Image: Social Media Landscape

(Click link to download the Social Media Landscape poster)

Poster: Social Media Landscape is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

FourSquare is a social networking tool that could prove to be exceedingly popular over the next few months. This particular tool is focused on where you are and how you relate to the people in your personal network. It also uses mobile technology, and as more people with handsets such as the iPhone and the Blackberry find out about FourSquare, the more it is likely to spread.

The power of GPS has made FourSquare possible, because this is how you use the network and how it recognises where in the world you are. And because you can use it at home, in the city or abroad, you can always check in and let people know where you are and what you are doing.

The principle of FourSquare revolves around checking in. Your network of friends won’t know where you are unless and until you check into FourSquare. When you do this the site tells them where your current location is. This means they can meet up with you, or simply get in touch to recommend places they like which are nearby.

Check ins earn you points as well. If you are always out and about and checking in to let people know where you are, your total will go higher. But it pays to revisit your favourite places as well, because this can earn you the title of Mayor. This is awarded to the person who visits a single place more often than anyone else. You will need to carry on visiting to retain the title though, because anyone else can visit to take it from you.

There are badges to be won by completing certain tasks too. You can see these on the home page of the site. The home page will give you a good idea of what to expect because it is constantly updating to show you the latest updates from various members of FourSquare. You can also see some of the badges they have earned.

If you are an active person who has a vibrant social network, FourSquare offers you another way to unlock the benefits of that. It also offers a great opportunity for socially driven businesses to bring in more customers, as they offer rewards for those people who achieve Mayor status.

In short, FourSquare has the potential to go mainstream and become as much a household name this year as Twitter. Will you be a part of it when it does?

Visit FourSquare and unlock your city today.

An Introduction To FourSquare is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Here is a novel little gadget that could keep your kids, or even you!, entertained during those long chat sessions with your friends – the Chatman – an artificially intelligent and opinionated friend for your PC that really has something to say.

Chatman has a familiar look in a Pacman/Emoticon style and uses sequences of LEDs to animate mouth expressions matching the sound to up to 500 actions. His eyes are motorised and he even talks back. Chatman connects to a spare USB port on your computer. He listens in on your chat sessions through partner services including AOL, Yahoo, Facebook and MSN.

To learn more visit Chatman.

Get Chatty With Chatman is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

A lot of people probably couldn’t answer that question. That is a shame because it means they could be wasting some time on one or two social media sites that simply aren’t working for them.

This is a bit like writing articles and submitting them to various article directories. Some of those directories work better than others too, and you don’t want to spend your time submitting to sites that just don’t get the results you want.

If you have your own blog or website and you are trying to use social media to grab some traffic, make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your site. This will not only tell you how much traffic you are getting, but where it is coming from as well. If you go into the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics once you are signed in, you will be able to see what your top sources of traffic are for each site you have registered.

The best results are gained through persistent and constant use of your social media sites. It’s no good expecting a huge deluge of traffic when you have only used one or two sites a couple of times. But if you have been using a site for months on end on a regular basis and you just aren’t seeing any traffic at all, then you need to question whether your time is being spent in the best possible way.

Being pro-active and checking your traffic stats in this way is vital if you are going to get the best from your social networking and bookmarking sites. You could easily find that 30% of your time is effectively being wasted if you don’t keep an eye on your traffic and where it is coming from. Another point to consider as well if you are promoting a blog is whether you are getting peaks of traffic every time you post something new, or whether the traffic is steady pretty much all the time. Both are good – even if you don’t get any traffic at all from your social media sites in between blog posts.

In the end you need to weigh up the benefits each social media site is giving you. You will soon find it easier to balance the pros and cons of each site in order to produce the traffic and the results you want. You just need to accept that this won’t happen overnight.

Checking The Traffic From Your Social Media Efforts is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

FriendFeed lists work in a similar way to the lists feature on Facebook. You create a list, add relevant people to it, then access it via a link in your sidebar. If you aren’t familiar with Facebook, think of lists as categories. Just as blogs have posts broken down into topical categories to make it easier for readers to navigate, FriendFeed lists break your subscriptions down into easy-to-digest portions. To give an example: if you subscribe to a range of technology blogs (including this one I hope), you could create a list called ‘Tech Blogs’ and add all your tech blogging subscriptions. When you want to catch up with their latest posts, just navigate to that list to read without distraction. You can create as many lists as you need, and add friends to multiple lists if necessary.

As you subscribe to new friends you will be given the option to add them to your lists too, and also remove them from your home feed – doing so cuts down on the amount of noise, making a large number of subscriptions far more manageable. Unfortunately, you can only remove existing subscriptions from your home page one at a time. Personally I think this is cumbersome and hope, at some point, a more elegant solution will be introduced. If you decide you still want to streamline your home feed completely: visit each profile, click the ‘Edit‘ link at the top of the page, then deselect ‘Home feed‘ in the menu which pops up.

To Create a List

• Click ‘Browse/edit friends‘ in your sidebar to take you to the page listing all your subscriptions.
• At the top of the page you’ll notice a link marked ‘New friend list‘, click that and type the name of your list into the box that pops up, then click ‘Create‘.
• You will be taken to a new page from which you can add subscriptions to your list. Click the ‘choose the friends‘ link and a menu will appear. Select the people you want to add, then click ‘Save changes‘.

That’s it! Your list will appear in your sidebar ready for you to read at your leisure, and your feed will be significantly friendlier.

FriendFeed: How to Create and Use Lists is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

So how are you doing with the task of building up your social media profile? Are you like a social butterfly, flitting between sites and interacting with as many people as possible? Or are you like a bumble bee, only showing up when you want some nectar?

We all want to make the best of the social media sites in order to develop our businesses and earn more from them. But if it all becomes about promoting ourselves and what we sell, with the motive behind every contact being money, then it will surely backfire in our faces.

We would all do well to ask ourselves from time to time what the primary motive behind our social media activities is. Two way traffic is what we need to be aiming for. Appreciate what other people are doing. Read blog posts. Have conversations with people. Connect with new people. Tell them what you’ve been doing too.

But don’t try to sell them all the time. If you do that you’ll drive them away as surely as if you were that bumblebee dive bombing anyone who is nearby.

You should ask yourself what your motives are for using social media sites every time you join a new one. Some people flit from one to the other without ever really spending enough time with any one in particular. Is that you? Are you trying so hard to promote yourself that you fail to actually draw anyone in?

It seems like a contradiction but you will achieve far better results by taking a genuine interest in other people at the same time. I’ve met some really nice people on Twitter, people who have common interests with me, and we’ve swapped links and done link exchanges as a result.

But if I had foisted myself on them and demanded those exchanges, you can guess what the answer would have been.

So think about which way your traffic is heading – and whether or not you can see anyone else coming the other way. Are you a butterfly or a bumble bee?

Butterfly or Bumble Bee – Is It All One Way Traffic? is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

The following list contains 10 of my favourite technology related FriendFeed groups. It’s by no means comprehensive, but should offer a good starting point for anyone who wants to get more involved in the social and conversational side of Friendfeed.

• Adobe AIR Apps – The best place to find really great desktop applications covering a range of uses, from music to design to social media and more. You will need to install Adobe AIR to use the apps, but it is free!
• Art Room – Although, this isn’t strictly related to technology it is a useful group, especially for designers seeking inspiration. You’ll find everything from links to sites about old masters, to the work of talented graphic designers. Definitely worth a look!
• Friendfeed Feedback – If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions for the Friendfeed team, this is the place to post them.
• RWW: The Future of Tech – The Friendfeed presence of the ReadWriteWeb blog. Lots of interesting techy talk about the web, both present and future.
• Social Media – Post social media links, join discussions, ask questions and share ideas.
• The Apple Room – Discuss your love of all things Apple, and share advice and recommendations.
• The Blogger Discussions – News, recommendations and conversation about all things blogging related.
• The NextWeb Forum – News and conversation covering digital media, technology and related topics.
• Twitter – Discuss your love or loathing for Twitter, and share useful applications and services.
• WordPress – News and conversations about the popular blogging platform. A good place to ask questions!

That’s my list, I hope you found it useful. If I omitted any of your favourite groups why not share them in the comments!

FriendFeed: 10 Great Technology Groups is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

But there are other social networking sites which allow you a lot more room when it comes to posting messages for your followers to read. They probably haven’t got a fraction of the publicity that Twitter has had lately though, so perhaps it is an unfair comparison. But do people generally prefer the brevity of those Twitter messages, or would they rather have a bit more space to stretch out in?

Personally I don’t think that either short or long messages are better than the other. I think the main thing to bear in mind is what the nature of your message really is. A lot of people like Twitter because – ironically – it stretches your writing skills. You have to be brief to get everything in. But does that mean you have to miss essential facts out altogether?

I’ve spotted people on Twitter who have basically written short articles and posted them in bite sized chunks. The title appears in one tweet – something like ten tips for better writing, for example – and then you will get ‘tip one – edit your work’ or something like that as the first short tip. This is followed by nine more tweets of a similar nature.

It can be good to have more room to blog or post a message on your choice of social networking site of course. But if you only use that space to waffle in, then what was the point in the first place?

Perhaps the key then is not whether one form is better than another. Perhaps it is simply which one suits the message you have to give at the time. If a social networking site allows you limitless space to post a message in, that doesn’t mean you have to write an essay. Think about what you want to say, say it, and then move along. Nothing more to see here, you might say.

Of course it is more frustrating when you have a longer message to get out and Twitter’s 140 character limit won’t permit you to do it. In this case double tweets are really your only option.

But the most important rule applies to every message you will ever post on any social networking site. It’s simple – check everything before you hit the ‘post’ button, or make it live. If you do that, you’ll be more assured of striking the right balance, no matter how long or short your message might be.

Social networking, short messages or long messages? is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Social media shined with the Michael Jackson story. The blog TMZ was the first to break the story, which spread like wildfire across the net, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately Perez Hilton did his fellow bloggers a huge disservice when he made a very nasty post accusing Jackson’s sudden collapse of being a lie to help him get out of his planned UK concert tour. As soon as the news broke of his death Hilton took the post down but the damage was done. Outraged Twitter users began an “Unfollow Perez Hilton” campaign and screenshots of the post made the rounds of both Facebook and the blogsphere. If that black eye wasn’t bad enough, social media got another one when a few bloggers, in a selfish attempt to grab some of the Jackson and Fawcett traffic, started spreading false news stories claiming that actor Jeff Goldblum had been killed in an onset accident while filming a movie in New Zealand and actor Harrison Ford had been lost at sea in a boating accident. These fake stories only added to the enormous surge in traffic hitting social networking sites.

Expect most of those sites to continue having high traffic and even periodic outages. Jackson’s death is being compared to that of Elvis Presley. Can you imagine what it would have been like if the net and social networks had been around back in 1977?

Share your stories with us. Did you find out about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson online? Have you experienced problems using your favorite sites? Leave a comment and let us know!

Social Networks Shine and Struggle Under Huge Traffic Load Following Dark Day of Celeb Deaths is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Some people think they know all about social media. They believe that because they have some accounts with a couple of social media sites – Twitter and MySpace perhaps – they know all there is to know about it.

But you don’t really know how it works until you use it for a specific purpose. It is one thing to use these websites to help you stay in touch with like minded people. But it is another thing altogether to use them to help you promote your business, find new customers and spread the word about your interests with a view to making money.

The danger here is that you assume you know more than you do. Not all social media sites are created as equals, and that means that each one comes with a unique learning process. With Twitter it means understanding how to make the best use of the 140 characters you have each time you post a message. With Facebook it means working out how features like The Wall can help you to get noticed, among other things.

The people who repeatedly get the best results from social media are always those who take the time to learn everything they can about it. Every site is treated as the new entity it undoubtedly is. And they don’t assume that they know everything and that all the rules for one site automatically apply to another as well.

The truth is that you can learn a lot more if you assume you know less. If you started using Twitter and thought, ‘Oh, it’s easy to write a message in 140 characters. I can do that,’ you wouldn’t even consider watching what other people do before you got started. And yet the best people to learn from are invariably those who are already there, already established and already doing it.

Ask yourself how much you think you understand social media. Could you learn more? Of course you could – we all could. It is constantly developing, both in general and in terms of specific websites. It is up to you whether you want to grow and develop with it, or assume you know everything and stop growing in knowledge and experience right now.

I know which route I would rather pick. What about you?

How Much Do You Really Understand Social Media? is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology