Tag Archives: Yelp

Using Web Tools and Services to Expand Your Capacity on the Web

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by Gretchen Glasscock

In many ways, today’s web is all about moving beyond our own websites, getting out of our own skins and connecting with others. At the same time, you are connecting on Facebook and tweeting out your 140 characters on Twitter, you also will be checking Twitter or  geolocation apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and Loopt to see where your friends are and what they’re up to. You will be frequenting sites like Yelp to check the reviews that folks in your ‘hood are giving to local restaurant and services.  It will be a connected world and, to stay in the loop, you have to do your part.  You have to be churning out tweets like the rest of us.

By now, those who work on the web, or are dependent on the Web for their business, understand twittering is no idle pastime. For some of us, it is an essential business activity. And probably for most of us, it should be.

All of us who are web savvy know we should be twittering and building our social media profile, 24/7. We should be working our  Facebook connections, polishing our LinkedIn profile, or writing our blog and building our following on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, we can’t.  There are only 24 hours in a day and we can’t be working all of them.  Even if we could, we couldn’t use all those hours to enhance our social media standing.  Here’s the bare minimum of social media we should be constantly expanding and enhancing:

  • Twitter – for real-time news, trend spotting, shout outs, communication, and learning via TweetDeck and search.twitter.com
  • Facebook – for keeping up with old friends, meeting many new ones, knowing what’s going on and trending and learning more about your favorite brands ( who knew Coca Cola was so creative & how about that Starbucks?)
  • LinkedIn – the number one resource for executives on a talent hunt, so a good place to network. Bait for the big fish. Your LinkedIn Profile should be as fresh and up to date as fresh squeezed orange juice. And packed with Vitamin C.
  • WordPress – to deploy attractive websites loaded with plug ins and widgets to enable them to do heavy lifting on their own, with occasional but diligent monitoring and supervision

So , what to do?

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog , I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get. I’m a big believer in automating as many tasks as possible on a website. That’s what plugins and widgets are for: to free you up for the big thoughts, the hot trends, the strategic processes.  And for me, that’s where Twitterfeed comes in.

When you start with Twitter I think you have to learn the pace , the quick tempo, trending topics and how to retweet, ie. pass on someone else’s interesting tweet, perhaps adding your own thought to it. Long ago, I used to wonder what was up with Twitter. But, once I got into Twitter, I found it addictive for several reasons. #1: Thought leaders in the Internet space were constantly telling me what they were thinking and what was the newest and the coolest. And #2.  I didn’t need a ton of bricks to fall on my head to see what an incredibly powerful marketing tool Twitter could be.

Once I got started, I realized the need for constantly updated information.  I also realized one could automate this process, using my blog to feed my twitter account. You just go to Twitterfeed, set up an account, then paste your blog’s feed URL into the text box provided to set up a new feed.  You can also set up feeds for thought leaders in your field.

I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes. If you create and install a Twitter widget on your home page, you will constantly have a stream of fresh and updated content to draw users to your site.

But even if you tweet ceaselessly, which you can now do by following the steps above, it is still important to find time to post to your own website or blog and to develop the right mix between blogging and tweeting.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t put out a blog ( or in my case, several blogs), manage several websites, keep up with the social media and work with clients if I didn’t have lots of help from fast, efficient online tools and services which speed up the process and make it more effective.  One of my favorite services is Zemanta which is co-pilot of my blog, offering relevant links, suggesting keywords, providing related articles, in case I want to poke around the blogosphere a bit, and, usually, providing a pretty good graphic I can append to give a little pop to the story.

Adam Singer of  TheFutureBuzz.com reminds us “ you’re essentially contributing to someone else’s network on Twitter” rather than building your own website or blog following.  And , on your blog, “Old articles are valuable and still read years later, given infinite life by the engines.  Old Tweets live in archive purgatory where a majority will never be seen again.”

So do both:  Twitter, Facebook, social media and your own Blog, which you are building for yourself and for the future.  Just find the right balance.  And all the tools you can find to help you along the way.

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