Learning Recap by Zach Braiker Social Media Strategist

Learning Recap

written on June 22nd, 2009 by Zach Braiker

Originally uploaded by *yasuhiro

Here are five learning lessons I arrived at this week, most involve social media.

1. How can I use FriendFeed effectively? I recently reignited my passion for Facebook after importing Delicious, Google Reader, Pandora and other feeds into the account. I like sharing all my links in one place, especially if all my friends and colleagues are there. Now that I use Facebook for that purpose, why should I use FriendFeed? Especially considering that I can have conversations on Facebook walls and many more of my friends use Facebook. Right now I use FriendFeed to read comments from social media experts I respect. What am I missing?

2. Diagrams. Have you read 360i’s social media handbook.. It’s a good social media primer. Check out the diagrams on page 17. Note to self: use shapes to express social media concepts. Often, it’s so much more effective than words.

3. Dashboards. My company reviewed many reputation management tools in the last few weeks. These companies offered their dashboards as key points of differentiation. Before getting too excited about a dashboard, ask yourself what information is essential for your research. It’s easy to get crazy excited about all the ways powerful tools can slice and dice data, but I’d rather answer essential questions with boring tools than using slick tools and miss the point. BTW, check out this cool data visualization link.

4. Connecting my online world. This week my inner geek came to life. I went to LinkedIn, where I have a few hundred contacts. Then I clicked “contacts,” then “export connections,” then export to CSV file. This exported all my contacts to my desktop. I then went to Google chat, click “add contact,” and copied and pasted all my LinkedIn contacts. The result enabled me to chat with all my contacts on LinkedIn via Google chat.

5. We reveal different aspects of ourselves on different social networks. We show one glimpse of who we are on LinkedIn, another on Facebook and another yet on Twitter. When you are connected with the same person on multiple social networks you see a very dynamic picture of them. My favorite thing to pay attention to is the different status updates a friend has across a social network. When you connect the dots, you can see a complete picture. For example, take “Fred.” Fred’s LinkedIn status update is: “despite being tired, the presentation went exceptional well.” Take Fred’s tweet at 2 am, “Should get some sleep? No. Must party in Austin,” and then his Facebook status update: “a picture of Fred singing on stage in Austin.”

These are a few things I’ve learned last week. How about you?

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