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Social Media Automization Or A Fool Proof Way To Lose Your Credibility

My video today is made in an unusual location. It’s not been made in my office but at home in my living room. It has been around 11pm and I’ve decided to talk about my latest experiences with automization – with twitter automization in this case.

The Backgroundstory

A couple of days ago I’ve watched @jeffwalkers #ProductLaunchFormula and tweeted about it. You can find this tweet here. It took merely 5 minutes and the first followers arrived. I even had to mute my iPhone (well, at least the sound when a new eMail comes in), beacause almost every 2 Minutes new followers subscribed. At the next day I’ve had 325 Follower.

The Analysis

So I’ve took a closer look at those followers. At first glance I’ve been excited about this “success”, because it took just some 24h to double my follower base. But a second, more detailed look at them revealed the truth. I’ve seen followers with names like TrafficAvalance or MoneyCashCoach (these names are fictional and I’m using them just to show what kind of followers came in – self proclaimed internet marketing experts, who promise you the “get rich quick” method). And they’ve got around 5,000 followers, followed around 5,100 people and even tweeted an amazing 4 tweets.

The Disillusion

What do those profiles tell me? There are services that you provide with special keywords. Keywords people use. And if someone uses this keyword, she gets followed immediately. Just like the “I follow you, you follow me” principle. And those services are programmed to abandon the “worthless” people – those who don’t follow back. One day later (as my followers started to decrease) I’ve tweeted a test tweet to see what will happen. And just like I’ve expected it: those “people” whom I didn’t follow back and who abandoned me for (not) doing so, again subscribed to my tweets. To the time I’m writing this I’m back at 317 followers.

The Loss Of Your Credibility

What assumption can be made here? Those “followers” are machines that kick me out if I don’t follow back and thus show me, how “worthless” I am. The users behind those profiles hide themselves behind lurid names that promise the “get rich quick” method. You just need to do what they do: put your Twitter account on autopilot. Probably this strategy works sometimes, but can it bring success in the long run? Can I do business this way? On autopilot?

What do think about automized followers or machines, programmed to automize the communication to human beings?

Social Media Automization Or A Fool Proof Way To Lose Your Credibility from Frank Piotrowsky on Vimeo.

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3 Key Questions to ask yourself before you start to automize

When it comes to automization, a lot of folks think: “Well, when I’d be able to cut off that work, then I would save a huge amount of time!” And to be honest -- it looks tempting! It probably is work, that they don’t like to do. Or work that is not popular enough. Or work, that occurs on a reglar basis, that breaks up their usual daily workflow. Perhaps work, that is kind of annoying. Whatever the reasons are, they may look plausible and justified at first glance.

But sometimes it is not worth the effort you have to make, in order to get things automized. Even an obviously simple routine can become very complex, when you try to automize it. This is not because of the usual routine but because of the exceptions to it. Your workflow may be fairly simple and almost all times be the same. But those 2% or 3% are what makes the difference. And those can get very tricky. How can you recognize an exception? What should happen afterwards? Should exceptions be handled manually? Then you have to have some kind of an user interface to process them, etc. And this is, where the most costs in development are hidden.

This is why you should ask yourself at least 3 key questions, before you start to automize a workflow.

1. How much work does the task really take?

This is crucial. Just as I mentioned earlier, this part can be very subjective. Is the work popular enough? People tend to over estimate their daily work and to take themselves too important. “My work is the most important work that needs to be done” is one of those thoughts that can get really obsessive. Of course, nobody will agree to this on a concious level, but your subconciousness works this way. Because you only know and experience your point of view, your brain thinks that you are the center of the universe. Well, and this is a tough one: you are not!

You better want to start an objective survey -- most likely by an outsider, because then you can weigh the pros and cons of automizing this task.

2. How big is the actual workload of the task?

This is a funny anecdote of what can happen, if you overestimate the amount of work a task can take, or the amount of data produced by it. We have moved servers to a virtual environment, thus disabling the fax capabilities on the main server. We have put the fax card (Dialogic Diva) into the new host machine that is running a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and that is not part of the domain. The new Exchange server (2007) is also hosted on a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (virtual) machine, but this one is part of the domain. What happened is, that the Windows fax service was not (in all cases) able to deliver the incoming faxes via eMail to the end users. It was considered to be extremely important, that not an employee had to check the folder (file system) that contained the incoming faxes.

After spending hours figuring out how I can get that to work (it is actually still not working, because Microsoft still has some bugs in the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Fax services) someone came up with the idea, to check of how many faxes we’re talking about. And we discovered having a daily workload of around 9 incoming fax messages. So we decided to do the check manually. The lesson to be learned: always check the workload, the amout of data that you’re talking about, before you start to automize a task.

3. How long will it take to develop the automization and how much will it cost?

Another very important key question is the one about the time it will take to develop an automization method/program/workflow/etc. and how much this will cost. Going back to our fax example from question #2 I’d like to mention that the fax messages were a lot about business processes and orders that meant actual money. If we hadn’t figured out a way to make sure, that the fax messages were to be reviewed, that would have meant a lot of damage over time due to lost orders and/or clients. On the other hand there would have been a huge amount of work that would have to be put into the development of a technical solution, thus resulting in an investment that could have been achieved in another way (like we did in the end) for only a fraction of the costs, thus resulting in a better ROI.

As you can see in this closer consideration, it is not always reasonable to automize every task.

What are your experiences? Feel free to comment on this one. I’m looking forward to hear from you.

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Technical Difficulties during the last couple of Days

I’d really like to apologize for this website being unavailable a couple of times during the last days.
Due to Windows-Updates and server restarts the underlying database (MySQL) came up using the wrong ports. Since I’m running multiple instances of different versions of MySQL on this server, I’ve got to make sure, the instances use the correct port after startup. If they don’t, the first instance that starts occupies the port and the other, that wants to use the same port, fails to start.

This is what happened a couple of times during the last days and the reason for the “Error connecting to Database” message you’ve seen. I’m confident in having fixed this issue and the service should be running stable now.

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#CSMP 02 – Connecting Twitter To Facebook

Last time I’ve showed you how to connect Facebook to Twitter, so that you can update your Twitter account with posts from your Facebook page. Today we’re going to do it the other way around. We are going to connect Twitter to Facebook, so that your Facebook profil is updated with your latest tweets.

But wait -- just your latest Tweets? In the last post (at least if you have seen the video) I talked about a very powerful service that is collecting all your data from various social media services or even your blog. So I’m going to show you, how to use www.friendfeed.com to leverage your social media publication power.

This is how it works. It’s basically a 2 step process:

1. Connect friendfeed to Twitter, so that all your tweets  are pulled by friendfeed into it’s life stream
2. Connect friendfeed to Facebook, so that your friendfeed stream is published to facebook

1. Connect Twitter to friendfeed

I think that you’ve gotten a friendfeed account yet (if you didn’t, then sign up, it’s free…) so you’ve got to log in.

• Once you’re logged in, go to Settings
  
• Go to Services->add/edit
  
• From the various services shown on the left choose Twitter
  
• Enter your Twitter Username and click Import Twitter
  

That’s it. Now friendfeed will pull all your tweets into its life stream. Sometimes this process may take a while (even a couple hours), because friendfeed is pulling data from 58 services not for one but for millions of users. So don’t worry, even if it will take some time, it will happen.

2. Connect friendfeed to Facebook

Once you’ve entered all your services you want to connect friendfeed to Facebook. To do this you

• Click Tools at the top of the screen
  
• Then you scroll down the page a little bit to click Facebook Application. You will then be taken to Facebook. If you are not logged in to Facebook you will be prompted to do so. If you are, you’re good to go. On the next screen click Connect
  
• After that click Allow to allow friendfeed a constant authorization
  
• At the last dialog you then have to click Allow Publishing to allow friendfeed to publish information to your account
  

And that’s all about it. Now you can write a tweet with Twitter, that is then pulled by friendfeed into its lifestream and from there it is published to Facebook. This happens to all your services, that you have connected to friendfeed. If you let friendfeed pull your RSS feed from your blog, then whenever you publish a new post, friendfeed will recognize it, publish it at friendfeed and then automatically publish it to Facebook.

This will make your tweet visible to Google at at least 2 (and if your profile is publically visible it’s 3) different locations (this means up to 3 links for you!).

But always remember, just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that you have to. Because once you start spamming your services with your stuff, people will get annoyed and they probably will banish you from their radar. And that is nothing you want to achieve. What’s the value of winning Google and losing all your friends and clients?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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#CSMP 01 – HowTo Connect Twitter and Facebook Part 1 – Facebook To Twitter

The most important platforms today are Twitter and Facebook. This time I’m going to show you, how you can connect your Facebook account to Twitter, so that your Facebook status updates are published at your Twitter account. The post next week will cover the opposite direction. Connection Facebook to Twitter ist fairly easy.

• Log into Facebook
• Enter the Url http://www.facebook.com/twitter into the Url field of your browser
• Click Link a Page to Twitter
  
• Choose the page to connect to Twitter and click Link to Twitter
  
• If you are logged in to Twitter, you just need to press the Allow button. If not, you will need to enter your Twitter credentials before pressing Allow
  
• After Facebook has got access to your Twitter account, you can choose which data you want to be publicized to Twitter. If you’re done, click Save Changes
  
• That’s it! From now on everything that’s been published by you on your Facebook page automatically publicizes to Twitter.

Remove Link

If you want to remove the link you’ll do it as follows:

• Log into Facebook
• Enter the Url http://www.facebook.com/twitter into the Url field of your browser and click Unlink from Twitter at the page, that you want to be unlinked.
  

Here is the process on video for you:

Please feel free to comment on this. I’m looking forward to get in touch with you.

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Series – How to automatize Connections between Social Media Platforms (#CSMP)

This will be a sporadic updated series of posts on how to automatize connections between several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, etc. Sporadic because of the fact, that the world of social media platforms is growing day by day. And because of the social aspect in social media. Once you discover one platform, you should spend some time there in order to get familiar with its tools and with the audience it attracts. Then you should start creating connections. And if you’re established, then you should move on. In order to assist this step-by-step process, you will find one plattform per post to add to your existing network.

Because of this social aspect, it is not good to automatize every single step you’ll take during your journey through this universe. Social it is, because of the social habits a human being incorporates and of which man is comprised. Humans need the contact with other people. People need to communicate. Communication needs to be established. Does this establishment happen automatically? Without the people meeting each other? Without even knowing about each other? Well, I don’t think so. On the other hand, it is hard to keep up with the speed, new social media platforms rise out of nowhere. This is why it is legitimate, that you automatize at least the process of delivering status updates or other content to those platforms. Not the type of automatization where you use a feed reader to publicize content to your platforms (because of the social aspect discussed earlier, you should resist the urge doing so…), but rather having to type a status update just once and then have it spread around your social media world. This does not replace direct communications with other people (like chat, discussions on Twitter, etc.), it rather adds to the value you are delivering to your network. It helps people to get a better idea of yourself, of what you are doing and of the level of expertise you represent.

This series will be tagged with CSMP (Connecting Social Media Platforms), that you can use on this blog (see tag cloud) or on Twitter (#CSMP). So look out for it. The first post will be published in a couple of days.

See you soon, and I’m excited to read your comments on this.

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How To Connect Facebook Chat To Apple iChat

Probably you’ve encountered it, too, that your on- and offline at the Facebook chat periodically. Or you just want to use your favorite chat application on the Mac. So here’s how to do that.

You need to set up 2 Steps:

1. Set up a username at Facebook
2. Set up a Jabber list at iChat

Let’s start.

1. Set up a username at Facebook

• You go to Account->Account Settings

• On the Settings page you locate the Username field and hit the Edit Link

• You enter a username and check for it’s availability by pressing the blue button. If it’s still free claim it by saving it.

That’s all there is to step 1.

2. Set up a Jabber list at your iChat application

• Open the iChat Preference pane (cmd+,)
• Go to the Accounts tab

• Add a new account by pressing the + button
• Use the following settings:
  • Server type: Jabber
  • Username: YourClaimedUserName@chat.facebook.com
  • Password: your Facebook password
  • Serveroptions
    • Server: chat.facebook.com
    • Port: 5222
    • Do not check Use SSL!
• Do not let iChat check for the server settings automatically, because it will check Use SSL for you and this does not work with Facebook Chat right now.

• Press the Finish button

That’s all there is to it. Now you can start chatting on Facebook using your favorite chatting software.

Please forgive me for using screenshots with german terms on it, for my Facebook page is german. All important settings are in this text, the screenshots are just supposed to help you location those settings. If I translated something wrong, then please let me know in the comments.

And for all of you, who prefer watching videos, here’s the whole stuff for you in the good old YouTube format:

Please let me know, what you think.

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Plugins and Widgets used on this blog

This blog is composed out of the following components:

The basic system

WordPress 2.9.1

This is the wordpress basic system. This is the front end that is used to manage the blog.

MySQL 5

This is the database, where all the posts and adjustments are stored.

PHP 5

The scripting language that builds the pages, so that they can be viewed in a browser.

Frugaltheme

The Frugal theme is the actual design of this blog. It gives you a lot of possibilities of designing your blog without the need to write any code or to adjust any css files and it has great SEO capabilities, too.

The plugins and widgets

Cute Profiles

Cute profiles is the bar at the right where all my social media profiles are displayed by a grayed out button. If you hover them, the will get colored and if you click them, you will be taken to the certain profile.

Disqus comment system

The Disqus comment system is great! When I think of my browsing habits… Whenever I see an interesting blog and thought, well, you should really comment here, in 99% of all cases I would not do it simply because of the logon process. I have to create an account specific to that blog. But I’ve got enough of them already! I can’t use another one. Another login, another password to remember, etc. Probably this will be my last visit to this blog, so why should I register? Disqus makes it easy for the readers to comment on the blog because they can login using their already existing Facebook or Twitter or whatever account. They don’t have to create a new one! It’s as easy as that. You only need a free Disqus account to set up the comment system on your blog. You can get one here.

Facebook Share New Button

This is the Share with Facebook button at the top of each post (right beside the Tweetmeme button). It is used to enable the readers to share the post directly to their Facebook network. You could get one with the Facebook widgets, too, but as it is to those, you have to insert it manually to each and every post. And Facebook Share New Button will do that automatically for you!

Facebook Status Updater

The Facebook Status Updater actually is capable of updating 2 more sites: Twitter.com and MySpace.com. It does, what it is supposed to do. Whenever you write a post, Facebook Status Updater sends a status update to Facebook, a tweet to Twitter and a status udpate to MySpace. I think, I don’t need to mention, that you will need free accounts on those sites….

Facebook widgets

The Facebook widgets section brought the Facebook-Livestream into the page, as you can see to right, when you scroll down a little. You can choose from different formats and from different pages you can add. I’ve created a fan page of Frank Piotrowsky so I added its status to the page.

Sexybookmarks

Sexybookmarks is the bar with the different social bookmarking platform icons underneath each post, so that your readers can leave a bookmark to the post on their social bookmark profile. You can easily format this bar to include the platforms you prefer.

Tweetmeme Button

This ist the tweet/retweet button at the top of each post (right beside the Facebook Share New Button). It Is used to enable the readers to share the post directly to their Twitter network. Tweetmeme has nice analytic functions available. Of course, you will need a free Tweetmeme account to get that working…

Twitter Widgets

The Twitter live stream on this blog is brought to you directly by the Twitter Goodies. I’ve searched a long time to find a widget or plugin that could make it look like Twitter easily, but this was the best I could find. You will get it directly from Twitter. And did I mention, that you will need a free Twitter account for this?

Why Do Work AdSense

Why Do Work AdSense is used to display Google AdSense on the blog. Of course, I could have just entered it somewhere in a Text-widget in the Widgets section of wordpress, but Why Do Work AdSense has a nice feature to display advertisements after a specified period of time (e.g. whenever a post is older than seven days). Well, and you will need a free Google AdSense account to make any use of it.

MM Forms

MM Forms is a simple, powerful Forms system for wordpress, that can send you an email, store it in the database (of course with export capabilities), send confirmation emails to the user, etc.

WPTouch

WPTouch is the mobile theme plugin, that delivers a mobile website designed after Apple’s app store design specs, whenever a user loads the page with a mobile browser. It comes with a button to switch between mobile and standard view, Google AdSense and Google Analytics support, and a lot more.

Smart YouTube

Smart YouTube is a great plugin to easily insert YouTube videos into any blogpost. Just insert the url of the video into the text and append v, vh, vhd to the http to display v(ideo), v(ideo)h(igh), v(ideo)h(igh)d(efinition) videos (e.g.: httpvhd:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-k90Z9H5EU).

This is a list of the current status of the widgets and plugins I’ve used to build up this blog. I am really interested in your thoughts on other widgets, tools, etc. -- even design issues (for I am not a good designer…), so please feel free to comment on this.

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New issue (#3) of the Productive! magazine

A new issue of the Productive! magazine is released and available as a download here. Michael Sliwinski (editor of the Productive! magazine) managed to win the canadian coach of the year 2006, Michael Bungay Stanier, over to being interviewed.

Michael Bungay Stanier, born in Australia, is now living in Canada; GTD Connect members may know him from the creative questioning series with David Allen, discussing some exciting questions that encourage to rethink your own beliefs (NLP) about you and your surrounding world. In the interview, Sliwinski and Bungay Stanier discuss about the coaches new book Find Your Great Work.

Bungay Stanier divides work into three categories:

• Bad Work
• Good Work
• Great Work

Bad Work

Bad work is work that is a waste of time, energy and life. Doing it once is one time too many. This is work that is pointless.

Good Work

Good Work is familiar, useful and productive work you do and you do well. Good Work is how you spend most of your time. It is work that results from your education, training or the path you’ve travelled so far. All in all it’s a source of comfort, nourishment and success.

Great Work

Great Work is work you want more of. Work that is meaningful and has an impact and makes a difference. It inspires, stretches and provokes. Great Work is work that matters. It is a source of comfort and engagement, the “flow zone” where time stands still and you feel you’re working effortlessly at your best.

But Great Work also is a place of uncertainty and discomfort. The discomfort results from the fact that the work is new and challenging and that there is a chance of failure. Because it is work that is meaningful, that is a matter of your heart, you don’t want it to fail.

In the interview you will find a lot more.

It is a pleasure reading the magazine. It’s not too much and has a ton of good food for thought at no charge. A must read!

http://productivemagazine.com/

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