Getting Around Flickr

This is the seventh in a series on Social Media.

Flickr is the the largest of the online photo sharing communities. It boasts 11 million regular members, 30 million monthly visitors, and over 1 billion photos. There are also Flickr groups for almost anything you can imagine.

When you set up your account, uploading images requires only three steps.

1. Choose the images you want to upload.
2. Click the upload button.
3. Give each image a title, a description, and popular tags.

Even easier than that is the "Flickr Uploader," which you can download to your desktop. To upload a photo, just drag and drop it into the icon. In addition to ease of uploading, Flickr gives you great exposure with search engines when you use keywords in your tags, file names, and image descriptions. If you click on an image you will see more information about it, such as tags and descriptions; when you click on a tag, you will see all of the other images on your site with the same tag. That's why it's a good idea to fill in this information as you upload each image. Just as you would develop a marketing strategy for LinkedIn or your Facebook page, you should establish one for Flickr.

Clients and viewers can find you through your images. You can share your photos with the public (who can post comments) or limit them to your friends; you can also keep them private. Fickr allows you to organize and link to your photos, separate them into galleries or sets (collections of related images), and export them into your blog and Website.

Flickr is a powerful tool and well worth the time it takes to explore its many tools.

Getting to Know the Giants of Social Media

By 2012 more than 1 billion people are expected to be online through blogs, social networks or photo/video sharing services. Social media is a great equalizer. Ordinary people are talking to each other and the businesses they patronize about what is important to them. Every day new sites are launched to enable people to broaden their conversations. Still, many stick with the sites they know—the giants of the social networking scene.

MySpace started out as the exclusive domain of young people, and after tying to become a mainstream site, went back to its roots. MySpace was the first social network to make the word “friends” (meaning contacts) part of our everyday language. While MySpace members aren’t as old or sophisticated as Facebook users, they function seamlessly in their own piece of cyber space. If you are an adult who insists on being on MySpace, ask your teenager to help you.

Facebook is big—the biggest—social networking site. Forty percent of its members are over thirty-five. Facebook offers personal profiles, calendars, movie reviews, photos, groups for every conceivable interest, targeted advertising, demographic profiling, and multiple ways to keep in touch. Members use Facebook to keep up with friends and friends of friends. It now also provides “fan pages” for setting up professional and businesses profiles.

LinkedIn is the number one social network for businesspeople and professionals. The site works on the principle of six degrees of separation. Members find and connect to their existing business contacts and then to their contacts’ contacts. Members post resumes, form networks, write recommendations, and keep their contacts updated on changes in their professional lives. When members update their profiles their new information becomes immediately available to everyone in their networks.

Twitter is an innovative, free social network that restricts messages to 140 characters. “Tweets” range from “what I’m doing right this minute” to trends and important issues. More than 100 services have sprung up that mimic Twitter, and there are many sites that augment its services. Followers can tune in to messages from other members and send targeted messages to people they follow by simply putting @ in front of the other person’s Twitter name.

YouTube is the best-known and most popular video-sharing site. It was acquired by Google in 2006 and went mainstream in 2007, appealing to both individuals and businesses. Members upload more than 65,000 videos a day. Most social networks and Websites support video. As a social networking site, YouTube features personal spaces, playlists, friends, favorites, and conversations. To assess its value, think quality over quantity; positive comments mean more than the number of views.

Flickr is right up with Facebook in terms of size. It has 11 million regular members, 30 million monthly unique visitors, and more than 1 billion photos. There are Flickr groups for almost anything you can imagine ... anything. In addition to making it easy to upload photos and other images—with carefully chosen keywords, tags, file names, and image descriptions—Flickr has no trouble attracting search engines. Tags are descriptive labels photographers and viewers can apply to photographs.

These are the big kids on the block, but in each category, there are many other sites that are attracting members and offering an increasing number of features. Biggest is not always best. It pays to explore the less-well-known social media sites to find the right fit.

Confessions of a Web 2.0 Addict

I’m trying to remember how it all began. I think it started innocently, as these things usually do. I went to a St. Louis Publishers Association meeting, and Bob Baker, the speaker, was doing a presentation on something called “social networking.” It was intriguing but confusing. Even with the handout, I had no idea what he was talking about. “This is Web 2.0,” he said, if one can actually speak in italics. “If you’re an author, you must have a presence on the Web.”

I got the idea that a website is not enough to create that presence. Apparently, one also needs a blog, podcasts, a newsletter, an identity on Amazon, and memberships in such things as Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Gather. I’m not much of a joiner. I was overwhelmed.

I don’t remember when I attended that presentation, but I know it was pre-twitter. Since then, I’ve come a long way, baby. I have two blogs, a newsletter, and lots of memberships. I started a group on LinkedIn; I have a page on Facebook where my daughter’s friends write on my wall; and Amazon is #1 on next year's marketing plan (podcasting is #2). But what really blows my mind is the amount of time I spend micro-blogging on twitter. You’d be surprised at how much you can say with only 140 characters. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I was.

You can probably tell that I’ve jumped feet first into Web 2.0, astonishing young and old alike with my computer prowess — young being my daughters, who think I've lost my mind, and old being my contemporaries, who agree. What nobody told me about blogging and tweeting and joining is that they are seductive and addictive.

They are not just a part of marketing; they are a way of life. All day long and into the night I hear twitter making bird sounds as it informs me there is a new tweet on my TweetDeck. My e-mail is full of the latest blogs on blogging and tweets about twittering. I am constantly updating my e-mail list and planning my next newsletter or blog post. I have printed out so much advice on how to do it all better; I could start my own recycling plant. Only as I write this do I realize how far gone I am.

I am truly addicted, and I have no idea how Web 2.0 addicts recover. Everything I read tells me to blog and twitter more, not less. I guess I’m lucky because I don’t send and receive tweets on my iPhone or Blackberry, only because I don’t own them. But it’s only a matter of time.

It is almost midnight on New Years Eve of 2008. I’d love to say I’m resolving to cut down in 2009, but I'm not sure I can. This is bad, very bad.

Social Networking for Novices

Somewhere on one of my earlier marketing plans, I had a goal (or a strategy or a tactic — can’t remember which) of getting my name out there in cyberspace through social networking. I had help with the marketing plan but absolutely no clue what I was getting into with social networking. “Well, you know,” my marketing guru explained. "It’s sites like FaceBook and MySpace and Yahoo 360.” I really didn’t know, but I think I nodded anyway.

So, off I went to all these strange sites, where I filled out forms and invented passwords and created long, detailed, personal profiles. One the early ones I found was Gather, which was fun. I met a lot of nice people and posted book reviews and photos. I loved Gather until the powers that be changed it completely. I never figured out why they would take something that worked and break it; maybe it was part of their business plan.

MySpace was still pretty much for kids, so I skipped it. I did sign up for FaceBook, but never really got the hang of writing on people’s walls. On Yahoo 360, I started a blog, which is now languishing, since I have “The Writing Life” on my own website. Someone invited me to join LinkedIn, which I have found to be one of the best sites for making professional contacts. And. lately, I have learned to Twitter.

For my generation, I would have to say, Twittering is as strange and mysterious as text messaging in undecipherable code. It has its own version of Twitter terminology, which I printed out, and LOL (laughed out loud), it was so goofy.

Try translating this:
UR Tweet wos GR8, but I wld rather do V2V w/ U. RU up 4 that? If so, I’ll ttyl. FYI, 2nite is good 4me. TIA, BL

For the uninitiated, it means:
Your tweet (short, 140 character instant message or mini-blog post) was great, but I would rather do voice-to-voice (talk on the phone) with you. Are you up for that? If so, I’ll talk to you later. For your information, tonight is good for me. Thanks in advance, Bobbi Linkemer

People “follow” me, and I follow them on Twitter. It gets a little overwhelming, especially when I can’t remember exactly who they are or why I started following them in the first place. Their little messages — some of which are stream-of-consciousness accounts of every move they make — pop up on my TwitterDeck (downloads the tweets into different categories), always with links to someone else’s Twitter page/site/whatever.

In addition to just plain Twitter, there are TwitterPacks (a Wiki that lists Twitter members by category, geography, etc.); TwitterFeed.com (connects my blogs to Twitter and tweets them automatically); Twellow.com (where you find people to follow); myvidoop.com (where I signed up for TwitterFeed); TwitterBuzz (quick tips for business tweets); Tweeple (people who tweet, or is it twitter, from LinkedIn); and tinyurl.com (which I haven’t figured out yet).

I know I could easily make social networking (especially Twittering) my life’s work if I don’t get a handle on it immediately. I know that because it would appear that others are making it theirs. I can picture them, staring bleary-eyed into their computers, cell phones, Blackberries, and other tiny screens, texting, twittering, e-mailing, and slowly going blind and bonkers. It’s not a pretty picture.