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Welcome to a new year and a whole new set of blog ideas, conversations, opportunities, and more.  I am going to do thing a little differently this year.  Mondays I will post a blog,  Wednesdays my friend Jennifer will guest blog, and Fridays I will leave open to my creativity.  This morning, I am going to do one more blog on how a best selling novelist (JK Rowling) uses Social media.

Rowling receives 6.17% of traffic to her site from Twitter, 3.7% from Facebook, and another 6.17% from a site called Mugglenet.  Mugglenet is more than a social networking site, rather it’s a social networking platform dedicated to the Rowling’s writing.

This social networking platform integrates the social networking site MuggleSpace, which is a Ning based social networking site where JK Rowling and Harry Potter fans can interact with one another.  The uniqueness of Rowling’s social networking strategy is that she doesn’t have one.  Let’s get real.  She is a brand.

So, there’s the last lesson we can learn from this series.  Become a brand, and use social networking to familiarize people with your brand.  Rowling, or Rowling’s rat pack, created a Web within the World Wide Web that ensnares visitors within a maze.

If you want to brand yourself, create a type of Web within the World Wide Web that captivates your audience and makes them forget about time.  Send them through a maze, much like Rowling, filled with websites, books, movies, information, chances to interact, and reasons to escape their otherwise mundane lives.  Chances are it won’t be as extravagant, but start out small with a Twitter or Facebook account, a book trailer or two, and keep growing.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

This week, let’s look at how the Bard of Horror, Stephen King, uses social media.  King uses the power of what I call fundamental (mainstream) media to broadcast his messages.  King published his first work (“The Glass Floor”) in 1967 at only the age of 20 before the World Wide Web. Along with countless books, King’s novels have resulted in several television and big screen movies.

King doesn’t rely on one medium to get his message across.  Before social media, he had his books made into movies, television movies, or audio books. And he still relies on those forms of media. Stephen King has made appearances on various news media, online radio shows, and other popular media.  King even owns a radio station.

Social media is supplemental media, and should not be expected to create buzz in the way fundamental media creates buzz (unless your Pepsi or Lebron James).  If you’re not a notable figure, it is unadvisable for you to replace fundamental media with supplemental media.

If you’re an author using social media, and you can’t figure out why you can’t get more than a few hundred followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook, it might be because your using supplemental media as fundamental media.

So, where do you start? Book Trailers! They allow authors of any level to use supplemental media to mimic fundamental media.  Though, book trailers are an aspect of supplemental media and should not be used as fundamental media. Your next step is to call television, radio, and Internet-radio stations.  Ask them if you they would interview you.  Or consider a podcast.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Last week, I met a friend for coffee.  He talked about a business idea, and then he asked me to sum up what people meant by “social media.”  I answered, “Integration.”  Twitter and Myspace integrated with Facebook, Facebook integrates with your personal experiences, and we all use the Social Web to integrate with one another and learn more about one another.

Recently, I tried to explain the concept of Apps to another friend.  I explained that many Apps allow a person to do in one or a fewer steps what once  took several minutes to do even on non-smart phones with Internet capabilities.  Other Apps allow people to do what cell phones could not do that long ago, even with the Internet.  They allow people to integrate with their phones in much the same way they would integrate through social media using their laptops or desktops.

The terms ‘social networking’ and ‘social media’ are often misused and used interchangeably.  Think of social networking in the same way you think of networking.  You network with people you know, people you want to know, and/or people who want to know you.  Now, think of social media in the same way you think of media.  You use various social media channels to network with people, learn information, or tell others your message.

Through social media, everyone who uses the World Wide Web can potentially interact with everyone else who uses the World Wide Web.  And that social interaction through sharing interests and using technologies allows us to integrate our experiences on the World Wide Web with our experiences in real life.

What is ‘social media’ and ‘social networking’ to you?  How do you use them?

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#social#media #social#networking #social#web#browser #conversational#web #flock#web#browser

So, you’ve read my blogs about the social Web browser Flock this week, but you’re not ready to give up your Internet browser.  No worries.  Neither am I.  Sometimes, I use Flock, and other times I don’t.  It depends on my mood, and what I need to get done.  If you want to give Flock a whirl, but you’re already set up with another Web browser, you can change your settings.

Click Flock in the tool bar, select preferences, select main, and type any site as your default site.  If you’re like me and you’re an Internet pack rat (You collect and save so many websites that you can’t remember them all), go to favorites, select organize favorites, select import HTML, and import your favorites from Firefox, Safari, or an HTML file.  If you want to export your favorites at a later time, select export HTML file.  You can also import your favorites by selecting File, clicking Import, and going through the steps.  If you go this second route you cannot import an HTML file.

Remember, if you blog, you can integrate your blog with Flock.  Open your Flock browser, click the key icon under the star, scroll down in the left sidebar to blogging, and select the blog service you us.  If you have a self-hosted blog, select Self-Hosted Blog and type your blog URL.  You can also use their photo and video uploader and many other features, so go ahead and try Flock today.

I’ll see you tomorrow.  I may discontinue my weekly “This week in social media,” but I’ll make sure to have something good for you.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Today, let’s talk about how Flock integrates search into the social Web experience.  In the top right corner of the My World tab, you will notice a search bar.  Next to the magnifying glass, you’ll notice the icon of the search engine it’s defaulted to and an arrow key.  You can use that arrow key to change the search engine you use to conduct your searches.

Of course, Google and Yahoo! are among those search engines, but maybe you want to search for the best deals on a new e-reader.  You can make eBay or Amazon your default search engine.  You can also set your default search engine to Wikipedia, Digg, and Twitter among others.

Continuing on in the My World tab, there are preset columns.  One of those columns is marked Twitter Search.  You can use that to create a stream for whichever keywords you want to search for on Twitter.  If you click on “Save Search,” that stream will become it’s own stream allowing you to watch multiple Twitter streams.  And if you want to see which terms are trending on Twitter, there’s a button that will tell you exactly that.

For those who want to search through various media, they can use the search bar in the Media Bar.  To open that click on the icon of the camera near the upper left corner of the browser.  A black bar will appear above the Web page you are on.  On the top left, you will see media streams that will allow you to choose which site you want to use to search for media.  You can also use the search bar on the right side of this screen for a similar function.

There’s more on search, so check out this cool vid.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#social#media #social#networking #social#web#browser #conversational#web

So, now that you’ve downloaded Flock, you need to know how to use it. Well, when you first open Flock, two tabs will appear: Flock – Getting started and My World.  The getting started tab lists the icons of nine social media services you can integrate your social web browser with.  As I mentioned yesterday, there are more, but these are the most popular ones (Notice Myspace is on there).  The My World tab shows four columns with your most recent visited sites, friends activity, Twitter activity with a search bar, favorite feeds, and favorite media.  If you want to change the positioning, you can do so just like you would change the position of a column in a Twitter desktop client.  If you’re not sure what that means, see my blog on The Battle of the Twitter Desktop Clients.  These are just the basics of using Flock.

Now, let’s start setting up Flock.  Once you choose which services out of the ‘stay connected’ services in the Getting started tab you want to integrate into your social Web browsing experience, you’ll notice a live stream of Tweets and/or updates from people you follow appears in the right column.  Without leaving this Web browser, you can respond and/or retweet them.  There are only three options of sites to connect with in your getting started tab, but you can connect with others by clicking on the key icon above the streams.  After you get them all set up, a green dot will appear to signify which ones are active.  To be able to see that side bar again just click on the icon of the person almost all of the way to the left.  Below that, you can select which of the sites you want to see your friends’ streams from, or you can select all.

There’s more on Flock.  For now, check out these vids.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#social#media #social#networking #conversational#web #social#web#browser

Maybe you want to get into this whole social media thing, but you’re not sure where to start.  Or maybe you’re way in over your head with all this conversational Web mumbo jumbo, and you don’t know how to make any sense of it.  Well, today I’m going to tell you about a tool that is going to make your life much easier.  It’s a social web browser called Flock.

I don’t use all the services Flock connects to, but I use enough to make it useful.  Now, before we get started, go ahead and download Flock.  Depending on what operating system you’re using, the steps to download it may differ.  It works on Word, Mac OS X, and Linux; and it’s available in several different languages.

Before I tell you how to use Flock, let me tell you what it connects with.  For those who want to stay connected with their friends, Flock integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, and Myspace (yes, Myspace is still one of the leading social networking sites in the U.S.).  If you just want to find great photos and videos and post them, Flock integrates with YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, TinyPic, and Truveo.  For those who just want to keep up with their e-mail, Flock integrates with Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL.  And if you want to make your blogging easier, Flock integrates with Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress, and Xanga.  If you have a self-hosted blog, you can integrate that with Flock.

And you’re not limited, because this social web browser is an Internet browser.  You can use it just like you would any other browser, but it makes socializing on the conversational web seamless with cruising through the World Wide Web.

I’ll tell you more about Flock, tomorrow.  For now, check out this cool vid.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Let’s examine the four types of Web traffic: Direct traffic, Referring sites, search engines, and other.

Direct traffic doesn’t just refer to traffic from people who bookmarked your site or know the URL by memory.  Direct traffic also refers to people who came to your site because of a television or print ad or through e-mail campaigns or other untraditional Web sources.  Recently, GA has categorized some traffic coming through Google Adwords as direct traffic.  That could be because of improperly tagged or untagged destination URLs in people’s ads (Read more here and here).

Referring site refers to sites linking to your site, which can be those sites you’ve developed link partnerships with, social bookmarking sites, microblogging sites, or other social networking sites.  Google does not recommend trading links with other webmasters as the best method of obtaining links to your site.  We don’t recommend it either as it is time consuming and often shows very little ROI.  It is against Google’s TOS to buy or sell links that pass pagerank.  Google recommends creating useful content as the best way to get people to link to your site and get referral traffic.

Search engine traffic is any traffic that comes from any search engines.  This is where it’s important to make sure your website contains good Web content. Make sure to follow the rules, so you don’t find yourself in the sandbox or banned.  According to one Google contributor, there is no more sandbox, but just play by the rules and you won’t get TOSed.  And “other traffic” refers to any traffic that cannot be categorized in one of the first three categories, such as users who come from banner ads or e-mail newsletters.

So, what are the X and Y factors of SEO content?  Think of a pie chart, which your analytics program probably uses to show the distribution of the traffic.  The X factor refers to those times when you have had an equal amount of traffic from all four of those types of sources.  This is highly likely, and not always the most desirable, so there’s also the Y factor.  This refers to those times when a site receives an equitable amount of direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines.  How do you achieve the X and Y factors?  Peruse your analytics account, review what is and is not working, make changes where appropriate to drive traffic from all sources, and don’t rely too much or too little on traffic coming from one type of source.  This means writing good Web content for website and using social media to promote that content and your site.

Here’re some other important blogs and articles to read:

Important Exception to Google Last Click Attribution

Excellent Analytics tip #18 (By Avinash Kaushik)

3 Creative ways to Drive More Traffic to Old Blog Posts

An Introduction to Link-Building: A Crucial Aspect of SEO

Stay social my friends,

Erick