At first, it was a difficult transition to make.  Twitter and (to a lesser extent) Facebook have become primary modes of communication for me.  Most of the people I connect with on a regular basis are members of one site or the other, and in many cases both. The greatest challenge for me was to break my own personal patterns of internet usage, and to act as if social media simply didn’t exist. Surprisingly, it was not as easy as one might think.

So what did I learn? I learned that, while we tend to think of the internet as ever-changing, very little actually changes day-to-day. I also learned that time spent on social media sites has very little impact on my general productivity.  While I may have gotten slightly more work done, I spent a lot more time researching things that would normally have been crowdsourced.  I was also reminded of the importance of maintaining a sense of balance with regards to work and life, and that it’s an especially important consideration for those of us who work on the web.

Perhaps the greatest lesson learned from my experiment is that none of this social media stuff really matters.  Social media may provide us with the ability to connect and communicate with our friends and business associates, but it’s not a substitute for real engagement with real people in real life. I think those of us who spend a significant amount of time online tend to forget that there’s an important distinction to be made between the *real* world and that which exists online.

As John Lennon once said, “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination”.

Now, I’m going to assume that you have a blog. If not, go out and buy a good domain, get some hosting and install WordPress. While you’re at it, I would recommend investing in Chris Pearson’s stellar Thesis theme. Once you’ve got your blog up and running, start working on content. And by content, I mean stuff that you think your market would be interested in. By all means, resist the urge to publish self-promotional fluff and try to write with the interests of your market in mind.

If you haven’t already done so, go get a Twitter account. Try to secure an account that either a) reflects your brand name, or b) reflects your target keywords. Theme your account along the lines of your website (logo, colours, background, etc) and link back to your main site from your profile. At this stage, you should also sign up for accounts at Bit.ly and TwitterFeed. Bit.ly will let you track clicks on links dropped in your tweets, and TwitterFeed will auto post your new blog posts to Twitter.

Then go build a Facebook page for your website / product / service. Again, try to be consistent with your use of colour, logo, catchphrases, etc. and be sure to cross-link your Facebook page with your blog and your Twitter account. Add one of the RSS apps that allow you to publish blog posts to your page, and submit your blog feed. You can also sync your Twitter account with Facebook, in one of two ways. Firstly, you can add the “Notes” application and import your blog posts or tweets via RSS. Alternately, I discovered another app by a company called Involver that allows you to add a dedicated Twitter tab to your Page. Note: the “official” Twitter Facebook app will *not* allow you to publish to a page; only to a personal account as far as I know.

It may seem like a lot of work, but once this system is up-and-running your blog content will be syndicated to both Twitter and Facebook automagically. While there is no direct SEO benefit to be had by using this strategy (aside from indexing and some minor link juice flow), it would be foolish to think that Google is not looking at social traffic patterns and other such metrics to determine trust factors; especially in light of Larry Page’s quote in the first paragraph.

While the example above is limited to Twitter and Facebook, it could easily be extended to social networks beyond those mentioned.  Friendfeed, for example, allows you to sync your account with your Twitter account for cross population.  For those willing to invest some time and effort, there are loads of opportunities for creative content syndication within social media.

Last Minute Update: As of August 20, 2009, Facebook Syndicates Updates From Pages To Twitter, Still Holds User Updates Hostage.

I’m feeling a little bit mischievous today, and just thought of a pretty funny idea. You see, there’s a lot of people on Twitter that are obsessed with their follower numbers. It’s an unhealthy obsession, in my opinion. Twitter is not a numbers game; it’s a platform designed to facilitate conversation. I’m not saying Twitter should be used this way or that, but when people lose sight of the real value (conversation, connections, comraderie) of the platform, it’s time for a reality check. On that note, allow me to introduce you to The #UnfollowFriday Project.

I’ll need *your* help to make it happen, but the goal is to identify Twitter users that have thousands of followers and are seemingly obsessed with their numbers. Somebody like Robert Scoble is an obvious target, but he got laid off today or something so let’s cut @Scobleizer some slack. Once we’ve identified our target, if they lose over %50 of their followers I am going to give away a prize to a random #unfollower. This is antisocial media at it’s finest! Let’s get some suggestions in the comments below to get things moving. Once we’ve settled on a user, simply unfollow the target and tweet “I unfollowed @username for a chance to win #UnfollowFriday”. This could be very amusing…