Your Social Web Presence

Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps
By Deltina Hay (c) 2009

Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how's this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I'll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:

• A WordPress Blog
• A Facebook Profile
• A Facebook Page
• A MySpace Page
• A YouTube Account
• A Flickr Account
• A Twitter Account
• An Upcoming.org Account
• A GoodReads Account

Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence

Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed

The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .

Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now

You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.

Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.

Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.

It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.

Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia

Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.

WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.

A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you've added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.

To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.

You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.

Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools

The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you'll find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.

Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools

Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.

Step 6: Research and Repeat

The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it's best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?

When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.

About The Author
Deltina Hay is the principal of Social Media Power, and founder of the new social media Website service, Plumb Social. Ms. Hay's graduate education in computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology led her naturally to social media consulting. Her new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, will be released in March 2009.

How to Create a Bad Website and Frustrate Your Visitors

How to Create a Bad Website and Frustrate Your Visitors
By Jason OConnor (c) 2009

If you're a sadistic kind of webmaster or website owner and have a burning desire to royally frustrate and anger your site visitors each and every time they visit your site, these three lists are just for you. If you want to have a terrible website that looks bad, works horribly and breaks fundamental marketing rules, read on.

First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to look at any website is to break it up into three equally important segments; design, technical and marketing. In other words, every site on the Web contains these three components.

They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all have to be on a server and coded properly to be live on the Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which they attract visitors and make sales (marketing).

Let's look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your website visitors and basically fail miserably at the whole website endeavor in each of the three segments. The following is a list, broken up into the three categories, defining exactly what NOT to do.

Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:

1. Not using Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky formats that no one's ever seen and no one can understand.

2. Writing trite, predictable, boring or copied content only and not updating your site.

3. Creating totally different and unique navigation for every page so that your visitors need to waste time re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new page. Also creating totally different look & feels for every page so that your visitors don't know if they're on the same site or clicked away.

4. Using confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for all your links and buttons so that no one ever has any idea where they're going if they click. The more confusing, the better.

5. Making it impossible to search the site. Offering no search box, no site map and basically no possible way to find anything on your website.

6. Including content that only talks about you. Not mentioning anything about your visitors or how you can help them, just talk about you and your history and all your achievements. Including a big picture of you and your office building right on the home page.

7. Including only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar mistakes, and ubiquitous, curious and horrendous spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.

8. Not including any text. Making every page on your site one big picture. So for instance, on your home page have one giant picture of you and your office building and have no text so search engines can't see your site at all.

9. Using buttons for your navigation only, or use complicated JavaScript drop down menus that complicate your site's navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no text links, the search engines won't be able to spider (navigate and record) your website.

10. Making your site as difficult to read as possible. Use teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to read against some funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a black background.

Top 10 Technical Mistakes:

1. Making your website take forever to load in people's browsers. The longer the better.

2. Making it so that your site looks completely different on everybody's computer. So for Macs your site looks one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and FireFox.

3. Making it so that any functionality on the site is confusing to figure out and works improperly and inconsistently every time it's used.

4. Including lots of broken links and missing images throughout.

5. Setting it up so that it regularly crashes. For example, if more than three people are visiting the site at the same time, the home page becomes inaccessible.

6. Has no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any thing under the sun into your website forms. Maybe some smart hacker-types will enter executable code that corrupts or takes over your server.

7. Making all your site visitors have to download and install lots of plug-ins to view your site properly. If they don't, too bad.

8. Telling people that they have to view your site in a specific browser and browser version only.

9. Making it so that there are tons of pop-ups, moving newsletter sign-up boxes, running videos, animations and Flash movies that take forever to download before you can view the site.

10. Using lots of frames.

Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:

1. Making your website completely bounce-friendly. In other words, make it 'un-sticky' so that when people arrive on one of your pages, they leave immediately.

2. Including no calls to action so that your site doesn't ever ask your website visitors to do a thing. Making it so that every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors scratching their heads and then clicking away.

3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand.

4. Has no terms or policies page.

5. Evoke no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray, dull and forgettable.

6. Making sure there is no way for anyone who visits your site to sign up for anything or give you their contact info or email address. Certainly don't use your site to build any kind of email list.

7. Converting absolutely no one who visits your site into a paying customer. Ever.

8. Including no phone number, email and absolutely no other way to contact you. Hide behind your website.

9. Not using any kind of an analytics program like Google Analytics or Web Trends and not measuring or even looking at your website activity.

10. Making it so that search engine can't read your site and make it so that people can't really read your site either.

Follow these three lists perfectly and you'll be well on your way to having a bad and useless website and frustrating and angering everyone who visits.

About The Author
Jason OConnor owns and operates Oak Web Works, LLC, www.jasonoconnor.com and writes a periodic, free web design and marketing newsletter www.thenetgazette.net .