Image by kenjonbro via Flickr

Back in the mid 1990s, people started to say that you HAD to have a website.  So, you hired someone to code up a few pages and it was good…  You were done. 

Ten years later, those same people were telling you that you HAD to have a blog.  The cool thing was that you didn’t necessarily have to hire anyone, you could just toss one up.  So you did it… and then it kind of languished after the first couple of months because you didn’t get any direct business from it.  You were done.

A couple of years later, you finally started hearing from some of your peers that that blogging thing actually worked… so you dusted it off and started posting.  You were done. 

Seemingly, 30 minutes later, the consensus was that you needed a Twitter account.  But before you could call it done, you needed a FaceBook Fan Page… then you needed a YouTube Channel… and a Yelp presence…

Now, if you aren’t on Google+, you are just wasting time with the rest of your internet program… or so say “the people”.

When does it end?

Does it end?

Image by TheMBG via Flickr

Nope.  It doesn’t.  Technology and “what’s cool” keep marching on.  There is always a new site and there is always a new way to engage consumers.  There are always new channels and there always will be.

What’s worse… or better… is that they are unfolding faster than EVER before.  Newspaper dominated for centuries.  Radio dominated for generations.  TV dominated for decades.  Websites dominated for years.  Now we are down to weeks…  Maybe days.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to try to ride EVERY wave that breaks on the shore.  In fact, it means that you shouldn’t.  A hundred years ago, you couldn’t go big if you weren’t in the newspaper.  It would take a while before the next wave came in.  Now we have waves breaking constantly.

Pick your battles.  Figure out what you are going to be able to do… alone or with your team.  Learn ways to automate without destroying engagement.  Aggregation and Syndication can be your friends.  Link and leverage your networks.  Pick your battles. 

Image via Wikipedia

You aren’t done.

But you never really were…

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1 : to subject to or manage as a syndicate
2 a : to sell (as a cartoon) to a syndicate or for publication in many newspapers or periodicals at once; also : to sell the work of (as a writer) in this way <a syndicated columnist> b : to sell (as a series of television programs) directly to local stations 

— syn·di·ca·tion \ˌsin-də-ˈkā-shən\ noun

— syn·di·ca·tor \ˈsin-də-ˌkā-tər\ noun

source

Syndication is another part of a solid social media and social networking strategy. One of the biggest pitfalls of social media and social networking is maintaining a presence in many locations.  It can be a serious time suck.  Updating a bunch of site individually could take hours…  Even just keeping up with all of the profiles could be more than many people could handle.

Luckily, there are some tools that can make life WAY easier.  Posterous, AtomKeep and FriendFeed are three that come to mind…

Since we recently talked about FriendFeed, as an aggregator, we can start there…  It is unique, in that it both aggregates AND syndicates on multiple platforms. Through FriendFeed, you can make a post from Twitter show up on FaceBook, and dozens of other sites.  You can also have posts or activity from other sites reflected onto Twitter (or where ever… Twitter is used as an example).  Bringing in the data from a bunch of sites is aggregation, while putting the collected information out to a bunch of sites is syndication.

AtomKeep is unique in that it is designed to only handle one aspect of your social media presence… your profile.  Through AtomKeep, you can write the profile once and then syndicate it out to many sites.  Updating can be done in one step, rather than individually updating dozens of profiles…  There are limitations, since the least flexible platform rules all others, but it is a great way to handle to platforms on which you are least active.

Finally, the new kid on the block is Posterous.  It also has an aggregation capability, but the cool part is that you can email anything to Posterous and have it automatically routed to the appropriate sites (on which you participate).  Pictures to Flickr, FaceBook and Twitter.  Videos to YouTube.  Blog Posts… you get the idea.

The key to maiing effective use of social media and social networking is to be efficient.  Getting your message out to multiple platforms in one step is part of that efficiency…

However… Another aspect of an effective social media presence is INTERACTION.  Don’t just spam your message all of the time.  Remember to spend time interacting on the sites to which you are paying the most attention.

from Lane’s Active Rain blog

1 : a group, body, or mass composed of many distinct parts or individuals
2 a : the collecting of units or parts into a mass or whole b : the condition of being so collected

source

Aggregation is one part of a social networking and social media strategy. Simply put, in order to keep up with the rush of information, we need to collect, classify and filter it.  This allows us to spend the most time on the most important information, and skip the rest.

With Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Flickr and a zillion other networks, aggregating feeds can be quite challenging.  There are some tools that can help, though.

To start with, within some of the applications there are ways to bring in other info…  Through tools like FriendFeed and Ping.fm we can get a lot of our monitored feeds into just a few places.  I think that FriendFeed might be the best of these tools. Plaxo is also an excellent way to stay on top of multiple networks.

Specifically with Twitter, tools like TweetVisor and TweetDeck are great for keeping up with large numbers of followees (the people we follow) so that we can interact with them.  TweetDeck, for example, can allow us to run various streams at the same time with different groups or hashtags (like #activerain).

Finally, there is another tools that can be used to aggregate more feeds than any of the others I have run across so far.  It is also more effective as a filter, allowing the user to determine how much they want to see, although it doesn’t filter based on actual content… it filters based on the user’s input.  It is called Gist.

Keep in mind…

Any of these tools would be worthy of a write-up longer than this whole post.  To find out more, it would be advisable to check out their sites and see what they are about.

Feel free to share YOUR experiences in the comments.  Your fellow Readers would love to see opinions other than mine…

from Lane’s AR blog