AI, Industry 4.0, Tesla, maker, and more...
This is turning into video learning week here on Joesgonesocial, and today’s feature is a video that demonstrates how to send yourself messages in the future using three different tools:
All three solutions are simple and effective and each has distinct advantages. Check out the short video:
Is working for yourself the equivalent of not having a day job?
Unfortunately this application is no longer available on Facebook. Feel free to check out other Facebook related posts on my blog.
This is a instructional video to show you how to use the Facebook App Profile Maker to dress up your Facebook profile. Profile Maker is a nice conversation starter and a fun app to play with. There are some general suggestions about how to edit the image in advance to get the most benefit as well as a walk through of the process included in this short video.
In early September I saw a post by Mari Smith about a social analytics website called Twentyfeet.com. In typical Mari fashion she described why she liked the site and her list included the fact that Giraffe’s are among her favorite animals. When you first visit twentyfeet.com you will see how the Giraffe branding works, it’s very creative and revolves around the measuring of your web activity, primarily new media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Since the Giraffe is the tallest land animal on the planet reaching as high as “Twenty Feet” in height, see where they are going with that? I immediately signed up and thought from the onset that this was going to be a useful site for me, but I had much to learn about the real value of the site. That of course takes time but I think this article will help you cut through that learning curve a little.
Twenty Feet provides 1 Facebook and 1 Twitter account free of charge. They also support Youtube and bit.ly and have plans to add many more services. Currently they accept suggestions and allow you to vote via their UserVoice account. Currently Google Analytics is in the lead as the next supported service and I think it will be a natural fit especially after you read about Notifications later in this article. In addition to the free service you can add any additional supported account for $2.49 per year. This is a very fair price for the quality of the tool in my view. I have no problem paying that personally. Of course you can take advantage of the free product regardless.
No analytics app would be complete without a dashboard to configure, view and review metrics. The dashboard with Twenty Feet is very easy to use. The first thing you do is add your accounts so that the system can start collecting and crunching the data. I am not sure what it is like today adding a new account but when I added mine things were a little bogged down and slow to update, the simple answer to this of course would be to add your accounts one day then come back to analyze the data the next. Your results may vary, I started very early. If you need help setting up your dashboard visit the Twentyfeet Wiki page just for the Service dashboard.
The dashboard itself is very useful, you can setup favorites of the items you wish to come back and monitor in a favorites list. Here is a sample of one of the graphs, in this case the “Key Performance Indicators” for Youtube:
As you can see the charts are very high quality and provide a really good historic view of whatever indicator you happen to be monitoring. While I think the Dashboard is essential I will share later in this article the most useful feature the notifications system:
I didn’t even know about the notification system when I started using Twentyfeet. While it may seem obvious looking at it, it took me a while to appreciate the power of the capabilities. The notification system actually keeps tabs on what the “normal” range is for activity in all of your different accounts and sends you a digest of activity that falls outside the norm. This is exceptionally useful to me because I don’t really have time to go look at the dashboard every day nor do I want to get all the activity and try to figure out what was really outside of the norm. Here is an example of one of the notification Emails:
As you can see this format displays only irregular activity, there is no reason to know that activity fell within the normal range. You can also share the changes if you feel so inclined via Twitter, Email or via any other method with a link that is provided. The “share” pages also have Facebook Social Connection enabled so people could comment, like and event post the comments to their own profile.
The Twentyfeet crew definitely get social media. They are hands on and among the first to respond to anything you write about Twentyfeet in a very authentic and positive way. I had the opportunity to interview Martin Siebert of Twentyfeet recently via Skype, here is the interview on Youtube:
Summary
The “Egotracking Service” Twentyfeet is definitely a must have for anyone who cares about their social media footprint and effectiveness. It provides you with a tool that will help inform you when your activity falls outside of the norm, you can immediately relate that to your activity on the networks and get a feel for how your message is resonating and whether it is resonating. If you don’t care about your social media footprint, then Twentyfeet is probably not going to keep your interest for long. Personally I have found it to be valuable in keeping tabs on the effectiveness of my new media activity.
With the big shift to personal branding is egotracking the next big thing?
Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.
Recently I noticed I was featured in a paper.li daily by @morgaine. I went and checked it out, thought it was a pretty interesting site. Being the web 2.0/Social Media tinkerer that I am I could not help myself so I created an account and started playing around with my own dailies. I found some extremely beneficial aspects to the service but I am going to focus on 2 of them for now:
Helping Friends
Since your paper.li papers can be about lists, people or hashtags – there is great opportunity to help people. How is that you ask? Well if I make a Joe Hackman daily, it will feature my tweets and the tweets of my followers to generate the article content, videos, etc for the feature. Being mentioned in a daily, or anything, is almost always good for a Twitter user (unless someone is complaining about you!). The other thing it does is build back-links to your sources articles and blogs. We all want to be found, being linked to will benefit your sources SEO. When you start to think through the list feature, hashtags, etc, you start to understand how there are many ways to help your friends achieve the mentions and back-links for better SEO.
Building Influence
This point is fairly simple, people like to be featured in your paper for the reasons above and for another important reason. It is great to have your content recognized and shared. In this case you will receive recognition for following others. How? By following anyone on Twitter they have a chance to be featured on your paper, if they are feature and they actually are paying attention they are likely to appreciate it. This means that if you produce a paper.li your sources on Twitter are more likely to be recognized and recognize you. That is influence. Of course you could also record a cool video and write about it in your blog then direct people to read about it. I think that might add a bit of influence as well.
Be sure to watch the video for additional tips and subscribe to my Youtube Channel if you enjoyed this post. I’d also love to hear your tips about how to utilize paper.li.