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Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps
By Deltina Hay (c) 2009

Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts,
you have established your own blog and joined a number of
social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn,
Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org,
among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to
each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So,
how's this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the
process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh
and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The
trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most
social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy
for developers to write applications that enhance the
features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at
applications that can help us streamline our existing
presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process,
I'll start with an example. Imagine that you have the
following social media tools and accounts already in place
on the Social Web:

A WordPress Blog
A Facebook Profile
A Facebook Page
A MySpace Page
A YouTube Account
A Flickr Account
A Twitter Account
An Upcoming.org Account
A GoodReads Account

Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence

Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed

The very first step in streamlining your presence in the
Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner
(http://www.feedburner.com). This is a free service, and
obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily
manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have
burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new
feed, which will look something like this:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName.

Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now

You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage
from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into
all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding
applications. Remember that each social site may provide
its own different way of accomplishing this.

Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into
the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the
Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that
allows you to import notes from an external blog.

Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different.
Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access
many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery
from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.

It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but
blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you
read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for
streamlining your micro-blog entries.

Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia

Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by
adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and
by feeding your images and videos into your social
networking profiles and pages.

WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr
images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag
(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flickr-tag/), a plugin
that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right
into your blog posts, and create galleries.

A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you
can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will
pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your
Flickr account. Find out more by going to:
http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or
Website by using your YouTube channels. After you've added
videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a
video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.

To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and
MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add
it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr
(http://apps.facebook.com/myflickr/); for MySpace, use
Happy Flickr.

You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing
an application called YouTube Box
(http://apps.facebook.com/videobox/), and using the
application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips
on your MySpace profile.

Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools

The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely
upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social
Web presence. In the example I have created, we have
accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and
GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that
have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications
in Facebook and MySpace, you'll find that Facebook offers
an application that allows you to integrate your
Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include
applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books
and book reviews.

Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools

Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts
to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your
micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm
(http://ping.fm) is a useful tool that lets you post one
brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a
number of social sites.

Step 6: Research and Repeat

The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people
through social platforms and applications; therefore, when
deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a
new social tool, it's best to research the ways that tool
will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you
feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images
from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your
video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated
the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer
applications to integrate the new tool?

When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or
Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable
steps presented above.
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Deltina Hay is the principal of Social Media Power, and
founder of the new social media Website service
(http://www.plumbsocial.com), Plumb Social. Ms. Hay's
graduate education in computer science, applied
mathematics, and psychology led her naturally to social
media consulting (http;//www.socialmediapower.com).
Her new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0
Optimization, will be released in March 2009.
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