I was tagged by Chris Brogan to contribute a post about best practices for social media marketing in response to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. Since I mostly blog about technology I will share my take on this question from that perspective. How does someone from a tech point of view look at social media marketing?

Pai’s best practice for social media marketing involving technology:

1. Be Honest: It sounds simple but it isn’t when it comes to social media. It can be like high school with some of the cliquish things that go on with some circles. Too many people are afraid to be totally honest about things in fear of not being liked by an A-lister (GASP!). I learned that everyone, including those rare mutants known as A-listers appreciates and respect honesty above everything else. I apply the same practice to my reviews of technology and startups.

2. Be Respectful: Always remember that behind all of this technology and all these cool tools are real live human beings. Too often we lose sight of that fact and say things that truly hurt people’s feelings. We need to remember to respect everyone’s dignity no matter how much we disagree with them or what they’ve said or done.

As far as sharing someone else’s work regarding this topic I am pleased to share an excellent post from Jackie Peters  called “Caught in the Echo Chambers”. It still has me thinking deeply about things. It’s so well-written and thought out. Take your time and read it carefully. Great stuff.

I will tag the following who I know will have great tips to share!

Tojosan who’s a master in socializing no matter what the platform online or offline. He also puts his money where he mouth is (huh?). For example, for a great cause (mail our military promotion) he offered to shave his head if they reached a certain donation level. Needless to say, his new name is TojoSANSHair (yea, I coined that one for him).

Purplecar is a writer who also loves social media and uses the tools. Everyone loves Christine and she will have some insightful secrets for sure.

“Should I host my own blog?” Sooner or later, every blogger will ask that very question. Eventually, you will want to know the pro’s and cons of hosting your own blog vs staying with a free host like blogger or Wordpress.com. Is it worth the expense and all the trouble to fly solo?

I recently did the research and came to the conclusion that it was well worth the expense and effort to “wing it” myself. I’ll share everything I learned, some things the hard way! There’s a great deal of information out there but this will be a stripped down collection of what I feel is the most important information you need to know about this subject matter. Ultimately, it’ll still be your decision whether to be your own pilot or continue to let someone else fly your plane.

Let’s start with a simple comparison of the two choices. We will use Wordpress.org (self hosting) and Wordpress.com (free blog host) just to compare apples to apples.

Feature/Option

The verdict? Well, it depends on you, of course. How serious are you about blogging? What is the goal of your blog? If it’s just a personal blog and you are not that technically savvy then perhaps the free choice is the right fit for you. However, if you enjoy tinkering with this stuff anf want full and complete control of your blog then self-hosting is a no-brainer. It’s also the right choice if you want to have a professional or business blog with any hopes of monetizing it.

Preflight Checklist

1. download wordpress software (use peazip to unzip files)
2. Register new domain name
3. Register new web host (Wordpress approved hosts )
4. Export all posts/comments from existing blog

Spreading Your Wings! (Here are Detailed instructions from Wordpress.org )

1. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
2. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
3. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details.
4. Upload your WordPress files with an FTP program such as the free Filezilla to the desired location on your web server:

• • If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
  • If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “blog”, you should rename the directory called “wordpress” to “blog” and upload it to the root directory of your web server.
• Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.phpIf you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php
• Import all posts/comments into new blog
• Upload all themes and apply the one you want to use
• Upload all plugins and active the ones you want to use
• Add all badges and widgets that you want to use

Postflight checklist

1. change feedburner information
2. change technorati information
3. change all links to blog in profiles to new url (twitter, friendfeed, etc.)
4. Spread the word about the change
5. Backup database/blog (schedule regular backups as well)
6. Optional: If you want to redirect traffic from your old wordpress.com blog to your new self-hosted wordpress.org blog then checkout this PDF from Blog-Well.com.

Free blog software

www.wordpress.org

Free unzipping utility

PeaZip

Free Automatic Blog Backup Services

blogbackuponline(50 MB of storage)
Wordpress Plugin for Database backup

Free FTP Software

FileZilla

Free blog themes & templates

http://themes.wordpress.net

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

11 free magazine style themes

WPThemesFree

Mashable’s 70 fresh & modern templates

Free blog plugins

Wordpress Plugin Library

Best plugins

Word Press stats

addthis plugin for wp

FriendFeed Comments

Retaggr

Category Cloud

Search Everything

Send to Email

Sent to Printer

Subscribe to comments

Akismet

Best widgets

meebo

clustrmap

alltop badges

twitter badges

retaggr

mybloglog

disqus or Sezwho

Final Thoughts
Speaking for myself, I must admit that I wish I made the decision to fly solo a long time ago!
Despite all warnings and fears, it truly isn’t that difficult to do. Best of all, it’s tremendously more fun and rewarding. Think of it like this: Do you want to be the passenger on a commercial airliner or do you want to fly your very own plane? Do you want to fly from point to point or do you want to go where you want to go and do loop de loops? Give it a test flight and I hope to see you up in the clouds real soon!

Utterz 2.0 is now LIVE! The biggest change is the user interface of the home page. It is much cleaner, less cluttered and easier to use! Check it out here:

New Profile URL

User profile pages are also vastly improved and easier to remember. The URL is no longer this long and hideously cryptic address! Instead, it’s as simple as Pai. http://www.utterz.com/Paisano

Mobile Utterz

Using utterz on your mobile device is even better than ever! Call: 1-712-432-6666 *record, listen AND reply.

Video, pics, text:

-public: go@utterz.com

-private: private@utterz.com

Title your last utter:

title@utterz.com

Look at all the new options available from your cell phone’s keypad! http://www.utterz.com/u/cli_doc.php

Go to m.utterz.com from your handset to browse and reply to friends’ messages

Sending a message to go@utterz.com or private@utterz.com within 10 minutes of recording matches up your photo, video, or text with the recording.

New Personal Email Address

Members now get their own personal email address for easier direct communication.

For example, send a message to paisano@utterz.com and it will get routed to me instantly.

Also, taking a queue from Twitter, You can now send an utter to someone’s inbox by including ‘@username’ anywhere in the text of your message!

Finding Friends

Adding your friends from your address book or other services such as Twitter has also become much better! Just login to your service and Utterz will show you which friends already belong to Utterz. Just click follow and you will be linked to them on Utterz. http://www.utterz.com/u/find_friends/network-twitter

Come check it out!

One of the downsides of having a large group of friends on Twitter is the difficulty in following all of the tweets directed at you. In most cases, it’s impossible to catch all of the messages that normally would interest you.

Thus, most of us are relegated to using twitter search engines such as Summize or TweetScan. While both are fine services, they are manual processes that take time that we don’t normally have.

Enter TweetBeep which can send you email alerts whenever someone mentions you, your blog or any other keyword you want to track. For example, whenever someone mentions your name with or without the @ sign it will be captured and a email will be sent with all of the tweets every hour or once a day (your choice). If you want to be alerted for any mention of your websites or blogs then those alerts will take place instantly because the searches are performed live on twitter. The nice thing is that this works even when people use URL shortening services.

Final Thoughts

Search alert tools such as TweetBeep and SM2 (covered in “What About Me“) allow us to keep tabs on everything that’s important to us on the ever expanding information super-highway (Thank you Al Gore!). It’s like having our very own private investigators combing the web for us.

These time-savers are much appreciated as we become increasingly busy. Thanks to these types of services we never have to miss anything again.

The new Twhirl update (0.8.2) has included a much needed new feature for everyone who has ever wanted to create groups for twitter. They now support Rooms on FriendFeed which means you can now filter your firehose of information to whatever you want according to the room you join or create.

For example, you can create a room for your favorite sports team and see only updates on that topic from the people who join that room. Likewise for any other topic such as Social Media, Stamp Collecting, or whatever the case may be. Here’s the room filter option on the bottom right of the FriendFeed client window (the pound sign #): I’ve created a room for Utterz which is selected in the following image.

The beauty is that you can quickly and easily jump from room to room without impacting your other Twhirl window which contains all of your twitter messages. Thus, the digital age’s equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time!

Yes, Twitter should’ve done this type of thing long ago, but that’s all right. Just be glad this is here now. We finally have a useful tool that will help us drink from that firehose without getting soaking wet!

Thanks to an excellent Adobe Air application called Snackr, you can now view the posts on Utterz from your circle of friends on your desktop! The good news is that it works on Windows, the Mac and even Linux and best of all it’s FREE!

Here’s how easy it is to setup:

Go to Utterz and copy the URL to your circle of friends (sometimes referred to as your Herd). Tip: It will be in this format: http://www.utterz.com/~h-Paisano/v-circle/r-1/rss.php (replace Paisano with your Utterz name, of course).

Go to http://snackr.net to download and install their cool RSS ticker. If you’ve never installed Adobe Air before (used by other services such as Twhirl, Snitter, AlertThingy and many others) then you will need to install it first. Go here to install Adobe Air.

Once Snackr is installed it will ask you what you want to do. Select the manually add feeds. Then click the plus sign on the bottom leftside of your screen and paste the URL of the RSS feed for your circle of friends on Utterz.

Within seconds all of your friends’ utterz including your own will begin scrolling across your screen and look like this:

Note: You can add all kinds of other RSS feeds to Snackr as well. This was just a way to show utterz members how to add their feed to their desktop.

Want a Personal MilkShake?

By the way, you can add your own Utterz RSS feed to services like GoogleReader and FriendFeed. Just add your own RSS feed from Utterz just as you would for any other RSS feed. (On FriendFeed click the add Blog feed option) Here’s the format:
http://www.utterz.com/~h-Paisano/list.php (again, replace my name with your Utterz user name). Bada Bing, Bada Boom! You’ve Got Milk!

How to Add RSS feeds to your Outlook

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers. You can add your favorite RSS Feeds as subscriptions in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. There are a couple of ways to add an RSS Feed.

Adding a single feed at a time

Copy the feed URL that you want to add to Outlook

Go to the RSS folder in Outlook and Right-Click the root

The following menu will appear:

Select the Add a New RSS Feed (Third choice from the top)

Paste the RSS URL in the following box

Important Tip: Outlook seems to like XML RSS Feeds the best so whenever possible select that type of feed. It will look like this: View Feed XML

If you don’t see that link, you can try adding ?format=xml to the end of their rss feed.

How to add a collection of RSS feeds

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 supports the .opml file format for exchanging a collection of RSS Feed configuration information between programs that can organize and display RSS Feeds. Such programs are known as RSS aggregators. Office Outlook 2007 includes the functionality of an RSS aggregator.

A collection of RSS Feeds is shared by exporting it to an XML file with the .opml file extension and sending the file to the other person. You can attach the .opml file in an e-mail message, copy the .opml file to a network shared folder that both people have access to, or copy the .opml file to removable media such as a disk, CD, or a memory device. The other person can then import the .opml file and choose which RSS Feeds to add to Outlook.

In Office Outlook 2007, a collection of RSS Feeds can be exported to a file with the .opml extenstion.

You can import a file with the .opml extension to Office Outlook 2007 or other RSS programs.

1. On the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Select Import RSS Feeds from an OPML file.
3. Click Next.
4. Click Browse to specify where the file to be imported is located, and then click Open.
5. Click Next.
6. Select the Feed name check box for each subscription that you want to import.
   

    

   Tip Click Select All or Clear All to quickly select or clear all check boxes.

   Note You are importing only the subscription information, not the actual items from the subscription.

7. Click Next.The .opml file is imported to Office Outlook 2007

How to export Your Google Reader RSS Collection as an OPML file

• Click the Manage Subscriptions link and click the Import/Export option
• click the Export Your Subscriptions as an OPML file
• Save the file to your local system
• Now you can import your Google Reader feeds into Outlook (all of them or selected feeds)

Google has finally added a much needed View Menu to Google docs. You can now view your documents with fixed width and margins much like desktop word processors! This is a step in the right direction for online web applications if they seriously want to challenge traditional desktop applications.

While this might not seem like a big deal at first glance, it really is more important that it appears. This gives Google docs a much improved look n’ feel that closely resembles Microsoft Word which means improved user acceptance. It will also attract more bloggers to use google docs for posting directly to their blogs. Here’s a screenshot of the publishing options:

Final Thoughts:
I applaud Google for adding this and other new features. I look forward to the battle between desktop apps and web apps!

Microsoft has actually released an excellent new application! Windows Live Writer is truly a powerful and useful tool for bloggers! It’s like Word for the Web 2.0!

I haven’t been this impressed from a Microsoft product in a very long time. Live Writer allows you to credit blog posts with amazing ease and spectacular results. It totally blows away another other blog editor that I’ve used before such as Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.

Any Blog, Anytime!
Live Writer has no problems working with just about any blog platform as well. I was able to open/edit and publish to Blogger and WordPress blogs without a hitch. What I liked best about the experience was its ability to open any existing blog post from any blog on the fly. You could then make any changes and re-publish it instantly. The results were almost always exactly what it looked like in Live Writer.

Insert This!
Inserting elements are also vastly improved on Live Writer. Simply click on the item you want to insert such as video, picture or link and Live Writer does all the dirty work for you. The options for manipulating the look and position of pictures is also very impressive.

Plug-in Mania!
One of the best features of Live Writer is the incredible amount of free add-on plug-ins!
Go to Live Writer Plug-ins and take a look at all of the things you can add to the experience! I instantly added a dozen must-have plug-ins! Plus, there are always new ones coming.

Here’s a visual rundown of the new Live Writer:

Preview before you post

Know what your blog post will look like before you post it, including photos and other rich media. Writer detects your blog theme automatically, including fonts, and displays it while you compose and edit.

Works with your blog service

Writer works with most major blog providers, including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many others. Get started with your blog in minutes, thanks to automatic blog configuration. Post to multiple blogs: themes are automatically detected for each.

Rich media made easy

Turn your blog into a story with photos, videos, maps, tags and other rich media.  Writer publishes all of it automatically when post.  Quickly link to previous blog posts and other Web pages.

Powerful editing tools

Insert and edit tables directly in your entry. Inline spell checker helps you polish your text. Easy hyperlink support lets you link your blog to the online world. Use the HTML view to edit directly in HTML.

More rich content with easy plug-ins

Use plug-ins from Windows Live Gallery to add more rich content to your blog like music feeds, emoticons and quotes of the day. Can’t find the plug-in you want? Make your own and upload it to Gallery for the whole world to share.

Final Thoughts

The only thing missing from the Live Writer experience is the ability to save drafts to online storage accounts such as Microsoft Workspace Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho Writer, or any others. I have no doubt that it will come someday, so we’ll just have to settle for saving drafts to the local drive until then.

Good Links

Download Live Writer here
Live Writer Blog offer useful information about Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer Group is a discussion forum for Live Writer users.

Here’s a good screencast on Live Writer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6gf5aa93E]