
July 23, 2010 7:35 pm | 
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