After days of trying to add the Facebook Like Button to my wordpress.com blog, I finally found a simple solution. This site is all you need to increase your website or blog traffic.
Have fun with it. It is SO easy. By the way, if you read something about plugins, note that those only work for wordpress.org, not wordpress.com.
happy getting social 🙂
Suzan
Here is an article that appeared on Mashable today, discussing the increasing use of Android phones. Relates to my last post and my still indecisive mood about what phone to replace my dying BlackBerry with.
So Verizon will have the iPhone starting on February 1 and the ATT users with pesky phone service are finally free to switch providers. I, for one, have been a customer of USCellular for almost five years, and they do not anticipate carrying the iPhone until close to summer.
But I want an iPhone… I thought when I stood in the store this past Monday, forced in there by my dying BlackBerry Curve that I aquired about a year and a half ago as a refurbished deal. I quickly understood that I had the choice of either switching providers, going with an HTC phone, or waiting until summer hoping that my BlackBerry holds on until then.
It was been two days and I have slept on it twice. I know the HTC Mesmerize is sitting at the USCellular store on the safe shelf for me, ready to be picked up today. People I have asked say it’s better than the iPhone anyway. But I have to admit, I have fallen victiom of the brand obsession, congratulations Apple. I think I will try and give my BlackBerry a shot and wait for USCellular to release the iPhone sometime this year, who knows when.
One of my new year’s resolutions is to read the news and do social media for two or three hours first thing in the morning. Three hours a day is a significant time commitment, but I have found that they pass very fast as I browse through my favorite sites and share the best links with my social media networks.
There is so much information out there, though, that I barely feel like I have caught a glimpse of all that’s going on, even after three hours of concentrated browsing. There are websites I don’t even touch in my daily routine although I know they contain information I need and wouldn’t find elsewhere.
At the moment, the sites I visit are Cnn.com, Nytimes.com, jsonline.com, and mashable.com. This way, I get a good mix of news, opinion, video, and social media related stuff. But seriously, reading the news could be turned into a full-blown 40 hours a week job, and I would still be missing things. All I’m hoping is that I am doing enough to keep up with developments enough to avoid becoming a stone ager. I’ll see if my plan works out.
I started this blog in the spring to document my thoughts on social media in the frame of doing social media consulting. In the fall, I was enrolled in Emerging Media; one of my first three graduate courses at Marquette University. Linda Menck, my professor, required that we all keep a blog about emerging media and update it once a week. So that worked out nicely.
Now the semester is over and I would like to share a little bit about how the course has helped expand my social media horizon.
My favorite part about the class were all the guest speakers we had. Few of the professors I’ve had have small enough egos to turn it over to someone else as often as Linda did. The speakers all had unique backgrounds and valuable things to tell us. Check them out if you’re interested:
In terms of content, we mainly discussed the use of social media in marketing and personal branding. I already knew a lot about the marketing aspects, but it was still nice to learn about how various companies changed their approaches. I also got familiar with a lot of new technology.
Personal branding was very interesting, too. Many people in the class made personal sites for their final projects. I didn’t think I had to because I already had a website and all possible social media accounts. But watching the presentations made me want to centralize my content more. So one of my projects for winter break will be setting up suzanodabasi.com Should be fun!
For my final project, I did a prezi on social media and journalism. The class also made me realize that, while social media marketing is fascinating to me, my true calling still lies in journalism. Obviously social media has revoluntionized that field too, and I would like to be an advocat for its use in order to bring hope to those who believe journalism is a dying profession.
Understanding the dynamics of social media and being proficient in the technologies required to use it will prove nothing but helpful in all areas I am interested in: marketing, consulting, journalism, and research!
Humor me once and google “How to get more Twitter followers.” The results will seem endless. I can predict that most blog posts and wikihow-ish entries will tell you three things:
– follow people so they follow you back
– use hashtags to link your content to interested audiences
– Tweet a lot
Okay, that’s all fine and dandy. But there are a couple of questions you should ask yourself. Number one: Why do you want to accumulate a network of random people to blast your content out to? And number two: What type of person do you want to read your tweets (this includes location, interests, and career)?
I asked myself these two question, which motivated me to go out and get more followers. I got 100 new ones in a week with a few minutes of work per day. These followers will be useful to me because they are local (Milwaukee and Wisconsin), and they care about the things I brand myself with (social media, journalism, Marquette, etc.) I found them through lists, not hashtags. Because lots of people now make lists called something like “Peeps in MKE to follow.” Because I always include hashtags with #Milwaukee in a lot of tweets, I am now on 9 such lists myself.
I also have a specific reason why I want to build a large following. I need a strong local network because I want to stay and work in this area. So once I launch a business idea, I will have an automatic network of people that will automatically be interested because they are here and share my passions. Voila. That’s how you establish a meaningful and useful following on Twitter.
One of the things I am most proud of in my life is the amount of journals I have filled between my eighth birthday and today: 24, cover to cover, written in the past 17 years about anything that I deemed important – Anne Frank style. If you’re not already annoyed by me right now, let me get all humanities on you and say that my journaling experience has given me a bigger understanding of human nature, and made me a better person as a whole.
I am currently reading the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Holocaoust years. It seems that her experience with writing only for herself was a very similar one, intensified by her historical moment and personal circumstance (she knew she would be sent to a concentration camp and died in Auschwitz). Those of us with a passion and talent for writing just start doing it and it takes us a long time to understand how profoundly it fulfills and changes us.
While writing in a diary has never exactly been among the activities that increase your social networth, blogging is now cool. Many of my friends have blogs and try to update them regularly in whatever style they see fit. So more and more people are keeping a diary now – a virtual one. Does that mean we are all about to make great leaps in our understanding of humanity and lead elder generations into a better world?
Hardly. The reason I say that is that we can only discover our own depths and goodness through writing if we do it intensely and for noone else but ourselves. That is not what blogging is. Blogging is about being cool, about marketing ourselves with content we choose and distribute. Those who have the courage to post raw reflections for everyone to see probably already keep a journal with even more raw reflections.
So I believe that the best tools for creating a better self through writing remain pen and paper. Or a digital file, locked away only for your very own eyes.
Thoughts on Social Media 