Can social media make you more popular?

We used to measure our popularity and successful relationships by the number of friends we had; those who exchanged birthday cards, met for lunch, sat on the front porch on a summer night. Now, though, our "friends" are measured by the activity in our social media sites.

How many followers are enough to make you popular? If you have more social media traffic, are you inclined to make more frequent posts? Are thousands of online friends better than a few true friends? Is social media an effective way for you to keep in touch with close friends?

A recent Writer's Digest article posted counts for notable pageviews for writers trying to prove they have a decent following for their work.



Notable numbers are high, starting with:

20,000/month for blogs
5,000 followers for Twitter and for your own email newsletter.

By those standards, most of us are lurkers - reading just the blogs and Facebook/Twitter feeds we can scan in a few minutes.

It's summer, and we know where our real friends are - out on the porch, waiting for us.

Get to know Google Plus

Here's an excerpt from a review I did on the Complete Idiot's Guide to Google+. If you're tired of Facebook and want to step up to a productive social media tool - give Google+ a try.

The language of social media has moved beyond 'friends' and 'posts' and 'like' to a time-wasting mess resembling a dorm room during Finals week.
There must be a better way.  With Google’s move into social media with Google+ I think we finaly have a way to manage the mess.

Here's a look at The Complete Idiot's Guide to Google+ by Michael Miller. We now can sort, manage, and grow our social media presence with Circles, Streams, and Hangouts in Google+. Add in video conferencing, a layout you can tweak, and ability to publish across all social media, and Google+ starts to look like the answer. And, its free.

You're probably thinking if Google+ was completely intuitive we wouldn't need an Idiot's Guide, but it is the quickest way to see the logic of Google+ so you can get started.

Not quite a year old, Google+ is differentiated by the ability to segregate friends into “circles” where you can follow messages, posts, photos, video sharing, even email and instant messaging. But what goes on in a circle stays in a circle. So when you’re at work, looking for the photo of a product concept, you don’t have to scroll through hundreds of friend’s photos to find it. The integration of Gmail and Google search is also a time-saver.

 Unlike Facebook, which is stuffed with updates on kids, pets, and coworkers all mixed together, in this CIG Google+ book, you'll see the ability to post to circles is well  explained by Miller. You’ll see that when you create a post you can choose to send it to specific circles, such as ‘family’ or extended circles that includes friends of friends. Go further and make a post public and it will appear on your Google+ profile, to any visitor, even if they are not in your circles.Or, you can choose to post to 'specific contacts’ to quickly communicate the same information to people in different circles.


Read the rest of this review and feel free to comment at http://open.salon.com/blog/helen_gallagher/2012/02/19/book_review_the_complete_idiots_guide_to_google

Bing is the 2nd highest-ranking search engine. Do you use it yet?

I wrote a blog post here a few months ago entitled "Why I Bing," at this link.

I can't take credit for its subsequent success, but I'm happy to report today that it has become the second highest-ranking search tool, right after Google.

If you want to learn more, or see what you're missing, go to bing.com. It offers more focused search results, indexed along the left side of your screen. Google searches return a lot of junk because results are based on popularity of searched terms, among other complex algorithms.

Instead of Google's plain white screen, Bing features a beautiful photo each day - an interesting way to gear up for research.

Here is a USA Today article with the full details, in an article entitled "Microsoft eclipses Yahoo in U.S. search."

Perhaps the move to Bing.com will grow, now that Google is in trouble for "enhancing" its search results by providing what might be too much information, raising concerns over privacy and antitrust issues. Full article is here.

Want more blog traffic? Think "Keywords"

Keywords are the grabbers that search engines sort and rank. Your blog topics should fit popular keywords, depending on your foucs. whether science, dieting, philosophy, or celebrities, your keywords help your blog rise in the search engine rankings.

Google, long known for their algorithms, has just made a sweeping improvement. The result for you is better exposure. One of the sites I follow, FreelanceSwitch.com, reports:

"This freshness change will impact 35% of searches. What will happen is when a user types a phrase into the Google search engine the most recent content will be returned first. Google has always attempted to provide searchers with the latest results, but their old algorithm methods had an impact of approximately 17.5% in the past."

So, if you want more blog readers, post more and know the words and phrases people use when find information similar to yours.
You'll have higher search rankings now, so use it to your advantage.

Okay, here's a sample:  If you want to learn more about social media, especially social media for beginners, jump over to Amazon and purchase "Blog Power & Social Media Handbook" the social media how-to, available in softcover for $12.

Blogger change coming soon

Mashable.com reports that Google is finally ready to pay attention to the Blogger.com blog hosting service.

Fast and easy and free, it has fallen far behind WordPress, the only other dominant player.

So look for an announcement soon, if you have a blog on blogger.com. The product will be rebranded as Google Blogs soon.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20076925-17/report-google-to-rebrand-blogger-picasa/#ixzz1RKp47TqM

Requiem for a Website?

If you're an active blogger and use social media daily, when is the last time you checked your website?

Perhaps the time has come to put your site to sleep. Web sites are no longer the first place we look for up-to-date information or news. Social media is a more active and immediate place to stay connected.

Read this article at BNet.com and see if you agree. The most stricking evidence in the article is this:

"Shutting down your website to communicate solely through social meda channels might seem like a crazy idea for any large organization. But then again, there is some logic to it. The Wall Street Journal reported that Starbucks receives over ten times as much traffic to its Facebook page (19.4 million unique visitors each month) as to its corporate website (1.8 million). For Coca-Cola, the divergence is even starker: 22.5 million visitors on Facebook vs. just 270,000 to its website—over 80 times as much traffic."

Something to think about before you renew that annual hosting bill ???

from Poynter.org on LinkedIn

Get more value out of LinkedIn by following the suggestions here on the Poynter.org "Ask The Recuiter" blog. Details include use of Signal - a free LinkedIn feature:

"One of LinkedIn’s cool, free tools is Signal, which helps LinkedIn users extract more value from the growing amount of content on the careers site and Twitter accounts by helping users slice and dice a tsunamic newsfeed down to a stream they actually can use.

It works like this: There is a “Search Updates” window just under the “What should your network know?” window near the top of the screen. Type in the term you are interested in, and LinkedIn will extract all the relevant messages from its general newsfeed. With 70 million users in 150 industries, there is a lot in that general feed.

When you click after the search term, it will open up a three column-page with the  selected posts running down the main central column. Headlines on that subject, passed along by others, are in the right rail. The left rail lets you refine your search further."

Good or bad? Facebook adds email addresses

This from the Facebook Blog today:

Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.  You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use.  Simply choose their name and type a message.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one.

Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message.

Google Settlement on

Google, grabber of all the world's information, tried to capture too much private data when they launched Buzz.  Buzz was intended to let you share all your social media feed, photos and videos, but Google was keeping that information.
Sued for the privacy grab, the US Courts found Google guilty, and slapped a fine of $8.5 million, (probably one-day's ad revenue!).  Yet google users don't get a penny. The courts found:

There are too many people in this settlement and too few actually suffered any damages for Google to bother paying them directly. Instead the company will give the funds to nice Internet privacy organizations.

Thanks to  Rosa Golijan at Gizmodo for digesting the court case down to this concise summary.


Helen Gallagher
Blog Power and Social Media Handbook (Volume 2)

Blog Power and Social Media Handbook

It's here and available now on Amazon: the update to Social Media Handbook, including the Blog power secrets you've been waiting for.

Don't let social media ruin good communication

Not much new in technology lately, so it looks like I've been neglecting this blog in favor of the Release Your Writing and Pajama Marketing blogs.

But today, I've read a business report on something that has been bothering me. By being more efficient with tech gadgets, some people are actually becoming rude, quite unintentionally. I guess we need a new guide to etiquette: You can't save yourself time by taking tech shortcuts if it makes more work for the other person.

So when you send a message, even view Twitter or your phone, take the time to be lucid, not dash off a phrase and make the recipient guess the context.

Here's an interestng BNET article that explains it fully.

Facebook & Twitter & LinkedIn... Oh My!

If you're reluctant to get on board with social media sites, fearing a complete loss of privacy and having your free time sucked into some magical vortex, relax.

You can sign up for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin without fear:

1. On each service, control your privacy settings. It takes less than ten minutes to read and understand your options. Start by limiting your 'friends' to only the people you know.

2. Write useful comments at least once a week. No need to write every day, or to respond to other people's comments. It's not expected, so don't make it more work than you want.

3. Use a single interface to view all the traffic/feeds/comments on your collective social media sites:
-- Use Hootsuite.com to post to all social media sites at once, and update on your schedule

-- Use Echofon.com for a fabulous way to keep up with Facebook and Twitter. It's literally a little dot in your browser. Click daily to view the new stream of tweets, and you're done.

-- Don't get scared by the thought of using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to amass all the sites and chatter you desire into a single site, such as your Google Reader page.



Find more help understanding the development of the social media craze in my Social Media Handbook.

A teacher purchased 30 copies yesterday for her classroom!

Something of value on YouTube??? It's possible,

I'm not a big fan of YouTube, even if there is good content out there, or very funny content with laughing babies or juggling hippos. Too much consumer-generated content, too slow to wait for video and too much time wasted.

But, reading Hemispheres on United Airlines last week, I learned there is something out in that vast wasteland. YouTube Edu -- here you can listen to and watch lectures and presentations from the academic world... online & free. Just launched in 2009, it contains lectures and coursework from over 100 universities. An interview in The Wall Street Journal states the content just from the Univ. Minnesota contains 200 lecture-based courses in literature, history, law, engineering and other subjects.

I know what I'm watching tonight...

Social Media Handbook: New book out in January 2010

If you're wondering what to make of all the cross-traffic on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter... wonder no more. I've put together a small book called Social Media Handbook, and will announce its availability here next month.

While most of the social media sites are temporary blips on the radar, more companies are using them to reach the friends of the friends of their friends, and the impact on society is undeniable.

I myself am a Twitter quitter, but participate in Facebook and LinkedIn, just enough to say I'm out there.

But this kind of stuff... just not worth any energy:

Connect with Twitter?

"Would you like to connect TweetMeme and Twitter together to be able to easily and quickly tweet your links? You will be able to edit your tweets before they are tweeted."

Hmmm. I think I'll just say 'no.'