As we move into the holiday gatherings with our dear families whom we rarely see enough, I’d like to take a look at something…

The dearest things we give and reeceive in all the world are not wrapped in shiny ribbons and bows. Frequently our greatest gifts are as simple as a hand-crafted compliment that is entirely accurate and deserved, a kind ear that listens beyond the first several egoic-driven impulses to ‘move on’, and in so doing, giving another heart a chance to reflect and to be heard.

These types of gifts are often remembered for years. Perhaps even a lifetime.

I watched a lovely TED Talk by Brene Brown about the power of vulnerability (it was superb), and it reminded me that being true to yourself, allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to be loved and courageous enough to do the loving are some of the most miraculous acts we can perform. And we can give these daily, even hourly, without being even one ounce diminished ourselves.

I hope your holidays are rife with the love and joy that is family and loved ones.

This will allow us to break out of a crowded and cluttered social web and make more deliberate choices about which communities get the bulk of our time and energy. It’ll be driven likely by increasing user frustration at social behemoths, like Facebook, for their frequent privacy issues and the inherent disdain of an online monopoly on our friend connections and identity.

The next big thing is little.

What are your thoughts about the next step in the evolution of the social web?

Usually when I drill down and ask if there are any specific questions the response is nearly always “Well I just wonder what you would recommend.”

Its fine, I don’t mind this question and I’m happy to help when and where I can. What I think people are frequently looking for is some general sense of where to go from here. You’ve got a WordPress blog, now what?

So what follows is a general response to a recent inquiry I got from a buddy online. If it fits for you and is helpful… awesome!

In my experience its a bit of an ongoing process. You’ll probably feel out the design for a while and make changes til you’re happy with it.

I’d say make the effort to continue writing. Every day if you can find the time. Your writing will quickly evolve and you’ll define more and more your own specific topics and style.

Creating a clear focus or a thread that weaves its way through all of your content is always ideal, but that can take time to do it right. Often developing a sense for what this is for one’s own self takes a bit of time first. But write anyway. The focus will come. And if later down the line you decide you’d like to change focus you can easily do so.

Meanwhile you’ll be developing connections with people. A community that witnesses your writing and becomes increasingly engaged with you, your ideas and your brand (or personality plus expertise).

Remember that writing is building equity. All the rest is details.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Joshua

Is it inherently a bad thing to “toot one’s own horn”?

While it certainly tends to be inherently annoying for those around us (unless they care greatly for us and choose to see past it), I would argue that just a bit of occasional gloating is a good sign.

Be honest. You know that when you feel a sense of pride in something you’ve put effort into, you like to share it with those who feel close to you.

What about online? What about on Twitter or Facebook? How will your guilty excursions into touting your recent accomplishment fare for your image? Probably not well. But then you probably knew that. Certainly you don’t need me to tell you that gloating puts people off.   But I will say this. If the people whom you feel connected with and want to share this with are online in those venues and you wish to share it… do!

Why? Because god-dammit… be you!  – It’s okay really.

It’s your choice to share what you’re proud of.   Others can choose to take it in any way they please.  Besides, I for one want the opportunity to be even more proud of you.

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photo credit: Florin Draghici

End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it below.  For more on using Twitter for business subscribe to this blog or follow on Twitter

So I started to write about a related topic and the keyboard revolted. Or maybe it was my fingers.

In any case this post about “which are my favorite Twitter clients and why” pretty much wrote itself.  It’ll be useful for you if you are looking to reduce confusion or streamline your interactions on Twitter.

What is a Twitter client and why do I care?
The best user experience for Twitter is generally achieved using a Twitter client, an application that acts as an intermediary between you and Twitter and does some of your bidding; or at least makes the experience easier and more enjoyable.  Twitter clients also tend to make engaging on Twitter more feature-rich and faster than if you were to engage simply using the web interface.

My favorite Twitter clients and why they’re worth your time
On my Mac I use Tweetdeck.  It’s powerful, customizable and I find that it keeps me in the conversation.  It can however be overwhelming if you have many columns and haven’t customized the notifications to only alert you of the high priority items, like your @ mentions and lists you like to keep a close eye on.  If you need help doing this leave a comment on the blog here and I’ll help you out.

I also use Tweetdeck on the iPhone but strictly for the lists functionality.  I use it to stay up on my local peeps as well as lists I follow for news and happenings in the spaces that concern me.

Tweetie for iPhone has been for a long time my absolute favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It’s really great for accessing my main Twitter home feed and responding quickly to peeps I see there.  It’s highly intuitive and pretty fast.  Where the performance begins to break down is with lists.  Which is exactly why I use Tweetdeck for lists.  Tweetie is just too slow in this regard.  For most everything else it’s great though.

Hootsuite is good if you have a need to schedule individual tweets. Like for example, you have a thought or find some news at 11:20pm when you know that nobody will see it if you share, so instead with Hootsuite you can share it at a later time.  Just select ‘send later’ and choose the day and time you’d like it sent.  This functionality is available on both the iPhone app and the web app.

Tap 11 is my new shiny object as Twitter clients go.  I’m an analytics guy.  I get my kicks from stats and from drawing actionable conclusions from patterns.  If you like to track things too, you might like Tap 11.  In addition to being a more than decent Twitter client, it offers the added ability to view charts and stats about all manner of things you can geek out on.  It is still in private beta though, so you’ll need to request access.

What are your favorite clients and why? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.  ;-]

-@JoshuaGuffey (whispers: “follow, follow”)

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/evablue

You know you want one!

Now adding a Facebook button to your WordPress hosted site is as simple as installing a new plugin.

A bit ago I posted about adding a Facebook ‘like’ button to your posts.  The process was a bit janky since no developers had yet released any WordPress plugins to accomplish this task.  Now there are about a jillion plugins to accomplish this. Hooray!

I looked over several of them and settled on WP Facebook Like. I certainly didn’t test them all, so there may be a few out there that have some extra bells and whistles, but this one seemed solid, so I’m giving it a go.

The nice thing about adding this to your posts is that as people visit and ‘like’ your stuff, that shows up in their ‘recent activity’ stream, which is nice if your trying to use social media for business.

To install it:
Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “wp facebook like”.  Click the install button.  It’s that easy.

Like I said, there are several, so if you’re trying to get this exact one, be sure that you’re not installing some variation on this name.  The most notable of which simply adds the word “button” (ie. “wp facebook like button”).

By default you’ll see the button on all posts after the post content.  some users may want to have the option to exclude the button from certain posts or enable it manually only when desired, and I’m sure either a later version of this plugin or a different one currently available will offer this, but that wasn’t important to me.

So far I like it a lot.  It’s simple. It works. Tada!  (try it out below)

[note: If you're using WordPress version 2.9.2 or earlier it seems you'll need to select "iframe" as the embedding method. The default of "xfbml" works fine on WordPress 3.0 beta-1.]

For more ways to implement social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

Twitter automation isn’t a free ride

It may be a good idea to setup notifications so that you get pinged when your Twitter account sends out tweets from specific Twitter applications. You can arrange this via an advanced Twitter search and get notified via email or txt using a service like notify.me.

How to setup notifications for just Twitterfeed Tweets

Step 1 - Visit search.twtiter.com

Step 2 - Search “from:Username source:twitterfeed”
(you can do this for any ‘source’, not just Twitterfeed)

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Step 3 - Grab the resulting RSS feed link

Step 4 - Drop that RSS link into a service like notify.me for email, text or other types of notifications

Step 5 - Sit back and read your notifications via email
(or have them sent to you via sms)

For more tech goodies, subscribe to this blog via email

Essentially what this means is that Facebook has now made it possible to not only integrate elements of it’s interface, such as the ‘like’ button, into everywhere you go on the web; they’ve made it possible for you to bring the Facebook experience and your friends along with you wherever you go.

This also makes it possible to navigate the web as YOU; being served up web pages that are tailored specifically to your ‘likes’ from across the web.

Some of what this means now:

• Implementation of Facebook features across the web very rapidly.
• See what your friends like on websites all across the web.
• Ability to essentially be connected to your Facebook friends all the time across the entire web.
• Facebook becomes the hub for your ‘likes’ and those of the rest of the world.
• Share documents with friends via docs.com (a direct attack on Google Docs)

What we may see in the near-term future:

• Social search further threatens Google.  Facebook and Microsoft are working together so there may be some further implementation into Bing in the future.
• Expect advertisers to start to take into consideration your ‘likes’ from across the entire web and display customized ads on the pages you’re currently viewing.  This may position Facebook further as the most targeted advertising platform available. Imagine Google Adsense ads being replaced by Facebook ad panels.  This won’t happen immediately since data needs to be gather and frameworks implemented…but expect something like this to emerge.
• Increased competition for the web’s social default.  I’m thinking Google may jump in with their Gmail-based, relatively untapped, Buzz, however I’m unsure how well this would take hold.  The ideal would be an open source platform that keeps competition going, such as some implementation of XAuth.  Xauth isn’t ready (or even designed) for this type of use, but I’m still holding out hope for an open source, social web.
• This could further position Facebook as the go to location for data to fuel the emerging Social CRM trend.
• Third-party tools for accessing and manipulating Facebook’s open graph data in useful and meaningful ways.  Much like the third-party explosion of applications we’ve seen for Twitter.

Further thinking on how ‘open graph’ changes the game

This effects a lot of the web (basically all of it) and the many of the major players in the game.

First, it’s an attack on Google’s reining web-dominance.  As the web and search becomes increasingly social these two giants are pushing forward into this ever overlapping arena.  Google currently wields a tremendous amount of data about our web use and the information from its suite of services for organizing and managing our lives .  While Facebook seeks to be the hub of our likes and interest and seeks to make our daily web activities more social and personalized.

Facebook has now made itself essentially as open as Twitter while at the same time distributing itself across the web via the developer’s ability to embed certain Facebook interfaces into non-Facebook pages.  They’re counting on the rest of the web community to use this as the new standard and they seem to have significant forward motion in that direction.

Still, this poses the problem of disgruntled users who had come to expect the privacy the Facebook used to tout as central to their policy.  In March of 2008 Zuckerman, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, said “If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users”; this clearly isn’t their policy anymore.

Google could perhaps implement a similar system which enables a personalized web experience without Facebook’s vision of complete social integration; and perhaps offers a more low-key way of sharing, connecting and collaborating with friends online.

How do you expect these new changes to effect the way we use the web? Leave a comment below to voice your thoughts.

For more about social media for business or just to connect follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

There are a number of interesting considerations to be made about timing with social media marketing, depending of course upon the intention of your tweets.

Ideally, if you’re using social media for the purposes of personal branding, promotion or other communication with your people, you’re also actually being social. It’s what makes it fun, connected and gives people a reason to pay attention. But that’s for another post.

How can you be more sure that the people you serve are able to benefit most from your, let’s face it, tiny, 140 charater messages?  Just broadly, I’ll give a few recommendations. These will shift depending on your specific demographics and goals, but it’s a jumping off point.

1. Promotional tweets (or Facebook messages) should be sent at times when your target market is present in that social space. Give some thought to this and if you aren’t there yourself during those times to do the posting, consider a scheduling service. Hootsuite offers a free service that includes scheduling as does SocialPing (still in private beta).

2. Think about the content of your message and if it is appropriate for that time of day. For example, if you sell pizza and you’re running a 2-for-1 special, when do you suppose you’ll get your greatest return on tweets promoting the offer?

My guess as to a good approach (mind you I haven’t done any pizza-lover research outside of consulting my stomach) — I’d think about tweeting about it once around 4:45-5:30 (when people are leaving work or just left work), then around 7:00-7:30 mention it again in a different way (avoid I’m a robot syndrome). I’d also tweet something social or fun once or twice in between the two promo tweets. You don’t want to have your profile filled with promo tweet after promo tweet.

3. It’s also highly useful to align yourself and your message around what is relavant with current trends. And sometimes to have fun heading in the opposite direction from how others are doing it.

We want to be relevant with the current happenings in the world (seasons, holidays and even events with large media coverage or anything really high profile) but ideally to do so in a way that sets us apart from the rest.

A great example of this was a ski resort commercial I heard on the radio not long ago. They were promoting their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like, but they did it completely differently and hit their target market square on the head.

The commercial was with the usual absurdly-booming voice declaring that they were now on “Twitbook” and “Faceplant”. It was a riduclous commercial and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t snowboard or ski, so I didn’t go look em up; but I guarantee if I were into snow sports I’d have been there following them.

So this all relates to timing in that social media is now widely accepted as a marketing channel and promoted everywhere. But the message gets stale. Their ad was on target and also refreshing change from the usual “become a fan on Facebook”.

Can you think in different ways about your timing? Are there areas that could be improved? And what can you add to this conversation?

For more ways to think outside-of-the-box about social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

A while back I wrote a post entitled “Don’t follow us on Twitter” that was intended to get a conversation going about how we use Twitter, whom we follow & how we make that choice. I got several comments that helped me to view this topic more broadly. Thanks to those who commented.

I’ve got another thought for you on the topic of whom we follow on Twitter, and it’s thanks to my conversations with you.

It occurs to me that this is a very individual decision. People engage on Twitter for a spectrum of reasons ranging from purely personal to strictly business; it looks different for everyone.  Some just drop links from their blog. Others exclusively use Twitter to engage in casual conversations.  Many share links to things that are happening in their areas of interest or in their industry.  And a few of us have begun contacting companies for quick feedback and questions about their services.

The uses for Twitter are as varied as those using it. And your purpose for engaging on the service certainly dictates the manner in which you use it.

All of this also leaves out the manner in which you filter tweets, if at all.

Obviously, as your network increases in size with active twitterers, your stream will grow. If you are using Twitter for more than casual conversations (and even if you aren’t) you may want to employ some type of filtering so that you can focus on one group of connections at a time.

There are many ways to filter incoming tweets and as you ‘get bigger’ the methods you employ must naturally scale to enable you to continue to function at a high level. (if that is your goal)

You could choose to follow liberally and ‘see what shows up’ on your Twitter stream; or you could choose not to follow anyone but instead to use lists, groups or third-party services to engage where the action and interest is for you.  Most people will likely find their own follow style somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

Regarding this ‘to follow, or not to follow’ dilemma I’d like to share what seems sure to me.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

Three things seem sure to me:

1. That there’s no “right” way to make this choice; we all make it our own way.
2. You shouldn’t feel obligated to ‘follow back’ just because someone followed you.
3. And that “your way” may likely change over time, as all things do.

So go forth!  Follow who you will.  And don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong; least of all me.

What’s your follow style? Leave me a comment and let me know.

For more about Twitter and ways to filter the incoming data stream that is today’s web, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

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photo credit: Wallula Junction

So I was thinking today that I’d really like the ability to tag my tweeps. I mean seperately from how lists work. In fact, sort of backward from how lists work.

Here’s what I mean:
I recently followed a mobile app developer. I know because he has it listed on his Twitter bio. But what about in three months when I realize I need to talk with a mobile app developer?

I’m not going to look at everyone’s profile whom I follow. And if he isn’t very active on Twitter or on at different times than I am, I may not really have him on my radar.

I don’t have other mobile app developers that I follow so I’m not going to create and manage a list for just one person.

So how do I find him?

I could tweet to ask if there are any, but he may not see it.

I could search all of Twitter for people with ‘mobile app’ in their bio, but what if I really liked his approach and specifically want to try to work with this guy? Besides, it’s possible that he’s changed his bio.

What I’d like is the ability to assign free form tags to any tweep I follow. Tags are different than lists so I’d get a different type of value from them. Tags are more flexible and have a lower maintainence cost. (I don’t know if this is an established term but it fits).

I want to tag tweeps more freely than I feel compelled to use lists. Lists seem cumbersome. Heavy. If you use Tweetie for iPhone, you feel this when you go to view your lists; they take a looong time to be retrieved from the server.

Perhaps tags wouldn’t be much different in this regard, but certainly they’d add a flexibility that I’m just not feeling with lists.

Are there already third-party solutions for this that I don’t know about?

Would you use this feature if Twitter added it? Your thoughts?

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Photo credit: pumpkincat210

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

I didn’t mean “what’s missing from the service?” I meant “what’s missing from my use of it?”

Today I asked a question about car seats and received a reply from three blogger moms that I follow within five minutes.  The responses were useful and nearly instantaneous.  Amazing!  Amazing and yet this happens every day on Twitter.  And to be fair, it happened on Facebook too when I got advice on the same topic from some moms that I know offline and stay up with via Facebook.  Since Facebook is still a sort of a closed system and the ladies aren’t really promoting themselves, I’m not going to list them here.

All of this gets me thinking.  Everyday.

What’s most amazing to me about platforms like Twitter is that I’m meeting intelligent, funny and talented people whom I would likely never meet otherwise. Very often these people are very apt to provide assistance in their areas of interest or expertise.

The service is also transforming the application of customer-centric service, primarily for companies that do not have a brick and mortar business model.  Tonight I sent this tweet to Timebridge and received a reply within the hour (after hours).

I’m learning a lot on Twitter every day; about a variety of topics of interest to me: tech trends, mobile computing, location-based shifts taking place in the social media space, web design, festivals I should be going to and a whole barrage of things that lift my skirt.  I’m connecting with a real community and even learning a few things about human interactions.  And I share the best of this stuff out to those following me.

What sorts of experiences have you had like this?  Leave a comment on the blog to add to this discussion.