Yes, it’s all hallow’s eve, and while the kiddies are thinking about candy and costumes and spooky houses they’ll visit tonight, business people have a different idea of what’s truly scary. Especially PR and marketing professionals who are watching social media speed up the reaction time of their customers to light speed. How can we keep up? For your reading pleasure a few horror stories and near misses from businesses around the world. There is a lesson in every single one, so pay attention!

Citibank
Social Media is no new medium to Frank Eliason, SVP for Citibank, so when Occupy Wall St protesters heard that Citibank staff had called 911 when protesters entered a branch in New York and the word went out on multiple social media channels that people were being arrested, he didn’t sit on his hands hoping it would all blow over. He didn’t waste any time gathering as much data and content as he could so people could get a better picture.

Sure, there was the video of protesters being arrested, prevented from leaving the building, but there was also video from inside the building during the protest which basically showed the protesters disrupting business, not canceling accounts, but asking for support from the staff.

Now Frank was on his way to speak at PivotCom, where he could have expected a lot of tough questions about leaving his office at a critical time to attend a conference. He opened his talk with the video of the arrests followed by the video of what was going on inside which prompted the staff to call 911.

The lesson?
By doing this, Frank reached thousands of people through Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and several blogs, possibly many more than the Occupy Wall St folks simply because of his own network combined with the powerful networks who were at Pivotcom. Basically leveraging social media to show the whole story and showing at the same time that transparency is ALWAYS best.

Ragu
Ragu sauces thought they could take a poke at Dads’ apparent ineptitude at cooking dinner for the kids fairly safely, and many years ago mebbe so, but with today’s social media savvy dads, many of whom make the choice stay at home to care for the family and/or work at home– it just wasn’t so smart to launch their “Dad Cooks Dinner” video channel. Needless to say Dads didn’t think it was funny.

Then somebody at Ragu got the bright idea of reaching out to some Dads on Twitter, notably CC Chapman, a blogger and social media celeb who is also known as a “Digital Dad”.

CC went on a pretty good rant on the subject and of course other social media people picked up the flag and ran with it, although not all of them took his side in the discussion, including the mommy bloggers who gave their opinions in the video. In fact I brought it up in a panel on Social media for brands at OMMA Social in San Francisco last week.

In the end CC decided to make his own sauce, showing that yes, Dads CAN cook too. He even offered a little social media advice for Ragu, just in case they were paying attention. It’s good advice too. Click the link and go read it. It doesn’t look like Ragu did though.

What did Ragu do? Eventually they called CC to talk to him, but their initial reaction was to stick their head in the sand and ignore it. The videos are still up, showing they either decided to ignore the whole mess, or they really just don’t care, but not before it got a little out of hand.

The lesson?
After being dissected in social media circles for weeks, in the end Ragu leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouths. Why? Because they didn’t do their homework and they didn’t engage their target market in a genuine way. Rather than offering the videos up as a sauce in your face slap, they might have posted a contest that pitted both Moms and Dads against each other for the most innovative recipes and put a positive spin on Dads in the kitchen instead. They could have reached out to Dads and asked them for their secret ways to use the sauce to spice up meals instead of pitting Mommy bloggers against Daddy bloggers. Lastly they should have researched who they were reaching out to sop they would have a clue as to how it would be received.

Chapstick
As you’ve seen above not all of these social media nightmares are huge worldwide disasters, and if responded to in some way that engages the people involved things can settle down and people can be reasonable. But if you don’t talk to them, or try to muffle their voices it’s going to get ugly. Take Chapstick for example. They posted a pretty silly add of a woman up-ended over her couch, hair flying, apparently looking for her long-lost tube of Chapstick on their Facebook page above the catchy title “Where do lost Chapsticks go?”. Apparently the image needed to be explained, and they wanted to invite people to share their thoughts on this riveting topic on their Facebook page.

OK, silly image right? No big deal right? Well, some people posted comments on the Facebook page complaining about the ad and blogger Margot Magowan didn’t think it was funny. She blogged about it and then posted on the wall of the Chapstick Facebook page. Chapstick admins deleted the comment. Others posted their thoughts on the subject and Chapstick deleted those too. Then they took down the ad and replaced the picture of the girl with one of some tubes of Chapstick. Problem solved right? Oh no, this opened a Pandora’s box of complaints and user launched “Butt seriously, Chapstick” a page on Facebook all about the whole mess where people could complain to their heart’s content. Golly, we can hardly wait to see response to the new campaign featuring Australia’s top model with the tag line “Never let your lips go naked”….

Had they not pulled the comments down it might have all blown over with a simple heart felt apology for any offense.

The lesson?
Seriously. It wasn’t the ad itself, it was how it was handled. Chapstick had a great opportunity here to reach out to the consumer and say something like “Gee, we’re sorry you don’t like the ad, we didn’t mean any harm”. and call it a day. They could have made a series of images with people in equally silly situations searching desperately for lost tubes in odd places. Really, their only mistake was trying to cover it up by deleting comments. Negative comments are an opportunity to learn from your users and to let them know you are listening. To correct a negative assumption.

This time the changes at Facebook are really big. Graphically pleasing perhaps, but also very noisy and cluttered with duplicate information and graphics. Good thing we’ve all got broadband these days isn’t it or it would take forever to load Facebook’s Timeline. I did a quick video overview of what is in the new Facebook profile and a few thoughts on how we might use it (or not). Overall it’s very attractive and once we get used to the new look I think people are going to like it. As usual though there is going to be an adoption period and that can be tough, especially for people who were perfectly happy with the old look!

Gone are the tabs we are used to and your information is distributed on the page instead. Oddly enough the same information is accessible in several places, especially photos friends and your info section. For example if you update your profile or cover image then it shows in the header section as well as lower in your timeline and again in the photos section. Now that everything is on the home page it gets pretty noisy. Seems a little redundant to me but who knows, maybe it’s only in the beta? Or maybe it’s so you can pick your favorite view and hide the rest? Still, the photo and frinds browsers are much easier to navigate and visually engaging. It’s possible to hide photos from others by just clicking an X to hide the image.

I think business people will quickly see that the new “cover” graphic can be a whole lot more than a picture of the family trip to the Rockies, it’s ready to tell the world all about your business like a big ol’ billboard. Please resist this temptation lest all your friends shun you.

Business will also see the value of running social ads based on the piles and piles of demographic and personal information they’ll be collecting and the filtering they’ll be able to do to target social ads to you, your friends and the friends of your friends’ friends. This will be great for businesses wanting to leverage the social graph, but could soon become annoying for users.

Facebook is showing off a brand new look and as usual everybody’s in a snit about it. Honestly, it amazes me that they seem to do their re-designs in a total vacuum. Any web developer knows the first rule of web design is to listen to what the client wants, collect their feedback and do a needs assessment. That’s even more true in a social network whose users are often less web savvy and thrown by major UI changes as well as concerned about privacy issues.

On Twitter today Myspace is trending, not because it’s about Myspace but because people are suggesting Facebook is doomed to the same fate as Myspace. People are migrating to Google plus now that it’s open and even though that interface just got a whole slew of new features it’s still got a long way to go to be useable for Facebook’s typical user base.

Personally I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot again and it’s a mistake for Facebook to chase Google Plus. Trying to do too much has been the downfall of many a platform. Facebook should focus on it’s strengths and what it’s user base wants. Both networks have their place and can easily exist together, each seeing more use from a particular user base. But that’s my take.

Here are just a few quotes from my Facebook page, sans names to protect the innocent:

• Dear FaceBook: Here’s a story you might like: WHAT THE #@! are you doing????????
• All these new features being rolled out before f8 seem to be pretty intuitive, but its a li’l much all at once!
• Okay FB, I don’t need your “help” with categorizing news feeds and creating lists. Anyone else find this not so helpful?
• WOW, OMG Poking is, like, SO MUCH EASIER NOW! I HEART YOU FAECBUK!!!!!
• Which annoys you more, the news feed or the ticker?
• This outrage happens every time anything new is introduced on facebook. I’m now just waiting for all the “NOTICE: Facebook is sharing your most secret information with everyone on earth including OJ Simpson and space aliens unless you change this one obscure setting
• I mean, at least give it a chance. It’s been all of what? Maybe 9 hours for many… try it out before you start whining JUST because it’s a “change”.

You may know that Facebook is not my favorite network, but still it serves a purpose for me and for my clients. It’s also still a great place for close friends and families to be in touch, though not with the privacy one might have hoped for. Now the changes have people confused again, and while I’m happy to answer questions it would be a lot easier if Facebook thought things out a bit better and made the UI intuitive.

Here’s a very happy little video that explains it all.

Facebook news feed changes

The most recent posts are no longer at the top of your news feed. Facebook chooses top stories for you.Top stories are based on how active people are on the story (remember the importance of edge rank!). If a lot of your friends have shared, commented or liked a story, or if you are particularly close to theperson, then it’s a top story for you.

If you don’t agree with Facebook’s choices you can demote a story by clicking the arrow in the upper right corner of the story to “unmark” that story. If you do that often enough it’s assumed you don’t want stories from that person or page anymore and you won’t see them as often in your news feed.

If you want to add that person or page back to your news stream, go to your home page, hover your cursor over the left side of the left hand news feed menu and you’ll get a pop up list of people, apps, pages and groups you’ve hidden and you can select the ones to start showing again.

If you want to hide an application or a type of post (games, quizzes etc.) click the drop down menu in the top right corner and choose “hide all or “unsubscribe” to hide everything from that person, “hide story” to hide just that story and of course you can still “report spam” here too.

confused about the changes? Here’s a link to explain the news feed changes on Facebook.

The Ticker

On the right hand side of your page you’ll see the news ticker. This is where you will see the real time comings and goings of your friends. You’ll see images, videos, stories, tags and friendings. You can control what is seen in the ticker by un subscribing from a person’s feed, selecting most important or Most Updates. If you really HATE THE TICKER here’s how to get rid of it. This is a joke actually, for now you’re stuck with it, but I thought their examples were great.

Lists

Very much like Google Plus circles, you can now filter your news feed by lists. Isn’t it nice that Facebook is now creating your lists for you based on your interests with the new “smart lists“? (yes, I’m being facetious) Click the name of a list and see just the posts from the people on that list.

Email alerts

Starting Sept 30 Pages won’t be able to email all of their fans but even better you’ll be seeing fewer email alerts from your friends

I know, sounds crazy right? If you’ve head me speak on social media you’ve heard me say that social media is not about numbers but about quality. This is particularly true on Facebook. Why? Because Facebook has a ranking system called “EdgeRank”. (check your Edgerank  here) To put it simply Facebook looks at how many friends you have for your Facebook page, how many times your friends have interacted with your posts (share, liked, commented), The algorithm runs and checks to see if there is an affinity between you and each fan.

Facebook is looking to see if you have common interests and the quality of those interests, and it does this with an algorithm. For example has this fan responded on your page before? Have you commented on something they posted? Have you exchanged posts only once or twice in two years? Are the topics you talk about on your page showing up in the fan’s daily activities? Are friends of the fan interacting with it?

Flatly stated, if nobody shares, comments or likes your posts, Facebook isn’t going to put it in their news feeds because you’re not interesting to them. Or at least they haven’t demonstrated any interest.

What does that have to do with numbers?
Facebook also looks to see how many fans you have and how many are interacting to come up with a ratio of interaction. The higher the ration there better your ranking and the more likely you will show up in people’s news feeds. Low ranking? You could be the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Nobody will hear you.

So, for the sake of discussion let’s say you have two Facebook pages.

Page one talks about reptile raising
Posts are about housing, feeding and caring for snakes, lizards etc. This page has 1,000 fans and 500 “interactions” per day.

Page two is about Wine
Posts are about enjoying fine wines, comparing regions, tasting wines and visiting wineries. This page has 10,000 fans and 500 “interactions” per day.

Which page would you say is the most popular?
If you guessed the wine page wrongo, back to square one you go! Those lizards are getting a 50% interaction rate while the wine page is at a lousy 5%!

If you fan both pages and so do your friends you will likely see a lot more posts about snakes than Cabernet in your news feed. In fact, without a real effort to go view the wine page often it may seem like it’s disappeared altogether.

What to do?
Quit focusing on getting more fans and start getting deeper engagement so your posts start showing up in people’s news feeds. THEn, and only then will you grow a valuable fan base on Facebook.

Encourage interaction
Whatever your page is about, find ways to encourage people to comment and share your posts and their own posts on your page. Be polarizing. Start lively discussions.

Post pictures, videos and jokes
I know, I know, but people love this stuff. Make sure there’s real content there too, but the occasional cat doing the macarena is going to get your page shared. Live with it or come up with something equally intriguing. Maybe an infographic?

Be timely
If we already read it on everybody else’s page what do we need you for? Keep it fresh and be the go-to person for the latest in your field. Toss in a dose of politics or breaking local and world news to get things shared.

Good content
Bottom line figure out what your page is about and make sure you stay on track with that. Use the hints above but add your own flavor so it suits the goals of the page.

Feature users
Face it, we all love a good stroke now and then. Find out what interests your fans and talk back to them. Show off their blogs and products, help them grow their pages and they’ll help you grow yours.

This post is taken from my member site, the Facebook Success Kit. Learn more about using Facebook, my best tips and tricks and how to build your own Facebook pages for your business for one low annual fee.

Google just introduced their “plus 1” button. It hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but you’ll probably see it soon. If you’re in a big hurry you can sign into Google’s Experimental Labs and add this experiment to your services. Here’s a video description of how it works (from Google’s point of view.)

So who sees your +1′s? People in your Google chat or Gmail lists, stored in Google Contacts or who you are following in Google Reader or Buzz. Learn more about managing your social connections and view your existing connections in Google’s help section.

It seems that Google is taking on the Facebook like, and +1 buttons will start showing up on web sites so you can like a web site and have it show up in your like stream too. Your +1′s will be visible to anyone in the lists above, or , if you set your +1 settings to public, anyone can see what pages you’ve clicked the +1 button on by just visiting your Google profile.

So what’s the downside here? Just like Facebook “Likes”, advertisers can also access this information and form an idea of who you are, where you go online and what you prefer to fine tune ads for you. Is this a bad thing? Is it going to stir up another privacy debate?

Likely so…

What do you think?

As you might have already heard, Facebook just rolled out the new Facebook Pages design and features as a preview last night. The goal is to make pages look more like profiles and although you still won’t have the same options as you do on your profile it’s a big step in the right direction.

Now, this isn’t official until March 1, so for the moment admins will have the opportunity to preview how your pages will look with the new layout. After March 10 (give or take) all pages will be rolled to the updated layout.

How does it work?
When you visit your Facebook Page you’ll see this banner at the top.

Go ahead and click preview and it will walk you through the new features and give you the opportunity to upgrade the page you’re on and any other pages you administer as well.

There’s no big downside to updating, but there are a few things to think about.

The new design puts a bunch of the images shared or tagged on your page in the “photostrip” at the top. If you don’t have any you might want to get some before you make the switch. If you have some but you don’t want them all featured you can change that in the settings for the page.

Probably the best new feature is “Login as Page” which gives admins the ability to comment on other pages as the PAGE instead of themselves. This is a fantastic addition for those of us who would love to represent the brand on the page on other Facebook pages. drive traffic to our pages with useful commentary and separate our personal voice from the voice of the page. You can also finally post to your page as yourself, something admins have been clamoring for for ages.

A VERY close second is the new notifications feature. Admins can now create settings to get a notification email when new posts are made on the page. This makes managing a page and interacting with your fans much better and faster. If you are currently using Facebook as your page, you’ll see these notifications in the top left corner when someone interacts with your page.

The “Everyone” filter will allow you to filter the most interesting and engaging posts to the top of the page and even filter out pages that are not in the language you speak (we’re not sure if this is a good thing…)

All in all this is a big step forward for Facebook as a real interactive and useful tool for business. We look forward to seeing what YOU do with these features and what you think about it.

OK, so what’s the downside?
Probably the biggest one is we’ll be seeing spam from pages posting to other pages and even worse you’ll get notifications about it. It’s likely that Facebook will quickly create a way for us to manage this!

Need to learn more about Facebook? Head over to the Social Media Coaching Center right now and give it a spin.

I had a very interesting conversation with a Facebook application developer today. He’s a very smart guy and we agreed and disagreed on quite a lot of things. Here’s the crux of the discussion from my point of view. If it’s not yours, or if it is, please–for the love of community–pitch in and SAY something!

We were talking about how to build community on a Facebook page and whether or not that’s really even possible. Look at any big brand Facebook page. Do you see really engaged conversations or simply reactions to a post from the brand or other members? Are people really discussing anything on Facebook?

Now, I’m one of those old school community people. I really do think this is important stuff, and that’s probably what Guy Kawasaki means when he calls people Twitter Nazis, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Community requires involvement and a certain amount of passion or the discussions are pretty shallow. There are no breakthroughs or epiphanies.

BUT, that’s just my opinion, and it’s only one kind of community. There’s also the kind where people come to hang out and have fun. That’s pretty much how I see Facebook. People go there to relax, swap stories, play games and see pictures of their cousin’s kids. Sure the big brands are using Facebook pages more than ever, but are they doing it for community or marketing? Of course they’re doing it for marketing. They’re businesses.

So here’s a thumbnail of just 4 “social networks” and how community applies to them (in my opinion). This is very general, so don’t get your panties in a bunch if I say your favorite network is not what you think it is. Maybe it is for you and it just doesn’t work that way for me. That’s why there are so many forms of community right?

Twitter
Twitter is like having a conversation while running a marathon. You talk to people in passing and when you catch up with them again. Then again in the break area and you’re off again. That’s generally the depth of the conversation. What’s it good for?

Research. You want an answer, to know what your competitor is doing or how their customers feel about their product? Look to Twitter. Wanna know the most recent news, trends or information rich blog posts? Look to Twitter.

SEO. If you want to drive a lot of traffic to a particular web site or raise your brand visibility you can do it with Twitter. Link sharing is easy here and it often gets carried over into other networks like Facebook.

Brand building. Especially a personal brand. Curate enough interesting material around a topic and you’re an authority. Even if you don’t know what any of it really means. (not judging, just sayin’)

Facebook
Facebook is where people hang out. Sure, there is a bit more long form discussion than on Twitter, especially in the new groups, but really? People are sharing pics and chatting among themselves. They’re sharing links they found on Twitter and then discussing them and re-sharing them on Facebook. Brands build pages with huge numbers of fans who take little or no action. Over 65 million people “like” something daily? Cool. But does that mean they really like it or are just marking it for later? Just logging it doesn’t mean we care about it, much less discuss it.

Facebook is more intimate. People are more likely to post their kid’s pictures and personal stuff there than on sites like Twitter. They’re more likely to spend hours wandering the fan pages looking for something fun to do like games, quizzes, sharing video links and finding out about their friend’s appendectomy.

Blogs
People share passion on blogs. You see it in the comments and on some of the best blogs the comments from the regular readers are as valuable or better than the actual post itself. They’re also great sources for information you can share and discuss more in-depth on other networks. Blogs have subscribers but not members, so do they even qualify as community? At least they’re also great for SEO. Google loves WordPress, no question, and every comment adds value for the commenter and the poster.

Forums
Users who like forums like to have long threaded discussions. They’re there for a fairly focused reason, they’re often quite passionate about it. Maybe they’re talking about cars or code, but you can search the forum for answers to your questions or post them and see results fairly quickly. Forums are one of the darlings of us old-school community types and they take us back to the days of passionate arguments on bulletin boards with people who became life-long friends.

Maybe it’s a bit naive or nostalgic to think business must develop true community to succeed with social media as a marketing tool. Who are we to define what is truly community? Are ideas like that holding back the evolution of social media?

(cartoon courtesy CoolGeeks.com)

If you’re a social media geek you already know about Facebook’s live session today to introduce their new messaging system. If you’d like to see the re-caps go here. There had been a lot of buzz about Facebook rolling out a new email client, whether it was going to be a Gmail killer and a whole bunch of other speculation, but in the long run it’s really an extension of their existing messaging system, not email. Facebook’s Zuckerberg says This is NOT email, “Email’s too formal”. “Think of the friction of trying to think of the e-mail address and think of a subject line, write ‘Hey Mom,’ at the top and ‘Love, Mark’ at the bottom.” <snark>Oh the horror of complete messages</snark>.

Don’t go check just yet. The whole thing will be rolled out initially to a few thousand people and then gradually to the rest of the network. BUT if you want to get added to the invite list don’t send your email to anyone to get one (this is a scam that popped up immediately) Go to http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ and click the link to request an invite.

Here are the basic features.

The new Facebook messaging will incorporate email, Facebook messages text (SMS) and other chat clients like Jabber all collected in an email address that will be yourusername@Facebook.com.

What’s different than email?

It’s going to feel more like a chat, or (dare I say it?) a Google Wave thread. There won’t be subject lines and you won’t be able to CC or BCC other users. You CAN forward messages however. Messages will be threaded which records a conversation with one person on all of the linked networks.

You’ll be able to filter messages in your “social in box” to sort your friends and not so friends into different buckets, bounce email from people you don’t know and move friends from one bucket to another.

It was interesting to watch the live stream with the Facebook folks catching questions from the live audience. It seemed to me that they got a little defensive as the questions rolled in and it seems to me that they may have rolled this out as almost a beta–for testing by that lucky few thousand–to work out some of the details that came up in questions.

Some are already calling the new offering Fmail, and I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the existing Fmail app on the site. Oops, I expect they’ll shut that one down, but just in case don’t sign up, all of the discussions on the page reflect a broken product to me…

Last, but certainly not least, give this new product a little time to ripen. There will be bugs. And then there are the security issues. Remember the Google Wave security nightmare? They finally killed it and that’s Google, who’ve been doing messaging and email for a long time. Data mining teams must be rubbing their hands together in glee at the prospect of all that lovely data.

If you’ve decided to create one of the new Facebook groups and add your friends here are some tips to make it worthwhile for everyone.

Creating the group is easy. I’m assuming you’ve seen the video by now, but if not here’s a link and some info on creating Facebook groups. Here are some things to think about first though!

Start with a plan
What’s the focus of the group? Is it one subject or a general topic. Why should we care? You’re much more likely to have a vibrant groupif you think about this first.

Is there already a group started?
Creating a group just for the sake of owning it isn’t really the best way to get people to engage. There may already be an active group where you could add value without re-inventing the wheel.

Who would want to be in this group?
Choose members carefully. The last thing you need is a bunch of people posting how they want to leave the group. Add people who will naturally have good information and strike up a conversation.

Collaborate
Your group members are already your friends so you must know something about them. How can you use the group to collaborate around a topic or help them with their work? Groups are not about you.

Don’t add your whole friends list at once
Add a few, get some conversations going and then add more. This gives people a way to see the value when they’ve been subscribed instead of another list of people.

How will it benefit people to be members?
What are members going to get out of the group? Make sure it’s clear to you before you add people. Then make sure it’s clear to them when they join.

Start something
Adding a bunch of people to a group with no valuable content confuses new members and devalues the group. Make sure there is something they can talk about from the get-go…or they’ll go.

Don’t take it personally when people leave
This whole idea of adding people to groups without opting in is making a lot of people crazy. If people don’t want to be in your group it may not be personal.

The number one question I get about social media is: “How can I do all this social media stuff and still get my work done?”

Great question isn’t it? I mean, OK, I confess I spend all day attached to social media like an IV but that’s my job. People hire me to watch out for them and find new opportunities to engage and new tools and it’s all candy to me, but it shouldn’t be for anybody who wants to run a business that isn’t around social media now is it? You need a social media efficiency strategy.

The answer isn’t so simple though–because it’s different for everyone, but here are some basic ideas to get you started on your quest for social media efficiency and honestly, efficiency in work-flow that will carry over into your day-to-day business.

Email
I got this one from Michael Port. In one of his recent seminars he said something like this. “Go through your email in box and unsubscribe from all the email newsletters you never open.” Wow. I heard this on Sunday and so just for fun I filtered every one of the newsletters and rss feeds that I never even bother to scan into a mailbox. Some of them delivered daily and some of them weekly but it didn’t take me long to see that there were a dozen of each that I really hadn’t read in a long time.

It took me about 15 minutes to unsubscribe from them all. Liberating is the only word for it.

RSS Feeds
It wasn’t enough though, I was on a roll. I went into my Google reader and deleted every blog that hadn’t posted within the last 30 days. Now I can quickly scan the headlines of the blogs who really do add value on just one page.

There are a lot of other things I tell people to do to streamline their social media workflow. Rather than take up your time reading on, here’s a list of ways to be more efficient managing your social media time.

Automate
No, not sending auto DM’s (send me one and you’re Ota here), but automating day to day tasks.

I use Objective Marketer extensively for clients to automate posts related to contests, speaking engagements, book signings, event announcements etc. Hootsuite works well for this too. If you are using social media for marketing then you don’t want to bury people with information all at once but feed it little by little in useful quantities. (Like Guy Kawasaki Tweets and does for AllTop. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to engage directly but it gives you the freedom to schedule these all at once and have them go out over time so you don’t have to constantly be online just to post content. You also get back some great data so you can really see which posts are getting the most attention and fine-tune accordingly.

I will also use it to send content out to my network over a period of time so when I read my RSS feeds every day I don’t just dump a dozen feeds on my network but spread it out over the day. That allows more time for people to actually discuss things before the next wave hits.

This works well with blog posts too. Break up a long post into a series of posts and schedule them to go out over time. When you get great ideas for blog posts write the titles in your WordPress (please tell me you use WordPress) dashboard and then you can go back to them later and write them up. Sometimes I’ll write 5-6 posts when the spirit really catches me and then schedule them to go out over a few days. This gives me more time for other projects. (I got that one from Tim Ferriss)

Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite
I know that Twitter users use the web site more than they do Twitter clients but really, once you get more than 100 followers you are missing a lot of stuff and trying to find the people you really want to hear can be a chore. Twitter clients that allow you to sort your following into categories can save you gobs of time and make you a better engager.

Set up a follow back schedule
You know those little emails Twitter sends you when you get a new follower? Either turn them off altogether or filter them into a mailbox you only look at once a week. Then do all your follow back research, look at the profiles and send them a message if appropriate in one sitting. The same goes for all those Facebook event invites and friend requests.

Outsource
Forum moderation and follower, fan and connection requests can all be handled by a well trained admin. Need a blog post edited and pictures added to it? Get a virtual admin or have an assistant do it.

Alerts
A well managed alert system can be a huge help. Go to SocialMention.com and set up alerts for your business keywords and your name. Scan the alerts daily for things you need to act on or respond to.

Turn it off
The world will not end if you don’t have Facebook open on your desktop all day long. I confess I leave Seesmic open all day but it’s in it’s own monitor and I can quickly scan it for new things I need to respond to in a second and get back to work. I turned off the chime that tells me I’ve got a message. I do the same with email. I turn it off and open it only when I need to send a message or about every hour or so. This took some practice. Start with 15 minutes and you’ll see some impact. Baby steps people…

Linkedin
Like the newsletters above I get a PILE of messages from the groups I’m in on Linkedin but I often scan the headline and delete. If you find you’re in a group full of MLM spam leave the group or turn off alerts. Manage your connection requests once a week at most and while you’re there clean out your inbox.