Toot sweet…Ping.fm & HootSuite

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.

Tweetie

To all my fellow Mac users I gots somethign to share with ya. On Monday my favorite iphone Twitter client, Tweetie, released it’s desktop client. As the the creator of Tweetie, atebits, tagline states this is some “suspiciously simple software.” Wonderfully intuitive and exceptionally powerful, gives you to the tools to pan for all the gold the Twitterverse has to offer. 

I encourage you all to check out the ad-supported version of the app, and if you dig it the mostest, spend the $19.95 and get the advert-free version.

@tracifenton, an awesome tweeter

Traci Fenton of WorldBlu, Inc. is a great example of a CEO leveraging social media to engage her audience. Right now Traci is at TED Palm Springs provindg a live feed of her impressions of the conference and the speakers. Take her comments on speaker and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates

• 30% of students in US never graduate from high school, 50% of minority students don’t – via Bill Gates #TED about 1 hour ago from web
• Bill Gates – Past performance, not years teaching or MA education makes great teachers, we must study that to improve education in US #TED about 1 hour ago from web

Many who follow TED know, it’s not just about the speakers, but the community of people who attend the event. It’s a special brand of individual that is willing to dedicate the time and put forth the financial commitment to attend an event purely dedicated to the promulgation of ideas. Traci does a good job of tweeting the vibe of the TED PS audience as well:

• An indication of how cool people are here at TED@PalmSprings – I am sitting next to the guy who did the music for this year’s Super Bowl.about 2 hours ago from web

Too often Twitterers, myself included, unintentionally spam their followers with tweets that really aren’t about informing them or engaging them in a conversation but act as some cathartic release. There is nothing wrong with tweeting your daily goings ons, I’m sure someone cares where you ate for lunch, but when using Twitter for professional purposes it’s best to stick to topic, and strive to use twitter to create conversations with your followers.

p.s. check out Traci’s interview with Yahoo HotJobs.

How do you define social media?…

I’ve been actively involved in the world of social media since 2003 as an entrepreneur and consultant, and it seems to me we often lose sight of what social media is really about, human interaction. Blogs, Wikis, Tweets, Mashups, Widgets, Rich Internet Applications, so on and so on, are awesome. I mean I flex my nerdosity  every time  I see a kick heiny  web app as much as the next Sleek-Geek, but it’s like getting super jazzed about a new shovel…a really awesome and shiny shovel, but a shovel none the less.

Like any tool they allow you to create something beyond their intrinsic value. Facebook and MySpace allow you to reconnect, and maintain those connections, with long-lost friends. Blogging allows give you the opportunity to engage in conversations outside of geographical and timagraphical boundaries. Twitter, the web app de jour,  can keep all on your friends and family up to date on real time decisions about the conflict between having Chipotle or Panchero’s for dinner. Like any tool, social media applications need to be used with a comprehensive strategy  built around user engagement that takes into account the audience you’re trying to reach and the conversation that you are hoping to have.

 

Social media lads and lasses, your time is now

As the United States of America ushered in a new era of leadership, and as an aging generation saw the labors of their youth come to fruition, a generation on the ascent tweeted, facebooked, streamed, and dugg every second of it. 

During President Obama’s inauguration Twitter saw 5x the normal tweets-per-second and about 4x the average tweets-per-minute (graph). Facebook enjoyed an average of over 4,000 status updates per hour Tuesday morning, peaking at 8,500 updates every minute during President Obama’s inaugural speech. The President’s speech set a new record for simultaneous streaming-video with 7.7 million video streams, according to content delivery network Akamai Technologies, which provides the NYTimes.com, Ustream, Viacom, WSJ.com, and other leading networks with support for live streaming.

The truth is all of these technologies are still in the early stages of their life-cycle, andas they continue to mature  we will find new and innovative ways to leverage them, ushering in a new age of citizen participation in government and a sense of togetherness that hasn’t been felt in generations.

I am grateful Bedouin|Interactive has the opportunity to be apart of this great transformation I and am inspired to have a leader like President Barack Obama.