Social Mediarology

On Tuesday, I moderated and sat on a panel of bloggers who write for the Indiana Insider Blog, which I manage for work. We had a good discussion and the audience members had some great questions ranging from blogging best practices to FourSquare and the future of social media. The focus of the panel was on blogging, but Facebook was brought up during the session as well. It got me thinking about a best practice for Facebook Pages – feeding your blog posts through to Facebook. It’s a relatively straight-forward process, but there are many different ways to feed your blog content through to Facebook.

There are a multitude of apps that will pull in your feed as well as Facebook’s Notes app, so I’ll go through some of the most popular ways to pull in your Facebook content and give you the pluses and minuses of each.

I’ll detail Facebooks Notes App, the RSS Graffiti and Networked Blogs apps and Hootsuite after the jump…

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Here’s some exciting news for music lovers out there:

Music discovery engine Pandora is receiving some deep social integration with Facebook, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the F8 Developer Conference.Made possible by Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, Pandora will be able to stream music directly on Facebook.com from bands you’ve “liked” across the web. You’ll be able to see which of your friends likes similar music and check out what other music they like and have in their collections.

The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook.

Pandora Partners with Facebook for Social Music – Barb Dybwad

For music junkies like me, this is great news. I tried out the iLike application when I first joined Facebook, but I’ve always loved Pandora. For the uninitiated, Pandora is an internet radio station that plays music you like. Create an account, enter a song, artist or album you like and Pandora will create a radio station playing similar music for you. You can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each song, which helps Pandora create better recommendations. You can only listen to each song once, so enjoy it while you hear it, but there’s always something new to listen to.

Facebook was smart to integrate with Pandora, as MySpace still seems to be the place to be for most bands and musicians. This could really give Facebook and Pandora the momentum they each need to stand out as tops in their respective fields.

Have you used Pandora? What do you think of this deal?

Late last week, HootSuite – the social media management software of choice for Social Mediarology and Indiana Tourism – made some upgrades to their service. I blogged about HootSuite and how helpful their service has been for Indiana Tourism here. Below are some of the key upgrades HootSuite activated.

Enhanced Team Collaboration:

In an effort to expand team collaboration, HootSuite has changed the way users manage accounts.  When you add an account, you’ll be asked if you are the owner. As an owner, you can give access to the account to other team members who also manage the account. As account owner, you have full control of adding or deleting members. Since the account owner can give access to team members, each member can manage those accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc) through HootSuite without needing to know the master password for each social media account. This just enhances the privacy for those accounts and puts the organization in control of their social media accounts.

The video below should give you a good feel for HootSuite’s expanded team collaboration features.

Reply All Feature:

If you’ve ever tried to reply to a tweet where multiple people are mentioned, you know it’s a bit of a hassle to type in everyone’s handle. HootSuite has fixed that problem by implementing their Reply All feature.

Simply hover over  the right-hand corner of any tweet and click on the down arrow. Then click on Reply All and your updates box will automatically populate with the twitter handles of everyone mentioned in the Tweet. This makes replying to multiple people in the same message easy.

Hootsuite University:

HootSuite University is another featured that was launched last week. Beginning on May 1, HootSuite will offer their HootSuite Professional Program. The program includes HootSuite Training Certification, a monthly webinar and a place for members to network, share ideas and talk with one another. For more information click on the image below or visit Learn.HootSuite.com.

If you have an iPhone, you can start managing your social media efforts from your cell phone. If you have an Android phone or a Blackberry, rest assured that HotSuite is working on an app for you as well.

Are you using HootSuite to manage your social media efforts? If not, how do you manage them?

Twitter and Facebook have changed the way that many of us communicate. Not only do we communicate with our friends and family differently now, but we consumer news and other media differently. We interact with current and potential customers differently. We get breaking news from Twitter and Facebook, not from the evening news. It’s because of this that it’s so important to know how to best share that information. Twitter and Facebook are the two largest social media sites in the country and each site has created simple ways to communicate important information with your friends or people who follow you.

Sharing on Twitter: Retweeting

On Twitter, there are a few different ways to share, or Retweet, information. The first way to do it is through what I’ll call the “classic retweet.” Seen below, the “classic retweet” simply consists of copying and pasting the message that someone else posted, and adding an “RT @username” to the beginning of the message to let people know you’re sharing someone else’s message. In this case, both @VisitIndy posted the message and @TCMIndy retweeted it before we did:

This “classic retweet” has been around nearly as long as Twitter has and was a practice that grew organically from Twitter’s users. Recently, Twitter implemented an official Retweet function, seen in the image below:

You can see the underlined Retweet link in the image above. If you wanted to retweet the message that @ThisIsIndiana posted, simply click on the Retweet icon and you’ll share that message with your followers.

You can see the Retweet icon () next to the status update. In this case, @VisitBtown clicked on the Retweet link to share @IIB‘s message with their followers.

However you choose to share information on Twitter, retweeting is a useful way to share important updates with your followers. You can use these retweeting techniques to spread the word about different events going on in your area, sales going on at local establishments or state-wide promotions to help inform your followers about what they can see and do in Indiana.

Sharing on Facebook: Shares and Mentions

Sharing information on Facebook isn’t always as easy as clicking a Retweet button and being done, but in some cases, it can be!

If you like Visit Indiana on Facebook (see Quick Update below), you can easily share any of our photos, blog posts, links and anything else that has the share link as seen below:

When you click on the share link, you’ll be presented with an overlay window like the one seen below. You can then insert your own message and when you click the Share button, the message and link/image/post you shared will show up on your wall.

Sharing content in this way is extremely easy and can dramatically increase the reach of your content. Once your page has 10,000 fans (I know, that’s a lot of fans!) you’ll be able to see detailed sharing statistics in addition to the information you can currently view with Facebook Insights.

One last feature I’ll talk about is the use of Facebook Mentions. Similar to the way you can mention @VisitIndiana in your tweets on Twitter, you can also now mention people you are friends with or organizations you like through Facebook.

Quick update – Right when I was in the middle of writing this post, Facebook changed the way they refer to organizations’ fans. From now on, you can “Like” pages rather than become “A Fan”. This appears to be merely a semantic difference, but we’ll start referring to our fans as people who “like Visit Indiana”. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also refer to “Fan Pages” as simply “Pages”

In the image below, you can see I mentioned both Tastings Indianapolis and Conrad Indianapolis. This message was posted on our Visit Indiana Page, but since it mentioned Tastings and the Conrad, it also showed up on each of their pages! This is a great way to spread the word from your official page, rather than from your personal profile.

The only caveat here is that in order to mention an organization, you have to personally “like” their page. In other words, if you manage the Madison Indiana Facebook Fan Page, buy you haven’t personally “liked” the Visit Indiana Fan Page yet, you won’t be able to mention us.

It’s really easy to mention another organization or person in your status updates. Simply type the @ symbol then start typing the name of the person or page and a list will pop up for you of all people you’re friends with and all pages that you “like”. You can see in the status update below that it’s very easy to include mentions in your Facebook status updates.

It’s really easy to share information via Twitter and Facebook and these techniques will give you even more flexibility to share the information you want with the people you want.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Twitter since it became popular in 2008 has been “How will Twitter make money?” People have made across-the-board speculations, including selling out to Google or Microsoft, charging for business accounts and selling ads. It seems that Twitter’s first step toward fiscal solvency is to begin selling “promoted tweets”.

Mashable is now reporting that the first of Twitter’s Featured Tweets are live as see in the screenshot below courtesy of Richard Nevins and TwitPic:

For now, it appears that all Promoted Tweets will be located within Twitter’s search function. In effect, the promoted tweets work a lot like the sponsored ads you’d see in a search engine. Some big names are among the first to get involved with Twitter’s Promoted Tweets: Starbucks, Bravo Network and Virgin America.

I think this is actually a great way for Twitter to introduce ads, and try and generate some revenue, without seriously detracting from the platform. The fact that many of Twitter’s power users update and view their Twitter account from third-party applications like Hootsuite, TweetDeck and various mobile applications makes traditional banner advertising next to useless for Twitter.

Not only do search-related text ads make sense for Twitter, but they can be useful for users as well. If you’re searching Twitter for “coffee” and Starbucks’ Promoted Tweet is the first thing that pops up, it could remind you that a Starbucks Venti Americano is sounding really good right about now.

I have no idea exactly how Twitter plans to integrate Promoted Tweets throughout their site, but the real usefulness for this functionality is how it could align with mobile users. Say you’re visiting Indianapolis and you’re looking for a place to have some locally brewed beer. You type in “local beer” in Twitter’s search on your iPhone and Scotty’s Brewhouse has a sponsored tweet letting you know about their assortment of locally brewed beers. Wouldn’t that be great if Scotty’s Brewhouse purchased a Sponsored Tweet for the phrase “local beer” in Indianapolis? Geotargeting Sponsored Tweets would fit right with my recent posts on Foursquare. Only time will tell if Twitter heads in that direction.

Here are a couple of other great articles about the new Promoted Tweets program:

• Mashable
• New York Times
• Ad Age

I’m as big a Google advocate as anyone. I’ll swear by Gmail,and Google Voice has revolutionized my voicemail and the way I leave myself notes. I use Google Contacts as a central repository for all of my professional and personal contacts. I’m always finding some new way to parse web data in Google Analytics. While I only use Blogger now for my personal family blog, it was where I got my start in blogging. I keep up with dozens of blogs through Google Reader. Even though YouTube‘s new auto-caption feature still has some bugs to be worked out, it has tremendous potential for, among other things, disablity compliance. At home, all of my photos are stored in and organized by Picasa, and every time I need directions, I pull up Google Maps.

Even though that’s all true, I can’t help but feel that Google has lost it’s edge lately. Last September, they launched Google Wave, which was touted as the future of email. Google Wave incorporated Gmail-like email functionality, collaborative capabilities like Google Docs and the ability to see responses in real time. First revealed in the summer of 2009, Google Wave was rolled out to a handful of early adopters in September. Almost as soon as it was released the blogosphere was buzzing with disappointment. Part of that was due to the fact that, with the rolling release of Wave, some of the earliest users didn’t have any one to interact with. In addition, Wave was confusing for even the most savvy web users. Though Google has made some small tweaks to Wave since its release, the general consensus is that Wave has been a let-down.

In February, Google released Google Buzz to all Gmail users. Buzz was to be Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. With a built-in user-base of more than 150 million, Google wanted to create their own proprietary social network to let users interact with one another through their email client. In addition to some big privacy concerns, Google only let you pull in updates from Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed and several Google-owned sites like Picasa, YouTube and Google Reader. Notice that Facebook is missing from that list? On top of that, Buzz doesn’t allow you to push out updates to Twitter, Facebook or other social networks, which makes it even more of a walled garden than Facebook, Twitter or others. Social media is at least in part about openness and ease of sharing and Google Buzz simply doesn’t cut it on those two counts.

Finally, Microsoft recently announced that they would incorporate an optional Foursquare layer to Bing Maps. I blogged about this in a previous post, and the Foursquare layer is now a reality on Bing Maps (Visit maps.bing.com and click on Map Apps, then click on Foursquare Everywhere – you might have to install Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin for it to work). This kind of integration is something I would have expected from Google, not Microsoft. If Google hopes to remain the technology giant that they are, they have to be on the forefront of social technology. Microsoft and Yahoo already beat Google in integrating real-time information (Facebook & Twitter updates) to their search engines and this is just one more area where Google is forced to play catch-up.

Every company is bound to release some products that are duds, but it feels like Google has been experiencing more than its fair share of duds lately. On top of that, they’ve been happening on relatively big products. I’ll still keep using the Google products that I know and love and I’ll continue to try out any new products they launch, but if they keep taking missteps like this, it might not be long until Google is reminiscent of some of the past tech and search giants like Apple before the iPod and Altavista.