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Identifying Your Social Media Triad

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:00:32 +0000

I recently led a webinar for AT&T Small Business Insite about small biz technology and received a question from photographer Lemuel Fillyaw about managing social media marketing efforts:

I’m a tech addict. How much tech and social media is too much? Not monetarily, mind you, but quantity (in order to) produce quality?

My response discussed one of my personal theories on social media marketing:

I think of my Social Media Triad: Three very strong social networks where I’m building a good following and where I can do the bulk of my promoting. Everything else is the icing, while those three places are the cake. My triad consists of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Then when I want to cast a wider net, I use HelloTxt or Ping.fm to spread a little icing!

The term “Social Media Triad” is my own, just my way of stating that three good social media sites or tools can be your foundation; where you need to focus to build a following, engage meaningfully with others, and promote what you do in appropriate ways. Sure, it is tempting to have presences and profiles all over the place, but when it boils down to it, there are only a handful of places where you need to spend most of your time.

Your Social Media Triad could consist entirely of social networks, comprise a blog, microblog and a social resume, or be any combination that provides you with the right doses of:

Presence. You want to be places where it makes sense for you to be. If you are a graphic designer, LinkedIn might not necessarily be your first choice; perhaps a more portfolio-based network could be more appropriate. For a photographer? Maybe Flickr is the right place to start.
Reach. You want to have the potential to not just reach a lot of people but a lot of the right people. But remember, sometimes you can reach the right people through others who know and trust you, or can vouch for your work.
Interaction. You want to choose a place where you can interact with others in meaningful ways — in this case, for business. If you hate tweeting, chances are that Twitter is not a great place for you to be in terms of interaction.

Here’s how I break down my own Social Media Triad and how each one has helped me business-wise so far:

Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter since March 2007 and have taken a very personal approach to my main account @alizasherman. I dance on the tightrope that divides professional and personal. I share a lot of my own writing and work, my client projects, interesting articles and posts I’m reading, and my thoughts on all things social media. But I also riff about food, share personal photos, talk about how I’m feeling — and can get a bit confessional after a glass or two of wine. Blending the personal and the professional can be risky for many people, but that’s who I am and who I’ve been since I started my first website in 1994. I “live” online in ways that may make some people uncomfortable, but it works for me.

For business: Twitter helped me to re-establish my visibility in my industry after a several-year hiatus. Twitter has helped my company find some of our key team members. I get my daily news and information about my industry and the world around me from Twitter. I get answers to my tech questions, lots of feedback on my projects and ideas, and some incredible business advice in general. My support network on Twitter is phenomenal, even for business.

I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2002 although my original LinkedIn account became inaccessible to me so I actually have two accounts; this is the corrects one. I love LinkedIn and know that you get out of LinkedIn what you put into it. When I’m diligent with updating and reaching out to my contacts in meaningful ways, LinkedIn becomes a bustling hub of true business networking. If I need to find someone or something strictly for business, LinkedIn is the first place I go. But when I neglect LinkedIn, it tends to sink back into the shadows and is far less fruitful.

For business: I’ve found excellent candidates for positions with my company and some leads to new clients. I’ve been able to get top-notch advice on business issues, and try to reciprocate with answers to questions where I have expertise.

Facebook

I’m not a huge Facebook user. I jump in when I have something to share but tend to leave it for days at a time. I struggle with keeping my Facebook Page updated and have yet to engage often with people there. The real engagement that I get with my actual friends on my Facebook Profile is a wonderful thing, just not directly business-related. Still, I cannot deny the power of the sheer number of people using Facebook and the friendly networking that goes on that could lead to business deals and strategic partnerships. To me, it feels like while LinkedIn is the high-powered networking event, Facebook is more like the backyard barbeque.

For business: I’ve gotten a few client contracts from Facebook, back when I was still a sole proprietorship. Now that my consultancy has grown into an agency and our charge is to reach Chief Marketing Officers and VPs of Marketing at bigger companies, Facebook is a good place to have a presence, but in many ways it requires a lot more time and finesse for true B2B outreach.

Finding Your Triad

There is no combination that will suit everyone, and not everyone needs three social media accounts. Yet many of us have dozens, because we also have accounts on YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr, Foursquare or GoWalla, even MySpace. Then there’s Delicious, Digg, Reddit, not to mention accounts on online communities of interest and our blogs. Linking some of these sites together or occasionally using a broadcasting or cross-posting tool — like Hellotxt and Ping.fm or any number of new social media management systems (SMMS), like HootSuite and Sprout Social — can help make managing your multiple presences on multiple channels easier.

But if you want good quality business interactions in social media channels, pare down and focus — create value and vibrancy first. You can always expand out onto other networks again as you grow your connections, fans, friends and following. Always keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with your social media presences. And always remember the adage: less is more. Don’t spread yourself too thin, or real value is lost.

What is your social media triad?

stock.xchng image by blogless
diagram by Aliza Sherman

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Facebook Pages Now Supported By Status Update Services Ping.fm, HelloTxt

Eric Berlin — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:00:49 +0000

We recently covered status update services Ping.fm and HelloTxt, competitors in the growing market for tools and services that help social media fans and online marketers manage communication using multiple social media profiles. Now Facebook has made Facebook Pages, the publicly available profiles for businesses, accessible for updating via both Ping.fm and HelloTxt.

HelloTxt, for example, allows you to post text messages, images and videos directly to Facebook Page walls. And while both Ping.fm and HelloTxt support the common hashtag (#) convention used on many microblogging and social media sites these days, HelloTxt has gone further in allowing hashtags to be used as a way to quickly and easily manage outbound status updates. By using the Settings page, HelloTxt members can set hashtags to apply to individual or groups of social media sites, so that when a hashtag is invoked (such as “#dealoftheday,” for example) only those profiles tied to that hashtag will receive the status update. As ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez points out, this should appeal to online marketers and social media workers who are managing multiple Facebook Pages at once.

Facebook’s aggressive promotion of new products such as Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect serves several purposes. Pages allows Facebook to become a more “open” platform for companies to market their products to its enormous online community, while Facebook Connect is vying to become a universal login that people can use to access social media web sites across the Internet.

While Facebook was already included in the services that Ping.fm and HelloTxt supported, when you updated your Facebook status, only friends of that profile could see it. Because Facebook Pages are not subject to the same privacy rules as regular Facebook profiles they can reach a wider audience and so are better-suited for being part of the social media strategy that online marketers are increasingly using to reach a large, yet targeted, online marketplace quickly and efficiently.

Are Facebook Pages part of your social media marketing strategy?

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How We Talk About Social Media

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:00:18 +0000

Reading Eric’s recent post about HelloTxt, I went back to some old files and opened up a presentation I gave last summer at BizJam Seattle and was treated to some entertaining content. At least, it was funny to me. I just had to laugh at the way I struggled to come up with compact, clear ways of categorizing and naming social media tools.

How easy it is to forget that everything we use and talk about every day now — just one year later — didn’t have a set of agreed-upon terms. I thought I’d share some slides from my old presentation to show how difficult it is to come up with ways to describe the tools that we use.

I discussed what I called Social Media Aggregation Broadcasting Tools or SABTs. I defined SABTs as third-party applications that allow you to both aggregate and broadcast messages — or status updates — to your other networks.

I divided those into four categories:

Active
Passive
Niche
Integrated

So here is how I grouped applications that were available last summer:

Active SABTs were the applications that let you actively broadcast your updates to multiple networks. At the time, Ping.fm was still in private beta by invitation only.

Passive SABTs were the applications that you could add to your blog to allow others to update update their own social networks. All you had to do was make those links available to your readers and provide content worth sharing. Then you could sit back while others shared your content with their friends, fans and followers.

Niche SABTs were the applications that began popping up that were exclusive to a single network. The most common were the clients being developed for Twitter to make it easier to tweet without having to constantly visit the web site to access your account.

Integrated SABTs were the built-in broadcasting features that some of the social networks were adding on as integrated features.

Despite the chuckle that I got when I read my earnest attempt at crafting these terms, I actually feel that my theories still hold up. My attempt to “name” these tools was definitely more than a little awkward, but the intention was clear.

We are all facing a huge influx of apps and tools that we are struggling to understand, to learn how to use, and to integrate into our everyday work.

Seeing how far we’ve come in less than a year’s time is not just amusing — it is downright fascinating.

What are some of the ways you explained social media “back in the day” that gives you a little chuckle today?

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Say Hello To HelloTxt As Status Update Service Space Heats Up

Eric Berlin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:00:50 +0000

Just as services designed to help social media enthusiasts manage multiple online profiles are becoming increasingly popular, services designed to manage posting status updates and communication to multiple online profiles are becoming plentiful as well. Recently, I covered Ping.fm, which has now been joined by Italy-based HelloTxt, a similar product that allows users to update a host of social networking, social media and blogging platforms, all at once.

Like Ping.fm, HelloTxt allows you to update a large number of online profiles and publishing platforms through a single entry field. (They claim to support 45 “social networks” as compared to 30 for Ping.fm.) Upon registering for HelloTxt, you’re given the option to add your active profiles from a wide array of services, such as Twitter, Bebo and Remember The Milk.

The number of characters in the status entry field count “up” so that you can make sure to cut status messages off at the all-important 140 mark, to keep with Twitter’s character limit. A nifty feature included in the status entry area is the ability to “post in the future,” setting the date for a status update ahead of time.

Beyond text status messages, images can be posted using your Flickr account, video via YouTube, music and audio files via Blip.fm, and streaming video via Seesmic.

HelloTxt is accessible through the web, and can also be updated via email, SMS, and Google Talk. An API is also offered that allows developers to install the service on other web sites or apps, a popular trend for status update and microblogging products.

It would seem that HelloTxt is an emerging player in the status update space. The company claims that it has attained 30,000 users “with no marketing to date,” with 35 percent of daily status updates coming from third-party sites, through its API.

Like any evolving web product, it has some rough edges that should be worked out over time. For example, after adding a product (such as Bebo) to your HelloTxt account, you can add that same account again later; an indication that you’ve already added it would be helpful.

It must also be noted that HelloTxt’s tagline, “we are status,” is quite catchy!

What’s your take on the growing popularity of status update services such as Ping.fm and HelloTxt?

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