David Swinney's Lifestream

I love Posterous.

It’s the easiest blogging platform I’ve ever used, and I thoroughly enjoy its power and flexibility. I look forward to watching its continued evolution and plan to take full advantage of it as that happens.

That said, I’ve decided to move the social media part of my life and job search to a new WordPress blog, which you will find at http://davidswinney.com.

This blog, now renamed as David Swinney’s Lifestream (thank you, Steve Rubel), will continue to be updated regularly. It will be the home for conversations about my life (natch!), pop culture, society, and anything else I’ve wanted to talk about through this forum but didn’t feel was appropriate in a niche topic blog.

And don’t be surprised if social media topics surface here from time to time, given how mainstream they are becoming.

If you currently subscribe to this blog only for the social media content, please follow me over at http://davidswinney.com and pick up my RSS feed there. I hope that you and all other current subscribers will stick around here as well. New subscribers are, of course, always welcome.

Oh, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin (especially LinkedIn, if you’re looking for a social media strategist/blogger/community manager). Check out the links in the biography section at right.

See you here and on the other side.

Earlier today I responded to the following question on LinkedIn Answers, and though it appropriate to share that answer in the blog as well:

How are you managing your Social Media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)? How much time are you spending on them? What tools are you using?

RSS: Each morning, I use an RSS Reader to identify articles to be shared through Google Reader/Buzz. More on that later.

Twitter: The best of the articles selected above (typically the ones that I think are most relevant to my social media job search) are tweeted through the course of the day; I try not to flood my Twitter stream in too much of a concentrated burst.

LinkedIn: I pull the RSS feeds for the LinkedIn Answers sections of interest/relevance for me into FeedDemon/Google Reader. This allows me to quickly peruse them without the hassle of going to LinkedIn.com, where it's much slower to review and answer questions. In fact, as I write this, I am inside a FeedDemon window. I try to do this two or three times a week. I also use the LinkedIn Network Updates RSS feed to monitor my updates; this is MUCH easier than using the web site.

Blog: I attempt to write three or four articles a week on social media and pop culture topics.

Tools

RSS: As part of my ongoing job search and technology research process, I created a Google Reader Listening Station to track topics of interest (a slide deck on the process is available at SlideShare) to supplement my existing RSS blog feeds. I use either FeedDemon or Google Reader (they sync with each other), depending upon whether I'm on my own computer or somewhere else.

Tweeting: HootSuite. I formerly used TweetDeck all the time, but I find myself increasingly using HootSuite because of its more flexible interface (you can create multiple pages instead of a never-ending phalanx of columns) and ability to display conversations. I keep it running through the day and tweet occasionally, but the primary output is early in the day. Just as with TweetDeck, I can post to LinkedIn or Facebook without leaving my Twitter dashboard.

Blogging: Posterous, because it is so easy and flexible. However, I've recently become more concerned about the SEO of my blog, so I'm about to transition it over to WordPress.

I also have all of the corresponding applications on my iPhone.

What does your daily social media workflow look like?

How did I not hear about Instapaper before now?

This morning I read a Techcrunch article about the upcoming release of Instapaper for the iPad and how it may end up becoming a “killer app” for the new device.

Instapaper is a bookmarking application created by made by lead Tumblr developer Marco Armen, and is currently available for the web, the iPhone/iPod Touch, and the Amazon Kindle.

One of the biggest problems that I’ve had in researching and educating myself about social media is managing the incredible number of resources that result from those efforts. On any given day, I may review (or plan to review) 15-20 separate blog posts or web pages about social media, most of which I want to retain.

Problem is, I use all three of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox, and the links end up distributed across their respective bookmarking libraries. I have to do extra work to permanently archive them in a single location for later access.

I’ve never really engaged with any of the social bookmarking services, as my social media research is primarily intended for my personal use. When I want to share links with the interwebs, I typically do that through Google Reader / Google Buzz.

Instapaper looks like the answer to my needs, and I’m about to fully engage with it.

If you’re an Instapaper user and have some insights to share on how to use it effectively and efficiently, I hope you’ll share them in the comments below.

A critical part of my  job search and personal improvement efforts is keeping up-to-date with the fast-moving technology surrounding social media.

That’s a tricky proposition, given the veritable fire hose of information coming through that funnel these days.

To do what I can to control that flow and process the resulting data, I have configured Google Reader to act as my personal listening station.

And while that serves my purposes pretty well, it’s a bargain basement solution at best.

On the other hand, businesses who wish to listen to the ongoing consumer conversations about their brands, analyze and track those dialogues, and engage with those customers have a number of sophisticated (and sometimes expensive) tools to choose from.

At the top of many vendor lists in this space is Radian6, and while I’ve never personally worked with any of them, I’ve heard many good things about the company and its products. They also have an outstanding public representative in Amber Naslund, their Director of Community, and the terrific content she shares through her Altitude Branding blog.

If Radian6 was the leader in the space as of last week, they showed their intention of staying there by firing a massive shot across the bow of their competition. The company has just announced a new product – the Radian6 Engagement Console – that really raises the bar for social media monitoring.

According to their web site, the Engagement Console:

• Is a complete real-time social web client
• Helps you coordinate team social media engagement across the enterprise
• Shows Radian6 topic profiles right alongside your personal or corporate Twitter and Facebook streams
• Lets you set one-click workflow for frequently use post routing, assignment, and classification
• Feeds data to your Radian6 dashboard for reporting and analysis

And on top of all this functionality, the desktop application – written in Adobe AIR – looks absolutely gorgeous (or as I said earlier today on Twitter – “delicious”).

Embedded below is a preview look at the Radian6 Engagement Console, which is currently in private beta and will be made available to Radian6 customers next month.

How I’d love to use this product for my own social media monitoring efforts. Sigh.

I spent today at the Aloft Dallas Downtown hotel attending the Social Business Boot Camp, where a set of engaging and interesting speakers shared their knowledge and expertise in various social media disciplines with an enthusiastic audience of approximately 120 people.

The two event headliners – Rick Burnes, Inbound Marketing Manager at Hubspot and Shama Hyder Kabani, President of Marketing Zen Group – really rocked the house.

This was my first opportunity to ever see Shama speak, and I was duly impressed. Wise beyond her years, she is passionate, smart, and simply owns the room when she talks. Seeing her dynamic presentation on The Zen of Social Media Marketing was itself worth the price of admission.

Rick closed the day with a terrific talk on Inbound Marketing, covering all the bases from the use of social media for lead generation to techniques for improving your SEO results to measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign. I knew a little about most of what he discussed, but I left the presentation genuinely enriched with a better understanding of the big picture.

Attendees were also educated by Cynthia Smoot of Gangway Advertising’s informative discussion on personal branding (related post here), an entertaining talk on the effectiveness of video in social media by Chris Yates and Cynthia Nichols (I got to hold one of their eight Emmy Awards!) of Huddle Productions, and a local all-star panel (including my Social Media Club of Dallas friend and Sticviews marketing manager Kat Farmer) sharing their business-related social media experiences – both good and bad.

And of course, there was ample opportunity to network, during which I made some new virtual and IRL friends, including the delightful Elaine Liner (seriously, follow her) of the Dallas Observer and Theater Jones.

Thanks to everyone involved in assembling and sponsoring this event, and I hope that this is the first of many such boot camps to come.

Well, not really.

But I was amused when one of my Dallas-area networking buddies sent me this e-mail message last week:

“I was just watching the creator of Twtvite do a Vimeo on the platform.  As he is doing his demo, guess whose Twitter name I caught on one of the screens...YOURS.  You are a rock star :).”

Sure enough, there is my twitter handle and avatar, prominently featured under the column entitled “Latest RSVPs” in the video embedded below.

That’s my five minutes of Internet pseudo-fame, I guess.  Wonder if I can figure out a way to leverage that in my job search.

Twtvite is a fine service, BTW, and one that I highly recommend.

That headline is meant to be a bit of a joke, playing off the recent negative publicity about the ever-growing number of folks who are identifying themselves as social media experts, gurus, ninjas, and superstars.

I profess to be none of the above.

Earlier today, I read an interesting blog post today entitled “The Top 10 Ways to Position Yourself as an Expert Using Social Media.”  Given that I’m trying to find a job opportunity in the social media space, I decided to assess how I was doing in the process of branding myself as – if not an expert – a marketable individual with knowledge and expertise in social media.

Using the author’s check list, let’s review where I stand:

1)      Determine how to brand yourself. I’ve wrestled with this a lot over the last couple of months, and I’ve settled in on: The Social Media Specialist with the Human Touch. With this brand, I’m trying to illustrate that not only am I knowledgeable in the technology and tools of social media, but that I have other skills which enable me to manage relationships with customers.

2)      Create a profile to match your brand. Because I’ve been massaging my brand statement for many weeks, I’ve been reluctant to keep changing my profile everywhere I’m registered until I’ve locked it down. Thus, this remains a work in progress, but I think I’m at the point where I can move forward with this item.

3)      Create accounts at all of the major sites where you can brand yourself, and post consistent information in each site with proof of expertise. Using Namechk, I see that I have registered accounts at over 30 social networking/bookmarking sites. That would seem like plenty, but I see some key sites that I’ve missed. I guess I still have a bit of work to do. J

4)      Get your knowledge out there by participating online. My most active social media-centric presences are on Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m less active on Facebook, and I usually don’t post about or discuss technology there. I show up in other locations from time to time, but I need to get more active and participatory outside of my comfort zone.

5)      Get published on the internet. My blog is http://davidswinney.posterous.com/. Not only does it include posts (like this one) about social media, but articles about my other love – pop culture – sometimes show up as well. I’ve been monitoring the site analytics, and they are trending upward.

6)      Interlink between the social media sites and have them crosslink to your web site or blog. I do this every chance I get. I’m sure I’ve missed some crosslink opportunities, but I’m constantly striving to connect all of my online presences. I cross-post between Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook a lot.

7)      Enhance credibility with simple informational videos highlighting your area of expertise. I haven’t done this yet, but I think this would play into my strength – helping others learn how to use the various social media tools and services. As a technologist rather than a marketer/salesperson, this is where I feel that I can provide a great benefit.

8)      Leverage the steps above for search engine optimization. I’m doing pretty well here, and in particular rank fairly high in the LinkedIn search rankings for social media in the area in which I live. Hopefully, as I get more complete on all of these bullet points, the better I’ll come out in overall Google and Bing rankings.

9)      Be active on these sites. Twitter is my most active location, with LinkedIn and Facebook rotating between second and third positions. I need to become more of a factor in the LinkedIn groups, answering more questions (and asking some as well).

10)   Become a voice of your industry. Though I share articles of interest all the time, so do many of the people that I follow in the social media space. In trying to avoid filling other people’s feeds with a lot of redundant information, I have backed off this activity a bit. Instead, I’m trying to fill it with more of my own original posts, which will serve me better anyway in my branding efforts.

So while it seems that I’m on the right track, it appears I’ve not yet accumulated the total complement of skills and credibility necessary to be labeled a social media expert. And frankly, that’s okay. Without any sort of certification program in the field, that term is effectively meaningless anyway.

I’ll just redouble my efforts to share, to learn, to connect, and to grow.

That social media job opportunity I seek is out there looking for me – I just have to keep my eyes open for it.

This is one of a series of postings through which I am sharing my motivation in seeking employment in the area of social media. I invite you to read the first article, which was published on Monday, February 1.

As I mentioned on Monday, I’ve worked in the computer and technology sector for my entire career, with the last fifteen years or so being in corporate IT.

Being part of IT in the Internet era (both pre- and post-dotcom bubble) gave me the opportunity to research, identify, and test dozens of new applications and services. I have always loved trying out new technological solutions.

Because I became known as the “go-to” guy for many of these new technologies – even ones that never were officially sanctioned for use – I also had many chances to interact with and support our internal customer base. I derived a great deal of satisfaction from helping them understand how they might use these tools for their benefit. And the experience helped me grow professionally as well.

Within the context of our organization, I was a community manager before I even knew the term existed.

I enjoy creating and building trust relationships. I like to collaborate with others to achieve a common goal. I like communicating with people. Simply put, I like helping them solve problems.

Any or all of these activities can be performed without the use of social media strategies and tools, but their ultimate scope is necessarily limited. Social media is an amplifier which greatly expands the potential reach and impact of any such effort.

Using tools like LinkedIn and Twitter during my ongoing job search, I have been able to locate and reach out to many others in the business community to learn about the growing number of ways in which social media is being used to enhance customer relationships, create business value, and improve personal productivity. It’s hard to imagine how I could have learned as much in a similar period of time if those services did not exist.

Over that time, I have established new relationships through which my eyes have been opened to the incredible potential in this space, and how my particular skills might be brought to bear in using such tools to solve business problems.

It’s so very dynamic and exciting, and I know with certainty that’s where I want to be at this point in my career.

Coming Friday – part 3: What I am and what I am not.

This is the first of a series of postings through which I am sharing my motivation in seeking employment in the area of social media.

During my time (more than a decade) working in the Information Technology group of a large corporation, I was fortunate to have been involved in a lot of very interesting and exciting technical projects. I had the chance to work on the infrastructure team primarily responsible for rolling out corporate intranet access to an user base totally unaware of the power about to be put at their fingertips.

Subsequent to that, I became known as the go-to guy for technical knowledge and support of browsers and other tools used to access various web services.

In addition to various project management responsibilities, I acted as a technology researcher. In that role, I strived to stay on top of the fast-moving technology and tool shifts going on in the industry, with the goal of informing management of potential candidate tools and services that might benefit the company.

Over time, though, the company reached a sort of technology stasis, where the pace of change needed to slow down. That’s the nature of big business, where you often have to get by with what’s “good enough,” rather than moving on to the next great thing. You don’t want to spend too much money or unnecessarily burden your customers with excessive changes to their processes – particularly as financial pressures are brought to bear by market changes.

This evolution was nearly concurrent with the broad public acceptance of social media services, which had attracted my eye through my research efforts.

I looked for opportunities to integrate social media tools and concepts into the framework of the projects I was supporting, and worked with a team charged with the selection of a third-party social networking/community tool for the corporate intranet.

About that time, circumstances intervened, and I left the company. I’ve been involved in the job search process for a while now, and have had plenty of time to think about what I want to do with the next stage of my professional life. And though I didn’t come around to this decision for a number of months, I’m absolutely certain now that I want it to somehow involve social media.

Coming Wednesday – part 2 of the story: Why social media appeals to me.

I’ve been looking for a new fulltime job since leaving Texas Instruments in early 2009.

Like many folks in the job market, during my downtime I’ve been very active in various local job networking groups. The one that I enjoy the most is the Career Connection MarCom Career Management Group (CMG).

I gravitated to this group partly because of my passion and interest in social media - which meshes very nicely with marketing and communications - and because it is full of creative and interesting people. While I don’t have a formal background in marcom, neither do most of them have a lot of experience in managing the social web. We complement each other.

In our weekly meeting today, we kicked around the idea of creating short video interviews of the CMG group members and putting them on the web, in an attempt to provide further impetus and new energy to their (our) job search efforts. During the conversation, one of the members likened what we were doing to the recently released documentary “Lemonade,” which most of us had not heard about.

So I came home and watched it on Hulu. And if you’re currently looking for a new job – in any discipline – or think you might be, you should watch it too.

“Lemonade” (embedded below) follows 16 advertising professionals who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and found a greater calling. Many of them took an entrepreneurial path, but  you don’t have to be wired that way to realize the truth in the message of the movie.

The film, created and produced by Erik Proulx and directed by Marc Colucci, is available on DVD and is also being screened in theaters in select cities this spring.

It’s pretty inspirational, and well worth 35 minutes of your time.