SU Comments

The easiest way to make friends is to be friendly, open and transparent.

Of course, this should go without saying!

The Book of Proverbs says that to have a friend, one must be a friend.

While this can be easy off line, it can be more difficult on social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Plurk and so on.

What a lot of people can’t seem to realize is that the key word in social networking is social, and so using it to promote the latest hot offer or multi level marketing program doesn’t go down that well with many.

While I have quite a number of friends involved in business on social media sites, it’s because of our other common interests that we get on well.

Using the message system of different sites to send weekly updates about products and services will inevitably lead to losing friends, and possibly being banned altogether.

The simplest way to get accepted as a friend on Facebook is to be open about who you are.

This includes using a decent profile picture, and allowing people to actually see your profile.

I had thirty friend requests on the site to work through today. I accepted ten, and rejected the rest.

The reason I accepted the 10 requests was simply because I knew the people from elsewhere, and/or they had some information about themselves, as well as a profile photograph.

It’s fine to have privacy settings turned up to the max if you’re just there for family and friends, but you’ll be at a distinct disadvantage you’re networking with others outside of your off line relationships.

Of the friend requests that I rejected, most had nothing about the person concerned, and/or had a sales pitch on their profile.

Networking on social media involves interaction, nothing more, nothing less.

The key to good relationships is transparency and openness.

To sum this all up, if you’re having trouble adding social media friends, include a decent profile pic, reset your privacy levels, and add some information about yourself!

Wishing all of our readers and subscribers a happy, peaceful and prosperous 2009…!

This year I took on a country school bus run, and every school day, have traveled up the highway picking up and delivering school children to farms and nearby villages for a local school.

I’ve mostly enjoyed the experience, and have spent down time thinking about different topics, taking notes, and planning future blog posts.

Covering a about a hundred and sixty miles on average, it soon became apparent that I needed to take my camera with me.

From kangaroos hopping alongside of me, to snow covered fields and mountains shrouded in mist, there was always something to snap if I had the chance.

One sight that has had me laughing and thinking every day is the sign below.

Obrien Constructions Sign

What’s so funny about the sign in this picture?

The sign itself is quite solid, sturdy, and conveys the message that a master builder is available in the district. No problems with that at all!

The thing that makes me laugh though is that it is situated in a field, next to a couple of run down sheds, and a rickety old fence.

I’m sure that the owner of the sign had nothing to do with the building of either the sheds, or the fence, but to me they do nothing to build confidence in the product being offered.

The sign would, in my mind, have been more effective in a clear space, away from the shed.

How does this relate to social media?

Many people think that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and others present the ideal opportunity for them to advertise for free.

Apart from the fact that this may contravene the terms of service of these platforms, such advertising soon wears thin, and those who promote this way can look inept, and amatuerish.

People on social networking sites are there for a social experience, and soon grow tired of constant messages containing advertising links.

A friend on one site has seen the number of friends and fans that he has drop dramatically because of this, and I have had some people ask whether they should unfriend him.

The messages wouldn’t be a problem if this person actually engaged and interacted with others on the site, but he doesn’t!

Social media is a great way to network for business, build a personal profile and creat a buzz about your website.

Do it the wrong way though, and you risk losing friends, or get kicked off the site, and in the process defeat the whole purpose of doing it in the first place.

Allan Cockerill

Yesterday when I was checking my e-mails, I noticed a message from Tinu Abayomi-Paul sent through StumbleUpon (on SU you can either send pages to other SU members or send a page to someone’s e-mail) titled How to Know if You’re “That Guy” in Social Media.

I really enjoyed the article, which uses humor to discuss a big issue in social media…are you part of the conversation?

One of the things I love about Plurk is that it makes having conversations simple. In one afternoon I can discuss the newest James Bond movie (and how cute Daniel Craig is :)), talk about long distance relationships, and agree to participate in a blog contest.

NAMG’s idea for a blog contest really puts the social in social media.

I’m going to copy her explanation below. I hope you think it’s a good idea and want to join in.

Hey my friends!  It is contest time once again!  When I
was deciding on my prize for my previous contest I wanted to do
something to help one of my readers defray some of the expense of the
holidays.  I realized, though, that I wouldn’t be able to do
much alone.Sooooo..,. I turned to my fellow bloggers on Plurk.  (The
BESTEST SOCIAL NETWORK EVAR!)  Several of them have pitched in and
we are having a contest across all our blogs.

Now, the rules.  You can enter once per participating blog per
day.  Entries are simple… just comment on our post for the
day.  If you blog and would like to post about our contest, doing
so will get you 5 extra entries.  There will be 2 winners.
Each winner will need to give us a mini bio of your family.
(Ages, genders, wants, needs, likes) and we will buy prizes
accordingly.  Prizes will be wrapped for under the tree and sent
post haste! Comments and posts from Sunday November 23 through November
26th will be taken as entries.  Black Friday we will announce the
winners!!!!

The following Blogs are participating in this prize package!

Not A Mean Girl

As Kat Knits

Passion Parties by Alana

PQ Nation

Confessions of a Middle Aged Surburban Diva

Popping Bubbles

Random Ramblings of a Stay At Home Mom

I Read Banned Books

The Daily Douz

Puntiglio

Puntiglio Bookshelf

Three Ring ‘Surf’Ace

Andrea’s Internet Cafe

This past Monday, we had our 16th Plurkshop. This was the first one I’ve hosted, so I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous, especially since it was also the first Plurkshop in over a month.

Nowsourcing was also on hand to help answer questions, which I greatly appreciated. He started the discussion off by suggesting that people share their SU profiles, which lead to a discussion on adding people as friends.

For years, if I followed you and you followed me on StumbleUpon, we were considered friends. There were 2 problems with that though.

1) SU had a 200 person follow limit, so you needed to be careful about who you added, and

2) friends affected what pages you’d see if you clicked the stumble button, so following a RL (real life) friend might mean you’d get pages you weren’t really interested in.

Recently SU made a major change that addressed both of these issues.

First they removed the limits! Now on SU, you can follow as many people as you want.

Second, they separated friends and followers. Now I can choose whether I want to see what my friends are stumbling or whether I just want to be friends with them. By choosing to follow someone, you’re saying you want to see their stumbles.

The nice thing about friend requests is that you are sent a message on SU advising that so-and-so wants to add you as a friend. You don’t get that notification about followers, and have to look to see who’s new on your Subscribers page (add /fans/ when you’re at your SU home page to see your subscribers).

Keli asked “What are the basic differences between SU and Digg?” Ethnicomm suggested a great article by Tim Nash that I hadn’t read before, but explains the differences well. (Thanks, ethnicomm!)

Nowsourcing went on to explain that “StumbleUpon is more like a discovery engine, like channel surfing on TV. Digg is more of the crowd effect.”

LChamp asked “What is the benefit of the SU community?”

SU is great about helping to get the word out about topics that interest you. When a page first gets discovered, it is added to the system to be shared with others. If your page is tagged correctly, the people who see it will be people with similar interests.

In addition, if you write a review about the page, that review is added to the Recent Reviews of everyone who follows you. If they like the page and also add a review, that review will go out to everyone who follows them, and so on and so forth.

Gassho asked “Does everyone find that most visitors from SU tend to stay .01 seconds?”

Nowsourcing mentioned that he had found SU traffic to have one of the lowest bounce rates of the large social media sites and both sonnygill and sleepymarci agreed. We discussed again the importance of making sure that your page is catorgized correctly so that you’re getting visitors who are interested in exactly what your blog is about.

Sonnygill asked about the many features of the toolbar. Unfortunately, both nowsourcing and I have changed our toolbars from the default, so instead I recommended the free ebook Using the Toolbar which goes into each part of the toolbar in detail.

BarbaraKB clarified: a “thumb down means, ‘I don’t wanna see more like this’ rather than ‘this is an awful site’ and a review means others read the reason?”

To which I replied “Yep. And a thumb up means I really like this and want to see more like it.”

Aivzdog added “Stumbleupon is my life…almost.

Finally, I wanted to mention that trading stumbles or asking specifically for stumbles for a site is against their TOS. This surprised people and questions ranged from “Can they enforce that?” by LChamp to “Why do they have the sendto then?” by nowsourcing.

As far as I know, they’ve mainly enforced it with sites designed to trade stumbles, but that doesn’t mean they won’t decide to in the future. As far as the sendto page, I think it is to share interests with your friends, not send out group stumble requests.

Nowsourcing mentioned that “the more evil sites out there just have random people stumbling ya. Use them and prepare to be banned, your site too.”

Here’s the link to read more about what StumbleUpon has to say regarding requesting stumbles.

I added that I love when friends send me pages they think I’ll like. It’s fun seeing what they’ve found.

There’s a quite a bit more discussion in the Plurkshop thread, I’ve tried to hit most of the highlights here. If you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll try to answer them. It’s likely someone else is wondering the same thing.

If you’d like to add me on Plurk or SU or any other social site, please feel free. I love meeting new friends!

If you’re not on Plurk yet, but would like to try it, here is my link. It will add you as a fan, but please click the “Add Teeg as a friend” button and request friendship, I’d love to get to know you!

This morning, I did a very brave thing. Our power had gone out, Ken was at work, and I was the only adult in the house.

I have a laptop, but it didn’t have enough power to last all day, and the modem and router didn’t have power so I couldn’t use the internet at all!!!

Arrrgh! A full day without being able to get online and see what was going on in the rest of the world?!? No, the thought was unbearable. I had to face my fears and brave the dark basement where the fuse box was hidden.

Now, to explain why I don’t like basements, I need to go back to before I was born. My mom (Alice) likes to sew, so Dad (Jesse) decided to buy her a mannequin.

Not, please understand, a dressmaker’s mannequin. Instead it was a full body humanoid like you’d see in the window of a store.

Mom wasn’t sure what to do with the thing, but it definitely needed to be dressed, so she put one of her outfits on it and threw a wig on it’s head. Then she asked Dad to take it to the attic.

Photo by Colin Rose

Mom and Dad lived in a duplex at the time. Two families were separated by a thin wall, but they shared the attic upstairs.

Sue and Herman had just moved into the other duplex. Sue was up in the attic working, when she happened to notice the mannequin against the back wall.

When it didn’t respond to her, she rushed back downstairs and phoned her husband at work. “Herman, you have to come quick. Jesse’s killed Alice and hung her in the attic!”

When I was 12, we moved into an old house with a large, dark, basement.

I had always been a little scared of the dark, but old houses make noises. Lots of creaky, creepy groaning noises…which sound especially loud in the dark.

Did I mention that my dad was a practical joker?

He thought my fear of the dark was rather silly, so one day he sent me down to get something from the back corner of the basement…where it wasn’t very well lit, and where the mannequin was also being stored.

Guess who was hiding behind the mannequin?

I think I jumped a foot in the air. Dad laughed and laughed.

Even guests weren’t immune to Dad’s mannequin pranks.

Dad would take them down to the basement on some pretext or other, and watch when they discovered the “woman” in the corner. I can still hear him laughing and as soon as they realized what it was, they’d join in. 

I don’t know what ever happened to the mannequin. But I still can’t go down into a dark basement without thinking of it.

A while back, Gwen Sutton (known to many Plurkers as Mama Sutton) asked me if I thought Plurk was fading.

I said I’d write a blog post about it, and then never got the post finished.

This morning, after participating in separate conversations started by BarabaraKB and ethnicomm about the same thing, I’m finally sitting down to write the promised post. Sorry it took me so long, Gwen!

In order to write about this, today I’ll start by discussing the elephant in the living room, Plurk Karma.

Let me say first, that there are some aspects of karma that I like.

I like the fact that you have to participate to raise Karma.

I like how karma keeps many of the broadcasters away from Plurk.

I like how karma helps keep spam low.

That said, there are also things that I don’t like about it.

Once I’ve shown that I know how to participate and be friendly, I don’t need karma anymore.

Karma drops if you don’t plurk for a while, even if you respond to others. That is probably my least favorite thing about it.

Because Karma drops for things other than spamming, it is not a good indicator of whether you should follow someone. So outside of a personal number, Karma has no clear value.

Here are my suggestions on how Karma could be improved:

1) End it at 50. Once you’ve reached 50 karma, you’ve shown that you know how to participate.

2) Don’t drop karma from non-participation. There are many reasons for having to be away from Plurk for a while. I know of people who’ve gone overseas on vacation and didn’t have internet access, people who lost power (especially during the hurricanes), and friends who have been in the hospital, unable to Plurk. Losing karma over something like that is ridiculous.

3) Once you’ve reached 50, karma shouldn’t drop for anything less than spamming. Karma could be a great way to keep spammers off of Plurk, it has the potential, but right now that potential is blotted out by all the other ways to lose karma.

So what do you think about Karma? Should the A-team keep it like it is, or could it be improved?

Last night I was talking with NowSourcing. He has an experiment going on where he’s taking social media “to the streets.” For the next 10 weeks, he wants to start meeting the people that he’s interacted with, bringing a personal touch back to social media.

Several months ago, Dr. Mani shrank the number of people he was following on Twitter down to 40. I watched this experiment with interest, curious to see how it would work, and the results were amazing. Instead of growing dissatisfied with Twitter, having only a few people to follow allowed him to interact with each person individually and to become real friends with them instead of acquaintances.

We like to say that social media is about the people and conversations, and it usually is as we’re getting started. But once we’ve gotten settled on a site and added more than a certain number of friends (whatever the number is that you can keep up with easily), the conversations tend to get lost at worst, or become sketchy at best.

When DoshDosh had a friend drive on Plurk, back when Plurk first opened, I added more than 100 friends in a day and went from being able to enjoy long conversations with friends and keep up with each post, to having to MAAR (mark all as read) way more often than I’d like.

I used to love StumbleUpon’s 200 friend limit. I didn’t feel guilty about leaving people as fans because everyone knew about the limit. And with 200 or fewer friends on a site, it’s easy to develop real relationships, turning them from online friends into real life friends.

So how do you stay social as your friend list grows? I really don’t have a solid answer yet, although there are a few things I do. I’ll list those and I’d love to hear your ideas too.

1) Use private messages. A short private message from a friend, something like, “I’ve been thinking about you, how are you doing?” always makes me smile.

2) Don’t be afraid to move a conversation. Some of the best relationships I’ve developed have been because we moved the conversation off the site we were on. If you’re nervous about giving out your usual e-mail, create a social one that you can use. Chats over IM are fun and flow faster than conversations on a social site, so it’s easier to talk.

3) Are you an aural person? Use a site like Skype or consider a broadcast site where some people can type and others can call in and talk. Even though I’m more visual than aural, I have enjoyed participating in broadcasts on TalkShoe, Skype, and Stickam so far. It’s fun hearing (and sometimes seeing) who you’ve been chatting with.

So what am I missing? How do you maintain relationships as the number of friends you have increases?

I’ve been thinking about Plurk, and what could be done to improve the site.

One complaint that I have heard quite often is the steep drops in karma that can occur when you away for a while, even for something as simple as sleeping!

This had never really bothered me until recently, because I work from home so much.

This past weekend though I had to travel out of town, and was gone for nearly 24 hours.

The drop was quite significant, although in the context of the rest of my life, it hardly matters.

It could be something for the A - Team to consider though!

If enough people get disillusioned with the drop in karma when they are spending time with family, or working, or, heaven forbid, sleeping, they might just move on to the next big thing!

There’s enough competition out there now, and it’s increasing all the time.

I plurked earlier today asking friends what one thing they would like to see change about Plurk!

There have been some interesting answers.

1. being able to search for friends inside of threads

2. Start with the oldest plurk first, on both updates and responses.

3. Message threading and being able to ‘bookmark’ conversations.

4. Staff responding to “Contact Us” messages.

5. Being able to add a search and any posts that match would come in to my timeline.

Interesting responses from people who enjoy Plurk, and want to continue using it.

What one thing do you think would improve Plurk?

Allan Cockerill

This post was written with the help of my Plurk friends, and contains some insights from them that may just help you to build strong online friendships.

I began by asking a series of questions over the past day or so about their relationships on Plurk, and other sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Contrary to the opinion of a lot of self styled marketing experts, social media users are not some group of avid consumers waiting to run and check the latest offering on their website.

These are normal everyday people from a range of backgrounds and interests that meet together on this, and other social platforms.

What Bugs These Folks?

People who Plurk or Twitter 50 times a day, yet never respond on to others.

People who spam with links and or products.

Other things that upset them is plain rudeness, and sharing too much “intimate” information.

The message is plain! Be friendly, reply to others and be respectful.

Sharing the occasional link is all right, but do it too much, and you begin to lose friends.

Once that happens, it really doesn’t make that much sense, does it?

Okay, I know that Teeg is the explorer, and I’m the writer, but today I think that I may just have scooped her by signing up to Posterous first!

Posterous is a very simple blogging site that you can post to by using email or sms.

You can link your account to Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and a number of other platforms.

Once you have set up your account, you can add the services that you want to link to, and they will be updated each time you post to Posterous.

You can send any type of file you like, including .doc and pdf, as well as different image and video files.

Links from Youtube and other video sites are automatically embedded.

Here’s the blog I started there today

I will share more about the site as I use it more. The blog I started today was there just minutes after signing up, and I believe that this is one reason that the site will be successful.

It’s obviously in a similar market space to Tumblr, but I found it much easier to use, and more appealing to the eye!

Please note that I am not connected to Posterous.com in any way, other than just having been converted to this simple blogging method!

Follow this link to go to Posterous!

Allan Cockerill