Mark Tosczak

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Quick tip: How to use Google's Sidewiki for personal branding

December 14, 2009 By Mark Tosczak

So Google recently launched Sidewiki, a service that basically allows anyone to add comments to any web site. If you have the Google toolbar with Sidewiki installed in your browser, you can both leave comments and also read comments that others have left at that site. All comments are public. (Although this might seem like Google has created a service that allows people to alter or vandalize web sites that don’t belong to them, technically the comments all reside on Google’s servers and you have to use Google’s tools to see them.)

It remains to be seen whether Sidewiki will take off or not. Similar services in the past from other companies have not been adopted by a lot of users. Still, Google is arguably the most important company on the Internet so it has at least the potential for this tool to be widely adopted.

What does all this have to do with personal branding? Well, you can use Google’s toolbar to leave extra information about yourself at various sites where you might have an online identity, such as your blog, your Twitter home page, your Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

I would suggest leaving something short and simple and friendly. Others may or may not leave other comments, but at least for other Google Sidewiki users you’ll be putting out a welcome mat.

Filed Under: Career, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, sidewiki, Twitter

Social media in two minutes a day

May 19, 2009 By Mark Tosczak

I got an email last week from someone who administers a group I’m a member of on LinkedIn. He had a simple question: What could he do to get me to be more active in his group. It was a good question, and one that deserved an answer. So I told him the truth: I don’t have time. Most of my personal social media activity, I told him, was confined to Twitter and Facebook and I simply didn’t have enough time to also participate in LinkedIn groups.

Nonetheless, I still find a lot of value in LinkedIn. It helps keep me connected to hundreds of professional contacts and gives me an easy way to reach them even if I’ve lost a phone number or email. It also keeps me in touch with people who are probably not going to be on Facebook or Twitter or other social media sites for quite a while. Sometimes LinkedIn seems to be the social media site for those who feel uncomfortable with the whole idea of social media.

But the biggest thing about LinkedIn is that it’s an easy way for me to keep in front of people. I hear from people all the time “I see you on LinkedIn,” which means they see my status updates on LinkedIn. The one thing that I do pretty faithfully, usually at least five days a week, is update my LinkedIn status. That simple action keeps me popping up in front of others when they log into their LinkedIn account. One update a day – about two minutes – and it unobtrusively but effectively keeps my name in front of lots of contacts.

What’s my point? Sometimes even a minimal, but consistent, use of social media can be effective.

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Five tips for using social media productively

November 10, 2008 By Mark Tosczak

One question (and complaint) that I hear from people who aren’t active using social media online (or who limit themselves to one or two sites) is “Where do you find the time for all that?” That’s a fair question. Being online does take up time, and sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the millions of blogs out there, they can call consumer a huge amount of time if you’re not careful.

However, you can use these sites and still be productive. Here are some tips on how.

1. Subscribe to your own RSS feeds. Many social networking sites offer RSS feeds of at least part of their content. That means you can subscribe to your friends’ status updates in Facebook or LinkedIn and get those right in your RSS reader. Why do this? If you’re like me your RSS reader is already a major source of incoming content and you monitor it every day. Subscrbing to RSS feeds means you can find out about those updates without going to the site. To participate or see you replies, you’re still going to have to visit those sites, but monitoring the RSS feed allows you to quickly scan what’s going on and choose what conversations you might want to get involved in.

Take-away action: Look for the RSS icon in your browser window or on the web page and decide which feeds it makes sense to subscribe to.

2. Set your account options so you get notifications via email. Social media sites will typically have account settings that allow you to be notified of things like connection requests via email. By setting those up you can ensure you don’t miss important notifications because you didn’t go to the site. Again, I’m assuming that even on days when you don’t have time to visit social networking sites you’re still checking your email.

Take-away action: Go check your account settings and turn on email notifications.

3. Update more than one social media at a time. There are a number of applications and services out there that allow you to update more than one social media service at a time. I use ping.fm and I have an account with, though I haven’t yet experimented with, hellotxt.tcom. That means I can update Twitter, LinkedIn and other services at the same time, assuming I want to give them the same update message. This also allows me to update these sites without actually visiting them all. Because these are web-based services I can use them from whatever computer I might be working on, at home or at work. One word of warning about these: Different sites impose different length limits on your status updates, so a full 140-character update for Twitter will be cut off on LinkedIn because that site has a shorter status message field.

Take-away action: Set up an account with one of the update services and start using it.

4. Measure the value of your updates. The key to effective social networking is to provide value. If you’re like me and you tend to send out a lot of links, then you might want to use a URL-shortening service such as BudURL or SnipURL that allows you to track click-throughs on your links. These allow you to see how many people are actually clicking through on your links. If nobody is, then it’s probably a safe bet that the links you’re offering don’t have much value for the people in your network, which may mean its time to do something different.

Take-away action: Set up an account with a URL-shortening service and put the link on your browser toolbar so it’s always available.

5. Decide on your key services and be diligent. Finally, it is true that you can’t do everything, and there are far too many social media sites out there to be active on all of them — even if you use every productivity tip in the book. So I recommend you choose a handful that are likely to be useful or fun and concentrate on those. That may mean that you choose LinkedIn over MySpace, for example, unless you’re involved in music in which case MySpace might be a better choice. Devote a little bit of time – maybe just 5 or 10 minutes a day – to checking each of your target sites and doing something there, even if it’s just leaving a comment for an acquaintance or reviewing status changes.

Take-away action: Decide on three to five targeted social media services to start with and try to be active in some way most days on each of those sites.

Have more tips on how to use social media productively and still have a life? Leave them in the comments below so everyone can learn.

Filed Under: Productivity, Social media Tagged With: budurl, Facebook, hellotxt.com, LinkedIn, MySpace, ping.fm, snipurl, Twitter

Why I'm becoming more promiscuous online

July 31, 2008 By Mark Tosczak

Are you conservative, friendly, open or promiscuous?

People use social media sites to network online in different ways, and you can classify them in roughly four categories.

Conservative: If you’re a conservative networker online, you’ll connect only to people you know in real life. It might even be just the people you know well and like.

Friendly: You’ll connect to people you know or have at least met in real life, even if it was only on a conference call, regardless of how well you know them.

Open: You’ll connect to anybody you’ve had some sort of contact with, online or off, even if the contact was as limited as following their tweets (or them following yours).

Promiscuous: You’ll connect to anybody, even complete strangers. You’re always looking for an excuse to send that invitation to link, always willing to accept one.

Ex-conservative becoming more promiscuous

Over time, I’ve progressed from the conservative end of this spectrum to promiscuous.  Why? Because it’s on that wide-open end of the spectrum that online social networking is so powerful.

Here’s what I mean. On the conservative end of the scale, where you’re connected to a relatively small number of people who you already know pretty well, social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook aren’t that much more useful than Microsoft Outlook. They give you a way to keep in touch electronically with people you already know, but that’s about it.

But as you make your online network wider and deeper, it becomes more and more difficult, and eventually impossible, to have the kind of personal relationship with each individual that you had when you were conservative. The connections in these broader networks are looser, the personal communication increasingly infrequent, the relationships weaker. But they are still connections, still relationships.

You can send out your status updates, pass along a useful link, maybe ask a question. Most of the people in your loose network may not pay a lot of attention, most of the time, but your status update — your ping to your network — is a way of maintaining at least a weak connection, but without being intrusive. Everyone is opted in. Anybody can opt out.

Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter, our blogs and the rest of the social media universe allow you to maintain more relationships at a greater distance, something that wouldn’t be practical for most of us offline.

Why would you want to maintain these weak relationships? Because when you need something (like a job), or want to know something (like an obscure piece of technical information) or have an idea you want to spread (maybe about the value of social networks and ‘weak’ relationships), you can tug the strings in your network and get more feedback than you ever could in your conservative real world network. Even though those connections are weak, if you ask the network for help, at least some people will respond.

So I’m becoming more promiscuous online. Want to follow me on Twitter? Go here. Want to connect to me on LinkedIn? I welcome it, find me here. Feel like friending me on Facebook? I’m friendly – go for it.

What about you? Are you a conservative networker online, or a prolific and promiscuous connector? Tell us about your online networking style, and why you’ve chosen that style, in the comments below.

Update: I’ve tweaked my approach just a bit. Please check out this post about my approach to Facebook. (Feb. 14, 2010)

Filed Under: Career, Networking, Social media Tagged With: Facebook, LinkedIn, Networking, Twitter

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