A few weeks ago, one of my favorite tech bloggers, Louis Gray, wrote a great item regarding the myth of “social media overload.” In it, he listed what he thinks are the types of social media a person needs to be using these days in order maintain his or her identity online and to engage in the conversations taking place on the world live web.
The list, which likely will appear daunting to you if you don’t maintain any of them, is a great roundup. As many of the accounts he mentions work with one another (as in, when you update one, it will notify the other), the task of maintaining them is not as challenging at it may appear.
Most importantly, Louis explains that you don’t need to register for every new version of each one of these categories of services. People like Louis (and me) will sign up for every new one of these we run across, but that’s mainly for research purposes.
Here’s what Louis describes as a “full deck” of social media tools:
1 or more blogs that you manage.
1 or more accounts on an RSS feed reader.
1 or more microblogging identities.
1 or more accounts on a business networking tool.
1 or more accounts on a social network.
1 or more accounts on a service aggregator or lifestream.
(Also helpful: A social bookmarking site, online photo site, music recommendation service, etc.)
While I agree fully with Louis, if I were just starting out doing all of this and looked at this list, I’d probably not start. That’s one of the reasons I recommend people set up a FaceBook account (even if they are outside its core demographics). It is one service that lets you experiment with all the types of features and functions Louis lists. Personally, I have several reasons that FaceBook doesn’t work for me, but when it comes to providing a way to manage your identity, network of connections and a means of expressing yourself online, FaceBook is the benchmark service. Nothing else — and by nothing else, I mean LinkedIn or Plaxo — comes close to packaging together so many different functions and features.
Here’s the deck of social media tools I use most:
RexBlog.com: For the most part, this is what I consider to be my professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). However, I do reserve the right to head off into totally unrelated topics at times.
Delicious.com/rexblog: These are sites I bookmark that are related to business-related topics. I sometimes refer to this as my “link blog.”
Hammock.com/rexhammock : My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”
RexHammock.com : Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.
Twitter.com/r : Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I “hang-out” online.
Flickr.com/rexblog : Where I post photos.
YouTube.com/rexhammock : Where I post videos.
FriendFeed.com/rexhammock : A “lifestream” (a combined flow) of everything I post anywhere.
Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”
Bonus advice for those who have several cards from the social media deck: Use the microformat tag rel=”me” (as explained here) when you link between your “full deck” of accounts. Technically, I’m not sure what I just said, but Kevin Marks told me to do it so I do. I don’t know exactly how it works, but the result is this: When you Google my name, all of my different social media accounts show up, even though they have different usernames (rexblog, “r”, rex, rexhammock).
I can remember watching political conventions from gavel-to-gavel as a child. In hindsight, I’m sure that wasn’t a common behavior for someone in elementary school. But, I must admit, it has provide me with a tremendous backlog of political trivia I carry around in my brain.
At Hammock, we’ve got plenty of political junkies who watch debates and channel surf during the conventions. And while we have supporters of both parties on our staff, we tend to be equal-time observers when it comes to learning how the different campaigns reach out and embrace their supporters.
I recommend to anyone who is in a field involving relationship marketing to sign up for e-mail from both the Obama and McCain campaigns. It is fascinating to observe their use of e-mail, video and a wide array of online conversational tools. In 2004, the Presidential campaigns online were all about the introduction of blogging and the organization of meetup types of events. This year, it is fascinating to see how willing the campaigns are to try new tools and approaches.
This year, the way the Internet is being used is as historic as some of those conventions I saw when I was a youngster.
Jon Henshaw, the SEO guru (among many other things) at the web-development firm Sitening, says some very nice things about the online strategy displayed on Hammock.com. Thanks, Jon. We feel like Sally Field receiving an Oscar.
I’m back in the office. Rested and relaxed from a week at the wonderful John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. It may not sound “restful” to spend about ten hours a day for seven days making a loopback Windsor chair, but to me, it was enjoyable and, at times, inspiring. And, as usual when I have time to experience something completely new, I see the connections I never imagined before. While the trip was completely personal and off-duty (I even joked that my going offline was an experiment in being NeoAmish), Jamie Roberts assigned me a writing assignment related to it for an upcoming American Spirit. I also took plenty of photos and video. In fact, here is a set of photos on Flickr that follow the progress of the chair I made.
Summer is here. Maybe you’re ready for a vacation. We are. Click on the photo of a Hammock person below and learn about a trip they love remembering. Hint: It’s easier to use at the full-size version of the map here.
[Cross-posted on rexblog.com]
Wired editor and author of the book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an item on his blog today that contains an observation I believe is so obvious, it is completely missed by many self-appointed experts. (Okay, I’ll admit I live in that glass house.):
“Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at 3-5 times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic’s survey, but they’re improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.
This is a fact of life in business-to-business-media, where the business model has long been focused on “free” distribution of content to decision-makers in specialized fields. The “cost per thousand” (CPM) model of advertising sales does not exist as a metric in this long-tail of the media world. Of course, if an advertiser selling a $100,000 piece of equipment can reach 90% of the decision makers in a market of 5,000 specifying engineers, then, hell-yeah, the publisher of that content should be able to monetize it at hundreds of times the rate of, say, a newsweekly.
The lesson here: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more “monetizable” it will be.
Four years ago, just as the economy was digging itself out of the recessions caused by the dot-com bust and 9/11, our friend and contributor, the columnist Harvey King at MyBusiness Magazine, wrote a column in the form of “a letter to himself in the future.” He wrote it, he said at the time, to remind his future-self what to do during the inevitable economic slowdowns he would go through in the future. As we seem to be heading into that territory, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on Harvey’s letter to the future, which, with his permission, follows.:
Dear Harvey:
It’s me, Harvey. I’m writing to you from way back in 2004. I’m hoping you are older and wiser, but I’m afraid you may be getting a little fuzzy with your memory. So I wanted to send you a letter from the past to remind you of some lessons you said you really wanted to remember the next time the economy started slowing down. Good times, the kind I hope you’ve been enjoying lately, tend to dull one’s senses a bit, don’t they? Well, I hope this expensive, painful advice from your past will jog your memory a little and serve as a checklist for the economic slowdown on your horizon.
1. Do it now. Whatever it is that needs doing, do it right now. I hope you don’t have to downsize, but if that’s what it is, do it. If it means dealing with that confrontation you’ve been putting off, do it. It’s a lot fairer to all parties involved if you’ll just get it done.
2. Take care of your customers even more than you already are. I know you said you would never take any of them for granted, and I hope you haven’t. But nothing else will get you through what’s about to happen except the mutual respect, trust and loyalty you have with the customers you are serving (and profiting from) now in the good times.
3. Love your bankers. I don’t care if you really don’t want to, get on the phone with those bank folks and tell them how wonderful they are. I know Mom taught us not to lie, but do it anyway. If you timed this right and you’re still a few months from the downturn, use flattery and your current fiscal soundness to lock down the best and longest terms they will commit to. I know you think it’s crazy to get a bigger line of credit when you’re not even using the one you have, but is your memory that short?
4. Brace yourself. I know you don’t want to remember the pain, but get ready to relive some failures. You’re about to rediscover what your face feels like when the door hits your nose.
5. Be patient. You’ll hate this one, but get ready again for the world to move in slow motion. Remember, during a recession it takes a company six months to approve purchasing a package of pencils.
6. Do not panic. Hunker down, maybe, but don’t panic.
7. Read and study and learn. While you’re waiting for that pencil order, take up a new hobby.
8. Get ready for some great opportunities. When things start looking really bad, take those resources I know you’ve stashed away during the good years and start marketing when your competitors go silent. Get on the road when the airlines report that business travel has plummeted. During this recession, turn on some lights when things get their darkest.
9. Forgive yourself. Remember, you are not personally responsible for the entire economy, just the stewardship of your microscopic slice of it.
10. Write yourself a letter to the future reminding me (and you) how to make hay while the sun shines.
Historically yours,
Harvey
P.S. How are those shares of Google doing?
(Note: That P.S. is a joke – Harvey was not that smart in 2004.)
If you don’t mind getting dizzy watching Rex’s random camera-work, you can sense how much fun Team Hammock is having preparing for its first big event in this video from the Country Music Marathon Expo:
This is not yet another Earth Day post telling you how environmentally conscious our company is.
I assume you’d not be surprised to learn that we, like you, have grown more-and-more committed to thinking green. I assume you’d not be surprised to learn that we are working with our clients to increase their use of recycled paper products. I assume you would not be surprised that we are committed to working with printers who practice green manufacturing approaches like our largest vendor for the past 16 years, Quad/Graphics, that is seeking certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for all of its major manufacturing sites. I assume you’d not be surprised that we are enthusiastic supporters of all the efforts in the printing and graphics industry to encourage environmentally-friendly industry practices.
What I don’t applaud are the efforts by some to turn any discussion of the environment, printing and paper into an opportunity for shouted accusations and knee-jerk rebuttals.
For example, a few months ago, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson made a good-faith effort to measure the impact on “climate” of the content delivered in the paper version of the magazine vs. the content delivered via the Wired brand’s digital properties. “Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?” he asked. As expected from Anderson, the author of the best-selling business book, The Long Tail, his blog post was a detailed comparison of the carbon footprint of a magazine like Wired (the impact related to paper, printing and distribution) with the carbon footprint related to the energy necessary to power each of the computers used to read the same content online. What he discovered was a surprise to some: the carbon footprint of the paper version of the magazine is not that different from the footprint of the same content delivered digitally.
As you can imagine, the debate over Anderson’s post (see the post’s comments) raged on for months — and is still raging, with back and forth arguments about Anderson’s motivation and methodology. Last week, on the Huffington Post, activist Todd Paglia even used a post criticizing Vanity Fair’s annual green issue to divert into yet another blast at Anderson: “Chris Anderson’s (post) about the magazine industry’s carbon impact came off less like the work of a cutting edge tech mag and more like a rehashing of the moribund timber industry’s lamest propaganda.”
Rather than point out the obvious fact that Paglia’s post came off less like a work of cutting edge environmental advocacy and more like a rehashing of lame anti-paper and anti-printing propaganda, I’d like to call on those who want to out-green one-another to recycle some of this energy into something productive.
As both a magazine-industry observer and participant, it’s rather obvious to me: Throughout the magazine industry, there is a recognition that adopting practices with less environmental impact is not only good for the environment, it’s good for business. And while we may want to believe that “going online” is a more environmentally friendly form of publishing, we often don’t take into consideration the unintended consequences on the environment of digital media. As we become media companies that are “multi-platform,” and not merely “print,” we must realize that “thinking green” is not limited to properties we create using paper and ink.
Rather than debate about who or what is more green today, I think a better approach is to stop arguing and start acting for tomorrow.
Here are a couple of suggestions about where to start:
Read Cherly Dangel Cullen’s, “18 Tips for Environmentally Conscious Publishing.” At Hammock, we’ve taken several of these steps and are working on more.
Check out the KinderHarvest program from our friends at MagazineLiteracy.org. The program rescues and recycles children’s and other consumer magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, and distributes them to children’s literacy programs.
Let’s celebrate Earth Day. Not argue over it.
Our friend Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 has released a new white paper called “New Rules of Custom Publishing – New Complimentary White Paper: Nine Strategies to Create a World-Class Content Marketing Company.” You can download the white paper in a digital format here.
After the jump, read Joe’s list of Nine strategies to create a world-class content marketing company. As anyone who follows Hammock Inc., it’s no surprise we agree with each one of them: