brad garland

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

is a phrase that I’ve been getting over the last few weeks from my friends of various social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. I didn’t think anything of it at first and chalked it up to it being about a topic they weren’t interested in but having a couple conversations offline it appears that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t understand all the @ this and # that you update. And the links you post I never click on b/c of it.”

Well, that’s no bueno. I’ve always used Twitter to automatically push updates to all other networks regardless what it’s about but realized that even though there is some overlap in my friends, each network has its own specialties. So whether they were mainly friends, professionals, or somewhere in between, I needed a way to be able to easily publish from one place yet push messages to only the networks that make sense. So here’s the solution I came up with…

It all starts with Twitter

Twitter is my publishing start point. I use a 3rd party application (same for desktop and iPhone) called Tweetie. I love it. It’s easy to use and has other integrations that make it perfect for me. I post everything here and then add hashtags or ‘#’ to tell Twitter to go to other networks.

When I post to Twitter without any special hashtag, it just stays on Twitter and that’s it. Easy peasy.

Facebook

So to send to Facebook, I just had the #fb hashtag at the end of my Twitter update and it’s good to go. Now, it is able to do this via an Facebook application called ‘Selective Twitter‘ and it looks at every tweet and only publish the ones to Facebook that have the #fb attached. Make sense?

LinkedIn

For posts to LinkedIn, it’s a bit more simple. No special setup required. Just add your account to your LinkedIn profile and tell it to only post updates that include the #in tag in the update. Easy as that.

*Optional: We also have a company social network we use called Cubetree and it does the same thing. I just use the same #in tag for that as well since when I use that tag, it’s generally professional in nature anyway.

So here’s the breakdown in visual form:

If still confused, please post a comment below and I’ll clarify. Now, onto my next hurdle, considering aggregating my blogging into one tool either Tumblr or Posterous and getting away from Wordpress all together. Hmmm, what to do….what to do.

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Listen on posterous

My view

Posted via email from brad garland’s stream

That was my reaction when the other day I received a call from our PEO provider Administaff. Charlie, our sales contact, called me and inquired about something that I said online…on Twitter actually (see image).



Now despite me leading a pretty open life online I was still taken aback from the call since I definitely don’t connect Charlie with Twitter but obviously someone at Administaff is listening. He went on to tell me what he was sent the message and just wanted to follow-up to see if I could exbound a bit more. I told him about some of my concerns on attempts to stifle our culture and he completely understood and said he’d take the discussion into his bosses. Regardless if it was him or someone else that found it, they fact that they are 1) trying to listen & 2) follow-up with me to ensure what’s going on is pretty awesome in my book.

Lastly, if this isn’t an example of being sure you stand behind the content you put online, I don’t know what is.

You hear that statement a lot, right? People don’t scale. Whether it’s stories of endless email or having to ‘trim down’ their RSS feeds or Twitter followers, people can’t keep up with it all. So my thought today was to take the contrarian view and ask, “So what, is that the Web’s fault?”

As everyone knows by now, anyone can post content (regardless of quality). I think the Web community does a good job of filtering the best stuff to us whether through Twitter, delicious, Banktastic, etc. But now, every time I either consider adding a new feed or following someone on Twitter I do a double check:

“Do I really want to do this?”

“Do I really want to muddy the waters with new content?”

That stinks. It’s not the Web or these services fault that I, the individual, can’t process it all. We have this beautifully decentralized ‘service’ that allows the tapping into the most brilliant minds in the world with a click of a button but we don’t because we “can’t keep up.” How sad really…

I guess my question is, how do we overcome? Is it the 10% stuff that Google’s Marissa Mayer was talking about at the Techcrunch52? Semantic search via service like Twine?

The Web is leaps and bounds better than what we had before it but now with the firehose busting at the seams, how do we continue to process more efficiently? Come on, you’re smart, let us know what you think.