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What has your experience with social media been like?

Guest Blogger: Jay, 36, Associate Creative Director

Social media is a relatively new experience for me, but one that I’ve embraced quite quickly. It was something that “all the other kids were doing”, so I thought I’d better join in or get left behind.

Currently, I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m also an active blog reader, especially the one my wife maintains about our children and their daily adventures.

I’m most active on Facebook and use it as a way to keep in touch with family and friends. It has become a daily activity, like checking email. Most recently, I’ve had a fantastic time reconnecting with old classmates from high school. Like so many of us experience, time and distance tend to wear away at old friendships. Facebook removed those barriers and has brought many good friends back together. I’ve even managed to get talked into helping plan our 20th class reunion, which might not have happened without those connections I’ve made online.

Seeing how much has changed in 20 years never ceases to amaze me, and I look forward to reconnecting with my old classmates in person.

LinkedIn has been a great resource to connect with other creative professionals in my field. I’ve found that professional organizations that I belong to (the NH Creative Club most readily comes to mind) have also set up LinkedIn groups, which adds another dimension to the relationships that I’ve developed. It’s been a good balance by keeping the monthly meetings loose and social (and less “networky”), while having the professional information handy should you need it.

It was a work colleague who led me to Twitter. I follow a few friends from work, some creative professionals, and updates from Walt Disney World. (Yep, even Mickey Mouse tweets about goings on at the parks).
I’m a pretty infrequent Twitterer however. I guess that stems from my lack of a multi-functional mobile device. I’m one of those people who still uses a cell phone for making calls, and that’s about it.

For me, the best thing about online social media is that it gives me the opportunity to grow those relationships that I have when I’m away from the computer. Getting the chance to reconnect with an old high school friend over dinner, making plans with the guys to see a baseball game, or setting up an outing with families in our kids’ playgroup–social media sites afford me a greater line of communication with those I want to connect with in a face-to-face manner. I’m a big believer that we need to keep the “social” in social media.

Jay likes this–”Thumbs up”.

What has your experience with social media been like?

Guest Blogger: Kira, 27, Account Executive, Pannos Winzeler Marketing

My experience with social media goes back to my last year-and-a-half of college, starting in early 2004 when it was all new and not many people were involved yet. Does anyone else remember Orkut, Friendster, or Hi5? Chances are, you probably don’t remember these places on the web, but these were first experiences with online social networks- for fun. And all of these first experiences were pre-Facebook. So, although Facebook was one of the first to mainstream, many people don’t realize that it has had some worthy predecessors. I feel reminiscent when I think back, because it seems like I am among only a few people in my online/offline social-circles who know this first-hand.

Orkut was my very first online social network- and I was addicted! Orkut was launched by a former Stanford University graduate student and Google employee, whose name was coincidentally, Orkut Büyükkökten. In essence, Orkut Büyükkökten was the first Mark Zuckerberg.

Preceding the introduction of Gmail, users were allowed to join Orkut by invitation only (similar to how Gmail launched by invitation only) and I was unwittingly invited by acquaintances from a semester I spent living abroad, as a college student. I don’t know who invited them, but that’s how I ended up on Orkut .

The invitation only aspect made it feel like you were part of some elite group. And I loved it because, ideally, it was a way for me to stay in touch and keep up-to-date with friends I made while living overseas.

Eventually, Orkut was bought out by Google and it died down quite a bit. Most of the people who use it now are from Brazil and India, from what I understand. I wouldn’t know first-hand because I stopped using it some time ago. And, that’s how I lost touch with all of my study abroad buddies- but I still feel that the idea and intention was worthwhile and really enjoyed the experience of being involved with friends on Orkut. My eyes were opened to the world of communication made possible via online social networks.

I didn’t value the online social network channel as much then, because it had not hit mainstream yet. I was one of the only people I knew, in my everyday life, who was involved with online social networking at that time. I could not have predicted how much it would evolve over the next five years, or so, to target specific audiences and address basic behavioral needs related to interpersonal communication and our current society.

Orkut, along with others like Friendster, and Hi5 were popular online networks that preceded MySpace and Facebook. It’s hard to find anyone who remembers these, I think because the newer networks like Facebook and MySpace were able to appeal more to the younger Gen-Y kids, based upon their creation to solely target the audience of secondary and college-aged students who were most likely to blow-up the online social networking phenomena to a broader audience. Basically, the predecessors, Orkut, Friendster, and Hi5 were not targeted to users who would be able to make them hit the mainstream. I think that was ultimately their downfall.

And, with that being said, Facebook was ideal in that college-aged students and communities are typically where a lot of early-adaptors can be found- trendsetters who can disseminate new habits and behaviors to the rest of us, over time. Now, Facebook has surpassed all other online social networks in users, including MySpace! How exciting to observe the evolution, as the user demographic becomes broader to include us all, no longer limited to the original requirement that Facebook established when it launched in 2004; being an enrolled college-student.

I know Facebook was the first social network for many college freshmen, including colleagues of mine (Meagan)! It’s interesting to see how those who have grown together from the start for the more mainstream networks have become a changed generation, in relation to technology and its use in day-to-day life. It’s such a new perspective to many of us- even though technically I am considered Gen-Y, I did not grow up with online social networks as part of my day-to-day life. In fact, I am on the cusp, between Gen-X and Gen-Y. Sometimes, it almost feels as though there is a dividing line that is drawn, especially in correlation to online use and behavior.

Now that I am a marketing and advertising professional, I am involved with social networking to stay on top of trends and demographic-based behaviors for the audiences that our clients want to reach out to. I feel that I have learned a lot from my colleagues and friends at work regarding the professional value of being on Facebook, LinkedIn and other online networks. When before, it was just about having fun and being casually in touch with friends. Now, it has evolved to personal branding, being aware and in control of my own online presence and using online networks as a tool to leverage communication and openness among those whom I am in touch with regularly, online and offline, too!

The most exciting thing to see is the current class of college students, heading for graduation, and being fully aware of the value to be had through reaching out to professionals via LinkedIn and Facebook! I strongly feel that this current class/generation of new adults gets it- to the point where they don’t even have to think hard about using these online channels to their advantage. It’s ingrained in some of them, which is good. They have the most positive relationship with the Internet than previous generations who grew up with computers, in my opinion.

I have to say that I am thankful for the opportunity to be included among others who also recognize and understand the value. Especially because, sadly, I know there are many who still aren’t sure and don’t get it. I think it’s sad because I worry that those who don’t get it are being left out, somehow.

Eventually, I would love to be connected to all my offline family, friends, and coworkers through various online networks because the busier and further apart we are in our physical lives- spread out across the world, it becomes more and more important to me to keep any and all lines of communication open. Social networks allow me to reinforce my bonds with those people whom I share common interest and values with.

Have you used Flickr?

I just had an occasion to get intimately acquainted with Flickr. I’m hosting a 2-year old party on Saturday and will attempt Elmo cupcakes. I wanted to see how others have decorated them, so I did a search for Elmo cupcakes on Flickr. 676 photo results appeared! Looked at lots of examples and off I went to the store for supplies.

At its core Flickr is a photo sharing platform. It’s another free social media application. Photos can be easily posted for all to see, or access given just to certain groups, such as friends or family. Photos are organized into sets (with common themes) and collections (groups of sets). Photos can be tagged with keywords such as “Elmo” and “cupcakes” to provide search relevance.

Flickr is social because of the interactivity it offers. You can connect with others through Flickr by having your own set of contacts and becoming part of groups. You can also post comments and notes on others’ photos. There’s much more you can do with Flickr including editing photos through their Picnik partner, and you can even purchase custom made photo items.

So, as a business what’s the best way to leverage Flickr? For companies with a tangible product, photos of all you have to offer come first and foremost. Billboards, ads and other marketing materials with compelling visual elements would be of interest to certain communities. For service businesses such as banks, consider posting photos of your exterior branch locations and tagging them with the town. Does your business participate in any community/non profit events? Post photos from those! There are a host of ways to bring exposure to your business through photo sharing. Tagging is the key here so people can find your photos. Make sure tags are relevant and incorporate your name and web site. The more relevant you are, the more search engines will drive traffic to your content.

On Flickr as with all other social media sites, there are rules of etiquette which are important to observe. At the top of the list is to be relevant in your comments and avoid hard, direct pitches via your photo streams. Here’s a thoughtful article on business uses for Flickr.

Here’s a link to our Flickr page. As you can see, we like to have fun!

Have you seen any smart business uses for Flickr? Please share.

When was the last time you picked up a yellow pages book?

For me personally it has been several months. Nowadays it’s so much easier to go online and do a search through a yellow pages web site such as superpages.com, yellowpages.com or just type the name of the company into Google or my favorite search browser at the time. (After we got a dog, it became Dogpile!) I’ll even admit that at home I will turn on a computer to find a phone number rather than go fetch the book. It’s not about being lazy; rather it’s all about getting the whole package. If I turn on the computer and look online I will not only get more info (links to web sites, product reviews etc.), I certainly will get more accurate and updated information. But hey, I know I’m just one person and a whole industry doesn’t hang on one person’s point of view.

So, I did some digging. Data wasn’t hard to find and suggests that the yellow pages industry is in a steep decline. Idearc, publisher of the Yellow Pages directories, was delisted from the NYSE on November 21, 2008. The Wall Street Journal at that same time said “The yellow-pages industry is running out of lifelines”.

The Kelsey Group which analyzes the Global Yellow Page industry noted, “Given the structural changes in the local ad market, we believe the next downturn will favor media choices that are more flexible and
provide a lower cost per lead than print directories, which would signal a profound shift.” One trend identified was a growth in opt-out plans to better distribute books to those who really want them. Another is a rise in tracking phone numbers to gauge performance.

From an advertiser perspective, one needs to consider carefully where your leads and sales are coming from. If you have a print yellow pages advertising plan in place, how can it be more effective? How many books do you really need to be in? A thorough analysis of sections, ad size, message and cost should be in order. Can you swing some of the money to online yellow pages advertising? If you choose not to advertise in the yellow pages, where best could those dollars be spent? Would it serve you better to shift those dollars online to either paid search, yellow pages search advertising or a combination of both? Or perhaps some of that money would be best invested in a new or upgraded web site so that once someone lands on your site, it conveys the image and the message you want.

There are a lot of opinions about where the industry is headed, what the evolution will look like, who the winners will be and at whose expense.  Where do you search for business listings and where do you see the industry going? Please weigh in!

Here are some of the other articles I read before writing this post. As with all information online, be aware of the source and their potential bias in reporting.

Phone Books & Yellow Pages on Google Trends

Yellow Pages Had a Worse Than Average Week

Is It Time to Abandon Your Yellow Pages Advertising?

Internet Advertising Trends

Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast In Four Years

Decline of Paper Yellow Pages - Rise of Online Advertising

Facebook membership is growing at a fast pace. Are you seeing the growth in your network?

Absolutely! The biggest indicator to the growth and acceptance of Facebook was my husband joining last week. The day after, he told me no less than 10 people came up to him and shook his hand to congratulate him. One friend commented ”I’m worried that this is one of the 7 signs that judgment day is approaching.” 

When I joined Facebook last summer I looked for high school classmates and found none. That’s right - zero. Granted my class was small, around 70. I recently did a search again and found 9 people. Hey, that’s growth!

Truth is, those age 35-54, still make up a small portion of the entire Facebook audience (slightly less than 20%). But this demographic is the fastest growing age group on the site, 276% over the last 6 months. To put that into perspective, Facebook is doubling this group every two months. Stunning!

Certainly this is a trend that can’t be ignored. Most people I know are excited to be a part of Facebook. They admit it’s easy to get caught up in it, but are finding it a really valuable (and fun) way to get back in touch and stay connected to people. Isn’t that what life is all about?

How is TweetDeck working for you?

TweetDeck is an application designed to to make organizing Twitter tweets easier. I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago and have to say it was very easy to get up to speed using it. The program resides on the desktop so it’s easy to launch. There are 3 windows by default. On the left are all the tweets from your followers. In the middle are your @replies and on the right are your direct messages. Those last 2 windows are key because in Twitter there is no alert that you have any @Replies and Twitter only gives the total # of direct messages. Who can remember how many direct messages you had the last time you logged in? Not me! It also speeds up conversations to be able to click on the person’s image to reply, direct message or retweet without having to cut or paste anything.

There are actually 10 windows that you can view in TweetDeck. Just scroll to the right to see them. You can view all of your followers. You can create groups of people based on the kinds of tweets they provide or as this YouTube video author does, you could create a group for those followers you see as providing valuable content. This video is a good quick intro to TweetDeck.

TweetDeck has a search function which is a very cool feature. When you do a search, the application puts the search results into a new window. The window stays there so this feature is good for tracking topics. My search for TweetDeck resulted in 126 tweets. But this search feature is not one and done, it keeps growing. By the time I was done with this post it was up to 200.

Some of the tweets I found via search said that they felt TweetDeck was more of a resource hog than Twhirl, which is another Twitter application. My computer was very sticky while TweetDeck was open writing this post. Once I closed it, the issue resolved immediately. So maybe I’ll give that one a try on my home computer for comparison sake!

Cast your vote! Which Twitter application do you like? TweetDeck, Twhirl or some other one?

There are a lot of Twitter search tools. How do you search on Twitter?

The two search tools I use most often are Search.Twitter.com (which is from Twitter) and Twellow. Not only can you search to your heart’s desire on Search.Twitter, but it also gives a top 10 ranking of the hottest Twitter searches right now. As I write this blog post #snowmageddon (Minnesota is getting hit hard with snow apparently), Safari 4 (Apple’s new browser released last week), and Rocky Mountain News (closing of paper) are the top 3 searches.

Twellow is an easy way to find people by name or industry. If you’re new to Twitter it’s a fantastic way to find people to follow based on common interests. I knew about Twellow way before I even knew about or used Twitter’s own search function! There’s something on Twellow I just noticed called Twellow Hood, which directs you to people in your geographic area. I find it hard to believe there’s only 885 people in the entire state of NH on Twitter-126 in Manchester. Some people don’t put their location so that may cause the numbers to be low. This is very cool to find people local to you.

There are plenty of other search tools. Here’s a good list of them.

What are your favorite Twitter search tools?

What was your take on the Social Media Breakfast NH today?

I’m glad I went. The crowd was diverse. The speakers were good. It was convenient to me, well planned and interesting. I met tech folks, writers, free lancers, marketers and a few people looking for a job. This is a great networking opportunity for job seekers by the way. A large portion of who I met worked at Massachusetts-based companies and as an outgrowth of the Cambridge/Boston Social Media Breakfast that seems to make sense. Some of those people work from offices in NH which is great.

The theme of the breakfast was Building Bridges and there were three 10-minute speakers. I found it interesting and actually refreshing that as much time was dedicated to networking as to the speakers. Everyone had their laptops and Blackberries going and I wonder how speakers nowadays feel about an audience that isn’t looking up at them. I found it takes a lot of concentration to be updating on Twitter and still paying attention to what the speaker was saying. Particularly doing this blog post, I wish they had printed handouts.

Jen Zingsheim from Custom Scoop was the first speaker. She talked about social media best practices and bridging the gap between old and new media. I didn’t know many people in the room, but I had met her at a Yankee Chapter PRSA event before (on what else, but social media!). Since I was Tweeting and only hearing the speakers for some periods of time I came to the conclusion that the second speaker, Wayne Kurtzman from Hello Direct, sounds like Casey Kasem. I wonder if anyone else got that connection. He gave some history on social media and also conveyed some aggregation sites for Twitter which were new to me (Twitter Search and Tweet Grid). Good sense of humor.

The event was capped of with David Hurlburt from WMUR-TV (though he made it clear he was there representing himself). He talked about trends in television broadcasting and how newsrooms and reporters are learning to adapt and change to meet the today’s news standards. Citizen journalists are now accepted and welcomed which is certainly a sign of the times. I have a disclaimer too: my husband is a reporter for this station.

These events are going to be held monthly. It was a full capacity crowd with a huge waiting list. No doubt the rest of these will be successful. Would be interested in others’ feedback on the event. Join in!

Heard any news lately about your generation embracing social media?

I read an article recently on Twitter from Time that said that the 35-44 year old population is the largest demographic on Twitter. I have to say I feel personally proud. Our generation didn’t grow up with technology, certainly not in high school. College was my first introduction to computers – mainframes. Work stations were housed in one room and connected to a mainframe. Whenever you needed to do a project you’d trek to the closest computer room. Computer programming classes taught us how to write in DOS language. I really enjoyed that class because of the logic involved. Little good it does for me 20-plus years later, right? Wrong. What they were really teaching us, which I think schools now more than ever stress, is the ability to think critically.

For us Gen Xers computer technology has been thrust upon us and from the stats it looks like a good portion of us have embraced it. Schools today recognize that technology is constantly evolving. Continuing education in today’s fast paced work environment is vitally important no matter what your age. Computer programs come and go like fashion trends, but the ability to learn, adapt, and think strategically, now that’s a recipe for long-term success.

What do you want to talk about today?

Friday the 13th is a good day to talk about how social media can go wrong. There have been a couple Twitter blunders lately. An advertising agency executive, who ironically was presenting to his client about digital media, made a not-so-enthusiastic remark about being in their city. Another mistake occurred when a reporter was upset at a marketing consultant.

So, it is perhaps a good time to review some principles of new media.
1. Twitter and blogs are public forums. You never know who will see what you write. So be careful.
2. If you put it out there for the whole world to see, you must accept the consequences. Don’t attack unless you’re ready for everyone to hear the other side.
3. If you write when you are all worked up have someone else look at what you post before it goes live. Or type your response but put some time between the emotion and hitting send or publish. Even better, pick up the phone and work it out with the person.
4. Don’t speak negatively about clients. Seems like a no brainer right? Well, apparently not. Best to take mom’s advice “if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I’m sure there are others I could think of but it’s Friday night, dinner is waiting and with today’s luck my computer will crash. Please feel free to add to this list.

Juicy stories grow legs fast. Just because we have this new great technology doesn’t mean it should replace traditional ways of communication especially when your personal reputation is at stake.