Google Plus Twitter

Finally! I found a way to post to Google+ and have it sent to Twitter. Which is good, because I’ve been so focused on G+ that it’s hard to remember to not neglect Twitter. Here are screenshots of it working instantly.

 

How’s it work you ask?

The key is a little site called www.manageflitter.com. Give them your G+ URL, sign into Twitter through the Twitter API and your accounts are connected. Their system is set up so that you must post to your Public stream in order for it to work. Alternately you can adjust your settings so that you must at #twt to the post to get it to work. I’ve suggested to the folks at ManageFlitter that they should offer the ability to have just G+ posts to a defined Circle go to Twitter. I could choose my Flitter Circle to post to, or add it to my public post. This might offer a bit more control. I’m not sure if this is technically possible, and they may not want to because, most people don’t adjust their settings, so by default everything will go public, and through ManageFlitter to Twitter.

Keep in mind that content posted to Google+ will be truncated in Twitter, remember that pesky 140 character rule? I’ve also run a test including a video, a photo and a link. I haven’t seen those populate my Twitter stream yet. I’ll update this post once I see results.

 

Update:

Here is a screenshot of the links, and the photo I uploaded to Twitter:

In both Twitter.com and Tweetdeck the links open in a browser window, including the image, which is linked to a file on Google’s server. I have not seen the video link yet.

Speed Dating on Google Plus

I’m talking business here folks, I’ll save the romantic relationship talk for @urwingman.

I was recently asked how I use Google Plus. One way is to limit the conversations I see. I use Circles to group specific users and can focus on just those streams. Very decluttering I must say.

Another way is to meet new people. On Twitter, everyone’s Follows and Followers are publicly available, but clicking through them is a chore and it’s difficult to learn about them due to the limitations of biographies. With G+, many users are keeping their Circles public while some users’ Circles are private (I keep mine private), it’s very easy to see who they interact with. If +Robert Scoble posts a comment you can see the hundred or so folks that will respond. It’s very easy to rollover their names to see who they work for. This alone is a great way to learn a great deal about them.

 

Above you can see a comment by +Brenna Ehrlich. She is in a couple of my Circles, and I’m viewing this comment in the stream of just one of those Circles (there is currently no way to view multiple Circle streams). I can see a comment by +Blake Robinson.

By mousing over +Blake Robinsons I can see that he works for Rackspace. Hmm, might be a good contact to have.

I can add Blake to a circle right here. Or, I can click through to his profile to learn more about him. I can see where he works, who his connections are, if they’re public, where he lives, where he went to work and what other sites I can connect with him on.

I can read a few of his most recent posts (in order to avoid following someone that posts lots of animated GIFs of kitties. I have a special Circle for those people…).

Then I can add him to an existing Circle or make a new one.

Now, I have a contact at Rackspace I never knew before.

I’ve been using this to collect contacts that work for press organizations, creative agencies, potential technology partners, Google employees, and all around cool people. So, it behooves you to make sure your Google profile is filled out the way you want it to be, with more or less content and information to suit your personal online brand strategy. Pictures are nice too. I don’t add anyone to a Circle that doesn’t have a bio and photograph. I want to know who I’m talking to.

What are you going to use Google+ to do?

 

Google+ for iPhone Launches

 

 

Google+ was released for iPhone today. Scrolling through G+ you’ll see many posts like “finally, Google Plus for iPhone”. We’ve become such an MTV-generation on crack that having to wait 3 weeks for a smartphone app for a brand new social network (?) platform is excruciating!

If you are ready to download G+ for iPhone, click here. Word to the wise: you CANNOT currently find Google+ by searching the App Store. You must open this link on your iPhone.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:

The sign-in screen, clicking here requires your Google login and password credentials.

From here you can launch your circles, stream, upload photos or edit your profile.

 

Much like the mobile browser version, you can swipe through the streams from your various circles. A little tough for those of us with more than a few circles (disclaimer, I have 39 and counting).

 

From this screen you can see photos from your circles, view or edit your albums, see all the photos on your iPhone and choose which to upload, and see pictures of you others have posted.

 

You can view your Google+ Circles (I’m calling them Gircles dammit) here, add more, edit them. You can even see here how many people haven’t uploaded a damn avatar. My family is obviously not tech savvy!

 

You can view your contacts by name and add to Circles here. You even get the ubiquitous Suggested People feature, if you’re feeling lonely and adventurous.

 

I’m still trying to figure out what a Huddle is. There’s no explanation so I’m going with thinking of it as group chat. Unfortunately NOT a Hangout. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Hangout on iPhone or iPad, since it will conflict with Apple’s Facetime. I’m looking forward to using Google+ Huddle for the next Boston Social Media Club meeting.

I’m sure stuff will be changing as the Google+ team keeps moving forward. They’ve been doing a great job in taking everyone’s feedback.

I’m looking forward to the iPad app and more updates in functionality.

 

Google+ing your Blog

So, you’ve heard of Google+ right?

• If yes please read on
• If no please click here

Now that we have that out of the way… You’ve FINALLY gotten your Google+ invitation, you’ve logged in, you’ve figured out how to use everything, what else do you do? It’s time to Google-ize your blog. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that hard. The first thing you should do is add your Google+ link to you blog. After all, you want your readers to find you everywhere right? There are many ways to share your Google+ URL depending on how your blog is set up. It could be a contact page or, as in the case of my blog, a set of icons:

I keep a relatively short list of my social networks in a widget on my blog. The first one, About.Me is nothing more than a personal landing page with most of the same links. However you share your social network profiles with your readers is fine, just make sure to add your Google+ URL.

About that Google+ URL: most of us using the service agree that it’s ridiculous:

the number, in this case, 116375847890292587823, is your actual Google+ ID. Most of us our hoping that unique nicknames will be added soon, remember, G+ is in beta. Google is moving very quickly with this new service so I don’t think we’ll need to wait as long as we did for personalized URLs for LinkedIn! If you don’t want to wait, you can try a free service a bunch of clever guys thought up called Gplus.to. Just copy your G+ ID number, pick a nickname and you’re all set:

You’ve already got a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button on every blog post right? Now it’s time to add a +1 button. It works kind of like a Like button, nothing more. I’ve looked around to find a WordPress plugin that combines the Like, Tweet and +1 button to no avail. For now we’ll have to deal with:

If anyone comes across an elegant plugin that combines all 3, let me know!

Your blog should be all done! Currently there is no way to have a blog stream your G+ posts, you can see mine streams my Twitter stream, but I expect it fairly soon. At the moment you can’t share G+ posts with Facebook or Twitter either.

Make sure that when you publish a new blog post you share the link on Google+ the same way you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter:

Google+ Gets a Check+ Part 1

The Fourth of July holiday weekend was ruined for most of us by the launch of Google+. In just 4 days the new social platform by Google has exploded. Of course many have still not seen it as it is in real beta (as opposed to Gmail’s multi-year beta status) and the company was so overwhelmed with invitation requests that they’ve had to bottleneck entrance to the system.

WTF?!

Google+ was launched on June 28 following a little over a week in which slight changes to Google were spotted. It is essentially a status/content wall similar to Facebook’s that aggregates Google+ content from people you’re connected to in Google apps, Gmail, etc. You can visit the home page to request an invite and I think they’re giving priority to those who request an invite that have already been added by multiple people already using Google+. That would seem to be the case considering how many of my social media colleagues are signed up but few non-industry friends are. It would make sense from a marketing standpoint as we’re all early adopters and influencers to some degree.

Functionality

Keep in mind that this is beta and some nice folks from Google have already told us they’re taking feedback and making changes rapidly as we go.

The Navigation Bar
The first thing you’ll notice is that the new Google bar that you’ve been seeing now begins with +Michael. You can still reach your Gmail, docs, etc, but the +Username will take you to Google+. The right side of the bar gives you an account dropdown with an alert box that turns red when you have a notice. The Share field allows you to post a quick note (like a Tweet or status update), followed by more in-depth settings. It’s an efficient and compact design. It reminds me of something.

Stream
The Stream is similar to Facebook with far more control and is your main Google+ UI much like your FB Wall. You can view your stream with all of your contacts or, with a simple click, see only content from the Circle, or group, you want. More on Circles in a moment. You essentially get the same functionality with your stream as with Facebook Groups or Twitter Lists but with a far superior user experience.

Email
A quick word about Google+ and it’s effect on your email: Once you sign up for Google+ go into the settings quickly and change what you wish to receive alerts on. Every comment in your stream will send an alert to your email. So, unless you want your Gmail account to blow up, make this change soon.

Circles
Google+ allows you control over your contacts like never before. With Facebook you get a few settings that give you the ability to lump contacts into one of a very few categories with no overlap. The problem with this is that human relationships and communications are much more complicated. I’ve written and spoken in depth about this, theorizing that the next big social network would take more realistic human relationship dynamics into account, even going so far as to begin building out the concept behind a possible startup. The fact is that Facebook’s founder and many of it’s young programmers don’t have the depth of experience with human relationships that us old folks have, especially those with some background in psychology, sociology, or mental health.

Circles allow you to create custom groups and organize your contacts into them. Not only can you put a contact into a group, you can out them into multiple groups, say, co-workers AND colleagues, or client AND friends. Once a contact is in this group you can control what content they see and don’t see. I’ve attempted to load 100+ into a circle at once and the platform froze. I haven’t figured out the exact limit but more than 20-30 at once is fine.

 

Simply drag a user into a Circle to add them, the number in the Circle will change. You can drag a user to the gray Circle to create a new one, or just click on it.

You can click on a Circle to open it to add members this way, remove members or rename the group or description.

You can sort users of a single Circle by first name, last name or relevance.

Make sure you’ve updated your Google profile with an avatar or you look like one of these faceless gray icons.

Profile
Your Google+ profile simply pulls content from your existing Google profile. If you’ve been too busy with Twitter and LinkedIn, you might want to go back and clean up your Google profile. You don’t want to be one of the graphic heads as seen above! Your G+ (I”m getting sick of typing Google+) profile has several sections:

Posts – what you’ve posted.

About – this is your Google profile content as Introduction with fields for Bragging Rights, Occupation, Employment.

Photos – you can create albums here just like in Facebook. It automatically creates an album for all photos from your posts. I haven’t tested the file limit yet but will soon.

#1′s – this are posts that you’ve #1′d or Liked, or whatever we’re calling it.

Buzz – this is essentially everyone that you follow or that follows you.

You will see a smattering of people you’ve put in Circles, and those that have added you. On the right you can add as many links as you want, the major ones like Facebook and Twitter come with icons.

 

As delve deeper I’ll show you more of the UI and functionality behind Google+. Stay tuned!

Managing Your Brand+

Most of you have heard of Google+ by now. It exploded like a firework over the 4th of July weekend for early adopters lucky enough to get an invitation. I was one of those lucky few (million). While organizing my Circles I noticed something interesting: a serious lack of avatars. Now, most of the professional social media types I know like @girlgamy, @cmajor, @danschawbel, @vanhoosear had their lovely faces in place, but a vast majority did not.

Now, I know that you’ve all been busy focusing on Facebook and trying to build your Follow numbers on Twitter and have forgotten about that Google profile you filled out last year and never use. However, Google+ is upon us, time to get your Gshit together, your Gducks in a row. Even if you don’t have a G+ account yet, or aren’t planning on using it, if you have Gmail, would you rather be this guy:

Or this guy:

 

That is all.

Search Versus Social Media Results

Few companies are willing to post numbers or results from their search engine and social media engagements. This leaves a ton of forums full of people asking what works, what doesn’t, what kind of results they can expect, etc. and no one is sharing answers. Some numbers can’t be shared for competitive reasons: how much you spent on a campaign, your exact numbers, elements of your strategy, etc., but some can. In the charts below the actual volumes have been removed but there is still some very strong data that I’d like to share with you that will hopefully help inform brand and agency strategists.

Data

This data is very specific to my current employer, a financial software company, and some very specific tactics that have been undertaken. The company has a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presence. While we Tweet, Facebook, and Linked at least once a day, based on some of the earlier number we received we decided to run ads on LinkedIn. Leveraging these channels as well as spending a good amount of time creating content and optimizing our website for search engines has led to the following findings:

Our Unique Visits from LinkedIn far outweigh traffic from other referring sites. To be clear, these results are outside of direct visits or referring sites like outside blogs, portals, even traffic from our own newsletter. They are merely focused on the traffic from Google, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Very often people swill stop investigating here. Focusing on the site sending them the most traffic. But, that traffic isn’t always qualified traffic. In the chart on the right, it’s clear that while our Page Views from LinkedIn users outweigh those from Facebook and Gmail, we get a much larger number of page views from Twitter and Google. To me, this means these sources contain visitors that are much more engaged, qualified and interested in our content.

As you can see above, LinkedIn represents our greatest percentage of new users. Gmail may sound a bit strange except that my company uses Gmail as our email tool so any clicked link in our email signatures or included in the body of an email  shows up as a visitor. This is very important since it remains one of our primary sources of communications and sales. Combined with data concerning Unique Visitors we can differentiate which sites give us more repeat traffic versus which sites give us more new traffic. An important distinction when deciding which marketing messages go to which sites. Bounce Rate isn’t a huge concern primarily because our site is information, not ecommerce. This means that our Call to Action (CTA) is for the user to call or email our business intelligence team rather than visit another page. However, when combined with Page Views and Time on Site, it is a good indicator of user interest or qualification.

Time on Site indicates how long a person spend on the site. It’s interesting to note how closely this mimics the number of page views. The first observation is pretty obvious since reading more pages would take more time, but then again, you could take more time reading a single page.

Findings

Initially Twitter looked like a bit of a loss for us. We got a minimal amount of traffic, and to be honest, our audience isn’t really that prolific on Twitter. However, if you look closely, even though visitors from Twitter were minimal, they had the largest amount of page views and a close second for number of pages visited. This means that we’ll continue to cultivate traffic through Twitter hoping for a growth in visits.

I mentioned that we ran a set of 3 ads on LinkedIn for the company. Despite the hype around Facebook ads, based on earlier numbers concerning bounce rate, time on site, pages visited, and contextuality we decided not to run ads on Facebook. LinkedIn ads allowed us to zero in on a highly defined group of users based on industry (we’re a very small niche of the financial industry), countries, states, even gender. LinkedIn best practices says “good ads have a CTR greater than 0.025%“. Our rates were .056%, .074%, and .087%. Our ads worked. We opted for a CPC (Cost Per Click) model rather than a CPM (Cost Per Impression). It’s a good thing, our impressions were 1300 times what our clicks were. Since clicks show interest, and impressions may not even be seen, this made sense to us. In addition our average click cost was actually half of what our click bid was!

Recommendations

Clearly this data is not going to define your strategy. It is unique to our company, not even our industry. I do hope that it will help inform you. You may decide we are nuts not to be advertising on Facebook, or convinced that we’re just not using Twitter effectively enough. All possible. Unfortunately digital strategy, for all of it’s data, still requires much experimentation. I encourage you to experiment, track your numbers (but don’t get wrapped up in daily results, look at trends), and define a respectable schedule to gather data over. Decisions shouldn’t be made over a few days’ worth of data, but over a few months, keeping in mind global events, holidays, etc.

Good luck.

User Experience Can Be Simple

I’ve been thinking alot about User Experience lately. Okay, I’ll admit it, I think about it constantly You could say I have UX OCD, thank god it’s balanced by my ADD!

I see a great deal of fantastic UX design (CNN), sometimes side by side with very bad UX (Facebook). User Experience, even just the User Interface portion of it is not relegated to the Web though. The greatest form of User Experience ever is the sandwich. Think about it: it requires no special tools and can have completely customized content. A sandwich can be flat, rolled, cold, warm and can include a variety of brands from private to Oscar Meyer before engaging with your mouth. Is this taking UX to a too simplified place? Not at all, anymore than discussing the genius behind Modernista’s non-website. For those of you not familiar with it, Modernista’s non-website is merely a layer of navigation over Google results for their name.  Technically it’s genius, but more importantly it uses this abstract of a website as a way to qualify clients. If their non-site is too weird for a potential client then its obvious that that client isn’t potential.

Don’t think for a second that User Experience is relegated to web designers. I mentioned the sandwich to give you a point of reference for how broad a reach UX has. Let me give you a recent personal example. As recently as 10 minutes ago and as personal as my breakfast. I’m talking about butter. Stop & Shop butter.

Believe it or not there is a glaring User Experience mistake here. Do you see it? It may not effect everyone but it does effect anyone with both salted and unsalted butter in their refrigerator. Imagine that you’ve just reached into the fridge to pull out butter to put on your corn or bread. Now imagine that you quickly glanced at the box and decided “I need the red butter, that’s the yummy, salty one” because the salted butter box is red. Now imagine how it will taste when you grab the red stick instead and read no further. You’ve just slathered your breakfast toast with unsalted butter. Have you ever tasted unsalted butter? It is NOT yummy.

Of course each stick has the type on it, but half way through a stick the wrapper is crumpled and yucky, barely legible. Why a designer chose to make the unsalted butter box blue but the stick wrapping red, and vice versa is beyond me. However, it is a good example of User Interface design that most of us can relate to. User Interface, and User Experience is everywhere and we all have to deal with it. How many of us have poured orange juice into our cereal because we haven’t had our coffee or put our glasses on and the cartons look the same? How many of use have cars with cup holders that can’t hold out coffee mugs? How many of us have struggled to figure out how to activate the automatic faucet in a public bathroom?

The fact is that more of us are involved in User Experience than we realize. My wife is a kitchen designer. She is constantly solving User Experience and Interface issues. Customer service is another extension of User Experience. Other examples with which you may be involved?

Crosswalks
Answering the phones at your office
Public bathroom cleaning
Slicing salami at a deli
Deciding if the IN door on your store swings in or out
Picking the music that will play in your changing rooms
The signature at the bottom of your email
Choosing when to do road work
Putting your name on your mailbox
Spraying graffiti on a wall
Making sure there are pricing labels on your products
Choosing which mobile platform to develop for
Cleaning the lines for your draft beer kegs
Throwing away your old company collateral

Any others you can think of?

User Experience can be complicated but it can be as simple as paying attention to and being thoughtful about some of the the things I’ve listed above.

Online Video Audiences: 34% Growth

According to ComScore online video growth has grown by 34%, with Google’s YouTube maintaining it’s lead of 40%.

Read More Here.

How Being a Social Network Butterfly Can Help You Land a Job and Improve Your Career

This article was originally written as a 3-part piece for Talent Zoo. I got enough positive feedback (and found it slowly getting buried beneath new blog posts), that I thought I’d re-post it here in it’s entirety. Since this was written alot has happened with Social Media, social networks and the job market. This has not effected the overall message in the blog post, as a matter of fact, it has made it even more important to get involved in social networks.

It’s no secret that Social Networking is huge. It’s also obvious that it is continuously changing. Friendster gave way to MySpace, which is fighting to retain users that are quickly immigrating to Facebook, all the while; many of us have snuck off to Twitter and FriendFeed. If these are the only sites you know, you only know about 1/10000th of what makes up the social network universe. Don’t feel bad, few can wrap their head around the breadth and depth of SoNets, and no one is omniscient enough to have even heard of most of them.

SoNets are a fact of life and business. If you’re reading this, you’re on Talent Zoo, which means you’re looking for a job or an employee. Businesses can feel free to hire me to consult with them about SoNets and Social Media (SoMe), this one is for the job hunters.

So you’ve got your resume perfect, it gives a brilliant overview of your skills, talent, and experience. You’re already a step ahead of me! You’ve briefed your references so they talk about your strengths and not what you did at the last company outing. If you’re a creative, you’ve got your portfolio book, site, or iPod full of your best work. That should do it right? Not exactly. What happens when your future employer’s HR staff Googles you? They’ll get to know you really well or not. They may find nothing, not a big deal; unless you’re a creative, marketer, advertiser, programmer, you get it. If you’re in the business you’d better be online. ‘Why’ should be obvious, we’ll get to ‘where’ later. Let’s talk about ‘how’.

How you present yourself online, in SoNets or otherwise is as important as how you present yourself in person. Even more so since this may be your first impression to potential employers, and you know what they say about first impressions. This goes not just for job hunters involved in advertising or interactive, but for everyone. Most savvy employers won’t hold your MySpace pictures against you, some may. The Internet is public domain. Everyone can see anything you’ve posted online. So those party pictures, blogs about Star Trek and forum rants are just a click away for anyone who wants them. If you want be treated as a professional, take care to establish a professional persona online. Keep your comments, blogs, etc. professional. This isn’t to say you can’t be yourself online. On the contrary, be as personal and wacky as you want. Just do it with a non- related screen name that you only share with friends. Speaking of which, if you’re on Facebook, get two accounts. One for friends that’s private and one for professionals. Don’t let friends or non-business contacts friend you. You’d be surprised how inappropriate your college buddies or that girl you just met might be on your Wall! (update: soon you’ll be able to use Gathr.me, so you won’t need multiple accounts. Just one account and multiple public pages)

For those thinking, ‘this is such a pain, why bother’, remember that first impression I mentioned? By presenting a skilled and experienced face on social networks, you can get a jump on the competition. By getting involved in professional forums you can position yourself as an eager learner, a helpful pro, even as an expert in your field.

You can get much more from social networks than just a chance to show your mettle. SoNets are a great source of education. Other users can help you solve problems, point you to tutorials and other resources, turn you on to industry news and events, even hook you up with contacts.

“Okay, I get it, give a little, get a little, put my best face forward. But where?” There is no right answer. If I was talking just to 3D artists, I’d suggest niche sites like CGTalk.com. You’ll have to spend a little time Googling to find the best niche networks to get involved with. For SoNets that aren’t so niche, a good place to start is our old friend Facebook. FB has a great many groups, some as random as My Name Is Durwin (of which I am a member of course), or as obvious as Design & Typography. Professional groups aren’t just on Facebook though, MySpace and others have some worth joining. There are a bunch of great sites dedicated to professionals only, chief among them, LinkedIn. If you don’t have an account here, you’re, quite frankly, nuts. Talent Zoo is a great site for job searching. Not only does it offer great articles (feel free to agree below) and job boards, but also gives you a chance to interact with colleagues and potential employers.

If you have a unique interest, alot to say, or ADD (all of which I’m very proud of), consider subscribing to or starting a blog. There is no end to the number of general and niche industry blogs, from technology to job hunting, advertising to life hacking. Got something on your mind? For free you can create as many blogs as you like with sites like WordPress, Blogspot (which somehow became Blogger when I wasn’t looking), to name a few. It’s as easy as using Word. Much more than an online diary, it’s a great way to discuss your ideas and get feedback from readers. If you want to develop a larger social network, consider using Ning to launch a blog that can turn into a fill-fledges, multi-member social network. D.C. Insider Ariana Huffington turned her blog into a multi-author, political blog network worth millions.

Of course, everyone is talking about Twitter now. It has actually become my #2 news source, after CNN and tied with the Huffington Post. I’ve made tremendous contacts and learned an enormous amount of helpful and professional facts, as well as a tremendous amount of inane and personal facts! “Isn’t that where geeks go to talk about their latest podcast and what happened on Heroes?” Of course it is. But it’s much more. There is nowhere that the conversation is more raw and to the point than Twitter. In 140 characters, you’ll get everything from Red Sox plays to the latest on the McCain and Obama campaigns, behind-the-scenes images and commentary from industry events. You’ll also get help with technical problems, employee referrals, heads-up on new products, new sites and new jobs. There is a fun movie on Twitter.com that explains the service. Your best bet would be to begin by following some people whose user name you know (like mine) and see who they’re talking to. Pick the ones having interesting conversations and follow them, then see who they are following. It’s as exponential as it is experiential. Twitter isn’t just for online chat. I’ve met dozens of the people I converse with everyday at industry events. As a matter of fact, that’s how I found out about the event in the first place. Even out-of-town Tweeps come into town; they get treated to a Boston Tweet-up!

Twitter is not a place to join and start begging for jobs, or beating people over the head with your CV. LinkedIn is not the place to start Friending everyone at a company you’ve never worked at in hopes of getting an inside referral. In any social network, just like when visiting a foreign country, get to know the local customs. See how people interact, what they are interested in. You may find it’s not the right place for you. But, don’t worry, there are so many social networks, you’ll very easily find one that suits you whether you are job hunting, trying to change careers, or looking to hire.

If, like me, you find it difficult to focus on several disparate social networks, or find time to run or keep up with a blog, you may want consider microblogs. Twitter us the best known, but Pownce and Jaiku offer similar services. Twitter’s limited 2 140 characters, so u need 2 learn 2 Twitter shorthand + b concise w your comments 2 fit them in2 1 microblog submission. Everyone using these services is restricted to the same limit, but despite, or perhaps because, of this, you can very quickly pick up some gems. Just this evening I learned: of new OpenSource training videos, that Twitterers rather than major media first broke the news about the LA earthquake, and found a colleague in need of traditional and online branding experts to write for her new site. Looks like I’m going to be spending more late nights typing away at the virtual keyboard of my iPhone while watching man-movies on Spike (Jaws 2 finished, I’m on to The World Is Not Enough)! Like any SoNet, there is great deal of irrelevant junk, but, thanks to Twitters newly purchased search engine and third party sites like TwitterPacks, you can search for subjects and people of interest and Follow (subscribe) to that person’s feed. Who knows, you may gain your own Followers. I’m following 170 people ranging from CNN to Digg’s Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble and am being followed by 184. Just remember, even in microblogging, keep it professional or at least make sure you don’t say anything you’ll regret.

Everything I’ve mentioned will work to increase your search engine visibility, your networking possibilities and your name recognition. Kind of like building a brand isn’t it? Brand YOU. Brand “you need a job”, brand “you are an asset”. Use these channels to promote yourself but don’t spread yourself too thin. Some networks are a great place to just sign up and post your resume and contact info. Some are full of colleagues and friends that will overrun your inbox. Decide which require minimum effort and stay on top of the ones that require more. Above all, make sure you keep your contact info and resume up to date.

There will be a lot to manage at first but you’ll get the hang of it. Don’t worry, relief is on the way. There are a few people, including myself, that are working on ways to aggregate, or bring together many of these social networks into one manageable tool.

Remember:

Don’t mix business with pleasure – keep your private-self jus that, private, and make your professional-self public.

Find the way to interact online that best suits you – join a SoNet, subscribe or start a blog, Twitter away.

Be easy to find, be up to date – Spread yourself around to as many SoNets as possible without spreading yourself too thin.

Always put your best face forward – be professional, don’t say anything you’ll regret.

Image by Stephen Poff