Social Networking – How Sociable Are You?

As you read this, more than 10,000 Tweets just went out. According to the Social Computing Journal, social media grew more in 2009 than all previous years combined. Social networking sites have rapidly evolved into much more than a way to connect with family and friends – social media has become the channel for interactive, digital marketing and communications that brings businesses, consumers and communities around the world together as collaborators.

A recent article on the web describes this amazing tool, HowSociable.com. This tool is fun, easy and informative. Just enter the brand name of any business you’d like to track (including your own) on the HowSociable? home page. The tool will query a number of the top social networking sites and then display the results for the number of times the brand or business name showed up on each site. To see more detail about the visibility on a specific site, like Facebook People, you can click on the results icon and get additional information, even specific posts or comments.

You can use the tools to measure where you are with your social media plan, or give you a beginning baseline for measurement if you are just getting started. It also provides an easy interface to see collective results. Give HowSociable? your email address and the brand you want to track, and they can email you the results on an ongoing basis.

You can also use the tool to study the success of highly rated brands and check in on how your competitors are faring in the social landscape. HowSociable? is fun, it’s free and it’s a way to measure your social success stories. Try it, we think you’ll like it.

Protect Your Privacy From Data Mining

By now, we’ve all been conditioned to protect our Internet privacy when we make purchases online. Most people know to only use reputable sites, make sure they use encryption software, don’t give out too much personal information at once, never give out your social security number – the list goes on and on.



We’re even becoming a little more aware (sometimes learning the hard way) that we should exercise some restraint on our social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.


What you may not know is that consumer sales organizations, including retailers, insurance companies and lenders, are very interested in your social media habits, profiles, blog comments and your social network of ‘friends’. Many of them are data mining social media sites and blogs to get a full personal profile of you and learn about your buying behavior through your social behavior.


One of the most talked about data mining services is Rapleaf, who claims to give retailers the ultimate in customer insight – by crawling through the most popular newsgroups, blogs and social sites – all unknown to the individual consumer. While lending and credit agencies swear that they only use factual data to determine credit decisions and scores, they still use social data to understanding consumer profiles – even looking at the credit worthiness of your friends or your followers on Twitter. After all, Twitterers of a feather, flock together.


Here are three important tips to keep your social pages from undermining your consumer rights:
1) Absolutely EVERYTHING you put on the Internet is public information. Period. Don’t let strict ‘privacy settings’ give you a false sense of security.
2) Choose your friends wisely. Don’t accept ‘friend’ invitations from random people you have never heard of or know only through friends of friends of friends. Your circle is being watched and mined for your connections.
3) Monitor posts on your account frequently and remove anything offensive.

Social networking and blogging is fun, friendly and here to stay. Just be mindful that your online conversations are big business for big brother retailer.

Backing Up Your Tweets

Twitter is an effective and fun tool, it can be used for your business as well as personal connections. Some people spend a substantial amount of time and energy into their tweets. So what would happen if all the time that you spent on Twitter, all the great stuff you sent out, all the followers you’ve gathered were to suddenly disappear? For a lot of people who are hooked on Twitter it would be a nightmare.

Have you ever thought about backing up your tweets? If not reading the above statement about what could happen if you don’t may make you change your mind. Backing up your Twitter can be simple and free. Here are a couple different programs that can keep you tweeting even if something happens to your account.

BackupMyTweets.com
Their tagline “Don’t lose your Tweets. Make Them Permanent” and that’s exactly what they do. With this service you can protect your tweets, do daily backups, and they offer flexible download options. The basic service is free but you can also get a Premium Edition $4.95 a year, pretty cheap for all that it does. BackupMyTweets.com also offers a suite of other programs such as BackupMyMail and BackupMyBlog.

TweetBackUp.com
TweetsBackUp is easy to use and it does daily backups but what makes it really stand out is that it’s all web based. No installation of extra programs on your computer to bog it down.

Tweetake.com
Tweettake makes possible users aware of just what can happen when Twitter malfunctions. On their about page under “Why bother to do this?” They state that Twitter may lose followers again like it did in June/July. If you are backing up your tweets you won’t be the one that’s scrambling to get them back.

How to Prepare for a Disaster Using Social Media

It could happen at any time, you could be running your daily errands. Your oldest is at school and youngest at daycare. Your husband or wife is in another city 400 miles away at a conference. You go into the store to buy milk while your walking to the register to check out it happens, an earthquake. Once the initial shock is over your mind is spinning. What do you do next?

Preparing for a disaster is something we all need to do to make sure that our family is safe and technology is there to make it possible. Within minutes we could contact our husband and children to make sure they are ok, find a local shelter to get everyone to, make sure you can find the safest route to all the destinations that you need to get to.

To use social media and technology as a guide to getting through a natural disaster you need to know where to start. First step is to make a plan and involve your whole family in it. Make sure everyone has all the vital information in their electronic devices that they need. Phone numbers, addresses, email address, etc. Check with your children's school to see what their plans are for natural disasters. Have a meet up place if your children are older so they know where to meet in case of an emergency. This is a great project for your virtual assistant to help you with so your family is prepared as well as you business associates.

Disasters can strike at any time and using technology can keep you connected. For more information check out this great article from wonderful guide HOW TO: Prepare for Disasters Using Social Media.