FIND THE EXPERTS

When researching a certain subject you need to find the experts. Use can use tools like WeFollow, Twellow and TweetTop. Check out your category and dig deep to find people that would have the expertise. If you would like to be an astronaut you can actually follow @Nasa. Once you follow the experts, who do they follow? In Twitter you can click on the link "followers" on their profile and see who is following them. You can check out their bio and see if their friends are interesting enough to follow. Who do the followers follow? In Twitter you can click on the link "following" on their twitter profile. This can sometime be even more interesting. You might even find another expert to follow. You can also use TweetStats (this link is the stats for the user @nasa). This is useful to see who they retweet and who they reply to. This might give you an idea of more experts to follow.

SEARCH

Twitter is a great tool for searching. And when I say Twitter, I mean the Twitter website: http://www.twitter.com. There is a nice search tool that can be used to search for people or keywords. With this tool you can see what people on Twitter are saying. And I mean everyone that has a public account! That means people that you do not follow. Cool isn't it? There are many more Twitter search tools out there. For example, on Monitter you can track three keywords at one side by side! On TweetScan you can follow what people are saying about a keyword and you can set up to receive email alerts about certain keywords. There is another tool that is great for researching. It is called Twootles! With this tool you can actually search Google and Twitter at the same time. Type in a keyword and watch it go!

INTERACT

Now that you have some people to follow, what do you do? Interact! Retweet interesting tweets you see. This can be done with one click in TweetDeck You can also send a message to people in twitter if they also follow you. If you read an interesting blog, tweet about it. Post the link and make sure to give the author or blog, credit.

BLOG

Set up a free blog in WordPress or other blogging program, write about what you have read (and don't forget to mention your experts in these posts). How do you get the word out about your blog? You twitter about it of course! Post a link to your blog post on Twitter. HootSuite will make it easy to shorten your web link and give you tweet statistics as well. The reports from HootSuite will show how far your tweet traveled.

TWITTER IS COOL

Twitter is not just for research. But that will be a post for another day!

Julie D'Aloiso
SpiderCat Marketing, Inc.
@juliedaloiso

Like so many other people around the world, I woke up yesterday morning to discover that Twitter wasn't working. "Oh well", I thought, "I'll just check it later." Then I went back to the tasks at hand.

Later in the day Twitter was back up, a bit wobbly, but mostly functional. Bloggers everywhere were talking about the outage—the result of a denial of service attack (DoS)—that also impacted Facebook and other sites. Problems continue today.

What surprised me most wasn't that Twitter went down, but that so many people were making such a big fuss—though here I am joining in. It reminded me of the days back on Pownce, when we'd see all the Twitter users suddenly return to Pownce so they could post messages about seeing the Fail Whale instead of their Tweets. In the summer of 2008, we Pownce users also saw our share of White Screens of Death or images of Admiral Ackbar. Network outages on Pownce, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, etc. were annoying. They made us grumble. But they weren't unexpected. We knew that every now and again something would cause an outage and we'd just need to communicate through other channels until it was back up.

Yesterday though was another story. In addition to the usual grumblings, there was a tremendous amount of media and blog coverage hyping the event. While two years ago this would have been seen as an inconvenience to all of those nerds (like me) who are jabbering online all the time, this week it was seen (by some) as a major communication break-down. Coverage was so extensive, that the Twitter Status report about the event is now the #2 search engine result (out of 97,000,000) for a Google search of 'denial of service attack.' (Which just goes to show that in-bound links have a tremendous impact on search engine optimization.)

To some extent the uproar is understandable. Twitter has seen tremendous growth in the past year. While most Internet users still aren't yet Tweeting, millions are. Twitter has become a way for many to keep in touch around the world and people have come to rely on it as a necessary tool for communication. This week's event was a good reminder that we can't fully rely on any service in particular. Systems will go down, and we should be prepared.

So what do we do when Twitter (or Facebook or whatever) goes down?

I think the main thing to do is to plan ahead. Don't concentrate on just one service. As we Powncers learned, a service can go down for a few hours, or it can shut down permanently. If there are core people, with whom you regularly communicate on Twitter, create a back-up plan. Exchange e-mail addresses, friend them on Facebook, Flickr, Plurk, StumbleUpon and other channels. Bookmark their blogs and Web sites on Delicious. If you create enough back-up channels, then you'll always have an alternative way to reach them—unless the Internet goes down entirely. If that happens we can always go back to using carrier pigeons.

A wee sampling of the many stories about the Twitter outage

• Could you be responsible for the Twitter outage?
• Ongoing denial-of-service attack
• Security experts scramble to decipher Twitter attack
• Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man
• Twitter Downtime: What Did You Do Instead?
• Twitter, Facebook DDoS Attack Targeted One User
• Twitter is Down: Defending Against DoS Attack
• Twitter Outage Moves Into Day 2
• What Did You Do The Day Twitter Almost Died?

In discussions with Susie Sharp, we uncovered a couple of event listings aggregators, Upcoming and Eventful. My initial impression was that Eventful has a really comprehensive listing of live music venues and events, and Upcoming's music coverage is incomplete but it has more of other types of events. Both of these sites provide feeds that can be viewed in your Google Calendar (either directly or via an iCal feed). At this blog post I give step-by-step instructions on how to implement that.

For my own calendar, my favorite live music venues and Meetup.com groups are now visible. What else is there? Ironically, the Cleveland Social Media Club currently offers only an RSS feed of events, but that's probably fixable. I think next I'll look into my LinkedIn groups to see if they have feeds. I've enjoyed a couple of those networking events.

Google is, I think, the king of viewer software. Google Reader is a great RSS feed viewer (though not flawless) and now Google Calendar is showing me all my social options.

I've brought this up in many places over the last couple months. Even The WELL, normally a deep reservoir of expertise on these matters, couldn't help. At the launch party we held last week for this site and the eBook, I brought it up in the Social Media 101 breakout group. In passing, Dominic Litten mentioned Google Wave as a possible solution to this problem, but I guess that remains to be seen. We don't have answers for everything, and I'm open to suggestions!

The other week, at the Cleveland Webloggers meet-up, George Nemeth and I had a brief discussion about this site. While we were chatting, George mentioned that since our focus is social media, we'd like to open about the project. My thought on this matter is that we can use this blog to let you, our readers, see behind the scenes as it were. So I thought I'd tell you why I just spent 3 minutes or so bookmarking the Welcome to Social Media eBook chapters on delicious.

I use delicious to bookmark any blog article, Web site, social media service, or page that I want to be able to access again. It let's me access my bookmarks from any computer, but more importantly it makes it easy to find things in the future. If I'm building a Web site and use some WordPress tip I've found, I want to save that for for future reference. Next time I'm working with WordPress I may want to use it again. Or, if I'm writing a blog entry on writing and language, I'll save all the pages I find while doing my research. These may become pages I link to in the article. By tagging them with a common tag such as language, I can have them all grouped together for easy reference.

I also have made it a habit to bookmark my own content. I don't do this to be able to find it—obviously I know where my pages are. I do this to see if others are bookmarking it too.

Delicious is a cool tool for measurement and marketing

Last year, in Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors, I covered this subject in greater detail, but here's an overview of what I've just accomplished by bookmarking the social media chapters.

Saving this content lets me monitor its popularity among delicious users

When you save a site on delicious you can see how many times it has been saved by other users and who those users are. If a site has been saved by more than one person, you will see a blue box to the right of the link showing the number of times it has been saved. When you click on the blue box, you will see a list of delicious users who have saved that page. I've saved the Welcome to Social Media Chapters on delicious with the tag: WelcomeToSocialMediaV1.

This site has been live less than a week, so I'm not expecting to see many blue boxes just yet. Thus far only one chapter has been saved by another person. But over time, more pages will get saved. If I look at this tag in a year I'll be able to see which chapters were saved most often. I can also see who saved them—in case I want to add them to my delicious network. This will let me see what other useful content they've found and it will also let me share specific saves with them. Thus when we publish Volume 2, I can share the links with the people who saved chapters from Volume 1.

My delicious saves serve to announce (on multiple channels) what content is important to me

I bookmark things because they are helpful or interesting to me, but many of these things may also be of interest to the people who follow my Web Development Blog, follow me on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. Delicious makes it easy to share things with the people who follow me both on delicious and elsewhere. Many of us see delicious as a useful bookmarking tool, but it is also designed to be social. I can add other people to my network to see what links they are saving and vice versa. I can also subscribe to a user's RSS feed using Google Reader.

For example, my friend Wayne Smallman, a Web designer in England, saves many links related to Web design, development and science to his delicious account. By subscribing to his feed, I don't have to remember to go visit his bookmarks page, I'll just see the links while I'm catching up with blog reading on Google Reader. Similarly Wayne, or anyone else can subscribe to my delicious feed to keep up-to-date with my bookmarks.

Publishing your delicious bookmarks to other channels

By saving links to delicious I've passively shared them with anyone who knows about my delicious account. But I can also take a more pro-active approach. I can re-publish the feed in other places. For instance on my own site I created a page for My Social Media Profiles in which I list the services I use most and why. When appropriate I also pull in the related feed. Thus the description for delicious also includes my 5 most recent bookmarks.

I've also set up Facebook to pull the delicious feed into my wall. I find this very helpful as I don't have the time to update Facebook very often. This way information is added whenever I save a bookmark, and I don't even have to think about it.

At first I wasn't sure if this was a good idea, would people on Facebook want this? But so far the feedback has been positive. Friends in the design field have thanked me for sharing useful links and after I saved a dessert recipe my mom left a comment wondering if any cake was left.

Now you are probably thinking that there are some bookmarks you save, that you just don't want to share with the rest of the world. There's no need to worry about that. Every time you save a link to delicious you have the option to mark it as private. These bookmarks will only be visible to you.

Promoting Welcome to Social Media on Facebook via delicious

As you'll recall, I started writing this post because I had saved the Welcome to Social Media chapters to delicious. Thus those links were pushed out through my RSS feed to my own site, to my delicious friends, to Friendfeed and to Facebook. While I only wrote one of the chapters myself, I am part of the project team and thus want to spread the good word about the eBook. By sharing the links to the eBook chapters—as part of the usual stream of links I share throughout the week—I've let my Facebook friends know that these pages are worth reading. Naturally many Cleveland Social Media Club members have also announced the site on Facebook, so I'm not the only one. But by bookmarking the chapters on delicious I was able to reinforce our message by sending page specific links to Facebook. As a result of our combined efforts, 12.6% of the traffic (this week) on the Welcome to Social Media site has come from Facebook.

Conclusion

Delicious is a great tool for bookmarking, but if you've not used it to do more, give it a try. Whether you want to see which blog entries are most popular among delicious users or want to share links on Facebook, delicious offers numerous possibilities to aid you in your social media and marketing endeavors.

Delicious Resources

• delicious
• Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors
• Social Survey: Del.icio.us

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Welcome to the Welcome to Social Media Blog!

In conjunction with today's launch of the Welcome to Social Media, Volume 1 eBook, this blog has been created to share insights, ideas, observations and tips regarding social media and social networking.

Topics covered may include, but are not limited to:

• Social Media in the news
• Services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• Professional best practices
• Tips for collaboration
• Networking strategies
• Personal observations and anecdotes

The Welcome to Social Media Blog is a group project, and we hope to continually add new authors as it evolves. If you're a member of the Cleveland Social Media Club—with a gift for writing and a penchant for all things social media—we'd love to have you on board. To apply, simply fill out our online application form. Submissions will be reviewed on a monthly basis.

If you prefer to read, but have ideas on topics you'd like to see covered on the blog, please submit them in the comments field or via our contact page.

Thanks for visiting!

“In order for us to get access to the chosen candidate’s information, we need to be able to view their page,” Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the interview. “And so that’s the way we’ve chosen to go about doing it. As far as we know, there’s no other way to get into their specific Face book page.”

Michael DeAloia

Calling all Cleveland area bloggers. You and a guest are invited to blog - live - at the final dress rehearsal of Falstaff on June 17th, from 6:15pm until the final curtain. This is a great opportunity to blog and tweet about one of Cleveland's great cultural assets from "behind the scenes." Kudos to Opera Cleveland for creating this awesome event and here's to hoping other cultural institutions begin this really cool initiative.

Make this experience yours! It is a wonderful opportunity to wander through the theatre and backstage - while a performance is in progress - and to share your unique view through your blog or Twitter account.

Listen, you do not have to be an opera aficionado to join this event. It is simply a way for Opera Cleveland to make opera more accessible through social media. And I for one thinks this is one of the coolest things ever. Let's get a ton of bloggers and Twitter afficionados in attendance.

To RSVP or for more information, please contact Lisa Hofmann at hofmann@operacleveland.org or at 216.575.0903.