Category Archives: Social Media

Taking Back FollowFriday the Chris Brogan Way

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Earlier today Chris Brogan tweeted about an idea he had regarding the Twitter FollowFriday Trending Topic and a cool way to give props to the cool people you follow on Twitter and Turn Twitter’s Follow Friday in Blog Traffic at the same time. Curious? Read on to see how you can join the movement to take back FollowFriday on Twitter, Chris Brogan style!

Help spread the word: Turn Follow Friday into blog traffic. Link to a post of your favorite followers. (pls rt?) On 2:23 PM Apr 9th 2010 from Seesmic

In essence, the idea involves creating a blog post that highlights the folks you’d like to recommend for FollowFriday and linking to it from a status update that get’s posted to Twitter like the one from Chris Brogan below:

My list of people to follow for this Friday - http://bit.ly/b8Fg3S On 2:36 PM Apr 9th 2010 from Seesmic

A Quick Note About FollowFriday

The point of FollowFriday is to mention someone you’re friends with and why you think they are the cats meow, thus “introducing” them to your followers and helping forge new connections and help build relationships in your social circle. Of late though, the problem is that all too often FollowFriday Twitter status updates contain little more than a list of names followed by a hashtag making them of little or no use at all.

Count Me In

Originally @ADSMitchell, @VSellis and I had agreed to lobby for better quality FollowFriday Twitter updates by including only one user per update, a reason to follow them and the #FF or #FollowFriday hashtag (and getting our friends to do the same), but I prefer this "post and tweet" approach to FollowFriday for several reasons:

  • It’s a great way to put the users you recommend in context as you’re no longer restricted to 140 characters.
  • Your message more meaningful to followers and invites interaction outside of the Twitter community in general.
  • It’s extra (and original) content for your blog, which is community focused and generates goodwill.
  • If used effectively , it could be used to produce link worthy content (think top 10 lists and link bait).

Moving Swiftly Along

So, look out for my new FollowFriday posts, featuring some of my favourite friends from Twitter. (Who knows? Maybe your mug will be in one of them!)

My Top 10 #oneletteroffmovies Tweets

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One Letter Off

One Letter Off

Pete Cashmore just posted his selection of the Top 20 #oneletteroffmovies over on Mashable and I have to say that there are a few corkers in that bunch that have to be passed on.

What’s #oneletteroffmovies?

#oneletteroffmovies is currently a trending topic on Twitter and simply put it’s a hash tag that allows people to change one letter of movie titles to make new one’s. I see that someone beat me to Sad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – dagnabbit!

I have opted to include some of my favourites from Pete’s list and also take a look through the hashtags to see if I found and other that I think are worthy of inclusion.

Also, where possible I have gone back as far as Twitter Search would allow at the time in order to credit ther oldest instance of the idea.

Continue reading →

How to build an online community

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Community building can be cold.

Community building can be cold.

This evening I was researching information related to planning, building and sustaining social networks or online communities when I found a great post by CommunitySpark Community Manager Martin Reed entitled “How to build an online community” which helped me with the two most important aspects .

In the first part, Martin identifies 5 questions to ask yourself when planning an online community.

Questions you should be asking yourself include:

  1. Why do you want an online community?
  2. Where do you build the new online community?
  3. Where are your members?
  4. What makes your community unique?
  5. How will you attract members and manage the community?

The second part of the article deals with 5 factors to consider when building an online community.

Factors you should consider include:

  1. Keep it simple.
  2. Respect your community.
  3. Keep it private (at first).
  4. Have guidelines and processes from day one.
  5. Highlight members and their content.

He concludes the article by saying that you should be realistic and adventurous and commit yourself to managing, measuring and refining your community over the long term because you’re not just building a site to woo potential buyers, you’re building relationships.

I found it a great read, very informative and helpful. There’s just so much new stuff to consider with community building that you have to plan ahead and put yourself in the users shoes to make sure that your venture stands any chance of success. I agree with Martin’s view that community building is about providing and sustaining value for your members in order to create a successful venture in the long term.

I’ll take a turn to answer those questions and review those factors in later posts, but for now I have added Community Spark to my Feedly RSS reader. I’ll also add it to the aggregator when I get that up and running on Cape Town Social using the OneNews WordPress Theme I plan on purchasing as soon as I find my PayPal details.

Wow, that was the first post I have written in ages, I hope you enjoyed it, please share your opinion or let me know what you look for in a social network.