This week we have a guest blogger: Hadassah Levy. Hadassah has done great work growing The Pet Wiki and is the Social Media expert for Jewish Ideas Daily.

Pet Lover

The statement that had the most effect on me at the 140 conference in Tel Aviv was that the key to online communication is taking an offline interest and moving it online. In other words, there are very few online activities per se. Almost everything we talk about online is something we are involved in offline.

This is clearly true of the pet community. Pets are very much an offline activity – we feed them, play with them and groom them in real life. For some of us, that’s enough. But for others it is important to connect with other pet owners online to share information, humor, advice and support.

For website managers whose goals include building an online community around a specific topic, the challenge is to find people whose interests include theirs and give them a reason to join their community. To return to the pet example, a person who owns 3 cats is a potential community member, but he may prefer to spend his time on social media discussing politics, entertainment and his children’s accomplishments. But if this person sees value in a twitter account or Facebook page which talks about pets, he will join. And when he sees conversations that interest and stimulate him, he will express his opinion. When asked for his advice or to share something else, he will engage in that way.

When you’re thinking about social media, the key is to start by figuring out what resonates with your community. Think about what gets you excited and what kind of issues you like to hear about. What kinds of activities do you get involved in offline? What are your concerns and what makes you smile? Listen to what the members of your community are talking about online and experiment with different types of materials. The emphasis should be on “community,” not on “online.”

Jeff Pulver in Tel Aviv

I have to say that I really love hearing Jeff Pulver speak. The first time that I saw him in person was at the Bird Brain Un-Conference. He is genuine and sincere in what he does. He believes in people, encourages them, and enjoys their success. The only problems with conferences like Bird Brain and 140Conf is that you only get to hear him for about 10 minutes. That’s it and then it’s time for the next person to go. Fortunately he can do a lot with 10 minutes.

Jeff opened up the conference by talking about how, with the help of twitter and social media, we are building our time capsules. Everything we say and do on the internet is stored. In the future, we’ll be able to look back on the stories that we’ve created through our words and pictures. We are documenting our own lives as they occur. We are leaving digital breadcrumbs to be shared. Human nature gives us the desire to be remembered. We all want to make a difference and stand out in the world. With networks like twitter, we are able to share the everyday story of ourselves. It’s pretty powerful stuff.

Being that the conference was in Tel Aviv, part of the panel (a whole 20 minutes!) was scheduled to talk about where Israel stands in the world, technologically and in the use of the real time web. I think that everyone would agree that Israel is a front runner in innovation and that Israel has had a very high impact on the high tech world. According to some of the pannel, Israel is lagging behind in its use of the real time web. I can understand where they are coming from – I happen to be the foursquare mayor of 3 different locations. It’s not that I’ve checked in all that often, it’s just that no one else has. On the other hand, Israel is a very small country, and if you consider the size of the US and how many small towns there are, I think that Israel is doing OK. It’s true that there is a lot of room to grow, but we can do it.

One thing that I did not agree with the panel on is that they didn’t think that a revolution like Facebook could come out of Israel. If there is anything that living on the web has taught me, it’s that there are no boundaries. To talk to people, all you need is an internet connection. Not only do I believe that incredible innovation can come out of Israel, I believe that it can come out of any country. The key is not to try to create something similar to twitter, but to create the next game changer, like twitter did. Don’t be copycats, be innovators.

For a one day conference, Jeff really pulled together people from all walks of Social Media life. Food, comedy, fashion, music, and art. Things that wouldn’t really seem to go over well in 140 characters or less. I never really thought about how other mediums need to express themselves with pure text. The key is that all these domains can influence people on an emotional level. Once we like the music or art or food, we want to share information and learn from others what they have to say. You probably won’t start listening to a singer’s music because you like his tweets, but you will be more interested in knowing that singer as a person if his music speaks to you.

We make ourselves cool by association. There are a lot of products out there that get talked about on the internet. Every time that we like a page on facebook or talk about it on twitter we are building our personal brand by associating with other brands.

Twitter can be used to save lives. A great example was how twitter was used in the recent earthquake in Haiti. It was amazing to hear spokespeople from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) talk about the rescue mission that they conducted there. After the earthquake there was no goverenment to help with evacuation efforts. By listening to information that was being broadcast about where people were trapped, the IDF was able to find and rescue them.

In the world of the real time web, even the way that we are telling stories is changing. Twitter is a great way to create personas that can act out different plots. People can form emotional attachments to the characters as if they are real people, and then they can read the live drama as it occurs in the twitter feed. It’s really cool. I’ve heard about a project that happened before Passover, where the different bible characters tweeted out the Exodus. It can make the story come alive.

A teenager was also one of the speakers. Michael Matias spoke about what it’s like to grow up in the real time web. We’ve only experienced it as adults, but to grow up in a constant information environment is a very different thing all together. He is constantly online. Even when he watches television, he is connected to his computer. When asked if he had to choose between the TV or the computer, which would it be, he answered that he couldn’t make that choice. It would be like choosing between his mother and father. I find that a bit scary. On the other hand, he was able to attend classes in Israel while he was in New York with the help of a live feed from his classroom.

The last session was about ways to use Social Media for social good. Promoting causes, like clean water in third world countries with Twestivals and raising awareness of Gilad Shalit by trending topics were talked about. You can even donate your tweets through JustCoz.org to raise awareness for the cause of your choice. It’s really amazing. I have talked about the amazing things that Romeo the Cat and Frugal Dougal have done to help support animal shelters for a while now. Their pawpawty’s raise real money to do good.

It’s truly amazing how much reach we each have from our computers. What are you putting in your own personal time capsule?

Taking time from a business trip to root for the Mets

Everyone talks about how to do Social Media. About how important it is to do Social Media. About how you have to be part of the conversation and how you have to be involved with your users. The one big thing that they’re not saying about Social Media is about how much fun it can be.

I work in a different niche than any of the friends that I see on a regular basis. I love animals. I always have. None of my friends have any pets. I find that such a pity. They really don’t know what they are missing. There is so much that having pets adds to life. But I digress, that’s not what this blog post is about.

Social Media has been a wonderful way for me to connect with like minded people that share my passions. I’m passionate about animals and their welfare. When I created The Pet Wiki, I was creating a place for all animal lovers to come and share their knowledge with the community.

When I get up in the morning, one of the first things that I do (sometimes before I get out of bed) is to check my user page, twitter feed and facebook fan page. I want to know what’s going on and be part of the conversation.

I live in Israel, so most of the friends that I’ve made over the past year are people in different time zones. I have been able to connect with wonderful people from all around the globe. I have friends in every continent. Our love of pets has been a unifying factor. Social Media has given us a platform to bring us all a little closer.

I’ve been pretty successful with growing the fan base of The Pet Wiki. If I had time to work on it full time, I think that I could be more successful. There are just so many hours in a day. Luckily, when you work on Social Media, if you’re in your niche, you really don’t feel like you’re working at all.

The biggest trick with Social Media is getting people who love being social involved. That might not necessarily be your marketing team. I don’t come from a marketing background. I’ve worked in Content most of my professional career. I’m good at it because I love it and I love spreading my message. I love engaging people.

This isn’t work at all. I kind of feel guilty about being on twitter and facebook so much. Although it’s work, it’s not work. It’s truly a pleasure to do what I do.

Gift Horse Contest

Running The Pet Wiki is a lot of fun. I get to try new things all the time. As an experiment, I decided to throw a contest. This isn’t the first contest that I’ve thrown, but a lot more thought went into this one than the last minute contest that I threw together when The Pet Wiki turned 1 year old. This time around we went with a “Gift Horse” theme. It was fun to create the graphics and figure out how to put them in the site.

Here are the things that I’ve learned this time around:

Press Release – I’ve never had a press release before. I probably have had other opportunities to create press releases, but I never did. There are a bunch of free sites to post them to, as well as pay sites. This time around, I went for free. The pay ones are supposed to be much better for SEO. Next time, I’ll try those as well.

Here’s the list of free sites that we came up with:

• http://www.prlog.org
• http://www.businesswire.com
• http://www.free-press-release.com
• http://www.1888pressrelease.com
• http://www.i-newswire.com
• http://www.your-story.org
• http://www.freepressindex.com
• http://pressexposure.com
• http://www.pressmethod.com
• https://www.pr.com

How to schedule post to Facebook with images – This one was a tricky one. There are a lot of services that allow you to schedule updates to Facebook statuses, but there is only one that I found that allowed me to post url’s with images. It’s a bit unintuative, but Sendible lets you attach images to the post. After you set up a regular Sendible account, here’s how to do it:

1. Click on the message tab
2. Select the account that you want to send the update
3. Just above the message area, there is an Add URL link, click it
4. Paste your url in the url box and click the Load Images from URL button
5. Check the image that you want to use
6. Click the Attach to Message button
7. Type what you want to say
8. Click the Insert Only button by the url link
9. Click the Schedule link (over the message)
10. Set the time you want it to post

Make sure to include the actual link in your post (Step 8). If you don’t, all you get is the picture without the url. I learned this the hard way.

Not the smoothest process in the world, but it works. I figured out how to do this for the contest, but there is no reason that I can’t use this all the time. It’s great.

Preposting tweets – I’ve been preposting a few tweets a day for a while now. I like to announce the new pages that get added to The Pet Wiki. My favorite tool for preposting is CoTweet. There are other tools that allow you to prepost, but CoTweet allows you to set up mulitple users and multiple accounts. It’s great for sharing. I used to use Hootsuite, but I found the frames annoying. It also bothered me that it stole the url – I consider that a very important part of branding. CoTweet also lets you plug in your bit.ly (url shortener) account and gives bit.ly stats right in the program. Hootsuite has ow.ly, and has its own stats.

Sending emails – I sent emails around Christmas time, but  wasn’t really happy with the way that they came out. This time around, I used MailChimp and I am so happy with the results. They made sending emails a breeze. I was able to use one of their templates and stick my logo and content in to make it my own. Really easy and really beautiful.

Blogging - The Pet Wiki has it’s own blog,  Omer’s Scratching Post, written by my cat, Omer. The little guy has been keeping his readers up to date for people to know what’s going on in the contest.

Contest sites – Besides posting to PR sites, we also posted the contest to some contest sites.

Prizes need to be relevant – I am looking for contributors. That’s the main focus of my contest. If I were to give a standard prize like a generic Amazon.com gift certificate, people who are not really interested in my site might try to get the prize, and I would not be in a position of creating a long term relationship with my users. I chose a great, inspirational horse book (is that the gift horse or the horse gift?)

That’s all I have for now. I don’t have incredible expectations for this contest, but it’s been a fun test and has expanded my knowledge of how to get things done. I can’t wait until the next one.

No, this post is not about another get rich scheme. I was recently at a conference where the discussion of making money on Twitter came up. What I got out of it was that there was basically no way to make money directly through social media. At least not short term money. That just ain’t so.

Every month, without fail, my anipals, led by in infamous Romeo the Cat, throws a paw pawty on Twitter. Firstgiving.com helps out by giving a secure way to donate to the causes voted on by animals all over the internet. Every month I’m amazed at the generosity that is shown by people all over the world for different animal causes.

These pawties are always themed. The one that took place this weekend happened to be Olympic themed, but I’ve been to others that have been Las Vegas, Farm and Beach themed. There’s even been a wedding between pets on different continents. There’s always a DJ, and there’s always a bartender (who else is going to server the virtual meowmosas?)

These aren’t just a few fancy hash tags that are thrown up on Twitter that people hope get a bit of attention. There is organization involved with the whole movement. People who sign up to keep the drinks flowing and the music going. There is support day and night – the whole length of the pawty. Gifts are donated and prizes are given for quizzes that need answers. It’s a ton of fun.

The problem with making immediate money on Twitter is not that it can’t be done. It takes some work, but it’s really possible – my anipals have taught me that. The problem is that these amazing (dare I say it) people, are doing it selflessly. They are doing it for a higher purpose. And doesn’t everyone want to be involved with that?

1000 Followers!

If you know anything about me, you know that I love Twitter. In the impersonal world of computers, it’s a wonderful way to connect and make friendships. As of yesterday, @ThePetWiki has over 1000 followers. That’s a pretty big milestone.

The truth is that it’s really not that hard to get 1000 followers. All you really need to do is to follow strategically and hope that they follow you back. With all the juggling that I’ve been doing lately, I really haven’t had time to investigate strategic follows. I’m glad that I haven’t had time, because it’s something that I really don’t want to do.

All the people that I have followed have been people that interest me. I want to read their tweets. I’ve learned a lot from what they have to say and I try to help them out when I can.

I haven’t set up any “user lists.” I don’t know how other people use these kind of lists, but I suspect that most people use it to sift the good from the garbage. It’s one way to get through all the twitter noise.

The other way is to follow very selectively. @ThePetWiki follows just over 400 people. Out of those 400, there are probably only 50 people that are very active. I suspect that I can’t do more than that without losing the community feel of the group.

Anyway, yea us! We broke the 1K mark.

I thought that managing 2 Twitter accounts was a lot. I talked about that in an early post called “Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts.” I have recently been put in charge of my company’s corporate account (@AnswerDotCom.) This is a short term project for me. I just need to set things up and then I will pass it off to someone else to take care of. I have 1 month to get things ship shape.

The more that I do, the more I learn. This account is more corporate than @ThePetWiki or my personal, @RenaR account. I haven’t really engaged any of the followers. There is a ton of content that the site has. I have mostly been tweeting about things that have occurred on a specific date-stuff like birthdays and history items. It’s all information that we have on the main site, and I can add a link to each item.

I have been using HootSuite to post interesting and informative tweets throughout the day. I have them set up to go out every hour or so. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a ton at one time. I know when I see tweets like that, I am less likely to read or spend any time on them. They seem like another form of twitter spam. By sending them out the way I am, I am also able to cover a larger range of time zones.

The more that I use HootSuite, the more I like it. If you use HootSuite to shorten urls that you put in your tweets, they will track how many clicks those urls get. I know that other people use bit.ly, but ow.ly is so well integrated with HootSuite, I can’t imagine using anything else.

HootSuite also allows you to add multiple users to a twitter account. I have added editors to check the pending tweets before they go out. They can also add their own tweets. I tried using CoTweet, pre-posting tweets and sharing the account, but for some reason, my tweets never got out. It was annoying to put all that work into creating and scheduling the tweets and not seeing the fruits of my labor. HootSuite has been very dependable.

Since I am managing multiple accounts, I still run a client application to keep track of them all. Seesmic Desktop works well for me. That and the Flock browser have been life savers. While I’m writing this post in Flock, I see live updates of tweets that are coming from people that I follow. The stream of tweets is a bit distracting, but it helps me keep on top of information that is important to me.

It’s been a lot more work than I expected, but I think that it’s going well. When I took over the account, there were about 30 followers. It’s been about a week, and there are now more than 1,300. Not to shabby. I am also very happy with the number of click throughs to the site. As the number of followers grows, it will be nice to see that number go up as well.

I find the whole thing fascinating. It will be cool to see how far I can get it in that month. I’m hoping for 5,000 good followers. Wish me luck.

This is something that has been bothering me for a while. I wish that there was a booklet that explained Twitter etiquette. That would make my life a lot easier. I tweet a lot. I retweet (RT) a lot. I really appreciate when people RT what I have to say. It means that they found it useful or enjoyed it. I have never sent a “Thanks for the RT” tweet that I’ve seen so many other people do.

Why haven’t I? I have always believed that it is important to show gratitude. It’s nice to show people that you appreciate them sending your message on. Until now, I have been so concerned that I would be contributing to the twitter clutter, that I’ve refrained from anything that might be seen as superfluous.

I’ve been missing out. There is already so much clutter on twitter, that it’s hard to imagine people reading every tweet that flies past them. It’s just impossible. Most people run twitter clients or services that point out when a person replies to them. The tweets stick out more to the person that you are sending the reply to. You can build a lot of goodwill by sending a simple “thank you”. It’s wonderful. It’s polite, and besides, it’s just the right thing to do. The answers is yes, you should thank people.  From now on, I will thanks retweeters.

I guess that I’m on the beginning of my own Twitter etiquette guide.

Yikes. I never thought that managing multiple Twitter accounts would be so hectic. I have little boxes jumping all over my screen. It’s quite distracting. Jumping back and forth between different types of information is a bit intense, but it’s also been fun.

I’ve made myself a guinea pig and have started trying out different clients and services to make the whole thing go a lot easier. I’m sure that there are other tools out there that I haven’t discovered (or haven’t been created yet) to make the multi-account lifestyle more bearable. Those will need to wait for another blog post…

I’ve had more than one account for some time now. Before I was really into tweeting with both my @thepetwiki and @renar accounts, I would use two different client programs to keep track of each. I used TweetDeck for one and Twhirl for the other. If the little pop-up was black, it was @thepetwiki, green meant @renar. All was good with the world. Although I probably could have survived that way, I decided to look for more sophisticated tools to let me do the thing I do.

Enter Seesmic Desktop, HootSuite, Splitweet and TweetLater. Out of the four of these, Seesmic Desktop is the only client application. The others are all web-based applications. Out of the three web-based services, only HootSuite and Splitweet allow you to see the tweets as they are coming in.

The TweetLater service, does just what you’d expect it to do. You can set your tweets to tweet at a specific time, after you set them up. Isn’t it great when things have appropriate names? There is both a professional and free version. I’m a pretty simple girl. For my purposes, the free version does just fine. Besides sending tweets when you want, you can also get all your replies emailed to you. That’s a nice little feature.

Splitweet is pretty simple. It allows you to tweet from one or multiple accounts at the same time. That’s all it does. Before I knew about Hootsuite, it fulfilled what I needed to do and I was happy.

HootSuite takes what’s best about both TweetLater and Splitweet and combines them into one nice package. I can tweet from multiple accounts at the same time, and set when those tweets will go out. The one thing that is annoying about HootSuite is the fact that you can only view tweets from one account at a time. It’s a pain to move back and forth between accounts to see what people are saying. It’s an improvement over the other two, but there is room for improvement.

Seesmic Desktop, the only application out the bunch, is built for viewing and responding to tweets from multiple accounts. In Seesmic Desktop, little boxes in the corner of your screen pop up to let you know you have new tweets and from which account those tweets come. It has a multi-colum view that allows you to set everything up in a way that is clearly marked, so you know which tweets belong to which account. It is a lot like TweetDeck and is nicely done. You can only send one tweet from one account at a time. Perhaps in future releases, they will allow their user to choose multiple accounts. That would be nice.

I think that I find Seemic Desktop and HootSuite the best out of the bunch. Those are my weapons of choice for now. It will be fun to see what other people come up with.

In my escapades as chief tweeter for The Pet Wiki, I’ve had a pretty conservative view of who should be followed. I still think that it’s correct for small individuals not to follow everyone, but for larger companies, it’s important to have a wider view of whom to follow.

This past Thursday, Nutro cat food was recalled. Tweets were flying everywhere to let people know about the recall. As soon as I saw the first tweet about it, I immediately retweeted with a link to the story. Nutro found me. I was impressed. They tweeted the following message to me

@ThePetWiki Hi, I’m an Ambassador for Nutro. Pls let me know if you have ?s about our cat products. See http://www.nutroproducts.com/

A recall is a big thing that can break a company like this, and that was exactly what a company like them should have done. They should be looking on the web and through Twitter for customer so that they can dissuade their fears. So far, so good. The problem is that when I tried to DM (direct message) their ambassador, I was unable to do it. Although she wanted my feedback, she was not following me, so there was no way for me to contact her personally without letting everyone know about it. That’s bad business.

If all you do is give your customers a link to a page after something of this magnitude, that’s not good enough. You need to calm their fears, and the best way to do that is to listen to them. That’s the power of Twitter, connecting with your customers and putting a face to the company.

As an individual, it’s OK not to follow everyone, but a company doesn’t have that luxury. No one does that better than Scott Monty of Ford Motors. He gets it. He knows how to connect and make customers and potential customers feel good about themselves. That’s a gift.

Twitter is a gift for companies that want to listen to their customers. Use it well.