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Some people long for the good ol’ days where the only way to talk to someone was to walk across the street and knock on their door or pick up the phone and call them. THOSE DAYS ARE OVER. Some people are trying to fight the trend by not putting their self or their business online on social media sites. THAT IS BUSINESS SUICIDE, or at least it could very likely mean death very soon. Some people and companies can still get away with not picking up the straight up trend of  Social Media, but why try? Why not seize a position in this brand new realm of possibility? It could be that if we take advantage of this trend TODAY, we may come out way, way ahead in the future.

Social Media is moving SO FAST that even the social media experts hardly have a handle on it. Heck, even the social media developers hardly have a handle on it. Facebook, for example, went to 50 Million users in 18 months. How is even possible to plan to tage advantage of something that unprecedented? My guess is that nearly everyone is learning on the fly which means we can figure it out right along with them… or maybe even ahead of them!

Here’s the strategy I’m working on for myself for Social Media…

As promised, I’ve been checking out many of the social media sites that I’ve listed. Some of them are great and other ones are not so great. Their are a few different categories of sites. There are Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. There are Article Sites such as Ezine Articles, your blog, Squidoo, and HubPages. There are Social Bookmarking Sites like StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us- these sites let you save the websites you like for other people to check out. There are Digg and Mixx which I think are a combination of Social Bookmarking and and Article Sites. There are Twitter and YouTube which seem to be in categories of their own. And then there are a host of sites and tools to use to help manage this hodgepodge of information!

Social Networks:

To begin with I am going to focus on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, (look me up if you have accounts too!) and at least one other Social Network site. Here’s a site that lists the top 10 Social Networking Sites and gives reviews if you’d like to check it out. Select the ones you like the best and maybe try something new. If you really want to get crazy you can go for Gather or Boomj, both of which are social networking sites that allow you to earn cash by using them in different ways.

Article Pages:

I’ve signed up for both HubPages and Squidoo. I will use those two Article Sites for now and may add Ezine Articles later.

Other:

I’ve signed up for both YouTube and Twitter so, for now, look me up on Twitter. I’ll get you a link to my YouTube channel when I put something up! I’ve also signed up for Del.icio.us and Digg as well. I will also include that I’ve signed up for a Yahoo! account too, to utilize Yahoo! Answers.

The Strategy:

Social Media is basically a party. I’m going to jump in and start introducing myself to people, getting to know them, sharing stories about business and life, and just overall making friends. I want to have fun with this! It’s not even real work! The basic strategy that I have at the moment is to join the discussion across all of these Social Media platforms. Each Social Media site is a different channel that reaches different people. The more I use, the more people I can reach.

The more I engage people the more of a following I hope to build. I plan to link the Social Media sites together too. I’ll tell my YouTube watchers to follow me on Twitter. I’ll “tweet” when I have posted a new, helpful HubPages article. I’ll reference this blog in that HubPage article. In this blog I mention all of my social media sites so people can find connect with me even more. All of these channels will feed each other.

As I get better with all of this stuff I’ll add another channel (site) to my connection web and engage people there. And then add another, and another.

Mike Dillard calls this type of thing the You Inc business model. The point here is to connect with people yourself, not to sell them on a business, product, or service – just to connect. There are endless possibilities when you get enough connections or some key connections.

So What Did I Get Done on Day 3?

Actually I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked:
- I’ve posted only one article on HubPages.
- I watched like 5 hours of video on SEO by Dan Thies from StomperNet.
- I set up accounts with many social media sites.
- I sent out an e-mail to my beloved newsletter-getters.
- And that’s about it

Coo Tool of the Day:

There is a nifty tool that I learned about called UserNameCheck. Follow that link and you’ll get to it. It’s a quick and easy way to test the availability of a username on several Social Media Sites without having to go them all individually. If you get an ERROR message under some of the Social Media names it is probably because some sites don’t let usernames contain special characters like spaces, underscores, dollar signs, etc. So check it out and enjoy!

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt