Taming the Beast: Managing your Social Map Part II
I categorize my activities in social media slightly differently than the social technographic profile presented in Groundswell. Primarily because social techonographics is dealing only with activities and I consider an element of intent as well.
I have four major activities in social media:
- Consuming Media – Analogous to a Spectator. It is where my look for my news, read other blogs, and generally consume other media
- Managing Network Contacts – Somewhat analogous to the Joiner category, but there is an active element to managing contact information of all my social circles
- Interaction – Combining elements of Collectors, Critics, & Creators, this is where I interact with my social network.
- Creator – What I consider pure Creation relative to my blogs and flicker account
With that in mind, let’s revisit the slideshare snapshots and walk through the information flow:
Consuming Media
Managing Your Social Media Slide 2
First, you’ll notice that the map is divided into Personal and Professional with a significant amount of overlap. I’ve found that while ultimately there is no privacy on the web, this publishing framework keeps my work colleagues from being bored with tales of motorcycle trips and my motorcycle buddies from becoming dazed with the flood of information regarding advertising, marking, and social media.
I use iGoogle for virtually everything blog, other RSS, or news related. I find it gives me enough customization to make sure that I can access what I need whether I have a half hour to catch up on the news or only five minutes.
Managing Network Contacts
Managing Your Social Media Slide 3
I use Plaxo as the central service for keeping my contact database updated, backed up and synchronized across both my personal and professional email as well as my iPhone. As you can see, three is a one-way sync from Linked-In to Plaxo as well as two-way syncs between each Outlook contact list. With the addition to a two-way sync with the iPhone I’ve insured that no matter where information gets updated, everything is synchronized and I have all my contacts at my disposal no matter the location.
Interaction and Creation
Managing Your Social Media Slide 4
The light blue boxes represent interaction and the dark blue represent creation. Although you’ll find me on other social media services, my primary places of interaction are Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and FriendFeed. My primary places of interaction when it comes to creation are the motorcycle blog, the tech blog, the company blog, and Flickr.
Starting from the left, you can see that my Flickr account publishes to FriendFeed. I follow several photographers on FriendFeed and as a newbie amateur, I’m interested in getting feedback and learning more about what I’m doing and not doing to create a great photo.
My motorcycle blog publishes to nowhere. My friends that are interested know where to find it and can subscribe via email or RSS feed. Both my Flickr account and my motorcycle blog do a bit of crossover into the professional category only to remind myself that this isn’t truly private content and I go on rides with a few of my co-workers.
Facebook likewise sits squarely in-between personal and professional. Consequently, you’ll get a little more personal flavor from me in my updates, but no incriminating photos or “sheep-tossing” applications.
Twitter and Delicious are both set up the same way. They both are published to three places: The side bar of my blog, the side bar of Real Branding’s corporate blog (currently in beta), and to my FriendFeed. Blog post to this blog are published to RB’s corporate blog as well as to FriendFeed.
In addition, I use Ping.fm to publish some updates out to multiple applications (indicated by the red circle with a P). Occasionally there are things that I feel would be of interest to everyone on my database. I’ve set up my feeds to make sure that when I do use Ping.fm that I’m not creating an echo.
This overall set-up simplifies my social media usage and allows me to focus on using social media as a way to help me get my job done by staying on top of the industry news (iGoogle), link to important information through my browser (Delicious), comment and link on other items (Twitter), and generally keep up with my colleagues and the state of social media/advertising (Facebook & FriendFeed).
And while this is a snapshot of how I’m currently using these apps, I’m always open for new tricks and tips. Which social media applications do you use? How do you manage them?
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