Gemma Worrall's now infamous tweet

Gemma shared a woeful lack of political, geographic and spelling knowledge by misspelling Barack Obama’s name as ‘barraco barner’ and mistakenly thinking he’s was the British president (let’s not even go there) in reference to him getting involved in the Russia/Ukraine affair.

Though Gemma’s story is extreme it does highlight how people don’t realise the potential size and breadth of their audience, the effect of their words and the potential fall out on themselves should the reception be negative. I feel for poor Gemma and her comments about some of the responses she has received as a result are a sad testament of our times.

Tips for Maintaing a Healthy Social Media Profile

Here’s a few things to keep in mind before you commit your thoughts to your favourite social media.

• Remember, social media is not the same as having a chat with a friend in the pub, round the dinner table or over a cuppa of your favourite beverage.
• By putting something in writing you are creating a record that can be referred to and shared and re-shared beyond your scope of control and influence, rather than a throw away comment to a limited audience that may be forgiven and forgotten.
• If your writing is public, such as tweets on Twitter, your blog/website entries and public posts of Facebook/Google+ then it is published in a legal sense. This means you are then opening yourself to defamation and libel laws should your words be construed as unlawful.
• Remember that when you write something people can’t perceive your facial expressions and body language, they have no cues from your tone of voice, so it is that much easier to misconstrue the meaning of your words.
• Make sure you read over your words before you click send/publish, think about the way people will potentially take it. Replace any ambiguity with clear meaning where possible.
• If you think what you are intending to write is controversial then weigh up whether your desire to express your opinion outweighs your ability to deal with any fall out. If not then don’t write it, save it for a private chat with a trusted individual/group.
• We all have bad days at work and we’ve probably all had a bad boss, work situation that we need to vent about, but there’s a time and a place for it and putting it in writing is rarely the answer. Never write anything openly hostile or negative about your employer or a company you wish to work for in the future on social media. Chances are if it’s a public post there are people employed to monitor all comments about the company and it could get back to your boss/recruiter. If it’s private, well exactly who is on your friend list, in your circles, perhaps you have a work colleague there that you didn’t remember or perhaps you added your boss?
• Be honest about yourself – if you have conflicting messaging, views, opinions and data about yourself on different social media (e.g. between LinkedIn and Facebook) chances are that recruiters and employers may pick up on it and start to question your honesty and integrity.
• You are entitled to a private life, but online you have to take steps to ensure that you manage and protect it. Social media like Facebook and Google+ will automatically default you to the most public and open settings and each time they bring in new tools and features you’ll automatically be opted in.  If you want to keep a private side to your online life then make sure you regularly check your privacy settings and use tools such as the ‘view as feature’ in Facebook to see how different types of people view your profile.
• Having no public Facebook presence can raise concerns with recruiters. It shouldn’t have an effect, but it sometimes does. In some places (notably the US) recruiters are illegally asking candidates for employment to give over their personal Facebook information for recruiters to ‘peek’ at your world.  My advice is to never give this kind of access and be sure to state that what they are requesting is against the law. However, it is possible to avoid getting into this situation in the first place by putting the occasional public post up that is non-confrontational and says something about what you’re interested in and do with your time. You can see my public Facebook profile as an example of this.
• Regularly google yourself and any aliases you use. You’d be surprised by how much information can come up and how a post you might have put on the internet back when it wasn’t all that popular (if you’re as old and geeky as me) can come back to bite you in the bottom! I make a point of googling myself about once every other month and always google myself before I start looking for work.
• When you’re looking for work it’s a good idea to become a bit more publicly active on your social networks, most notably LinkedIn to increase your chances of getting noticed by recruiters in your field of expertise. I find writing about my expertise and field of work helps enormously. I contribute to groups and try to blog on my website more often.
• Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, but not too much – when I’m looking for a new contract I update all my social networks to show that I’m looking for work. However, be mindful that on your more ‘social’ social networks like Facebook your friends might not want you to keep going on about needing a job. With LinkedIn, it’s the opposite, take time to refresh your status and profile, post frequently – but only on relevant topics, be active in groups and state that you’re job seeking where appropriate. Take the time to recommend colleagues on LinkedIn that you would like a recommendation from and then request a recommendation in return. It’s a lot harder to turn down someone’s request when they’ve already done something for you.

So, in conclusion use your social media to raise your public profile in a positive way that helps attract recruiters. When using social media for personal use take a moment to think before you publish your undiluted thoughts and feelings in a public forum. Most people don’t say everything they think and feel in crowded public places, perhaps it’s time to adopt this thinking for online as well as offline interactions?

Happy posting!

Wealie x

I have only just signed up for Business2Blogger, but I’m already excited about the possibilities.  The basic premise is to introduce bloggers with businesses looking to provide paid blogging opportunities to bloggers.  The Business2Blogger team will email you genuine paid opportunities that they have reviewed.  The emails will go out no more than once a day, so you don’t have to worry about being spammed by the service.  Should you write a piece for one of the opportunities then the Business2Blogger team will also promote your post on their blog, facebook and Twitter streams.

The service is free for all bloggers to sign up to and there is a two tier service.  To sign up for the higher tier service (preferred status) all you have to do is promote the Business2Blogger service through either a banner ad, button or write an article about the service on your blog.  As a preferred status member you receive the blogging post opportunities email 4 hours in advance of the basic status members, there’s no trial period and you become eligible for specialised opportunities based on your geography and/or demographics.

The Business2Blogger team seem very friendly and being bloggers themselves are committed to delivering a friendly, fun and useful service.  I look forward to seeing how Business2Blogger can help me.

Wealie x

Happy hunting!

Wealie
x

LinkedIn  - Building Connections

The professional networking site you really need to focus on building a profile with is LinkedIn.  Basically LinkedIn works like a cross between Facebook, Twitter and Facebook groups, but for professional and business relationships.

It’s a fantastic resource for maintaining existing business relationships, reacquainting with old ones and building new relationships whether they be with potential employers, recruitment consultants, employees, suppliers, business partners or clients.

There are a wealth of tools included on the site and the degree to which LinkedIn will be of use to you will very much tie in with how much you utilise these tools.  The site allows you to do the following:

• Set up connections with people that you have had a professional relationship with in some capacity in the past or present
• Communicate with your network through internal email style messages, discussion groups and status updates
• Provide and receive professional endorsements of  your contacts through the writing of personal recommendations
• Meet new people by requesting introductions through your contacts or by joining discussion groups and requesting contacts
• Update your status in a similar fashion to Facebook and you can link your status updates to show your Twitter Feed as well
• Set up discussion groups to build niche networks and/or to discuss topics of interest to your profession or business sector
• Provide links to all your other online profiles

It’s a great place to connect with your work colleagues old and new, build a reputation through your recommendations, get introduced to potential colleagues through your network contacts and find out about what is happening within your industry through discussion groups.  Discussion groups are also a great way of making new contacts and finding out about vacancies before they are advertised on the job sites.  I have a number of recruitment agents as contacts on LinkedIn, so they can always see when I’ve completed a contract and looking for new work when I update my status.

I personally think that LinkedIn is on its way to becoming as essential as your CV in terms of job hunting.  I would advise everyone to take the time to invest in setting up their profile as soon as possible.

Google Profile – Advertising Your Presence to the World

It’s also a good idea to set yourself up with a Google Profile.  The best way I can describe it is like having an online advert for you as an individual person.  If used correctly it can pull together the links to all your online profiles in one handy place.

You can add a short biography of yourself, plus information about where you’ve lived, where you currently work and have worked in the past and where you went to school.  You can also add photos by linking to an online photo sharing service such as Flickr or Picasa which then displays the photos you have or a selection of them that you choose.

You have the option to put in personal contact information, but I would advise being circumspect about the information you share here.  You can restrict access to the information to your contacts,  but that would mean you could only add contacts that you were willing to share that information with, which could be quite restricting for you.  To be honest this is an area of the Google Profile I would advise not using unless you are putting in business contact information and even then it could open you up to receiving spam emails, junk mail and unsolicited sales telephone calls!

Finally the other option you can add to your Google Profile is connecting a Google Buzz account to display your status updates.  Google Buzz is very similar to Twitter, but with a bit more functionality, but considerably less take up than Twitter at the moment.  Whether Google Buzz will become more popular is debatable and having more than one status messaging service can be harder to keep up to date.  However, if you use a service like Tweetdeck which allows you to update multiple status messaging functions from the one programme, the issues over maintaining content on each of these is greatly reduced.  Tweetdeck is a multiple platform programme which you can use on your Desktop, iPhone, Android Phone, iPad and within the web browser Google Chrome.  Tweetdeck allows you to update the following status updates: Facebook, *Facebook pages, *Facebook groups, *Foursquare, **LinkedIn, Twitter and *Google Buzz.

*Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Foursquare and Google Buzz cannot be updated on the iPhone, iPad and Android Phone Tweetdeck Applications.
**LinkedIn can only be updated through the desktop version of Tweetdeck.

Twitter & Google Buzz – Tell the World What You’re Doing

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking/micro blogging site.  Essentially what that means is that it allows you to write and read messages known as tweets, which are a maximum of 140 characters long.  Think of it as an online text messaging service, but one that publishes your messages to the whole world!  It is one of the most popular social networking services and has been growing rapidly since it first went online in 2006.

What you can do on Twitter:

• Follow the tweets of people that are friends or share your interests
• Create lists of people tweeting, such as people who all tweet about a specific topic, e.g. communication, or from a specific location, e.g. San Francisco, or to group all your friends who tweet into one list
• View only the tweets from the people on the specific list – As the number of people you are following rises then you will find lists very useful to ensure that the most important tweets you want to read do not get lost
• Send direct messages directly to specific people (these will be private messages,  visible only to the person you send them to)
• Gain a following of people who are reading your tweets
• View the trending topics (what people are tweeting most about) and add your own tweet about a trending topic

So how will using Twitter help with your job search?  Firstly it’s a great place to announce that you are looking for work and letting those people who follow your Twitter stream know that you’re available for work.  Secondly a number of recruitment agencies have started using Twitter and it is a good way to see when they are looking for people to fill roles without having to call them.  Equally if they are following you then when you tweet that you are currently looking for a role they will see it.  Thirdly you can view trending topics and/or search Twitter’s tweets for keywords and terms such as “Jobs” or “Job Seeking”.

In addition to the benefits of looking for work, Twitter is also another resource you can use to promote the work and resources that you make available online.  A photographer can have a link to his or her Flickr account to send a tweet every time they upload a new photograph.  You can do the same thing with videos on YouTube, for example if you were an aerobics teacher, you could upload a video demonstrating your teaching abilities.

Google Buzz

As I mentioned above Google Buzz is another social networking/micro blogging service and is very similar to Twitter, but with not as high a take up of users online at present.  However, where Google Buzz has an edge over Twitter is in the additional functionality of the service.

What you can do with Google Buzz in addition to what can be done with Twitter:

• Because Buzz is part of the Google family it has excellent options for integrating with the other Google services such as Google Profile, GMail, Google Reader, Picasa and YouTube, that you can easily set up when you apply for an account
• You can allow your buzzes (messages) to appear on your Google Profile
• It also allows you to link in seamlessly with other non-Google services such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter
• It allows you to see thumbnails of pictures and links to the larger picture within an individual buzz

Google Buzz has the same advantages to job seekers as Twitter does, so I won’t repeat the benefits here.

As with all the online social networking applications, the degree to which Twitter & Google Buzz will work for you, depends on the time you are willing to put in.  I won’t lie, maintaining a useful and regular online presence takes time and effort, but the dividends you receive are well worth the hard work and time spent.

Your Facebook Profile, Pages & Groups – Leverage the Power of Friends

Although Facebook is primarily a social tool designed for fun a lot of businesses and individuals are using it in a professional capacity.  Whether you choose to use your personal profile, a Facebook Page or Group very much depends upon what you are looking to achieve with them.

For most job seekers using your profile will be sufficient, but if you want to demonstrate your skills and experience, or sell a product or service of your own then a Facebook Page or Group might be the way to go.  I’ll talk a little about each and what you can do with them in terms of job seeking and raising your profile.

Your Individual Facebook Profile

Although your individual profile is likely to be primarily social, you can use it for professional purposes in the following ways.

• Share details about your job seeking through your status updates
• Message your friends on Facebook asking them if they know of any work going at their place of employment, or anyone in their network looking for people
• Join Facebook groups that are relevant to your profession, skills and experience or recruitment agencies and become an active member of discussions, chat with other group members and contribute to discussions
• “Like” Facebook pages of  recruitment agencies, employers you would like to work with, business partners, suppliers, etc, so you can keep up to date with what they are doing and make them aware of your profile

A Facebook Page

You may want to create a Facebook page, which keeps your professional work separate from your personal Facebook information, or to specifically draw attention to it.  People can “Like” your page so that any status updates and activity that happens on your page is shown on their news feed.

A page has all the functionality of your profile, (chat, status updates, photos, videos, discussions and events, message people who have “liked” your page, etc) and you are not limited to the number of people who can like your page, whereas you can only have a maximum of 5000 friends on Facebook.

Probably the most useful features are the analytics of the number and frequency of visitors to your page and linking into Facebook’s advertising system to advertise your page.  This is a particularly good tool if you are offering a product or service to people.

I personally have two pages, one that focuses on my artistic outputs and another that I share with a friend as part of our Dance Dynamic business for dancers to find out about what’s going on with classes and events and ask us questions.

My personal page is updated primarily automatically through linking it to my various other social networking sites and through TweetDeck.  My primary social networking outlets are my Website/Blog, Facebook and Twitter along with my specialist sites Flickr and YouTube.  By setting up automatic updating on my Facebook page it remains current without me having to physically go in and add content.

A Facebook Group

Groups are a better tool to use if you are looking to bring a group of people together to discuss specific topics such as a single business or a certain profession.  By setting up a group like this you are taking on a certain degree of responsibility for ensuring that in the early stages there is content to keep people coming back.  Successful groups have a lively group of members that regularly contribute to it and have all the same functionality as pages, but also group chat and the ability to message all group members and invite them all to events.

It’s worth noting that you can add other people as administrators on both pages and groups to help spread the responsibility of keeping them up to date. However, if you want to keep full control of what is posted then a self managed page is probably the best way to go.

Slideshare & Brainshark – Demonstrate Your Skills

I’ve talked a little bit about how you can offer something back to the world through your online presence, such as participating in the Facebook and LinkedIn professional groups, or providing links to good resources through your buzzes or tweets.

If you work in the corporate world and/or have a corporate profession or simply want to share your skills, experience and knowledge then you might also find the following services useful.

Slideshare

Slideshare is an online resource for sharing presentations and documents with the web.  Basically you can upload an unlimited number of presentations and documents (plus a maximum of 3 videos) that can be viewed in a slideshow format and if you allow it, downloaded by users.  Users can favourite the content and they can also use the usual social media ability to share it via a number of different services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz and various Blogging providers.  Viewers can also embed the content in a web page or blog post.

I use it to share a selection of my communications tools, training and templates that I have developed along with advice about communications.

In terms of supporting my job seeking this gives potential employers a place to view the output of my work before they even decide to get me in for interview.  In terms of generating business for my consultancy work potential clients can see the calibre of my work and get an idea of exactly what I do and how I can help.

An added benefit to Slideshare is that you can also link the account to your LinkedIn profile so that your latest update will be displayed on your LinkedIn Profile page.

The basic service is entirely free, easy to sign up and use.  There is a sliding scale of  monthly subscription pro plans that offer an ad free service, additional space for video content, lead generation, private uploads, analytics, buzz tracking and LinkedIn extras, but I personally haven’t felt the need to upgrade to this.  The pro plans start at $19 US Dollars a month for the Silver package, $49 for the Gold and $249 for the Platinum.

A word of warning though, if you are looking to sell your work to clients you might want to think about how much information you are prepared to give away for free here!

My Brainshark

My Brainshark is an individual free version of the web based communication tool Brainshark, which is becoming extremely popular with large corporates as a means of marketing and communicating internally and externally.

Essentially My Brainshark allows you to upload presentations, documents and videos to it in a similar fashion to Slideshare, which it then converts into web based audio/visual movies.

It has all the functionality of the free Slideshare plus the following:

• Add audio to your presentations and documents by phone, microphone or MP3, which follows the animation of your slides
• Provide working links to web pages and/or documents
• Add in user response questions such as interactive surveys or user polls
• Track your viewing results

As my content on My Brainshark is primarily of a training nature I was invited to become a learning provider (there is no additional cost to this and you can apply and will then be assessed as to whether your content is suitable), which allows you to charge users for your training and materials and to categorise them as learning content.  This is a great added free benefit that raises its usefulness above Slideshare.

As with Slideshare there are some paid subscription pro versions the My Brainshark Pro at $9.99 or the My Brainshark Pro Trainer at $19.99 a month, which provide additional services of adding private content, adding passwords to your presentations for added security and improved reporting tools.  The Pro Trainer also gives you the ability to provide testing and scoring, issue certificates of completion and integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS) and to copy and merge slides and audio from other presentations you have uploaded.

If I had to choose between Slideshare and My Brainshark I would have to say My Brainshark.  The free version has much more functionality and the pro prices are much more reasonable.  That said I would recommend keeping one or two relevant items on a free Slideshare account to connect it with LinkedIn.

Fickr/Picasa & YouTube – Display Your Talent

If your profession is an artistic one, or you want to raise the profile of your artistic endeavours then you might want to use a social media service to display your talent to the world.

Flickr, Picasa and YouTube are by no means the only sites that offer these types services, but they are ones that I am most familiar with so here’s a brief outline of what you can do on them.

Flickr

Flickr is part of the Yahoo group of web services and is by far the best free photo sharing service available on the internet.  It’s the only site of its kind where you retain 100% copyright of the content you upload to it.  You can upload photography, art and illustrations, graphic art and videos.  The video content is quite restrictive and I would recommend that you use YouTube as your primary site for showcasing your videos.  However, if you rarely upload videos and they are more often slideshows of photography or art then flickr will be sufficient for your needs.

Flickr allows you to organise your photos into sets and collections (collections are only available through the flickr pro account) and add them to groups and galleries.  A large community of photographers and those interested in photography or just your friends can view, comment on, share, add to galleries, invite to groups and favourite your content.

You can add people as contacts with varying degrees of access to your content and you can set privacy for individual pictures to make them private, friends and family only, friends only, family only or for contacts only.  This gives you a great deal of control over how and where people view your content.

You can upload, view, comment, favourite, share via the usual social networking services, blog your uploads, tweet them and embed pictures into web pages and blogs.  You can add tags for searching and add geo tag locations.

There are a number of affiliated services such as the creation of large scale canvas prints, photo book creation, normal snapshot prints, T-Shirts, Stickers, Mug printing, etc.  An offline flickr uploader makes uploading content to the site very easy and there are also iPhone, iPad and Android Phone applications to view, add and update your flickr content.

You can view, join or create flickr groups, which is a great way to meet new people and share your photos with a wider audience.  There’s a wide variety of people on flickr, from people just sharing their snapshots to amateur and professional photographers.  The community is a wonderful place to learn and share, provide feedback and encouragement.

The free version of flickr does limit the number of items you can upload to 200 and limits the number of sets you can create and the number of groups you can submit an item to, plus you have the ads on the site.  The pro account cost $24.95 US Dollars a year or $47.99 for two years.  What you get is an unlimited number of uploads, sets, collections and allows you to submit a single item in up to 60 groups.  It gives you access to your original files, statistics on the viewing of your items and photostream as a whole, high definition playback for any HD videos you upload and Ad free browsing. Also, they usually throw in a little carrot of a gift, which at the moment is a free photo book. If you have a pro account that lapses, don’t worry all your content remains on flickr’s servers and is accessible again when you renew.

Personally going pro on Flickr is so cheap that if you are serious about exhibiting your photography and art you really can’t say no.

Picasa

Picasa is essentially Google’s version of Flickr.  All the same services are available, but arguably Flickr is the photo sharing of choice for two main reasons, firstly the size and professionalism of the community and secondly the retention of 100% copyright of your content.

Where Picasa has an edge on Flickr is that it also has a desktop programme that allows you to store all of your content offline.

YouTube

YouTube does for video sharing what Flickr does for photo sharing.

You can upload, view, share, favourite and comment on videos.  There is the option to embed the code for your videos in blogs and to share it via a plethora of social media services.

Even if you don’t add video content, having a YouTube account is a good idea so that you can see all your favourite videos without having to search for them again.

YouTube like flickr also has iPhone, iPad and Android phone applications to make sharing on the move easier.

If you have a personal blog or website, another benefit to using these services is that you can link to the content without having to host it on your site, thereby reducing the amount of hosting space and bandwidth (the amount of data transfer generated from your site).

ArtFire & iStockphoto – Sell Your Wares

Whilst YouTube, flickr and Picasa are great sites for showcasing what you can do, you cannot make money directly from these sites.

If you want to make some money from your art then you need to be looking at sites like ArtFire and iStockphoto.  Again ArtFire and iStockphoto are by no means the only sites you can use, however they are the ones I’m most familiar with.

ArtFire

ArtFire is a community marketplace set up for users to buy and sell their handmade arts and crafts, without the need for their own website and e-commerce functionality.

If you’re just beginning or don’t create a lot of items, but would like to sell what you have then ArtFire is a great place to start.  If you’re a well established artist then ArtFire brings the added benefit of a greater number of visitors and potential buyers for your items.

ArtFire pulls together a diverse community of artists and is a great place to share ideas, get inspiration and advice from other users.

iStockphoto

iStockphoto does for photography what ArtFire does for arts and crafts.  You can buy and sell stock photography, vector illustrations, video footage, audio clips and tracks, and Flash media.  Simply set up a free account, buy some credits and download the content you need.

There are subscription services as well as the pay as you go options to purchase stock.  The subscription services are best for those people who are purchasing a lot of stock on a regular basis.

If you want to sell your work through the service you have to go through an additional sign up feature and complete a little quiz, it’s all free though.  In terms of getting paid for your stock, you receive a base royalty rate of 15% per download and you can sign up to an Exclusive programme where you receive between 22-45% royalties per download, but it is much more restrictive in terms of how you can use your stock elsewhere.

Conclusions

When using any of these online social networking applications, the degree to which they will work for you, depends on the time you are willing to put in.  I won’t lie, maintaining a useful and regular online presence takes time and effort, but the dividends you receive are well worth the hard work and time spent.

Other articles in the job seeking series:

Hints and Tips for Job Seeking
Using Recruitment Websites
Hints and Tips For Successful Interviews
Job Hunting and Standing Out from the Crowd
Hints & Tips for CV Writing
Infographic CVs

Here’s a successful example of one of my Seeds:

I wrote a seed called Why do you Write? and linked it to my article Why Write on 07 December 2010.  Since planting the seed I’ve already had two buzzes from Chris on his blog Wisdom and Life who wrote the article What’s With the Writing Thing? and from Chrystal on her blog The Self Employed Writer who wrote the article Why I Write.  Chrystal also kindly left a nice comment under my article Why Write.

How does it work and what will it cost me?

Each month you’re given 2 seeds to plant for free, but you can earn an extra seed for every time you buzz two other seeds, i.e. write an article on two other topics and buzz them on the Seededbuzz website. You do also have the option to upgrade to paid subscriptions where you can plant more seeds per month, or do a pay as you go and buy seeds when you need them.  However, (and it’s a big one), the real benefit of using Seededbuzz is the reciprocal nature of the buzzing, after all that’s what everyone wants.  So if you don’t buzz anyone else’s seeds you may find that they cease to buzz yours.  It’s very much a give and take philosophy.

Can anyone join and what do I have to do?

Anyone can join provided you have an active blog, which you regularly update.  NB, the Seededbuzz team will check out your blog before your account is approved.  To register for an account simply visit the Seededbuzz website, enter the brief personal details and blog information requested, sit back and wait for the team to approve your account and then you are ready to go with planting your seeds and buzzing others.

So what good is all this seed planting and buzzing?

Well, simply put Seededbuzz is a great promotion tool for your blog, it:

1. helps to increase traffic to your blog
2. helps you to appear on more searches and social networking references as you’re article is being promoted on other people’s blogs and social networks as well as your own
3. helps to increase the number of comments on your blog
4. helps to increase the number of followers of your blog
5. you get to meet like minded bloggers and share ideas and content together

Another function of Seededbuzz that I haven’t explored is the idea of writing a guest post for another blog, or inviting someone to write a guest post on mine.

Tips for getting more buzzes and standing out from the crowd

Your seeds will have to compete with all the others getting written out there; so here’s a few basic tips to make yours stand out from the crowd.

• Keep it short and sweet – when writing your seed keep it short and sweet, don’t waffle, people are notoriously lazy readers online!
• Get to the point – Make sure what you are asking bloggers to write about is clear and written as early as possible in your seed.
• Ask questions on your seed – Pose some questions to bloggers viewing your seed, get them thinking and hopefully contemplating the blog post that they will buzz your seed with!
• Don’t be too specific – Choose topics that have a wide range of avenues for bloggers to write about, e.g. post a seed about baking rather than baking chocolate sponge cake.  The wider the topic the more likely you are to get a buzz.
• Be original – Look at all the latest seeds, try not to plant a seed that is too similar to an existing one, or at the very least find a new angle on the topic to come from.
• Write about things with broad appeal – Choose topics that a lot of people will have an interest in, e.g. reading, writing, photography, baking, etc.  Worm collecting might be dear to your heart, but it might not get that many buzzes!
• Write what you know – Try to write from a position of knowledge and experience, this will make your seed and blog article more interesting to readers and increase the likelihood of your seed being buzzed, your article getting comments and your blog gaining followers.
• Be clear and concise – Keep your waffle to a minimum, ensure your seed is easy to understand and potential bloggers know what you are asking of them.
• Presentation is key – In your seed and more importantly your blog articles it is important to have good presentation and page layout.  Keep away from lengthy sentences and paragraphs, use bullet points, headings and imagery to break up the blocks of text.  Remember People are put off by large blocks of unbroken text on a screen and may find it difficult or impossible to read.

Time to Buzz Off!

Well I think that’s enough of a free plug for Seededbuzz today, I hope to see more people joining up with Seededbuzz soon.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Wealie x

With a strong community of followers a blog and website thrives and allows you to make it work as an effective mode of communication for your personal and business needs and to allow it to pay for itself through sponsorship and advertising and/or selling your products and services to a wide audience.

So, with this in mind I’ve been busy getting Wealie’s World onto some of the key blog directories: blogcatalog, blogged, blogger, and MyBlogLog.  I’ve also been further linking the website with my key social media channels: Facebook through the NetworkedBlogs App, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and many more.

In the human body, it is the interconnection of the veins and nervous system that let the key organs do their job and interact, the same principle can be applied to your key communication channels, with the linking and promotion being the veins and nervous system.  In order for all our different on-line and social media channels to work effectively and in conjunction we need to effectively promote and link them together.  By linking all our channels together we create a virtual communications network that can tap into all the diverse communities available to us and take advantage of a truly wide demographic.

There are also pitfalls to not connecting together our virtual comms network, with so many potential avenues of communication available to us, we need to ensure that we effectively manage and control the information and messages we are disseminating from the different channels.  Without the bigger picture we cannot ensure that we do not communicate at cross purposes with ourselves, or worse contradict ourselves.  For example there’s always the chance that we will forget to update certain channels and the information contained on it will be out of date.

It’s very easy to sign up with lots of different social media accounts (I’ve done so today with the blogging resources), but if you don’t update and manage them all, they can work against you, just like the website that is out of date by 3 – 6 months can.  By linking accounts and channels together we can minimise the number of times you have to enter information into systems to update your channels, e.g. By linking your YouTube account to update both Twitter and Facebook when you complete certain actions like when you favourite a video, or upload new content automatically means you are just putting in the information once to  YouTube, but a status update will appear on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter.

And last, but by no means least, we must not forget our traditional forms of communication, we still meet face to face with individuals, word of mouth is as important as ever and paper communications are still a reality in our daily lives.  Make sure that all your business literature has the key social media sites and your website address clearly displayed upon them, e.g. the business card and headed paper.  Ensure that your email signature has direct links as well.  When you’re speaking with colleagues, business partners and customers, take a moment to remind them of the different ways they can keep in touch with you on and off line.

Happy communicating!

Wealie