I have to admit, I am still not using a lot Facebook and Twitter. I think I understand now that I could use those tools to build and manage my online communities a lot better.
In the future, I guess our online brand will be critical for both our personal life and professional life. We need to manage them. One issue I have is the separation between those online identities. I don't want my regular employer to know that I am blogging about the Wii or anything else. I don't want anybody to look at my family pictures unless they are very close friends and so on.
Let's start from my need:
- Use some tools to keep in touch with my close friends and manage my personal brand with them
- Spend more time on the Kitesurfing community (and some other forums)
- Develop the community around the Zhorba blog
- Create my professional online brand
A complete list of tools possible:
- I would prefer to have one tool as a dashboard for everything else
Possibilities: Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Mail, Mailing-list, Forum, Linkedin, friendfeed, su.pr, thwirl, seesmic, flock
For a dashboard, there are 3 possibilities: Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Flock. I am biased for Seesmic as I am following Loic Le Meur for quite some time. But even if Seesmic has tons of fancy features, Flock seems to me more universal. I can update my blogs, forum, tweeter and so on with just one interface.
And now for each need its process:
- Use some tools to keep in touch with my close friends and manage my personal brand with them
Solution: Use Facebook only in Flock and gmail on Flock. My personal blog is automotically published in Facebook.
- Spend more time on the Kitesurfing community
Solution: Have a page that summarize all the forums activity on Flock
- Develop the community around the Zhorba blog
Solution: Create a twitter account for Zhorba - Use Twitter/su.pr to develop my blog
- Create my professional online brand
Solution: Use Linkedin
Use Flock as the dashboard for everything.
Some good reference:
"Tribes" from Seth Godin
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/twitter-apps-ratings-reviews/
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/facebook-not-replace-twitter/
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/start-settle-fall-love-twitter/
http://www.jamessenior.com/post/Facebook-ate-my-blog-content.aspx
A good example of community online:
http://www.communityofsweden.com/
