Social Media & Networking

Twitter is an exceptional tool to engage community. It allows you to communicate in real-time, share information, get help to questions and build relationships.

One feature that has been difficult to achieve, with accurate and up to date information, is searching the bio database of people you follow on Twitter.

I engage with many great people on Twitter, many are creative people, I have often thought it would be great to keyword search the biographies, similar to Linkedin. The limit of 160 character bio, encourages people to use short keyword descriptions of what they are about, including professional specialties.

As recent as last week, a dear friend Simon Salt, @incslinger to those on Twitter, posted an article “5 Ways Twitter Can Monetize Without Ads”.  The number one element he suggested? The ability to perform a keyword search on the biography. Imagine his surprise when I contacted him about TweepSearch Beta, which had not yet gone live.  His interest peaked further when he discovered the developer was Damon Cortesi or @dacort on Twitter. A very smart individual.

The latest creation is called TweepSearch.  This is the first BETA release and it allows users to search keywords, within the 160 character biographies, of people you follow on Twitter.  It is simple.

•    Enter Twitter @Username.
•    Que – The first time you use it, TweepSearch will que your information. *
•    Search – Create a simple search by typing in keywords.

Example:

In this example I searched “web design” and TweepSearch quickly searched the people I follow, and returned 72 results for web designer.

TweepSearch results included:

•   Picture
•   Full Name
•   Twitter address
•   Location information
•   Bio details

Results: 72 web designers.

The ability to search by location is available, in addition to the ability to sort by last update or screen name, and the ability to view which followers, you are NOT currently following.

The best feature for average users is the nightly update every 24 hours, instead of those outdated and inacurate.  Individuals with a larger followings, might experience longer delays between updates.  Remember, this is a beta.

How valuable is it to you, to have this new ability to “search” bio’s on Twitter? Does having the correct keywords in you bio becomes more important to you? Does it create an larger advantage to now use a landing page, leaving the bio field specifically for searchable keywords? Very interested in hearing your thoughts?

*Note: users with > 1000 followers may experience a slight delay depending on sites traffic.test

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I was tagged with the ‘7 random things’ meme, courtesy of my friend Simon Salt or better known as @Incslinger. Simon Salt is a good friend, but I am not a huge fan of these types of games or letters, but for Simon, I would happily play along.

As expected I thoroughly enjoyed my personal trip down memory lane, not all of which I shared, but the process was memorable. At the end of the post, time to tag seven people, you want to know more about.

Let me say, reading the various posts on “7 Random Things” has been enjoyable.  I have learned many things about people, their childhood memories, professional challenges, aspirations, as well as personal challenges. Most everyone was fairly transparent and some just plain bared their soul.

Here are a few of my friends and respected bloggers. They are in no specific order, as is clear in seeing the people at the end. I summarized, briefly, a few interesting facts.

Simon Salt, Incslinger

Twitter: @incslinger

Simon once lived in Scotland and traveled to England on weekends to play in Ultimate Frisbee. Today he volunteers as a firefighter. He enjoys reading and enjoys history, yet enjoys magazines like Men’s Vogue and Fast Company among other quick reads.  read more

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I was reading TwiTip and realized there was a comment field, to link your twitter address, linking to your Twitter home page.  That is a great idea. I searched for a Wordpress Plugin, none was found on Wordpress.org. This worked great until I upgraded to 2.7 and am hoping this plugin will soon be upgraded as well.

To my delight, a few days later ProBlogger, wrote a post on his process.  He provided a link to Ideashower, a plugin developer with a method of adding fields into the comment section. Between ProBlogger ’s post and the overview of the developers site I was able to code my comments, fairly simple. If you use Thesis template, ProBloggers post would benefit you.

Here is the process I used.  Let me remind you, each Theme is different, so your code may look slightly different. It is also a great idea to make a backup before changing any code, here is a plugin referred by @panah, WP-DB-Backup. I used Dreamweaver to modify my php files and used my “undo” a few times testing this method.

Download Plugin Files

Download the plugin files from the developers site.

• Download – Version 0.4 (Requires Wordpress 2.5+)
• Download – Version 0.2 (For Wordpress 2.0 – 2.3)

Install the Plugin

Unzip the “Extra-comment-fields” zip file.  Upload the file PHP file “extra-comment-fields“ to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, under your themes directory. This file does not have a folder as do many Plugins available.

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This post is in response to being tagged with the ‘7 random things’ meme, courtesy of my friend Simon Salt or better known as @Incslinger.  In his post, he describes ‘7 random things‘ as “fun blogging event to get people behind the blogs to open up a bit and put the human face to their blogs”.

I have enjoyed reading the others random things, so I will happy to play along, who knows there might actually be something new I have not previously shared on Twitter.

1 – Wisconsin Summers

Wisconsin is my birth place. I spent the first five years of my life in a small town, in Rock County.  After moving to California, we continued to spend our summers in Southern Wisconsin. This was the place of running through corn fields and making forts out of hay stacks. A place you could ride a tractor without a license. My first corn roast and a country fair. The early mornings fishing trips and afternoon catfish fry.

2– Best Friends 30+ Years

I had six best friends from High School, as most friends get lost in the shuffle of life, I am lucky that these six people remain in my life today.  Recently, we spend an amazing weekend in Vegas.  It was the first time, in 30 years, that we were all in the same place at the same time.

3 – I love animals

I love animals. We currently have two gold retrievers, one of which was a rescue puppy we met at a visit to the Veterinary Cancer Group, he was there looking for a home.  It was like he was sent to us. The very next day, Kacee our five year old retriever, lost her two year fight against canine Lymphoma. Our puppy, now named Cody, helped us focus on life, after all puppies don’t give you time to rest. We also have a Macaw, a chick imported from South America, only to end up living in a pet store for five years.  I found him, gave him a home, he runs of household and too smart for my own good. (I doubt this was a little known fact, as my Facebook and Flickr pages are full of furry friends)

4 –My Genealogy Library

Life is full of discovery and learning about my history, has been a seven year fascination.  My library is filled with books and recorders, some dating back to the 1600’s. I have a database of over 8,000 family members, primarily in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Denmark and Australia, so far.  It is fascinating to see people and lifestyles change over time.  I am a member of the HistoricalSociety of Wisconsin and a volunteer of Rock County, helping other researchers piecing to their family trees.

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This post has taken an interesting turn. My original thought was to feature individuals, as well as big brands in this set of examples.  That turns out to be an entirely different post, as few big brands have actually “branded” their Twitter backgrounds.  Valuable no cost space to show their unique brand, being wasted. Why? Maybe it was over looked as they hashed out their ROI justifications.

What the big brands have missed, the savvy business professionals have not. What do I mean? Take a look at these creative backgrounds, not only shows their brand, but also contains useful information in addition to the mini bio of 160 characters and your single URL link.

Sonny Gill

In this background Sonny Gill has managed to show his brand logo, email, AOL IM, Google Talk and shows the symbols of six of his other networks; Linkedin, Plurk, Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon.

It is simple, clean and sleek, yet packed with valuable information.
__________________________________________________________________________________________

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Very busy as of late and this morning I was catching up on my favorite bloggers. This particular post grabbed my attention, “Social Media is a Lotta damned work”. First, I laughed, thinking “isn’t that the truth”, but then continued to read and found Mack’s candor on the topic refreshing.

I was first drawn to The Viral Garden, though a meeting with Mack Collier, the author on Twitter. I enjoy his candor on Twitter and then began to explore his blog and have been a fan every since.

There are many great blogs writing about etiquette, what to do, what not to do, networking strategies, tips, applications and other services to engage in social media, but few so openly discuss the true time commitment involved. Mack sums it up.

Social media is a lotta damned work, and if you’re only interested in using the space to promote yourself, you’ll quit before you see the results you want.

Why don’t more openly discuss the time commitment? Would the truth detour people from participating in social media? Truth be told, if someone had pointed out the true time commitment, prior to my exploration into social media, I may have put if off until I had more available time. More time….. and we all know how that stories goes.

In the beginning, in addition to the time spent interacting, there is a learning curve for each service and application one might choose use, both online, desktop and even mobile.  Depending on each individual familiarity with these topics, learning curves will vary.

Having support system is a definite bonus.  There are many people to help, co-workers, friends, the online community through social networks, blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, manuals as well as service providers and application developers.

Through my LinkedIn network, I was able to find the education and support I needed to begin. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media
• On Managing A Community

Social networking, social media or building community, whatever term you wish to use, is NOT easy, fast or a rainbow that leads to the pot of gold. If this is what you believe it to be, then please invest your time in further research, before you are disappointed.

The network you have created is an important one. The same time you invest in your personal face to face relationships, you will need to invest in growing and enhancing your online relationships. Being active and engaging in your community is vitally important.

Now that your eyes are open, I must state Social Media is one of the best professional and personal decisions one can make.  You will have the potential to strengthen your network, expand your resources, encourage collaboration and meet like-minded individuals.

Why don’t more openly discuss the time commitment? Would the truth detour people from participating in social media?  What other bloggers have written on the topic of the time investment?

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Related articles:

• Using Twitter to Enhance your Social Network
• Twitter – How Do You Manage the Noise?

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