Joe Hackman — Page 73

Do you know what an “Ethnographer” is?

November 2, 2009 by Joe Hackman Leave a Comment

I watched a very interesting video this evening. The speaker in the video was Stefana Broadbent, one of a new class of “ethnographers” that is people who study how our social habits and relationships mutate. She cites some very interesting research about intimacy and modern communication apparatus including Skype, Instant Messaging and Facebook. One of the perplexing points is that while someone may have 100 contacts on their Instant Messenger they generally only communicate with a very small percentage of those people. On the surface this really does make sense but without seeing research data to back the issue up there are few certainties in the realm of social media and technology. Ethnographer defined.

Twitter Adds Lists!

October 29, 2009 by Joe Hackman Leave a Comment

Tonight Twitter launched a new feature – lists. These lists allow you to combine a number of different twitter feeds to one group and creates a new tier to the url system. I created 2 new lists to test:

@hackmanj/socialmediagurus and @hackmanj/rotariansiknow

These lists are a fast demonstration of how this tool could be used. This is a great idea and will really add a lot of value for Twitter. You could in essence locate every news outlet on Twitter and combine them in one list, this would be a very busy feed. No longer will people have to use sophisticated tools to search for certain kinds of tweets, they can find someone who’s done the work for them already. Way to go Twitter.

5 Twitter Tips

October 25, 2009 by Joe Hackman 1 Comment

Compliments of Guy Kawasaki, if you are on Twitter and interested in Entrepreneurial ventures or Social Media I recommend you follow him. These are 5 excellent Twitter tips. What I found the most compelling is the competitive advantage and guerrilla marketing aspects of the suggestions. I hope you find them interesting:

Five Wickedly Clever Ways to use Twitter

Facebook Must – Claim Vanity URL

October 24, 2009 by Joe Hackman 1 Comment

I’ve noticed that some people have not yet claimed their vanity url @Facebook. When you create a Facebook account you can claim this simply by accessing the following url:

http://facebook.com/username

You can then change the long url for your profile – something like http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=12122121212 to something like:

http://facebook.com/hackmanj

This is particularly important for Fan pages (Also called Facebook Pages). Since you typically create these pages because you want people interested in your brand to join, you want to make it easy for them to access it. There is one caveat – you must have 100 fans in order to claim a vanity url for a fan page. You can always invite your friends to join you. I manage a number of Facebook fan pages – mostly for non profits that I support. Here are a few examples of Vanity URL’s for Fan pages:

http://www.facebook.com/mkwc2010

http://www.facebook.com/managedsolutions

Now here are a few that do not yet have enough members to claim the vanity url (what a difference!):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Asante-Africa-Foundation/144439818617

http://www.facebook.com/pages/DanvilleSycamore-Valley-Rotary/140510619569

There is a “trick” to bypass these massive urls while your Fan page is in “transition”. I’ve often used tinyurl to shrink it to a reasonable size.

In this example I took the Asante Africa url went to tinyrul.com and shrunk it to:

http://tinyurl.com/asantefb

This is much more manageable and intuitive. So as you can see it’s about brand, simplicity and knowledge. The brand – what you want the name to be. Simplicity – something easy to remember and easy on the eyes. The knowledge I’ve hopefully helped with here. I’ve read a few blogs on this subject in the past and felt like they spent a lot of time talking about things people already know or can easily learn to do and not enough on the most essential aspects of the process. I want to thank Juliette Powell for inspiring me to write this. It is my first blog entry on my Social Media oriented blog. Thanks @JuliettePowell !