Hey, You're New Here! We love new people.

It would be great seeing you back again, so please subscribe by RSS feed, or get updates by email, before you forget!

It seems to me that if you can learn how to be the life of the party, you can learn how to work the social media scene. Let’s think of it as a party then, and do a run down of how it would work out.

Stage One: You Go to the Party

If you’re smart, you’ll be invited, or better yet, throw the party. The party of course, meaning the place where you socially interact in the social media arena.

On a social news site, the party might get started when you submit a link, or a party in progress might be a story you vote on that’s rising in popularity.

Stage Two: You Find the People Who Like
What You Like

As Rob Gordon says in High Fidelity, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” So find the people who have the same tastes as you, follow what they’re voting for, or saving, or where they’re hanging out.

One safe basis of friendship is commonalities.

Stage Three: You Mirror and Create Rapport

You know how you meet someone knew and start picking up their expressions, etc. When you’re meeting people online, we also tend to try on aspects of other people’s behavior. You’ll suggest things to each other, or catch yourself imitating one of the Alpha Populars.

There’s actually a scientific background to this. In Unlimited Power, Anthony Robbins talks about how to use rapport to build connections to other people.

Stage Four: You Make a Gesture

Eventually, you’ll start to drill down to your favorite folks, and in natural course, do something for them. It’s partially the paying of an imagined social debt - when people enrich our lives by sharing information we enjoy, we often feel like reciprocating.

That’s one of the reasons the free ebook still works so well to get newsletter sign-ups. (It’s email that’s failed, not the email marketing techniques. But I digress.)

Stage Five: The Gesture is Appreciated,
or Even Reciprocated

When you get feedback from shared links, when you are thanked for your gesture, or the person you hooked up does you some kind of solid back, you’ve definitely got the basis for a relationship.

It’s a two-way street.

Stage Six: You Are Friends

 

At least in the online sense of the phrase. This is the time when you can send a link out of the blue even if you haven’t spoken in a few days.

But remember the most important part of a relationship is maintaining it. Don’t take this new connection for granted, and keep doing the thing that made you become familiar to each other in the first place.

Popularity: unranked [?]

convert this post to pdf.

The more I think about what some people are doing wrong with social media, the more it occurs to me what other people are doing right, and how it can be emulated. I’m also realizing that I’m assuming that people know how to relate to each other, but that’s not necessarily true either.

Think about it - often, not always but quite a bit, people are congregating online to avoid offline encounter. It’s not always because they are shy or anti-social. Sometimes being online is more efficient than, say, having ten people fly out or conference call for a meeting.

Allan Cockerill started discussing what he says is the central issue to social media interactions:

These are social networking sites that we are talking about, and networking means relationship!.

If I don’t know you, why should I bookmark something for you?

And if we are friends in the online sense of the word, a string of links via instant message isn’t a friendship, it’s a dictatorship!

I would agree. You really have to think about what builds a relationship when you’re entering into these interactions, because if you enter into real connections with people, in the long run, this is what will work in your favor the most.

The difficult piece of the puzzle is two-fold.

1- We all have our idea about  the acceptable parameters of relating, on or offline, and,

2- Some elements of even a casual relationship akin to friendship are more difficult to imitate in an online-only connection.

Even if you don’t feel  that an ongoing link with another person in the online world is a friendship, by definition it is a type of relationship. The key to building better social media relationships then, is in remembering how certain types of casual relationships are formed, duplicating that in a suitable way online, and then show how they continue.

And we’ll ponder that next.

Popularity: 6% [?]

convert this post to pdf.

I can dig it, no pun intended. You want me to vote for your story on Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, PlugIM, BumpZee, StrrdUp, Mixx, or my save on del.icio.us, Facebook, etc….

I know I said my vote isn’t for sale. But, paradox that I am, my love don’t come for free either, baby. The currency ain’t legal tender, is all. It’s respect for my time.

Just so we’re clear then, here’s my voting policy, otherwise known as the three hoops you must be willing to jump through.
1- Feel free to send me anything, once you’ve friended me. I’ll look at as many things as I have time for in the time I have alloted that day. But don’t expect or ask for an automatic vote from me.

I love you. But no, I don’t roll like that, and I don’t expect auto-voting from you either. That whole thing with me having my own mind is kinda precious to me, as is believing that any front page ranking I can garner is deserved and earned. Most of the time, I’m probably going to vote for you anyway, because we have some kind of overlapping taste or you wouldn’t be on my friends list to begin with.

2- Feel free to be ignored if you don’t pay attention to how I like things sent to me. You’re the one asking for a favor, bub.

For example, I don’t read email, the support staff does, so that’s pretty much hopeless. It’s just not my preferred mode of communication.

I prefer you send it to my Open for Web Business Facebook group if it’s not a site of yours or the homepage of your site. If it is, put the link in the spot for URLs when you comment. About once a week I share or save in popular sites and I start there. If it doesn’t fit in either, send me a private message in Facebook or where ever we’ve connected online.

3- I’m not a top user. Don’t expect miracles. Sometimes the truly influential people will see your link because of me and that’s where the magic really happens. Other than that, I’m really just another voter.

Dig? Then Dugg. You know, maybe. If I like your story.

Popularity: 4% [?]

convert this post to pdf.

Before I get started, let’s get two things straight.

1. I’m not saying you shouldn’t offer to fairly compensate the people whose advice you’re seeking. Just the other day I requested that a well-known social media personality help me think through a tough scenario for another party, and I demanded that said party kick in the dough to compensate this person for their trouble.Effective advice? Is worth the price. In this article I’m saying referring specifically to Votes.
2. Personally?I will take a look at just about anything submitted to me in the way that I prefer. Like anyone who gets a lot of incoming requests, I have a completely un-straightforward, quirky, but extremely effective way of organizing incoming information so that the right thing gets my attention at the right time, which I’ll talk about later.

Okay, so now that we’re on the same page…

Just in case you’re a newbie to social media.

Do Not.

Ever. Offer to buy a vote from Anyone who contributes to social news sites.

I know, if you’re a regular reader here, you might feel like this doesn’t need to be said. Just remember that if you leave the building where you are now and ask the first ten people you find what a social news site is, they may not know. In other words, this isn’t obvious to everyone. If it is to you - Tell Others. Be blunt.

So this is how it came up.

The other day I was in the… path … of a *wink-wink* chat message of a not-at-all-well-known marketer to someone who gets many stories to popularity on a regular basis. They offered money for as many votes as that person could help them get, quite plainly and in view of all those gathered. The solicited party left the call immediately. I was later asked why this person was so “sensitive”.

Maybe because they could get banned from the site they helped build content for by accepting your offer.

Perhaps it’s just against their personal code.

Or it could be that their more than two brain cells told them that buying and selling votes in a community where the unbiased community opinion is supposed to rule the day just doesn’t make any sense!

That’s right - I said it. Offering to buy a vote is flat-out dumb, besides being wrong. It shows that the person requesting it doesn’t understand how this world works. These news stories are being promoted because that’s what that community would most like to see. Your job is to see how your story might fit into that paper, just like it would be for traditional print media.

Would you submit your story about what to look for in the perfect pair of ballerina slippers to Sports Illustrated? Not if you’re not an idiot. You wouldn’t waste thousands of dollars promoting to an audience that mostly couldn’t give a crap. It’s the wrong demographic.

Just because social media publicty is free doesn’t mean the same rules of publicity don’t apply. Rules like, if you have to pay people to say how cool you are, you’re automatically not cool.

Rallying your network, friends and fans around your cause is one thing. Offering to pay them to support you isn’t really support, is it?

Popularity: 15% [?]

convert this post to pdf.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching (boy, do I need that one), image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Sacre bleu, mon ami.
GIMP is an acronym. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X!

Gimp is right over here.

MorganLighter

Popularity: unranked [?]

convert this post to pdf.

Again, with keeping the same sort of thread that ran through Tinu’s posts dealing with JV-ing (it’s not really a joint-venture, it’s more like joint sharing) and commenting (it’s the commenting that made these tools available to you), as discussed in the earlier Tool Time Friday post today, I again ran across a great site with something really cool for all of you.

Martin over at Kabatology, has graciously allowed me to repost his awesome ‘8 Web Developer Must-Have Firefox Extensions!’

So here they are, in reverse order. Jump on over and when you’re done, thank Martin for his awesome work!

 

 

 

 

 

This is what makes Mozilla Firefox special; the many extensions that help us in our daily tasks. For a Web Developer, the use of adequate tools can drastically reduce time-wasting and improve performance. Here I put together those tools that help me in my daily undertakings and that I consider the most essential of the many excellent Web Developer extensions out there. If you have tested better extensions then let us know in the comments. These are those I find most useful;

IE Tab - This is a Firefox extension that embeds Internet explorer in tabs of Firefox. It enables you to view web pages in Internet Explorer without having to open another window. For a web developer this means you can quickly see how IE displays your web site - we all know IE interprets some HTML tags differently from Firefox and other major browser.
You can configure this plug-in to automatically open certain web pages that Firefox does not display correctly like the Windows Update page – thus you can also update Windows directly from this Firefox plug-in. IE Tab also includes context menu integration.
The only draw back is that you need IE on your system to install it.

7)

Foxmark - When you are not working on your computer maybe because you traveled or your pc is under repairs, one of the things you miss most is your bookmarks. With Foxmarks, you’ll always have your bookmarks at hand. Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer keeps your bookmarks on its server and adds the new ones to that list. So when ever you change pc, you just need to install it, get into your account and retrieve your precious bookmarks that every web master/developer or blogger can’t do without.

6)

Web Developers - It is a very useful tool for web development. It has similar features to Firebug, but offers more tools to edit the web page you’re working on. You can modify cookies, examine them, delete and even manually add them. Web developer allows you to clear private data, enable/disable the cache - all on the fly. If you find it necessary, you can display all the image-paths on a page with a single click.
This add-on could be of importance to all those who browse the web, you could take-off images or background-images and more to facilitate reading or downloading of web pages.

5)

Imacros - This add-on puts together many useful applications. It can be used to automate filling in forms, it offers a single doorway to many web sites using a single master password, extract data from a website and exports it to CSV files.
Most Web Developer’s use iMacros for functional, performance and testing of web their web sites and applications. I personally use it when I want to register to many different web sites. Also try Auto Fill to automate filling-out forms

4)

ColorZilla - This a simple but brilliant tool for designers and developers. ColorZilla places an eyedropper icon in your the left hand-side of the status bar. When you click on it, you get a crosshair cursor. If you place this cursor over a web page, the values of the pixel under the cross-hair will be displayed in the status bar - both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF).
Colorzilla also has an Online Palette Viewer and easy access to DOM Inspector Mozilla tool for examining a page’s Document Object Module.

3)

MeasureIt - Useful and very easy to use. It places a small ruler icon at the left-side of your status bar. When click on the icon you get a cross-hair cursor and your browsing page fades out. Move over to the desired area or object you want to measure and drag out a box over it – the width and height of the box would be displayed in pixels close to the box. With this tool you can measure the exact width of your sidebar, footer, header or whatever. To get out of MeasureIt, use the Escape key (Esc) and the page turns back to normal.

2)

FireFTP is a Firefox add-on that turns your browser into a full-featured FTP client. FireFTP opens up in a new tab that offers a two-panel interface that permits you to browse and transfer files between the remote server and your local PC.
This FTP client is easy to use, so just try it out.
Its major draw back is that unfortunately it still does not support SFTP or SSH.

1)

Firebug - This is probably the most important web development tool. This Firefox add-on allows you to browse and tweak HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a desired web page and preview the changes on the fly. It places an icon on the right-side of the status bar that informs you of errors in a web page. When you click on the icon it opens up a window that displays the line in which the error is found – this way it is easy to track errors on your web pages. In the Inspect mode hover with your mouse over a desired element and it will display all the codes that generate that element – much better than using the Page source that most browsers offer. It takes a whole page to write on FireFTP.

Thanks again to Martin!

MorganLighter

Popularity: 4% [?]

convert this post to pdf.