Social Media (“Tagging’) - 101 – what is it?

What is Social Networking: Topics of interest follow:

Tagging – different blogs

Twitter is a short form blogging. Instant messaging. Can add friends… then they follow friends. A spider web develops, information is passes in a web-like fashion. A viral communicaion tool. Broadcast to several people at once.

Advice: add some people who are relevant in your business to your twitter network. Search twitter.com. People in your industry, find their link, look at their twitter page; if their stuff is relevant to you, add them to your twitter network.

Why is it different from blogging. It is micro blogging. Where a blog is several pages, twitter is 140 char limit.

Succint.. See: Kathy Sierra : high tech/ social media

Earliest blogs were what I’m doing, what I’m seeing. Twitter is new; back to what blog was. “What are you doing now?”.

Personal brand is very important. Photo, message consistency. Pick key words which reference you. Twitter can start this for your personal company. Twitter recongnition from twitter username.

Marcus Nelson at Freelancecamp. Link (back to his photos, pages, etc) will include keywords : socialmedia, twitter…. What he wants to be known for. So when google indexes, his relevance is presented .

How do I twitter if I have never done so before,

1. Go create twitter account

2. Research your username first.

3. Choose a username. Include your brand in your name. ie. PrMargaret. Be sure it is consistent/ relevant across all your presence. If your name is common, make it unique. ‘FactoryJoe’. You may want a personal brand and a professional brand. Name will go across other networks. Should be unique.

4. Pick your keywords that will represent you.

5. Use the search at top of twitter.com to find others to link to. Search ‘socialmedia’. See who is on that thread. Margaret suggests searching “Public Media Twitter” to find a pre-made page of name.

Tip: look at how many people a username is following and how many are following them.

LinkedIn is an online business card; professional network.

Problem: getting unsolicited Skype calls from unknown contacts. Ask where this person got your information. Google your name/ username to find where it might show up. Point: this stuff really matter.

Contact @mrosas or @marcusnelson on Twitter if you have questions.

Margaret Rosas, Margaret Rosas contributed to the above

What is tagging?

Tagging is a different way of classifying information. Yahoo, years ago, had an index of links. Organized in categories. Website was put in a ‘bucket’ – single title grouping. This organization is taxonomy.

Now, tagging is different. Folkonomy. Anyone can catagorize information in different ways.

For any piece of information, we can categorize it in different ways. When viewing any piece of content, the tags can be used to find other relevant pieces of content. Example: at the top of an article you may find lists of keywords that are registered by search engines to bring up the page on different searches.

IE: in Twitter, you will creat a profile. It will have a link to your blog or page. Thank you can add keywords that define you. Flickr has a section on right-hand side where you add references to yourself.

On your websiste, reference every thing you can that is relevant to you. Get your friends who are interested in same topics, to link back to you. This provides link-juice : the power of referential links back to you.

Also (advanced): relation-tags and hyper-tags within a link on your page.

Used to be that your website was a destination. That no longer exists. You or your client is not a destination. Now, You have to go to the people. That’s where you need a Facebook page. Who is using this technology? Barak Obama. Great modern case study.

Host your content on other people’s sites. (the links back.)

Tweak Deck – client which separates your info. Columns of twitter feeds, your friends, direct msgs, replies, keyword searches.

Session ended; yet to to be discussed:

Personal Blogs

Knowledge about blogging to support why we recommend it to clients.