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Social Media Tools:
An Explanation for “the Rest of Us”

April 11, 2009 By Adam

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of people who have yet to jump on the social media bandwagon. They aren’t necessarily technophobic, they just have other things to focus on in their business or their lives. Because of what I do, these people tend to ask me “What is all of this online stuff good for?”

That’s actually a really good question to be asking if you aren’t used to using all of these sites every day. Not “Where so I start?” or “How do I get into it?” but — especially if you are only doing it to further your business — “What, specifically, are these tools for, and how do I use them to my benefit?”

So, for those of us you who want a roadmap before you run out into traffic, I’ll try to explain a few of the big sites people are excited about right now. The goal isn’t to get you to use all of these, but to help you understand the tools in a basic way that allows you to decide whether or not to try them.

Twitter

Twitter asks “What are you doing?” right at the top of their site. It was originally designed as a way to let your friends know what you were up to in short, easy-to-share portions (“I’m about to get a drink at Starbucks on Washington St. if anyone wants to join me.”). It quickly morphed into a public forum where anyone can talk to anyone — and everyone — else about what interests them.

Now, you can easily send messages to a few different groups through Twitter:

People who are interested in what you, personally, have to say (your followers).
People who are interested in a specific topic (through hashtags or Twitter Search).
Any individual you want to send a specific message to, or you want to ask a question of (using the “@” sign and their Twitter name, e.g. @AdamWeiss).

Twitter is good for connecting with like-minded people, or for keeping up on the absolute latest news in a particular area. In a mundane example, you could track all mentions of “MBTA” to get a feel for what is happening on Boston’s public transit system. While that is mainly just a curiosity for most, if you are a PR person for the agency, it could be quite useful information. If you have a brand — or just a concept that is very important to your business — Twitter can provide a window into the latest news, attitudes, and happenings in any field.

Oh, and putting your recent Twitter updates on your website is a great way to always have fresh information for visitors.

Facebook

Facebook is the current 800-pound gorilla in the social networking world. It is a place to connect with people you know, both personally and professionally. You set up a profile, with your picture, work and education vitals, interests, and basic contact information. You then find friends, colleagues, and old classmates and ask to be their “friend.” This lets you both keep current on what the other is doing and exchange messages.

Whenever you publicly do something new on Facebook (add a friend, comment on a photo), everyone you know is able to see that and decide whether to check out the profile, website, or photo that you just visited. This can be a bit disconcerting at first, with everyone seemingly “stalking” your online life. However, it is really a way for you to spread your influence quickly and efficiently. If you post a news article you found about your industry on Facebook, everyone you know will have the opportunity to see it if they visit your page. If one of your friends likes it enough to post it themselves, all of their friends will see it was well.

So, when you say “I just met with my client ________, and we talked about their new great service,” you are broadcasting your expertise and your client’s work to a large number of people. Better yet, if one of your friends makes a comment as simple as “Congratulations!” on something you’ve posted, all of their friends will see that note, along with the information you posted to get the praise. If two friends respond to you, you will have reached twice as many people without doing much work at all.

There are many more things you can do with Facebook (create pages for your business, become a fan of your favorite TV show, post Twitter-like “status updates,” etc.), but the above is where you should start. You’ll be surprised at the number of friends you’ll have just after you sign up — my mom recently created an account completely by accident, and she had 50 friends by the end of the week!

LinkedIn, when taken rather simplistically, can be considered “Facebook for Business.” It is a place where you can connect with people you have professional relationships with, get references and job referrals, and ask the experts in your contact list questions about their industries. It is also a good “mini-resume” and an automatically-updated Rolodex for people you do business with.

In my opinion, the one place where LinkedIn really shines is in its ability to help you find connections with the people you want to be talking to. If there is a particular expert or prospect who you want to get in touch with, a LinkedIn search will tell you who you know that knows them — and give you the option to ask for an introduction.

At this point, many people are using Facebook for a good number of the things LinkedIn is designed for, so — unless you know that a lot of people you want to interact with are already on LinkedIn and not on Facebook — I would recommend choosing Facebook over LinkedIn if you only want to sign up for just one of the two.

Delicious

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site. That may be a bit of an odd concept, but it is a useful one. Delicious is like the bookmarks feature of your web browser, posted online. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with delicious, but the “beginner” version is pretty simple: you can bookmark sites that you like, organize them, and share them with other people in your field.

Adding a link to your delicious bookmarks on your website (or embedding the actual list there) can instantly turn you into an industry resource. If your opinions are respected by others in your field, they will want to see what you are reading online. Delicious is a simple way to do that without much effort at all.

Digg

Digg is based on a very simple but powerful concept: people want to look at the stuff other people like. If there is something you like online, you can submit a link to Digg, and millions of people will have the chance to vote on whether to put it on the front page of the site. If a link makes it onto the front page, it could get hundreds of thousands of clicks.

Digg ignores one of the best things about the web — the ability to find what is useful to you, regardless of whether it is popular — but getting noticed there can get you more attention than you can handle (servers routinely crash if a site gets “Dugg”). If you have a strong interest in one of the categories of sites Digg covers, you can find great information every day. Also, if you produce great information, submitting it to Digg gives you a shot at being seen by millions.

YouTube

Everyone has heard of YouTube, and almost everyone has used it at this point. Millions of videos are watched every day on the Google-owned site, so if you are producing videos for any reason, they should probably be there. YouTube is also a great resource for your blog or website — it is extremely simple to put a YouTube video that is relevant to your work on your site using the “embed” info next to YouTube’s player. This gives you access to great content for free, and allows your video to easily spread throught the web — something I just experienced when my GV Mobile demo got 60,000 views in just a few days.

YouTube is just the search and delivery system for the videos; you have to have one to put it up. You can go the “quick and sloppy” route and use your webcam, or you can work with a producer or videographer to put up some really high-quality footage using YouTube’s HD playback feature.

Video can add a lot to a website, but it can also detract. The merits of the medium is beyond the scope of this post, but if you are going to be making video, put it on YouTube.

If this overview was useful to you, use it to try out some of the technologies I talked about: Tweet a link to it on Twitter, post it on your Facebook profile, save it on delicious, submit it to Digg, or even make a video about it for YouTube. The great thing about all of these tools is that they are easy to try, and it won’t really hurt anything if you decide not to get involved and delete your account. So, if one — or all — of these sites sounds good, give them a try!

Send iPhone/iPod touch Users Directly to iTunes

April 9, 2009 By Adam

bbtsiphone If you are a podcaster, you should consider making a change to your show’s site: instead of providing an “iPhone friendly” version of your site, send iPhone and iPod touch browsers right to your iTunes listing. This accomplishes two things: it keeps you from having to find (or make) a good mobile version of your site, and it gives your visitors the ability to add your podcast to their device immediately and start listening right away.

For those of you who missed it, the most recent set of new features for the iPhone included the ability to download podcasts directly to your device’s iPod app without connecting to the computer. Essentially, they have provided a pre-formatted list of all of your available episodes — accompanied by “download” buttons that add those files right to the official player app on the iPhone and iPod touch. That’s way more functionality than you can provide in a mobile version, and it’s all set up for you already.

As an iPhone user, this is great: it allows me to add a new podcast directly to my phone as soon as I hear about it — not to just start streaming it, but to actually store it for later listening, which duplicates the while “timeshifting” part of podcasting that you used to need the computer for. It also lets me add the latest episodes of a show to my phone without making a trip to my desk. When I’m traveling, this is essential, as my iPhone is synced with the iTunes library on my desktop computer, not my laptop.

As a podcast producer, it gets my content exactly where I want it: on the device that a potential listener is carrying with them right now, exactly when they are in the mood to listen to it. It removes the “I’ll listen later” mental excuse that people so often forget about, and it also provides the “media instant gratification” that iPhone users are now used to (for better or for worse).

I’ve set up Boston Behind the Scenes to do this, at least partially. I don’t have a browser-detection redirect set up, but I do have an “iPhone” link at the top of the page. I also have a mobile-friendly URL set up: http://bostonbts.com/iphone (on a computer, this link will just take you to the iTunes store — try it on your iPod or iPhone). Both lead directly to the iTunes app when clicked.

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, do you like this setup? Would you prefer to have producers do this, make a mobile-specific site, or just leave their sites alone?

Review: JustOneClubCard.com

April 7, 2009 By Adam

just-one-club-card-combine-all-of-your-club-cards I came across JustOneClubCard.com about a year ago, and now I get asked about it almost every time I use a “loyalty card” at the store.

Why? Because all of my loyalty cards on on one laminated card in my wallet.

JustOneClubCard.com is a free service that generates a printable image of all of your shopping cards. All you do is print out the page, cut on the dotted lines, and laminate the folded paper (and I use “laminate” loosely — I did mine with packing tape).

The resulting card was a bit smaller than a standard US business card (the short side is about the same, and the long side is significantly shorter), but I think that depends as much upon your printer as the site. I had to print a couple of them before I got one I liked, but that was entirely due to me being picky about the placement — and bad at packing-tape-lamination.

After a year, I still love the concept. There are only a few annoying things about it:

You can only place eight cards on each printout, so if you have a lot of cards you’ll have to make more than one. It is free, so this isn’t really a problem.
Some cashiers have a bit of trouble comprehending what you are giving them. I’ve never had it rejected, but I have gotten some confused looks and requests for directions.
The biggest problem I’ve had is with people that don’t realize that you have to cover up the barcodes you don’t want to scan if you are using one of the built-into-the-table laser scanners. Handheld scanners are more precise (though I usually hold it up with my hands covering the other codes rather than hand it over, even in that case). Sometimes that has resulted in confused checkout machines, but not very often.

If you are like me and don’t like a bunch of stuff on your keyring or in your wallet, I highly recommend this site — but only if you don’t mind conversations in the checkout line.

Eddie Doyle Laid Off From Cheers

April 7, 2009 By Adam

Cheers Last month, Cheers laid off its senior bartender, Eddie Doyle. I’ve gotten a bunch of emails about this from people who heard my Boston Behind the Scenes “Cheers” episode, where I interviewed Eddie about his time at the bar and his thoughts on its fame. Here’s my take on Eddie, and the bad news he got last month:

Eddie Doyle told me he started coming to Cheers, then called the Bull & Finch, a long time ago (the Globe puts their introduction in 1969). He said that a photographer friend of his told him to check out the Bull & Finch when it was a brand new bar. Eddie had some trouble finding the place at first — an experience that many Boston tourists share — because of the big canopy of the Hampshire House restaurant that still obscures the sign from one side. Once he got downstairs, he really liked the place, so he stayed for 40 years.

At that point, Doyle was a graphic artist in an advertising firm, and he would spend time at the Bull & Finch most nights after work. “I used to come and enjoy the ambiance and all my friends here,” he said. Quite ironically, it was getting laid off from his advertising job that made Eddie Boston’s most famous bartender. He had been a regular for a while, and was doing some menu layouts and graphics work for the Bull & Finch on the side, so he was a shoe-in for the bartender job that opened up in 1974.

A few years later, he was getting the bar ready to open one summer afternoon when a man and a woman from California climbed over the bar stools he’d put in front of the door to keep people out. “It wasn’t like I dragged them off the street and twisted their arm and told them this was going to be it,” he told me in the interview. They introduced themselves, and asked if they could take some pictures of the bar for a new sitcom being developed by NBC. He said yes, and the setting for one of the most popular TV shows in history was decided right there.

Once the show aired, curious fans started coming in to see the place. Some actually expected to find Sam Malone behind the bar, but instead they found Eddie (who is actually a pretty good double for the show’s mailman Cliff). He said that it got to the point where he would average over 3,000 people in a single eight-hour weekday shift — and over 5,000 on weekends — after the show was on the air for a while.

The Bull & Finch pub became the tourist attraction “Cheers” after the staff noticed people stealing ashtrays, menus, and silverware. “Most of the stuff didn’t even have our name on it,” Eddie said, but they’d take it anyway. Eddie’s inner advertising man suggested to his boss that they start making T-shirts, and the Cheers gift shop was born. They tripled their staff, and became a must-visit spot for Boston tourists.

In the decade and a half since Cheers went off the air, Eddie saw the crowds dwindle. They started picking up a few regulars again — only two or three had stuck it out from before the TV show — but when I spoke to him in the summer of 2006, he thought that 90-95% of their business was still from tourists. That probably has a lot to do with the economic troubles that led to him being laid off.

Eddie may be the one that the articles are being written about, but there’s another casualty of his leaving that isn’t getting as much mention: Eddie used his fame and Cheers’ visibility to help a lot of people, work that will also come to an end with his departure. In his 35 years at the Bull & Finch, Eddie’s charity auctions and events raised over $1 million for children and the underprivileged. In an interview with the Globe, Eddie said he wouldn’t do the auctions after leaving Cheers — and the owner of the pub implied that they wouldn’t continue without him.

Boston’s Mayor Menino declared September 12, 1999 to be “Eddie Doyle Day.” Eddie deserves that honor, both for his service the city’s tourists and to those in need. At 66, Eddie will get to enjoy his retirement and the accolades that are being piled on him, but his departure will leave a much bigger hole than just the one behind the bar.

Use this player to listen to my interview with Eddie:

My “Geek Video” Debut

April 7, 2009 By Adam

lifehacker-google-voice-for-iphone-and-ipod-touch-coming-soon-gv-mobile I just checked my Google Reader before going to sleep, and I was quite shocked to find the GV Mobile demo video I made at the top of , , , and who knows where else!

So, if you found your way here due to the credit at the end of the video, welcome! If you are an iPhone developer (or are friends with one), and you’d like a similar video made, I’d love it if you’d contact me. I made the GV Mobile video as a favor. If you hire me, yours will look even better!

Thanks,

Adam Weiss <- click here and solve the captcha for my email. For more info, Click “About/Contact” at the top of the site.