Year End Social Media Spring Cleaning

The end of the year is coming, and many people are doing their annual clean up of their apartments. As you know, it does get increasingly hard to clean up as more things pile up. This is also very true for your social networks.

As you know, many problems are easily solved when they are small. They take much less time, and are pretty easy to get to. This is true for car maintenance, maintaining your weight, and also social media.

So what is there to do for your social media?

1) Prune your Twitter Followers.

There are many deadbeats that you may have previously followed and some who just stopped tweeting. To maintain a good follower / following ratio, it is essential to remove people whom you do not need to follow anymore and follow some more interesting people.

There may also be some people following you that may be interesting, so make sure you follow some of them as well.

A good tool to use to prune your followers is Tweepi. Tweepi allows you to clean up your Twitter account from spammers and deadbeat users, as well as make sure you follow tweeps who deserve to be followed.

There are also interesting stats for Tweepi, and like Follower / Following Ratio, and Last Tweeted which may be helpful to manage your Tweeps.


2) Backup your Facebook.



There are so much information people put on Facebook now. I know many friends who solely keep their photos of themselves and their friends on Facebook. What happens when your Facebook account go down when people try to hack in? In the world of data portability, Facebook has allowed us to download our profile, so why not do it?

The process is really too simple to forgo. Here’s how you can stow away your social life for safekeeping:
1). Go to Account Settings,
2). Click on “Download Your Information” and allow Facebook (Facebook) to download your info,
3). Wait for an e-mail that will let you know your info is ready (it takes a while, what with all the stuff you probably have on Facebook),
4). Go through the security test that allows you to download your info (kudos on that one, Facebook), and, voila, your profile is ported to your desktop in a nifty folder.


3) Backup Your Tweets

Have you shared some great links which you wish to keep? As twitter search only go back a few weeks, sometimes whatever you tweeted is lost forever. But have no fear, there are tools that can allow you to back up every single tweet that you have previously tweeted -- Your Tweets may be backed up!

TweetScan will track your data back to 2007, and, using OAuth, will even grab your timeline, tweets from friends and direct messages. It is pretty fantastic and easy to use.

4) Backup Your Photos

Many people upload their photos on photo sharing sites, and sometimes forget their passwords. I own several devices which can upload photos themselves in the camera. The Eye-fi memory card allows you to upload photos directly from your camera to the Internet. So what if you have lost all your photos on your harddrive and every photo you have is on Flickr? Don't worry, you can download them all with tools of course.

Lots of apps and tools let you back up your Flickr photo stream, but a quick, fuss-free way to unload years of photo uploads is the Adobe Air (adobe AIR) app Flump. The app works on Mac, Windows (Windows) and Linux (Linux) and downloads a copy of each photo in your stream to a folder of your choice.

4) Backup Your Blogs

Wordpress and many other blogging sites allow you to backup your blogs with a click of a button.. (Sometimes a little more) It allows you to transfer the information from one blog to another, making it portable. Just in case the server crashes, why not back these information up?

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Well, the year is about to be over soon, and if you have sometime this weekend and you are taking a break from physical cleaning of your apartment, maybe you can do some social media maintenance as well.

Happy holidays and have a great year ahead!

-- Robin Low

2011 Social Media Trends

2011 Social Media Trends to watch

If you are just getting on social media, and would like to know what my thoughts are about the 2011 social media trends, the above is a presentation I did at Harvard before X-mas.

-- Robin Low

Social media arsenal, unleash your personal brand

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to be able to get a job all the time, in any economy?

Why do some people promote faster in your company or how do people become "superstars"?

Many people would call it luck, however, I know of many people which not much exceptional ability, seem to be able to find jobs all the time, even in a recession. I would not call this luck, but rather, lots of preparation and personal branding.

Instead of feeling bad when you lose your job, and lose self esteem and not get out there to meet people, you need to wake up and seize the opportunities available. You may have great experiences and skills, but may not have opportunities for people to discover them. Today, many people are leveraging on the Internet to help them for career advancement, get more opportunities for people to discover their talent, skills and passions. Can you share your passions and talents, can your skills be discovered?

People tend to stay on a job or position for an average of 4.1 years, and with today's dynamic economy, only your personal brand is a constant. How do I learn the latest skills? How can I make sure I have marketable skills? How can my skills be always in demand? How do I find a job before it is open in the market?

These questions and many more can be answered by your network, when you start building it. It is not true that only sales people need to have a big network, as know more people increases visibility, and visibility creates opportunity.

Your action is in your hands, but you can learn more at this personal branding workshop on 21 Jan 2011 (Fri). This is a lifetime opportunity, and people of all ages and career level can benefit from learning the proper ways to be a superstar in your job to springboard that career!

Social media arsenal, unleash your personal brand workshop

You deserve better!

-- Robin Low

Great use of YouTube for ReBranding

I came across this YouTube video for GM, and in view of what had happened, it felt like a great Crisis communications piece to address the reactions and anger from the public and acknowledging the shortcomings and thanking their customers and the people of USA for bailing them out of the financial crisis.




The best ads now are like movies, which are directed in such a way that they can convey a message and touch people, and somehow get people to relate with the message.

-- Robin Low

Social Media and mature workers in an Economic downturn.

There are a lot of talks about upbeat market, growth opportunities and booming market, especially in Asia. However, I still meet a lot of people who are under employed. And there is no wonder why many of the underemployed and unemployed people are the more matured workers who are aged above 45 years old.

Technology has advanced and many things have changed. Globalization created a lot of opportunities and challenges. The old mindset of getting a degree and climb up the corporate ladder does not work in most cases right now. Today, a degree is nothing special, and it is highly unlikely to stay in the job for a long period of time.

With the instability of the financial system, mergers and acquisitions, it is very common to get retrenched and lose your job. When the economy is good, people move up or move to another company for better prospects.

However, for people who are not as savvy with new channels of communications, they can be at a severe disadvantage. There is a high co-relation between unemployed, underemployed and the older workers. Almost overnight, many later-in-life employees were forced into the job market without the know-how to find and compete for scarce opportunities while decimated portfolios changed their retirement expectations. They want to work but countless numbers struggle to find and keep a job.

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It is not too late however as there is no law stating that older people should not get on social media and network. According to the study, "just 13% of older job seekers had used online social networking sites compared to 28% of younger job seekers." Together with the stigma of older workers, it makes it harder to find a job.

I've talked to many older people who are out of a job, and many of them seemed to have impressive credentials. At the University Alumni Club, I met people who are in their 50's and some of them has PhDs and masters degree, yet they have lost their jobs and unable find one for more than 6 months.

There was much disappointment in the room, that with their vast experience, they could not contribute back to society. After meeting them and having some thoughts later, I decided that if they have participated more in social media and personal branding, they can share their experience and perhaps possibly expand their networks and find jobs.

There are a lot these experienced could learn about engaging with others in LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Writing blogs and contributing in articles could also help others and at the same time create more visibility and in turn get more opportunities.

-- Robin Low

Facebook to reach the region.

Facebook and social media is definitely a great way to reach out regionally if you are in Asia.

Indonesia Facebook Users Exceed UK and Indonesia is now the #2 country with more than 28 million Facebook users.

Recently, Philippines surpasses 18 million Facebook users
Pinoy Facebook users 6th most in the world The Philippines only trails the US, Indonesia, the UK, Turkey, and France.

With these 2 countries with tremendous growth in Facebook and social media usage, it is no wonder many companies who are in Singapore want to get on Social Media.

Using social media, companies can reach out across borders with much less costs. The statement, "My market is not on Facebook" is less and less true as more people across different demographics are beginning to join in social media.

With the increasing popularity of 3G devices, iPads, Windows 7 Phones and other Android devices, users are no longer tied down to their notebooks and desktops. The can access their social network on the go, and you can see more people now updating on Gowalla or Foursquares, thanks to new technologies.

It is imperative to engage with your customers, know what they like, and have products they care about.

If there is any time to get on social media, the time is NOW.

-- Robin Low

Allow Photo-Tagging by Fans on Your Facebook Page

If you ever wanted to allow fans to tag themselves without asking for permissions or be your friends, here is how you can do it.

Go straightly to the app settings. Just replace ‘xxxxxxxx’ with your own Page ID inside the link below will do (2305272732 is the application ID for Photo app):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/app_settings.php?id=xxxxxxxx&aid=2305272732

How to Locate Your Facebook Page ID?

If you have not created a vanity URL for your page, you can easily obtain the page ID from the default link – the number at the back as indicated:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/SocialHub/367955087041

Once you have claimed your business page username, the page ID is no where in sight. What you can do is hover over ‘Edit Page’ then look for your page ID underneath your browser. Copy that and insert the numbers into the link above.

To find your Page ID, click on EDIT PAGE (See Red arrow on above pic)

The string of numbers in the top URL is the page ID (See red arrow in picture above)



Next: Replace your page ID to xxxxxxxxx and enter the link.
e.g. http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/app_settings.php?id=367955087041&aid=2305272732

When you get into the URL, you get to see the option to allow fans to edit your photo.

This is a little complex, but it works.

-- Robin Low