Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media, but were afraid to ask ...

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Preface........................................................................ixIntroduction...................................................................xiii1. Where Have We Been?.........................................................12. The Basics..................................................................73. Using Social Media to Promote Your Business.................................144. Using Blogs and Microblogs..................................................245. Social Networking Sites.....................................................336. Do You Know Where Your Friends Are? -Brightkite.com.........................387. Bebo is Under-Rated ... -Bebo.com...........................................438. Is it all About Business Exchange? -Bx.Businessweek.com.....................489. W'sup Facebook! -Facebook.com...............................................5110. Fotos that Flickr -Flickr.com..............................................6111. All Your Friends on FriendFeed? -FriendFeed.com............................6812. hi5 Around the World -hi5.com..............................................7213. Indenti.ca Tweets 2 -Identic.ca............................................7814. IncBizNet for Small Businesses -IncBizNet.com..............................8215. Microblog on koornk -koornk.com............................................8516. Link in on LinkedIn -LinkedIn.com..........................................8917. Professional Services on Plaxo -Plaxo.com..................................9718. Plurk for Perks! -Plurk.com................................................10519. Spoke for Business Folk -Spoke.com.........................................11020. Tumblr for Blogging -Tumblr.com............................................11321. Tweet in Twitter Land -Twitter.com.........................................11822. Yammer for Internal Use -Yammer.com........................................12723. YouAre Where? -YouAre.com..................................................13324. Audio and Video to Get Your Message Out....................................13325. Watch YouTube Regularly?...................................................14026. Do You Have a Second Life?.................................................14427. Non-Profit Organization's Role in Social Media.............................14728. Media's Role in all of This ...............................................15429. Dealing with Bad Media? Crisis Web?........................................15930. Going Viral!...............................................................16231. Where Do We Go From Here? Web 3.0 .........................................166Acknowledgements...............................................................169Author's Bio...................................................................171

Chapter One

"If Facebook was really counting friends, there would never be trouble finding enough poker players for Thursdays nights or finding enough players for basketball games."

Guillermo Paz, Director Comercial Infoxel de Argentina S.A.

* * *

Close your eyes and think back to when you were young. Do you remember what technology you had in your house?

Growing up, I had a black and white television in my parent's bedroom with no remote and a single telephone that we kept in the kitchen. As technology became more affordable, I remember my parents buying a color television set. We were the first in the neighborhood to have a color set and my friends were so jealous!

After that, we started to have phones in all of the rooms in our home and eventually, my parents offered my older sister, Lori, her own phone number. That was a big deal. Everyone wanted his or her own phone line, Lori included.

My parents had a Super 8 camera that recorded on film that we played back on a projector. I remember sitting in the living room watching the movies we made on a roll up screen.

In the 1970s, the Polaroid Land camera was the next big breakthrough in technology. It was amazing because it had film that developed within seconds. (Fanning the photos was half the fun!) Everyone wanted one. It was the hottest product around. Unfortunately, I remember the film being very expensive and when my parents bought a Polaroid camera for the house, they controlled every photo we took.

We also had a record player that played 45s, 78s and regular LPs. My friends and I compared albums while listening to music. Lori was a big music listener too. My fondest memory was when she played her favorite songs over and over and over again, in order to learn the words. She favored Earth, Wind and Fire, Carole King and America. I liked the heavier sound of The Who, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

Before I graduated high school, the first Sony Walkman appeared on the market. People listened to music through headphones and loved the portability of the product. My friends and I snuck our Walkmans into high school but couldn't listen until we were outside during recess or lunch, out of the teacher's sight.

When I went to college and lived in New York City, the Discman was the music device of choice. It was unbelievable! Compact disks fit into tiny little players and we played our favorite CD while wandering through town. I walked around New York City listening to "Talking Heads 77" on my Discman. I played it over and over again because I only brought along one CD.

In the mid 1980s, I worked at Ogilvy & Mather PR. We had a telex machine that allowed us to send documents internationally. This machine was so big that it needed a room of its own! Each desk had an IBM typewriter with correction ribbon and if you made a typo, all you had to do was press the back space key on your keyboard to erase it. For massive changes, you used white out or strips of white out and would type over it after it dried. I remember working until 11pm trying to make sure that every line and every word looked as perfect as possible and that the white out did its job.

A few months into my first job, management announced everyone in the organization was getting a word processor. I remember the other assistant account executives getting upset. I was mad too!

"If we learn word-processing, then we will never be able to move up," my friend Sheila told me, upset that we would be forever stuck in our current position, when we were capable of so much more.

"I worked too hard in college to be a secretary for the rest of my life," said my friend Nancy.

Of course that wasn't the case. Having a word processor made it so much easier to edit. Instead of staying until 11pm, we finished our work by 9:30pm.

I even remember the first Macintosh computer. It was so incredibly cool. It was a small little box-shaped machine that sat on your desk. It had a graphic user interface complete with smiley Mac and dogcow (that made "moof" sounds). The Mac could do so much and you didn't even need to know basic computer language to use it. Shortly thereafter, computers became ubiquitous. Businesses had computers and so did families. Computers became smaller and more compact.

In the 1980s, my husband, Brian, worked at Westlaw, a provider of legal research services. He trained...