Earlier this week I wrote a post about follower-building services on Twitter, warning about the dangers and how people may perceive you if you use them.

It felt a little bit like preaching to the choir.

Amy Mengel made an excellent point in the comments to that post:

“Unfortunately the people on Twitter who promote these schemes and have tweet streams full of nothing but the garbage you outlined above probably won’t be reading this post and getting the message!”

This made me think – did I target the post correctly? I came to the conclusion that in that case, no, I didn’t. If the people reading this site already view follower-building services that way, they’re more likely to be the people talking others out of these tools than the ones using them.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions on how to approach people using follower-building services and help them to re-think their approach to their followers (which, it seems, we all agree isn’t a good one).

How to approach

• Approach delicately: No-one likes to be backed into a corner publicly. Consider approaching them privately.
• Give them a way out: Ask questions instead of pointing the finger.

Reflective questions

• Benefits: What benefit . ...

You can’t monitor the whole Internet. Nobody can, not even Google. So what do you do? It’s obvious that you can’t ignore it? You need to be monitoring something.

“But I don’t have budget for fancy monitoring tools.” You don’t need any budget. There are dozens of free or nearly free tools to use but you could probably just monitor Twitter if you had to.The easiest and cheapest way is set up your team with TweetDeck, let it run in the background at work and run a search for your keywords.

I’m not advocating that you only monitor Twitter (and the above solution only works while TweetDeck is running) but I think if you only did one thing, it would be to monitor Twitter? Why? Why not blogs or set up alerts?

Twitter is the water cooler of the Internet. One could argue that it’s becoming the World’s Water Cooler. But they’d be wrong. The World has many Internet Water Coolers.

Facebook is the World’s Largest Water cooler.

The Facebook Water Cooler started off as a brand of water bottles exclusively sold at college. It quickly became the favorite water cooler brand in the US and is quickly become the favorite at all of the Internet’s international offices as well. ...

You’re at a conference, the wifi is good, and you’re excited about live tweeting the next speaker. But have you ever wondered whether it’s “OK” to copy and publish someone else’s words and ideas? If you were at the movie theater, neither the studio nor the theater operator would permit you to videotape portions of the movie to post on your blog. On the other hand, the art of critical commentary goes back to at least Shakespeare’s time, so it’s definitely established both in common practice and in the law that reproducing information, even copyrighted information, is acceptable under certain circumstances.

Setting aside issues of whether the practice is actually useful, and whether it is distracting to the speaker and to others in attendance, live tweeting and live blogging of conferences, events and webcasts raises legal and ethical issues. Producers of webcasts and live events often charge admission for these, and they may include copyrighted material. Speakers may also have copyrighted their presentations, or may (in my case) quote substantial portions of a copyrighted book or other work. These words and ideas are essentially products that are sold commercially, and the owners .. ... read more >>
 

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I like to use to use images to help illustrate the theme or point of a blog post. It’s a proven “best practice” in blogging and I highly recommend that every blogger do it.

One trick for easily finding and properly using images in your blog posts is to search the creative commons licensed photos on the photo sharing site Flickr.

So, what’s Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has created a standardized set of tools for granting various levels of permission for people to use creative works freely. The author or in this case photographer of the works designates a type of license and then Flickr allows you to sort through and find only photos that are free to be used for blog posts. I choose to use photos that carry the attribution/share alike license. This means that I may use the image here as long as I attribute the image to the Flickr user’s account where I found it. Here’s Flickr’s description of CC licenses.

So, here’s how to find and grab great images.

1. Surf to the Flickr Creative Commons Search Page - all images you search for here are free to use with proper attribution
2. Search for a specific phrase or concept .. ...

Here are a few ideas:

1. Fireworks Finder Mobile App - A simple map based application that would allow you to search for local destinations that have fireworks to decide where to go. In addition to the location, it would offer useful information like what else is happening, and how long the fireworks in that area are estimated to go for. After all, who doesn't want to see the longest fireworks display? Who This Idea Works For?: Fast Food Restaurant (could show nearby restaurants), Fireworks seller (link to nearby retail spots), Local city governments (to increase tourism and locals who stay close to home)
2. Fireworks Countdown Timer - One of ...

Part of what a lot of companies are looking for in the social media space is to be able to integrate social media into their existing marketing efforts.  Before this can happen the company really needs to understand what their current marketing efforts.  I know this sounds intuitive but a lot of marketing is a “black box” for organizations and marketing “just is”.  I’m working with a client on socializing their existing marketing and integrating social media into their existing marketing efforts.  I thought I would create 2 off the cuff examples of how companies can “socialize” their current marketing:

Customer Purchase

Existing Marketing

Customer makes a purchase and at check-out receives a thank you email for purchasing from the company.  Sometimes this can be followed with a discount for a future purchase or a reminder to purchase something else in the future.

Socialized Marketing

Customer makes a purchase and upon checkout is asked to join the company facebook fan page to receive special offers, promotions, sneak peak items, etc.  In addition an email is sent to the customer with a link to the company twitter page should the customer have ... read more >>
 

I think Social Friending is Scalable, but not neccessarly with one person reaching out to thousands of people - and in a guest post on Beth Kanter’s blog, @socialcitizen points to the Dunbar number of 150 contacts the human mind is hard wired to be able to maintain close contacts with.

There is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships (this is also called Dunbar’s Number). Beyond this number, which is estimated to be around 150, the stability of the relationships begins to break down and connections are not as meaningful.

Think about your own network on Facebook or the people who follow you on Twitter. Most probably fit into one of these three categories:

• Actual legitimate friends: You may have known them since the playground or at college, these are the people who use social networks for staying up to date on what’s happening in the lives of their closest connections, aka: “real” friends. Whether it’s as mundane as what they’re having for dinner, or as exciting as capturing their newborn’s first steps - you take note and share in the moment.
• Information Seekers/Gatherers: These are the people who expand ...