Blog Lafayette

Another month has come and gone and it is time for our monthly blog challenge on Virtual Online Learning, VOL for short. VOL is a meeting place focused on bringing together a community of people who are interested in blogging, social networking, online selling, and learning to use other online technologies such as Skype.

VOL makes learning fun AND profitable. VOL has many types of events each month, including this blog challenge and a Twitter challenge where each person tweets a minimum of 100 tweets in one day. These are great ways to increase exposure on Twitter and the Internet and to increase each person’s tweeting and blogging skills. VOL also has great “Go To Meeting” sessions where we learn new ideas, in depth, and have the opportunity to ask questions after the events to make the information useful.

If you are interested in learning and in being a part of an online community that is friendly and helpful, consider joining Virtual Online Learning. You will not regret it.

In the last few months I have been delving into the world of Social Media and Networking. If you are as new to seriously using Twitter or Facebook as I was in the beginning then you may be wondering, “How do I control the fast flow of information coming at me?”

When I first started using Twitter in particular, I felt like I was trying to drink from a fire hose. There was just simply too much “stuff” coming at me all at once. And what was I supposed to do with all this information anyway. I couldn’t possibly read every post or tweet. There had to be a reason I was participating in Twitter and Facebook and there had to be a way to make the information make sense to me.

Well, that is a two part journey. The first part, the “reason”, came to me just recently. I finally got it. I was tweeting and posting on Facebook in order to forge relationships and to be a “friend.” It is as simple as that. It does not need to be any more complicated. I am not a marketing guru who is trying to tweet about every eBay item I have up for sale and I certainly am not trying to gain affiliate dollars by hyping the latest “How to get Rich Tweeting” eBook. I am trying to form relationships with people and friendships. If I gain from it, I want it to be because I am such an excellent friend that my services are worth something not because I become a super spam machine.

The answer to the second question came to me recently as well. I am a new convert to the usefulness of using Hootsuite and Twitter Lists. With the use of Twitter lists I am able to siphon off groups of the people I follow on Twitter and put them into various lists that I create and then I am able to put each list into a separate tab in Hootsuite so that what was once a blast of water has become a drinkable drafts of water. I also love that I can make my lists either public or private. I can add my family to a private list and then I don’t need to search high and low to see what they are tweeting.

I have to admit, when I first started using Twitter and Facebook, I didn’t understand what it was for. I didn’t see the point. If I want information, I can Google it. But that is not what this whole “Social Media” thing is all about. It is about the first word in that phrase, it is being social. It is about reaching out to other real live people who are all over this world of ours. Pretty exciting once you grasp that. I am still learning but I get better at it every day. Happy networking!

For the last few articles I have been focusing in on blogging tips. In this post I want to talk about something that has been on my mind fairly steadily over the last few days. Social Media. For example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.

I am a Twitter and Facebook user and I am getting ready to start using LinkedIn as well, but I am a rank amateur at the social networking game. Call it a generation gap thing if you want. I am from the generation that grew up and went to school before Tandy computers and later, PCs. We didn’t text and we certainly didn’t use our phones to update our status on Facebook or Twitter every hour like some do these days. The learning curve for me on how to use Social Media effectively feels a little steep some days. I am learning though. I have been spending the last several days immersing myself in the topic of Social Media and listening to podcasts from several sources on the subject.

This leads me to a question that I want to ask you. How do you use Social Media? What do you use it for? One of my struggles with Social Media has been, “What is its usefulness?” I came to a decision this week about what I want to use Social Media and Networking to do. I will use Social Media, mainly Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to do two things. I want to spread useful information when I see something worth sharing, and more importantly, I want to use it forge real and useful relationships with my followers and friends.

As I have looked at Social Media over the last few weeks, I have seen a great bit of self promotion going on. That is OK, but it is not what I want to be my main goal. Instead, I would like to use these great ways of building communities to share encouragement and information to people that I really want to get to know. This means that my lists of followers and friends will not reach the massive numbers that I have seen some attain. My goal is not a competition to see how many followers I can get but more a competition to see how well I can connect and serve the followers I have.

Please feel free to post your opinions on this subject. I would really like to know how you use Social Media. Maybe you can teach this old dog some new tricks!