Social Networking with Communicate or Die
To ensure a vibrant web presence and to make your site more visible to younger viewers, it's important to establish outposts on the major social networking sites.
The 900-pound gorillas of the social networking market are currently Facebook and MySpace. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but each provide your organization with a free page and the ability to pipe in feeds from your existing website every time you post something new.
People with common interests can become "friends" or "fans" of these pages - and will be likely to then come take a look at your website. They can also share info from your social networking pages with their friends. Both capabilities can quickly help expand your site's audience.
Twitter, the micro-blogging site, allows for a different kind of social networking with an assist from the free service Twitterfeed. By pumping your site feed into Twitter (as "tweets"), you make it easy for people to follow your posts from their cell phones and PDAs. That's cool in and of itself, but Twitter (and other microblogging sites like Pownce) also give you a free page that other Twitterers can "follow" and share with their friends.
Communicate or Die now is now live on all 3 services. You'll find links to our pages in the "Social Networking" section of our right-hand menu bar.
But we'll list them here too for sake of ease:
* Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Communicate-or-Die/37837611848
* MySpace, http://www.myspace.com/communicateordie
* Twitter, http://twitter.com/commordie
Enjoy, and if you have accounts on any or all of these services be sure to link to us.
- Jason Pramas's blog
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Twitter? Get hip daddy-o -
Twitter? Get hip daddy-o - We've all gone to Plurk, Qik and Utterz. :)
But seriously... There are so many services out there now, all with very small points of differentiation. In deciding which to use, we need to balance that differentiation to get perfect fit with our requirements against the actual audience we could attract to it. If we end up getting our members to join network after network, until we find the right one, we'll end up confusing them (though we'll help a lot of Venture Capitalists buy the 200ft yacht they always so badly wanted, so hey, it can't be all bad!)
More and more, I'm thinking unions need to come together more and identify areas where a longer term view of social networking and sharing audience and skills, even if its only in a system that fits only 75% of what they need, may be the best way to go.
there may be an alternative
Well, John, you remind me that I need to do a post on the push towards distributed networking technology that will make it easy for all of us to end-run (and perhaps sink) the corporate social networking behemoths.
Maybe labor can help make that more democratic social networking tech robust at speed. That would be the smart move. I'll try to talk more about it next week.
Facebook?!?! Bah!
http://ourtimes.ca/Talking/article_87.php
Great piece on Facebook's potential and pitfalls
I hope Jason or Steve promote it to the front page. I know there are alternatives to Facebook -- what are they? What do people think of them? It may be my line of work but I have misgivings about the viability of a union-run sns. I could see particular locals doing that, but on a larger scale the problems of censorship and legal liability would be big obstacles. We need an independent, worker-friendly, alternative. One more thing -- one virtue of facebook is that people use it for a range or purposes, most of them personal. I think this is important for people who see organizing as a dialogue with the whole person, not just a means to sign up a member.
well gee ...
... I only wrote a whole big piece on the future of distributed social networking ... but I understand ... peeps don't actually read what I write ... [sniff] ...
;>
Aha! That's how I knew there
Aha! That's how I knew there were alternatives. Sorry, Jason, and a belated thanks for the leads. Distributed social networking sounds very much like the way to go. I will check out the tools you mentioned. It would be nice to have a simple, "ten points for using Facebook" piece that people could use when thinking about how to use it (or MySpace, twitter, etc.( I think the last point should be a combination of your argument for distributed networking and Derek's argument for using Facebook to lead people away from Facebook. The other ten?