Getting Started in Social Media

So if you're a Web 1.0 person who is feeling a little brave or irresistibly curious, here are a few places you might try out.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a great place to start. LinkedIn is the most professional and business oriented of the social media sites. It's not like MySpace and its ilk because members are real people using their actual identities. It's primarily used as a contact management system and relationship development site. You'd be surprised how many of your business associates, classmates, and colleagues are already using LinkedIn. As you develop your LinkedIn network you ask other LinkedIn users to join your network. LinkedIn tracks who you're networked with and who they are networked with. So if you wanted, for example, to make a new business introduction, you could find out who you know that knows the person you want to get introduced to, or perhaps who they know that knows you.

One facet of LinkedIn that I've been using a lot lately is LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn members post questions in various categories which members answer. I subscribe to a couple Answers categories via RSS feed and whenever I see a question where I can give a good answer, I take five minutes to post it. This has led to a bunch of visits to my website (since I usually point them to one of my newsletters for details), and creates good will among the LinkedIn community. It never hurts to help.

By the way--since you're reading this, if you're a LinkedIn member (or become one), would you please consider recommending me? LinkedIn has a built in recommendation system that makes it really easy to recommend experts in your network. Recommendations are very valuable and I would sure appreciate them from clients, agency partners and folks that have been following our newsletter for awhile (thanks!).

Diigo (in conjunction with del.icio.us) - Since I've talked a lot about del.icio.us already, and in past newsletters, I'll just say that for me, it's become a critical tool for managing RSS feeds, blogs and sites I discover daily. I also have seen significant traffic to our site through others having added me to their del.icio.us network and following my tags. (I'm ericholter on del.icio.us.)

Diigo is a competitor to del.icio.us and does basically the same thing. The main difference is that when you save a web page to Diigo, you can also highlight specific text on the page and add your own notes to the selection. These notes are viewable (if you leave them public) to other Diigo users. Didn't know that there is an invisible layer of Diigo notes over the web, did you? If you create an account you'll see Diigo notes here and there, and be able to post them yourself.

LinkedIn, RSS, Diigo case study: Just this week I got a LinkedIn Questions post in my RSS reader. Ian Lurie wrote an article called An Internet Marketing Manifesto. In LinkedIn he asked the crowd to comment on the article. I saw it in my feed and rather than just leaving a blog comment, I created a Diigo group called Internet Marketing Manifesto. Now anyone who has a Diigo account can see my notes I added to the page about specific statements and some of Ian's response--and you can chime in too. I love it when a feedpostdiigogroup comes together.

StumbleUpon - To me StumbleUpon is just plain fun. When you open an account, you tell StumbleUpon what categories you're interested in. You can then start "stumbling" the web. Click the Stumble icon and StumbleUpon directs you to a site they think you'll like. You can thumbs up and thumbs down the sites to refine your profile. You can also join groups, make friends and build a fan base. All of these thing continue to refine your profile in order to match you up with sites you'd like. I've discovered lots of cool and helpful sites this way.

MyBlogLog - Have you ever noticed blogs that have a list of profiles of people who have recently read the blog? These are all people who have MyBlogLog accounts. This let's the blog owner and readers know who is active on their blogs. On the MyBlogLog site members can join blog groups, add contacts and friends, and comment on member and group pages. MyBlogLog takes what was an invisible facet of activity (who's reading who) and makes it visible to everyone--connections made, groups established, popularity quantified, and the social web rolls on.

Flickr - I'm not a photographer so I don't use Flickr. But if you are into photography, Flickr is the social media site bar none for images--same structures, shared content, collaborative tagging, groups, fans, RSS feeds, popularity engines, and the rest. I subscribe to the RSS feed Flickr photo of the day and I'm always impressed with the quality of photos that come through. By the way, if you read our newsletter on Creative Commons, many Flickr participants make their images available under CC licenses. This could be a great resource for clients that would benefit from unique photography but don't have large photography budgets.

These sites are great places to get started in social media. I almost always use my real name as my member identity when I participate, but you don't have to. If you're more comfortable using a code name, go ahead, but try it out. You might be amazed at what you discover. And if you do bookmark your discoveries, add the tag "websmartcrowd." I'm going to subscribe to the tag and you can too. That way we'll all be able to share with each other the sites we find. Isn't social media great?!