MIrror.me helps you visualize what topics you talk the most about on Twitter, with a word cloud based on your tweets. I use it to monitor how much I’m talking about things my customers are interested in, rather than just the things that interest me.

It’s also a discovery tool as it will help you find other people in your network who are of like mind. I’ll demonstrate how in the following video, as well as how to test it out without needing to log in.

You can find the Mirror.com folks on Twitter too (@MirrorDotMe). When you do tell them I said hello, and that I enjoy using their tool.

© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

If you can’t see the video playlist, you can click here to make the magic happen.

I spent about half an hour this weekend updating my privacy settings in Facebook this past weekend.

I’m not a complete freak about keeping my data private – mostly because, due to snafu or acquisition by a less than sympathetic company, I assume that all of what I say online will be public one day no matter what one company or another may say, or sincerely intend.

However, there are some things I do on Facebook that I feel contribute too much noise to the stream or that I am happier keeping to myself. Examples: a game on Facebook that I play as a guilty pleasure – not Farmville. In fact, I’m so ashamed of this secret, you can only find out by watching the videos closely.

Another example: I love Spotify. And putting Spotify in my Facebook is the best idea since putting peanut butter in my chocolate. The only problem is that it broadcasts every single song I play on my playlist. Facebook touted this in their F8 announcement as a feature, rather than the bug I believe it to be.

When I was 19, sure, I wanted to share every waking moment and incident with my friends. Khadijah Ali-Coleman, who I am still friends with since we went to college together, can attest to the 20 page letters we would write back and forth despite the fact that we both lived on campus within walking distance.

But now that I’m about to skid around the corner to 40, I enjoy a bit more mystery. And whether it was Facebook’s intent or not, it’s clear from the update that they assume we all think like we’re in our late teens or early 20s, or they want us to adopt that thinking.

Thank you, no.

What might be fine when I’m listening to classical music is not so much when I’m in the mood for hardcore hip-hop, or some “make a baby” ballads.

Happily, during my time tweaking privacy options, I discovered that there are some settings you can tweak without removing the app. What I found out is on the playlist too.

However, there’s sadly no setting for deciding whether to publish on a case by case basis, or if I just want to broadcast the name of a playlist, manually.

Here’s a descriptive list of the videos in the playlist, so you can skip to the one that suits you:

1. How to Control Who Sees Your Public Updates in Facebook
2. How to Set Up Your Default Post Settings in the New Facebook
3. How to Set Your Profile Visibility and Privacy Settings on Facebook
4. How to Control Apps Posting Behavior And Protect Your Privacy from Apps on Facebook
5. How to Control Who Can Connect to You on Facebook and How
6. How to Stop People from Tagging You in Photos You’re not in
7. How to Keep Your Facebook Timeline from Being Completely Public
8. How to Block People or All Application Requests of a Specifc App on Facebook
9. How to Hide All of A Certain Type of Update (Like Tweets) From Your Facebook Stream, (or keep from broadcasting certain updates, like who you’ve friended)

Are you experiencing what my pal Gini Dietrich calls Social Media Fatigue?

Yeah, I think I have it too. There are things I love, like groups, and discovering content through my friends. But running around trying to get everything done in a reasonable time frame sometimes has me frazzled.

Then I realized – I’ve dealt with this before. What I needed was a healthy dose of my own medicine, in the form of social media time management.

In addition to the video above, I’ll be back with a list of social media tools, time savers and tips from other bloggers. For now, here’s a list of some posts I’ve written about this in the past:

• F-ed in Social Media?
• [series] How to Increase Your Sharing Influence in Half the Time
• Share Better – Find Tools that Help In All Stages of the Process
• Share the Smart Way by Noticing This
• Share at Optimal Times of the Day
• Social News Double Work? Try Bookend Voting and Submitting
• Too Many Links, Too Little Time? Boost Your Signal by Having a Soft Site Limit
• Solution to Social Media as a Time Waster? Be Purposeful with Your Time

For more tips on this and other social media subjects, attend the Women Grow Business Twitter Chat this coming Monday at noon on Coy and Decoy Marketing in Social Media. It’s my honor and pleasure to be taking questions this round.

I’m currently in love with a tool called Triberr.

Triberr Basics

Triberr helps you organize promotion of your blog posts as tweets with a community of other bloggers. You can currently join Triberr by being invited to a Tribe, or by applying to join an existing tribe.

Things That Initially Confused Me About Triberr

When you first sign up with Triberr, you get 3 additional tribes to run, in addition, to the one you have been invited to – so when you first sign in and see four communities instead of one, don’t be alarmed.

Start with the one you were attempting to join and fiddle with the others later. Do come back to those other three groups though – with them you can add other people, and build your own Tribe.

I like to use one to manage my own bookmarks from other sites, and decide which ones will also go to Twitter, or only go to Twitter.

There are two modes for publishing the group’s blog posts to your stream, automatic and manual.

If your Tribe allows manual tweeting, the settings area is at the top to your left, on the same line as “Members.” Automatic means that when a person’s blog post enters the stream of posts to go out, they go out right away. Manual means you have control over whether they go out, and some control over when.

You can set up multiple feeds and Twitter profiles by clicking the upper right link marked “Accounts”.

Bones are the community currency. If you need to do basic things like having more people in your tribe than the standard amount allowed, you’ll have to spend bones, but enough are given to you for free that when you join that if you aren’t in a mega-group, you needn’t worry about it.

If you create a group big enough to need bones, you can buy some.

Yes, Triberr Rocks

In a nutshell, that’s Triberr, tying other people’s blog posts to your Twitter, not just yours. I’ve found it helps boost my traffic, but that since I’m in manual mode, I have to make sure I have a tab open to publish posts. Actually I like that, because it forces me to read my peers work every morning, a step I tend to skip when I get busy. Building community with other people is an essential part of blogging, though.

Another tip regarding timing the tweets – if you’re interested in having posts go out during prime times on Twitter, the only way to change the timing for the moment is not to approve the tweet until you’re ready to publish it.

What About Spam?

Here’s how I look at it. I love the people I’m in Tribes with at Triberr. I love their content, I think they’re brilliant, I read their stuff, I was gonna retweet them anyway.

All Triberr is doing is making sure I don’t miss any. Lots of the most popular blogs on the planet do the same thing, they just organize it themselves.

What I do is set my tweets to manual. This way, I have to approve each one on a case by case basis. More work but then I get to read them first – I’m using it almost like an RSS Reader in that way.

If you work with good people, who are targeted to your audience, and you don’t abuse the system yourself, you won’t send spam out. And you can drop people from your Tribe if you’re an admin, and you can also leave a Tribe and join another if you like.

Not to mention that Triberr has guidelines in place that are likely to prevent spam abuse.

“I Need More Triberr Help”

When you get started, if you need more help, also take a look at the Triberr help section and some of the videos they have up on YouTube. Shout out to Dino Dugan, one of the geniuses I know over there, who you can tweet with questions.

Reply if you’d like to start a community tribe. You’ll have to participate in at least one of our free traffic challenges to join but after the video challenge is over there’s an easier one coming up.

Video Link: Sweet Dee Promotes The Bar with Crazy Paddy – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

One of my favorite shows on cable is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s about the on-going antics of four degenerate, self-centered losers who co-own and/or work at a bar in Philadelphia. Kind of a “Friends”-gone-horribly-wrong sitcom. I love watching it for two reasons.

The first is just that it’s one of those shows that is so, so funny for reasons that are so, so wrong in every way that I should almost be ashamed of myself for watching it.

The second is that one of the underlying themes is them attempting any shortcut they can to make more money from their bar. I like to think how I would have advised them in real life. Of course, they aren’t the kind of people who would listen to me.

The Problems with the “Viral Video Fallacy”

The problem in the video above is that both characters are trying to do all the wrong things in getting their video campaign started.

Right now I want to talk about how, in an earlier scene not pictured above, Sweet Dee has decided she’s going to “make a viral video”.

There are so many things wrong with both the phrase “make a viral video” and the fact that she intends to do so in order to promote a local business that I hardly even know where to start.

1- By definition, there’s no such thing as creating a viral video. We’ll get into the particular of that another time.

2- Making a viral video to promote a local business isn’t the best idea. It may work, but why not go after a method that’s 90% likely to fix the problem instead of the one that’s only 5% likely, all other things being equal?

3- She ends up attempting to make the cringe-worthy spectacle you see at the beginning of the video, one of those horrible, local cable commercials that make you want to turn your set off during sponsorship breaks.

How NOT to Approach Creating Video for Small Business

Which brings us to Charlie’s idea of how to fix the problem. His idea? If you want to make a video that’s successful in the way YouTube videos are successful, someone has to get hurt.

And yeah, in the video, this is so funny that every time I watch this episode again, I rewind this scene and watch the ball hit her in the face in slow motion. It cracks me up, and ironically is a clip that would make me want to watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” if I’d never seen it before.

Not because someone is getting hurt, but because I would just have to know what was going on there.

In real life, I don’t think people getting injured on film is funny. I understand WHY people think it’s funny, but I’m much more empathic than normal people are supposed to be and on some occasions will actually be in pain myself watching something like that take place. Unless of course I know it’s fake.

Regardless of that – laughing at pain doesn’t sell… anything. Not in and of itself.

Unless you’re a national brand with the kind of budget that can afford to put a commercial up that looks to sell by demographic, hoping to reach enough people that the odds will bear this wasteful model out, a video based purely on entertainment value isn’t going to do more than raise awareness and brand you.

And possibly to an audience that doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, buy your product or service.

Even if you are? Please don’t hurt anyone.

Seriously though, if you’re coming up on this week’s deadline in the video traffic challenge and want to submit in time to make sure your video gets listed, but can’t come up with a topic, here are some ideas.

5 Video Topic Ideas for Business Owners

1. Create a video version of your about page. This isn’t my idea. I saw it yesterday on Twitter and can’t find the post now.
2. Repurpose existing content: Take a blog post, article, or presentation and turn it into a video. You can do this with screencast video software or just talk to the camera.
3. Lisa Barone says “Show Your Product in Action” in an article on Small Biz Trends. There are 5 more tips in that article.
4. Shoestring Marketing says “Ask Customers or Clients to send in video” – two more tips there.
5. Do a short parody of a misled solution to a common customer problem. Xerox just did a great job with this in their recent commercial featuring Michelin. I thought it was funny even though I didn’t get it at first.

Have you got ideas for what kind of video to create that hasn’t been mentioned already? Do tell!

Resources:

List of Our Video Traffic Participants

The Original Video Traffic Challenge Thread

Network Solution’s Case Study on What It Takes to Make a Video Campaign both Viral and Successful

Fast Video Traffic Free Sample Chapter

Video Challenge Participants: Tomorrow is the deadline for the first video in the challenge. If you have your video up as a reply to the post announcing our Video Challenge Participants by tomorrow, I’ll help promote your video and the blog post where it’s published for an entire week starting tomorrow. If I pinged you on Twitter to alert you to this post, it’s most likely as a nudge to remind you.

If you left it for me elsewhere, please let me know where.

In this three minute audio, I talk about why all links are not created equally.

[download the mp3]

The video above, also found on YouTube, is based on the article, “Facebook for Business: A Simple Spam-Free Way to Get People on Facebook to Visit Your Site“, which is free for republishing.

If you’re an affiliate of Fast Facebook Pages Traffic , then you can replace the link in this article with your affiliate link when you publish it to your site or newsletter. This video is one of those that will soon be available in the affiliate section, if you want to embed the link in the video, and publish it to your site, as well.

I'm going to be really informal here, hence the small letters above. This is an audio about these 5 things.

1. An idea I got from a discussion I participated in with Denise Wakeman.
2. The results one of my traffic students, Coach Iyabo got after she followed this advice.
3. How to participate in this traffic tip as part of a group experiment for free peer counseling. (Join our Open for Web Business Group for more details).
4. My new monthly group and peer coaching program. (More info on Friday)
5. $7 Fast Facebook Traffic Special Ending in a few hours.

MP3 File

Resources:

Audioboo
Denise Wakeman’s FB page, The Blog Squad.

If you’re wondering to yourself whether Google Buzz is being used by the non-techie majority in Gmail’s estimated 220 million users, here’s a tip for figuring out whether it’s active in your area.

Before you watch the video below to see the “how-to” of this, let me explain why this is of any importance, in case you haven’t already come to one of these conclusions yourself.

You see, now that the furor over Google Buzz has died down considerably, many businesses and site owners are thinking about how they can use it to get exposure to their sites. Some are discovering that simply plugging their Twitter feed into it, or treating it like Twitter is failing.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that if all your connections are other people in technology, they’re probably getting the same “shiny new thing” feeling that came when Twitter came out. We all found it, kind of got it but kind of didn’t. Those of us who got it more, stayed and used it for other things than to talk about about how great it is. The rest of us came back later when more coherent explanations of how to use it came about.

The second thing I’ve found is that Google Buzz users are a different group, with a expectation as to the level of engagement they get with you. I also believe the infrastructure isn’t mature yet – on Twitter, we have Tweetmeme, there’s no such central authority on Rebuzzes to help discover content for Buzz.

*Edit: My good friend Doug wrote to point out that there are tons of WP Plugins for Google Buzz.

Right he is, which I pointed out last week in my coverage of Google Buzz top articles and conversations.

However, what I’m referring to in this article is the infrastructure around the site Tweetmeme, not buttons that show how many sites have Buzzed a particular post, or even that show links to the actual buzzes.

Being technically able to Re-buzz something is neat, but without the infrastructure with the API, the tracking, the central repository that sorts by category – it doesn’t have the traffic power nor the research capabilities of a Retweet. Why is another post I’ll write another day.

But Google Buzz is important, not just because of what it is, but because of what it enables. If you missed how I connected Google Buzz to Google Social Search, and how that means more visitors for you, here it is in a nutshell:

People who use Google Buzz must have Google Profiles enabled.

People who have Google Profiles can be connected to you in Google Social Search, which can currently bring you a nice bump in traffic, and may bring you a Huge advantage in seatch in coming months.

The more people with Google Profiles in Google Social Search that you are connected to, the more you can be featured in their search results via your social circle connection.

Google Buzz gives people a reason to have Google Profiles, and gives current GMail users a reason to stay logged in.

(Not that I ever log out of my Google account if I’m in the house. But some people do.)

Google Social Search doesn’t have a big impact now, but Google Buzz makes the potential for that to be Huge. And not just other heavy internet users, regular people you would not normally reach in search results or in one degree connections via social media.

But I digress. To read more about that, you really need to pick up a copy of Google Social Search Secrets in five videos I go on about that and effective ways to use Google Buzz for about an hour.

Today, I want to show you a quick way to see whether regular people in your area are using Google Buzz.

Word of caution:

1- If you’re in a suburban area that’s not heavily populated, during business hours, like I was when I did this, you’re not going to see a Lot of people.

I’d take my laptop or mobile phone to a metropolitan area and do this.

2- Also, I only tested this successfully in Firefox on a laptop. Safari came up with a blank page, except on Mobile devices. If you don’t have Firefox, get it, or use your phone to get to the page.

Warnings over: let’s proceed.

The first step: go to this address in your mobile phone or laptop:

http://m.google.com/app/buzz

The video will show you why you don’t see the mobile version of Google Buzz right away, and why you will end up going here next, and what you need to do on this page for it to work.

Step Two: At the top of the page, click the nearby link. This will ask for your location (for just that session or permanently is up to you if you’re doing this on your laptop, see the video). Then it will display conversations taking place near your physical area.

If there have been conversations recently, obviously people are using Google Buzz. You’ll find that they aren’t just talking tech. Some folks are giving traffic tips, others are asking about places to eat.

Step Three: Also look at the Google Maps tie-in to Buzz. It’s quite revealing how much penetration Local Google has in your area when you look at who is on the Map. People who are using Local Google have Google Accounts, and another way to provide feedback could be another reason for people to use Google Buzz.

So yes, Google Buzz came with a database of users, but I think it’s too soon to call it dead in the water. Among techies, with our high expectations of what these tools are supposed to do, Google Buzz may be dead – for now.

But if consumers are using it, even lightly, there’s definitely a long-term benefit to Google Buzz that we may be too close to the beginning to see (outside of the immediate benefits of Google Social Search, of course).

Because it’s not the audience we already HAVE that will be the best opportunities for growth for our businesses via Google. It’s the non-techie, the person we would not encounter outside their email,, our neighbors who are looking for us but don’t know it yet.

The people we want to buy goods in our retail stores, eat in our restaurants, and otherwise patronize our business to business operations, those are the people still using Google Buzz. Access to even a few hundred of these folks could be what makes Google Buzz useful to us.

(Here’s a link to the Google Buzz mobile trick video if you can’t see it below. If you can and it’s too small, that button on the right makes it full screen.)