10 Social Media Steps is a guide to how people with very little experience get get engaged with social web tools. Taking in a whole range of different services, from social networks to photos sharing to social bookmarking and blogging, I’ll be introducing each tool in an easy-to-understand way, using as many different types of media as possible. It’ll be fun!
The steps will be as follows:
- Join a social network
- Subscribe to some RSS feeds
- Bookmark stuff socially
- Share some photos
- Use online video
- Start blogging
- Stream your thoughts
- Aggregate your life
- Collaborate on the web
- Meet some people
If you want to follow the 10 steps, or (even better) pass them on to people who might get the most benefit, then just point your browser towards here, which will present all the posts.
So, I think that is probably that for this introductory post. You could always amuse yourself watching this video from Common Craft explaining what social media is all about:
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Might be nice to have a step about collaborative documents on GoogleDocs/Zoho in there as well….recently i would have said this is only for people working professionally with social media, but I’m starting to find personal uses for these now as well as professional uses.
A good theoretical example is the Google Video on using Docs to plan a wedding at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLmDj-BLxE.
Thanks for the suggestion, Kevin. I was planning to cover this in step 9!
How can I persuade you to lean towards free and open sites, instead of the Usual Suspects of Facebook, Google and so on?
Hi MJ
The trouble is, much of the reasons for giving advice on getting involved in this stuff, especially for government folk, etc, is that you can have a presence and be involved in the conversations where other people are – ie not forcing them to come to you but being active in the places they already hang out online.
If that means that Facebook is the place to go to, then I would have difficulty advising against it because it’s such a PITA and a walled garden. Even if it were a much better platform being offered as an alternative, if the mass of people aren’t there, then what’s the point?
OK, Facebook wasn’t the best example, but as far as I can tell Facebook sucks for government topics – I get far more feedback from local community forums than facebook. Facebook groups just aren’t sticky enough.
But more generally, is how you use twitter really so different from how you use identi.ca or other microblogging services? So when it doesn’t really matter, wouldn’t it be good to support the UK-developed or shareable ones?