RichardKannegieser.com

I see many people nowadays using social media to build businesses that will only last for the short term. I guess this works for some, but it never sat well with me. I wouldn’t feel right building a super pushy page that looks like a bad infomercial. At the core, social media is all about building relationships and who would want to build a relationship with a pushy salesman?  Here is a question for you to chew on:

Are you building a “click here buy now” pushy sales page and trying to use social media to send traffic to it, or are you building a  community that trusts you, buys from you and syndicates your content? In other words, are you building a straw house that will collapse within a few months and require a total rebuild or are you building a brick house that will stand the test of time and turn into a viable asset?

A lot of it depends on how you brand yourself! You must be consistent with your brand and never force sell people anything, people don’t like being pushed into buying! If you focus on posting quality information that is educational, enlightening, or entertaining, you will gain a captive audience that trusts you, because you didn’t try force sell them anything and you provided quality content. They will start to see you as an expert in your market and see what you have to offer without it being pushed down their throats.

Also by being branded as an expert in your market you will gain a following that will help to syndicate your content for you and increase your social buzz. This will help you to obtain high pr back links and search engine rankings.

The bottom line is if you look at social media only as a way to build traffic you will only see limited short term results! You must build relationships with that traffic that is coming in, to release the true power of social media!

Have you used social media in the wrong ways and come to see the light? I would love to hear about your experiences and revelations!

Photo Credit, Csitscenter

Thanks for reading my blog, if you would like to learn more about social media and how you can use it to grow your buisness, you can download the free syndication revalation report, which also includes free educational lessons. Thanks for visiting!

If you built more social media accounts that you can handle its definitely time to trim some of them and cut down some altogether. There is no point in having more that one network that does the same thing, it takes away your focus and spreads you message thin.

You don’t have to be on 5 different micro-blogs to get your content to those micro-blogs. If you provide good quality content your content will get to those micro-blogs. You don’t have to have a stumble upon account to get your stuff on stumble upon. If it’s good stuff someone will stumble it for you! This is the Way Social Media was intended to work!

By focusing on a few choice social networks, you can more actively participate and concentrate your signal more to rise above all the noise. You can focus your time back into building communities and relationships. Its all about Quality vs. Quantity. Quality relationships vs. Quantities of so called friends.

So what do you do with all the “Other Accounts” that you have? I pondered the same thing and came up with a conclusion! DELETE THEM! I deleted 10 of my social media accounts so far. I never used them and only set them up and posted to them with ping.fm occasionally, and gave them nowhere near the attention needed to build relationships. Plus as the Social Media Technology bubble is going to POP soon anyway and alot of those networks will die off.

Every one of your social media profiles, gives an impression of you and if your not managing one of those social media accounts 100% then when people come there they don’t get the greatest first impression of you. After deleting all of those networks be sure to unlink them from the sites you keep and also remove them from your aggregators.

Also, go through your social networks that you are keeping and trim up who your friends are in those networks. People that haven’t logged on in 2 months and you have no idea who they are don’t belong on your friends list, LoL I found a few of those! Jason Falls made a great post about the Bonsai Method of Social Media Management which talks about trimming your networks.

Bottom line: A small focused effort with a loyal following is much more powerful then a broad effort with people who barley know you! Focus you efforts and you can rise above the All the noise!

When I signed onto my Myspace yesterday I saw this message from Tom right on the front page:

Homeland Secuity Using MySpace For Emergency Alert Notices

The Department of Homeland Security is now using Myspace to get word out about Hurricane Gustav! That just goes to show the power of social media! It kinda reminds me of the Socal earthquake a few months back that got so much response on twitter and beat the news stations to releasing it. “Graph of twitter results for quake”.

Social media is emerging as a new viable emergecy alert tool. Does this mean soon enough that we won’t only see the “BEEP! This is a alert from the emergency alert system BEEP!” on our tv’s but also on our social media accounts? Will they start using social media to alert certain geographics specifically to emergency weather alerts?

It definatly has the potential to be a resourceful and useful tool to notify people, but will it start to be implemented accross the broad spectrum of social media networks? It already has by Myspace and Homeland Security apparently, but when will it all be integrated to other social networks, is only a matter of time I think.

Not all of them, but the death for many of them is coming soon. There are just too many of them out there and they all do almost exactly the same thing. There’s room on the Internet for more than one micro-blogging service, just as in the same way that there is room enough for Myspace and Facebook to coexist. But how many of these micro-blog networks can exist and still have an active loyal following? The time is coming soon that many of these micro-blogs will die off and only a few triumphant ones will remain! As of now the top five micro-blogs by Alexa rank are:

1.http://www.twitter.com Alexa rank — 995 - PR8

2.http://plurk.com Alexa rank — 22,477 - PR3

3.http://jaiku.com Alexa rank — 44,759 - PR7

4.http://kwippy.com Alexa rank — 109,904 - PR3

5.http://www.brightkite.com Alexa rank — 144,590 - PR5

I was suprised that identi.ca didn’t make this list, I thought it would have, but it ranks 241,378 and has a page rank of only 1.

UPDATE: Laconi.ca the distribution site for the software of identi.ca has an Alexa rank of 102,546. I’m glad to see they are going better than originaly thought cause I’m a big fan of open source.

Alexa Micro Blog Results

And for those of you who don’t like alexa numbers anymore here is what Compete has to say about it:

Compete Micro Blog Results

So by the looks of it twitter is gonna be here for a while, but what about the rest of the micro blogs? Which ones do you think will last? And where do you think micro blogging will be a year from now? Also if there are any others site you think I missed be sure to let me know.

This is just a test. I am posting this to see how fast my content gets indexed in google.

This test is being run also at charlesheflin.com. Charles’s blog has a PR of 3, while mine has a no page rank yet and is brand new.  In theory, his should get indexed faster than mine due to that, but we want to put it to the test.

We are both doing video updates on our results. For the full story and the update videos go check out Charles’s blog post.

Time of submission of new content 12:13pm Friday, August 22nd 2008

Want to drastically reduce your feedburner subscribers?

Just add the new adsense for feeds by Google. Apparently that’s what happened to Chris Brogan, Todd Defren and many others over the blogsphere. It may just be a bug, or it may be Google making stricter rules on what is truly a subscriber, so they won’t have to pay out as much money!

I hope that its just a bug, but either way this is definitely not making a lot of people happy! To lose over half your subscriber count, if not all of your subscribers like has happened to some people is just crazy! I don’t personally like the idea filling your feeds with ads, but to each his own. Either way Google better jump on this and fix the issue quick.

Bottom Line: It’s defiantly not a good way to release your new product by making everyone angry at you!

While compiling my new blog I began to ponder “Do I really need all these networks?” Do I really need to be on 7 different micro-blogs? I have an account on Twitter, Identi.ca, Jaiku, Plurk, Pownce, Kwippy, and Brightkite. I like that I can post to all of them with a single post from ping.fm, but it seems like one way communication to me.

Let me explain a little more in depth what I mean, I have started to notice that some of these accounts that I have on some networks and pretty lacking for real human interaction. I send out messages with ping.fm, but without going to the network specifically I can’t see what people are saying back to me. I could use friend feed to see what people are saying about my posts, but it will only show me the friend feed conversation, not the conversation on the network. So by using 7 micro-blogs I now have 7 conversations to manage on the same subject. 8 if you count the conversation going on in Friendfeed Even more than that when using Friendfeed you have to take off most of your networks other wise you will put the same post up on FF multiple times. All this really bothered me.

So what is the solution then? I’d have to say its a personal opinion and what your objective is in your social media campaign. Its a case Quality vs.Quantity . I know that the point of being on massive networks is to extend your reach into the social media landscape, but it can also hurt you if you don’t manage your networks properly. If you are using ping.fm to post to social networks, and then not maintaining each of those networks, the real users of those networks are not going to trust you or value your content as much. If you have time to take 1 micro-blog post and manage the 8 different conversations that come up on it in each network, more power to you, but that just seems to time consuming to me. I think by building quality profiles with real friends that you interact with and talk to often is much more powerful than a bunch of profiles that seem half built and dead. So I’m thinking of starting to trim down my networks, so that I can pay them the attention that they need.

What do you think? Do you think its better to have multiple profiles accross mass networks, that are very time consuming to properly manage, or is it better to have a few networks that you can manage efficiently and effectively? Or is there someway to efficiently manage all these networks that I’m just over looking?