Orangejack LLC

Are you new to social media but don’t know where to start?  We can help.

We have just published a free eBook: Getting Started with Social Media. This eBook is written as a guide or checklist to get yourself or your small business started with social media.  This is your starting point.  Also included is a handy chart you can print and use to fill in your various social media profile information to have on file.

Please head over to our eBook page (we hope to have more there in the future!) to download, read, and distribute the eBook Getting Started with Social Media.

Tropical Storm Fay is on her way to Orlando (ahem! home of Orangejack LLC) so we’re paying attention.

It’s been a hobby of mine tracking and keeping up with tropical storms and hurricanes.  I’ve been writing about it on my personal blog in the Hurricane category of rob’s place.

But that’s not the only place social media around this storm is happening.  Twitter has been buzzing about Fay.  I set up a Hurricane room on FriendFeed that allows us to automatically import updates and allows members to comment, discuss, and share links.  There are plenty of storm blogs available also.

One of the more interesting blogs that has popped up is one called Hurricane Fay Online Newsroom by the Red Cross that has a lot of breaking news updates and resources.  Not only can you get updates from them by email or RSS, but also Twitter and they even have used Utterz.

Although most people still get their news from TV, this is the movement we’re seeing in online communication.

Within the last 6 months, Delta Airlines released a new in-flight safety video. Although it’s better than the previous one, it’s still the video they show to several millions of people and is ignored by most of those millions on the plane.

However, Delta did something interesting when their new video was ready: they put it on YouTube. Within half a year it’s been viewed over 1 Million times and has over 1200 comments.

They announced it on the Delta Blog then gave us a little behind the scenes for how they produced the film.

If you haven’t flown Delta lately you probably haven’t seen it so I placed it at the top of this post. Posting a video they already created on YouTube got 1 million extra views — and it took all of a couple of minutes to plant the viral seeds. Here’s the question for you: what can you do take something seemingly mundane, spice it up, and see if you can create some buzz? .

I’ve been on Facebook for a couple years now and have gone back and forth with my opinion of it.  One of the things I liked about it at first was the ability to connect with friends quickly and easily.  I also liked that it had a clean look to the layout.

Later Facebook allowed 3rd-party applications to be added and we saw a crazy explosion of individuality expressed on profile pages.  They were becoming cluttered, long, and a bit unwieldy. I began to drift away from using it as much in part for this reason (the other being it is a walled garden and I’m not a fan of that but that’s a discussion for another time).

Very recently Facebook has been rolling out a new design to their layout.  At first I wasn’t sure where some of my stuff was moved to and there are still some things I don’t like.  However, the more I look at the main profile page, I realize there is a huge potential for Facebook to become an awesome tool for connecting and communicating.  It’s this issue I want to focus on; publishing and interacting inside Facebook has never been easier or more complete than this.

Update Status

Facebook has always provided a few ways to publish content to your own profile.  The most common way is to update your status - a short line that is usually a statement of “I am …”  It’s not always used that way, but that status is published out to all of your friends so they know what you are up to.  With the new design, updating your status is at the top of your page and the dominant feature highlighted and now asks “What are you doing right now?”

Wall

The new head or top of a profile page has moved into tabs.  You can see I’ve added a couple tabs from a couple of applications I like (a Clemson Fan and a USA Olympics Fan).  The part I see as huge is that the first tab, the wall, is now the focus.  Earlier the wall (basically a public discussion board) could be buried in a long page.  The wall is used as one of the main ways to communicate with others by leaving short messages for the person.  Now it is easy to find the wall and leave a message since it’s always at the top.

All Posts

Facebook is now aggregating all of the activity that one publishes along with comments from others into one chronological flow.  If you share a link, write a post, import something from outside of Facebook, or publish photos it will all be reflected in the All Posts section.  It is now easier to find all published content in the order it was published.

Commenting

Facebook has allowed comments on just about every sort of content you publish except for your status.  People would get around it by commenting on that person’s wall but when the status changed, often that wall comment didn’t make sense.  Now since your status is integrated into your main content, each item can have a discussion in context.

My Summary

What I’m seeing with this new Facebook design is that communication is much faster and easier than before.  Interaction is encouraged and is more sensible.  Some veterans of Facebook aren’t happy with the new design but I suspect it’s because they aren’t seeing it in this light.  It seems Facebook is now catching up to some of the other hot web 2.0 content publishing applications and improving on what they do well:

• Microblogging: Facebook Status Update like Twitter
• Blogging: Facebook Notes
• Bookmarking: Facebook Links like Delicious or Digg
• Photos: Facebook Photos like Flickr
• Discussion Board: Facebook Wall
• Lifestream: Facebook All Posts like FriendFeed

For another perspective on this check out MakeUseOf.com’s article Finding Your Way Around The New Facebook.

By the way, you can friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or follow my lifestream on FriendFeed if you like.

One of our favorite TV shows is The Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel. It’s a show about several crab boat captains in Alaska’s Bearing Sea as they go out fishing for crab (or is that just crabbing?).

It’s a fascinating show to watch mostly because I never expected to see real compelling stories of crabbers. Boy was I wrong!

All that to say that tonight I watched a video of Captian Sig talking about how all the boats are competing but they are a tight community. He also talks about the viral effect of how popular the show has become.

Folks, I submit to you that if you take what Capt Sig says and apply it to the web, you have a fine example of what social media is all about.

Oh, did I mention I got to meet Capt Sig at EPCOT earlier this week? Cool.

You can’t do social media marketing if you’re not going to be social in the different medias.

Social media is a great way to communicate with a lot of like-minded people.  There’s a reason the early mega-networks like MySpace and Facebook call your connections “Friends”.

Sure you can use different social media websites for marketing but the key to it all is first being social.  If you approach these communities as a marketer first, you will be seen as inauthentic and wanting to sell something.  However, if you approach it as a social human who wants to interact in life and participate in the conversation, you stand a greater chance of success.

So if you want to enter into social media marketing, please remember that the key word in the phrase is social.

Yesterday I suggested you start your social media with LinkedIN. Today I found a new video released explaining LinkedIN! See if this helps…

YouTube - What is LinkedIn?

Perhaps you’ve heard about Social Media but haven’t signed up to participate on any of the sites yet thinking they are all for kids with too much time on their hands.  Well let me share with you one of the more useful websites you can start with for your entry into social media: LinkedIN.

LinkedIN is a professional network.  It’s like a networking event you attend but this is all online.  They state:

Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.

Just like how most social media sites work, you first go to the site homepage and create a free account.  You now have a page on their network.  Mine is linkedin.com/in/orangejack.

Now it’s time to fill in your profile.  In short, what you are creating in an online version of your resume or business/professional profile.  The goal at this point is to create a profile that shows who you are professionally and what sort of opportunities you are interested in.

Once you are all set up it’s time for the social networking part.  There are millions of others on LinkedIN who have their own profile also.  If you know them you can invite them to connect with you.  If they accept they you two are connected.  Think of it as exchanging business cards but with a lot more relevant information.  The advantage here is that now you can see who they are connected to (and who their connections are) in order to see if you should make more connections and ask for an introduction.

Expanding your connections allows you to be open for more opportunities to connect, find jobs, hire qualified people, and potential partners. Search the site to see if your friends are on there or invite others to connect.  The more you build your network the more opportunities you will find for professional networking.  If you’ve worked with someone in the past and liked their services, you can write a reccomendation that will show up on their profile.

I encourage you to create an account and play around.  Feel free to invite me to be one of your connections by requesting from my LinkedIN profile.  Let me know if you have any questions about LinkedIN.  There’s plenty of other things you can do on the site easily and some not so easily.  But it’s a great start into social media for professionals.