Hi I am Joe Hackman, welcome to my personal blog. I am an Entrepreneur, IT Consultant, and Blog Talk Radio host. I also work with social media professionally as both a consultant, and by developing Wordpress based blogs/Websites.
While watching a video today by @garyvee today I was both validated and also inspired to write this post. Gary’s point was simple – if you want to get anywhere using social media to promote something, you have to grab it. You have to engage the people who can make a difference for whatever it is you’re interested in doing. This could be anything from getting a job at a certain company or getting a certain celebrity to wear a product you are marketing. I want to add to what Gary said in his video. We have to understand as a people that the opportunity to network has never been greater in our lifetimes and it is not only possible but it is likely that this window will diminish in the near future. I believe there are two reasons for this and I will get into both of them a little more in depth.
Reason #1 it’s the Economy
A bad economy gives you access to people in an unprecedented way. Case in point – I formed a business group in early 2009 called 1 Degree, several of the members of this group are simply people that would not have joined a group like this had their businesses been running at the typical brisk pace they had been just about every year prior. When you lose your job or customers to a bad economy, you get creative, you put yourself out there. Networking has never been more prolific than it is today, in a good way.
Reason #2 it’s the Technology
Every “new” technology is given a pass on many issues early on. Think back to the chain letters that seemingly reasonable people would forward in the early days of Email. These same people today would not even think twice about it. Or how about the early success of the Email SPAM industry, had it not worked so well people would not have continued to do it. SPAM has to be facilitated today on a huge scale to have any impact. Social networking is really no different from this. Today many people are using geo-tagging software that in essence tells the world where they are at a given moment in time. At some point in the future there will be high profile events that remind people that some privacy is a good thing and these technologies will be used much more sparingly. Or how about the prolific Facebook application posts that are already a bit of a taboo? I’ve seen a number of people create brand new accounts to avoid annoying their real life friends from the prolific wall posts of the latest Zynga game or similar Facebook application. Or how about the “50 things you don’t know about me” it’s a bit like the Facebook equivalent of a chain letter – tag 10 of your friends and post this on your wall.
Action Plan
So Gary is right, but we need to also encourage people to strike while the iron is hot and be prepared for the next stage of this ever evolving world. 15 years ago I forged relationships on Internet Relay Chat with a bunch of people around the US and the World that were Windows NT administrators. The dealings of this group have included quite a bit of commerce over the years and the core is all still communicating with one another. Today similar relationships are being established on Facebook, Twitter and other Social Networking related sites. There will be winners and losers but the people who do as Gary has suggested will find a way to win regardless of the circumstances. I think we all need to evaluate which technologies fit us best and pursue them for personal or commercial benefit. For me the value of the medium is much greater in terms of personal satisfaction for the friendships and inspiration but it’s nice to know that these efforts will continue to open doors for commerce. Let me know what you think. Share your story, plenty of room for your comments here.
The first application you should download is one of the Task Manager apps. These applications allow you to kill extra programs that you do not want running or failed applications that might have hung or crashed. I’ve only seen the latter once but it was nice to be able to stop it without resetting my phone. The kill function is very responsive, similar to a Unix type environment.
Don’t waste your money on expensive Wifi Analyzer hardware and software just pickup a Droid phone and download the Wifi Analyzer utility for free. This tool is useful in identifying networks that overlap and will allow you to determine if you’ve made the right decisions about the channel your wireless device is using. You can quickly and easily see if there is a strong wifi signal that overlaps yours. Unlike my example you should perform this analysis where you intend to USE your wifi client devices most. Here is a video demonstration for more clarity:
Prefer vimeo for your videos? No problem, view this same video @vimeo.
Earlier this week I watched a Youtube video about Google visual search or Google Goggles. It was the last in a series of things that I had seen and read about droid as a Blackberry user. For years I have been a Blackberry guy, by far it was the undisputed Email king. The problem is Email is only a fraction of my social and business interaction today. I am very active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I’ve also found my Blackberry 8830 seriously lacking the power to handle a Twitter client and it’s really cramped my style in the R&D department. There are so many “Killer” apps out there right now, I don’t even know where to start, but I will say that I can now participate. Yesterday I called Verizon to find out what my upgrade options were and after a conversation with a representative at a local store I was set to go pick up a Motorola Droid today. It was not without some complication, apparently I had been given some incorrect information by a rep at the local Verizon store. Without getting into too fine of details I ended up asking for a regional managers phone number which the store manager promptly gave me and a $100 bump in the price was averted. Verizon did step up but not on the front lines, word to the wise – ask for a higher up manager if you’re not getting satisfaction on an issue. As of this moment I am the proud owner of a Motorola Droid phone and I am completely blown away by how cool this phone is. As a long time technology geek this is nothing short of a kid in the candy store experience for me. I intend to follow up this article with more information on what I’ve been able to do with the Droid that I feel will interest others.
This article was too good to pass up, an important and timely read for many people. I wonder if it will have you consider some things you had not previously:
URL Shortening is a must in the age of 140 character micro blogging. Many have come to learn that it is really an art form to get peoples attention, get them to read your 140 character snippet and click your link to get more. This challenge can be made a little easier with the URL shortener http://bit.ly, the 5 reasons for this are:
Tidy’s up large URL’s and makes them much more compact.
Provides you with robust statistics on not only who clicks your link but other bit.ly links
Allows you to share your links on Twitter
Provides conversational data from Friend Feed and Twitter
Provides api key for other content aggregation sites such as twitterfeed.com
Check out my screen-cast for a detailed demonstration:
In my day to day travels both personally and professionally I am often encouraging people to check out and use certain social media sites and blogs. When I mention RSS it seems like a lot of my audience drops off comprehension wise. In response to this I’ve come up with a video that your parents could use to understand and use RSS and more specifically Google Reader. The video will get into detail but it will be useful for people who:
Might want to get updated content from certain web and blog sites.
Like to organize all of their media content in one place when possible.
Don’t know what RSS is but would like to be able to explain it to others.
Want to learn more about blogging and how the content gets delivered.
Have an interest in Feedburner for promoting their blog and RSS feed.
