Is Facebook Going To Lose Social Media Consultants Clients?

During my normal perusal of Twitter, I noticed something from Chris Brogan. His tweet was about possibly deleting his Facebook profile. It caught my attention and clicked on the link that brought me to his website.

He had written a quick post about the ads on Facebook. Basically he had seen a couple of inappropriate ads talking about women cheating and sexual encounters. I personally haven't seen any inappropriate ads on Facebook, but the reason I bring this up is a comment that I saw.

The comment was from Pete Codella, someone I hadn't heard of before but works in public relations and consults about social media. He said...

Chris - I couldn't agree with you more. I’ve also noticed some very distasteful ads on Facebook lately. It makes it increasingly difficult for me to be a proponent of using Facebook as part of a company’s online marketing and positioning strategy.

For someone who does consulting on social media or someone who is looking to do that for a living (me!) it's something that they need think about. Business are looking to get into the social media networks and if ads like those are riddled through Facebook, it might be hard to choose that network.

Facebook is such a big network that this one group of advertisements might be overlooked and seen as an anomaly, but who want their business associated with these ads? Facebook needs to be careful or they might lose those profiles and social media consultants might shy away and use other networks to promote their clients. It's just another thing to consider.

Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook?

I've been without my computer for the last five days or so because of a busted power cord. So I have been using my girlfriends computer which doesn't have TweetDeck. Not having TweetDeck has left me out of the loop on Twitter. It's been weird so I have been forced to use the actual Twitter website and refresh the page.

Well this morning, Twitter has been...well...all a-twitter about a certain article. Even Newsweek tweeted about it. The article is entitled The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook.

But is it really the ultimate? It's probably very close. The article was written by Tamar Weinberg who is a social media consultant. She contributes to Mashable and other online publications and is a former contributor to Life Hacker, so hey, she has some clout.

She focuses mainly on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn but the information really can be used for any social networking site. Make sure to read the article and use the information, because everything you do online is there for every one to see.

Bloggers To Follow On Twitter

Twitter has become an amazing tool and recently I have started using it a lot more than Plurk. I no longer feel that Plurk is superior especially with the amount of people on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter here.

It has become more of a small messaging service, SMS, but more of a small news delivering service. I follow some prominent bloggers and they share a lot of information and interesting sites. Here a few of the bloggers that you should follow...

@copyblogger

@chrisbrogan

@remarkablogger

@mintblogger

You may notice that I left off some the most popular ones including Darren Rowse of ProBlogger and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney. I don't have them on here because most of the tweets are either from their RSS feed or meaningless chatter.

If you are interested in more information about Twitter check out Darren Rowse's blog about it, TwiTip or this article from Lost Art Of Blogging, Twitter: Why It’s So Great And How To Effectively Use It.

Linkbaiting: Good Or Bad?

A controversial topic in the blogosphere is whether or not linkbaiting is a good or bad thing. We will cover a couple different topics about linkbaiting and then try and decide on whether or not you should do it.

First, what is linkbait? Linkbait is what bloggers and other Internet users call posts that are written for the sole purpose of receiving a digg or stumble. But since the word linkbait has negative connotations should we continue to call stuff linkbait, and is that word even relevant?

Obviously we all want lots of traffic and Digg and StumbleUpon can provide it, but is writing posts specifically for the purpose of being bookmarked or added to social media sites the right thing to do?

We all should be writing posts full of content that anyone would be happy to bookmark, but if those posts are few and far between than linkbaiting is a problem. On the other hand if you write every post chaulked full of content that is worth of being social media bookmarked than linkbaiting really isn't a bad thing.

Most blogs about blogging have written about linkbaiting but Darren Rowse from ProBlogger has a few posts on it. Take a look at his 20 linkbaiting techniques and his introduction to linkbaiting.

Twitter VS. Plurk: The Breakdown.

Micro-blogging services have exploded lately and more and more people are using the two big ones, Twitter and Plurk. It's basically like texting but everyone you are friends with can see what you write. Most people are members of both but I'm going to lay out the differences of the two services.

Simplicity of making friends or accepting followers.
Twitter makes this very easy by allowing you to follow someone which means you can receive their tweets. If they follow you back then you are basically friends and you will both receive each others tweets.

Plurk has a system thats a little different. You can be a fan of someone and receive their plurks but they will not receive yours. With Plurk you have to ask to be someones friend just like other social networks. This system is very familiar to most people and I feel is the better of the two. Although, it seems to take a day or so for a new friend to show up on my friends list.

Tools, tools, applications, and more tools.
If you want to use some sort of tool or application with your micro-blogger service, then Twitter is your obvious choice. Tyler over at SMM Guru compiled a master list of Twitter tools and applications. Are this many tools necessary? No. It makes things way to complicated.

There are a few tools for Plurk, but for the most part, it's unnecessary. Plurk's messaging service allows you to reply to other people's messages directly in a little chat box and every time you login, it tells you how many new replies there are. The tools for Plurk in the link above just add a few new things to Plurk like polls or pictures while the tools for Twitter change the whole dynamic.

Very different layouts.
I am just going to come right out and say that Twitter's layout sucks. It's very bland and annoying. Yes you can use a tool instead of the actual Twitter site and you can change colors and add a picture to the background, but ultimately the programmers didn't design a great layout.

Plurk's layout on the other hand is very innovative and fun. The time line layout makes the messages easy to read and the ability to reply to each one allows for better communication. The karma idea isn't a new one to the internet as forums have started using it to try and deal with trolls, but it's a cool idea none the less. The higher karma you have the better options you have access too. It's quite easy to improve your karma which doesn't alienate those who have few friends.

Conclusion.
They are both great assets in helping build your social persona and being apart of both is most likely your best option. But, in my opinion Plurk is the better looking of the two. There are more people on Twitter but Plurk is steadily gaining ground. If you aren't a member of either you probably should be.

Big List Of Social Networking Websites, J-Z

This post has been added to the other list. Go to the big list of social networking websites post and take a look.

Link Baiting!

My goal for this blog was for it to be considered more of a magazine than just a blog. I eventually want to hire people to write columns on certain parts of blogging. As of right now it is just me posting and so I will try to cover every angle at some point.

I have been working on a post about social networks all day, but for some reason blogger hiccuped and lost half of it. Hopefully I will have the post up tomorrow. Until then, read this article from SmashingMagazine.com titled Golden Rules of Linkbaiting.

It's a very in depth article that will probably be able to answer any question about link baiting. These are the articles I would like to write for this site. The posts I have written are not that in depth, but this will soon change.

Social Media Sniping - The What And How

Social media sniping, or SMS (not Short Message Service - SMS), is basically searching for articles or blog posts that are starting to gain a lot of exposure and posting a comment on that site. Now this can get out of hand and look like spamming, so you don't want to do this all the time or with every article.

If you are going to snipe a post and write a comment, make sure you read the article and give something worthwhile. Don't just comment...

Cool post.

or...

I enjoyed reading this.

Your comment will actually need to answer a question of the article or another commenter or maybe even ask a question relevant to it. If you do leave a post, don't disregard this site altogether. Come back to see if anyone has either answer your question or maybe even posed another one. This will make your comment look even less like comment spam. It will also help if it's a post or article relating to your niche. Not only will this help with your credibility and expertise, but you will be connecting with even more people interested in the same things you are.

This idea isn't a new thing. A friend of mine bought a lot of stuff on eBay and always talked about snipe bidding when there are just a few seconds left. Tyler over at SMM Guru talked about Digg sniping, but I feel you can do this with just about any social media site.

So try it out and see if any traffic is brought to your site. If after a few SMS attempts

Social Media Is Very Important, But Why?

Whenever you are starting something new like a business or a blog, networking is one of the most important things you can do to get customers or readers. With the Web 2.0 there is an easier way to do this and it's called Social Media.

Networking is important because it gets your name and your business or blog out there into the public. Ultimately the public is who you are looking to connect with anyways, and social media sites make it incredibly easy.

If there is something that is of interest to you, than there is most likely a social media site that will allow you to friend others that are interested in it too. Tyler at SMM Guru wrote a post last month entitled Top 198 Social Media Sites By Niche. It's an amazing list that has topics ranging from sports to health to pets and tons of other topics.

These social media sites will allow you to connect with other people with the same interests as you and also get your "brand" noticed. Your visitors will be able to connect directly with you. I'm currently in the process of joining a bunch of them and so you will be able to connect with me through them.