Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt

Motivational Speaker

Mapping My Social Media Empire

Filed under: Social Media — by at 12:37 am on Sunday, January 24, 2010

For 2010, I have chosen streamline as my word to focus on; as in streamlining my lines of communication. Giving this much thought, what I am truly seeking are ways to get my social media and networking efforts working seamlessly and smoothly; in essence, efficiently managing my media empire.

The first step is to inventory my media empire, visually represented in this diagram (click on the image to enlarge):

Diagram of a central circle connected to seven outer circles representing Glenda's media empire

As I see it, my blog is the center of my media empire with seven smaller territories or outposts: Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedln, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, and Email Broadcast.

The next step is where the process becomes intriguing and takes me back to my university courses in Mass Communication – it’s all about cross-media promotion! Think what you will about her, but Oprah is an awesome example of someone who has built a media empire and uses cross-media promotion to keep the whole thing humming seamlessly: she mentions her magazine on her TV show, her magazine points readers to her website, her website provides details about her satellite radio station, etc. Brilliant!

Those of us blogging and using various other social media and networking tools are striving to do the exact same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (at least, for the majority of us!).

Taking my social media empire diagram from above, I then add red arrows indicating the flow of information, the cross-media promotion efforts. In this diagram (click on it to enlarge) the dotted red arrows indicate a manual effort or action and the solid red arrow indicate an automatic action.

Glenda's social media empire map

The numbered arrows indicate the following:

  1. Manually tweet when I publish a blog post, bringing people to the blog.
  2. New blog posts are automatically added to my Facebook Notes and Networked Blogs. (Need to manually hit publish on Networked Blogs, but then it appears twice on my Profile page. A setting somewhere?)
  3. Tweets are fed automatically into my Facebook status line.
  4. Linkedln profile brings people to the blog, in theory.
  5. Videos posted on YouTube bring people to the blog.
  6. Manually stumbling posts brings people to the blog.
  7. Blog posts are automatically sent to email subscribers.
  8. The recently added TweetMeme (currently located in the upper left corner of posts) that enables readers to manually tweet out about that blog post. (I’ve noticed these tweets aren’t appearing in the twitterstream; rather, only the TweetMeme website. Another setting somewhere? Or, would another plugin be better for this? )
  9. Currently, the TweetMeme feature is also include in the email broadcast so the email readers easily tweet about the post.

Representing my social media empire in this way I find exciting and I can now see where the gaps are. This year I aim to experiment with ways to connect and to strengthen my empire, ways for cross-media promotion. Some experiments will succeed, other will bomb. I intend to share what I learn in an ebook later this year.

Have you mapped your social media empire? What have you discovered?

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18 Comments »

Comment by Ricky Buchanan

January 24, 2010 @ 3:24 am

Networked Blogs – go to the blog page on Facebook and click on “Feed Settings”. There’s a checkbox near the top marked “Auto Publish to Personal Profile” which you want ticked and one near the bottom under the Other Settings heading which you don’t want ticked – I suspect you have the second one checked.

Why it comes twice, I’m not sure. Have you set it to go to a fan page as well as your personal profile?

I like automation but the risk of doubling stuff up and annoying people is high – eg I have several people I follow on Facebook who autopublish *every* Twitter update as a Facebook status and it drives me crazy. Those usually end up hidden from my stream (or quietly educated, if they’re open to it). Too much automation risks pissing off your most ardent fans because they’re the ones most likely to read you in many different systems.

OTOH too little automation, as you’ve discovered, leads to not having enough time (or thumbs) (or spoons) to do everything you want to do. A connundrum!

I noticed your Flickr isn’t connected to your blog at all. One thing that you might want to do is set up a Flickr blog widget or a flickr photos page which automatically pulls your last photo (or a few) and displays it, then you can add photos from conventions you attend or anything else that’d be interesting to us and have it auto-update your blog photos. I believe you can get Flickr auto-tweet (or was it auto-post to Facebook?) when you post photos too, but that’s just a vague memory … I may be remembering wrong.

Comment by Ricky Buchanan

January 24, 2010 @ 3:35 am

PS
Does your twitter client by chance filter out RTs or something? Just used Tweetmeme to tweet this post and it’s definitely showing up in my stream – http://twitter.com/atmacjournal/status/8146923157

Comment by schmutzie

January 24, 2010 @ 3:39 am

This is a good exercise I should set some time aside to do. With people like us who tend to have our fingers all over social media, it’s a good idea to make it all work together as well as possible.

Comment by Mama Terapeuta

January 24, 2010 @ 5:46 am

I just put the shared button in my blog and the first time I try to retweet something, I was asked if I wanted to ‘join’ Tweetmeme with Twitter. Could that be the problem?

Comment by Eric Brown

January 24, 2010 @ 10:29 am

Hi Glenda,
Your graph is an excellent illustration of the flow of information to and from that helps create and expand your Digital Footprint.

Any of those outposts that are more or less important in your opinion?

We have referenced your post in a recent article.

Comment by Glenda

January 24, 2010 @ 2:25 pm

Ricky, thanks for your detailed comment! I was nearly finished writing a detailed response, then I accidentally hit ESC and the comment friggin’ escaped!

As I was saying…I checked the settings with Networked Blogs and they were already set as you said. Either the double posting on the Profile page is a bug with Networked Blogs or I’m doing something wrong – or both!

When to automate is a dilemma. I’m one of those guilty of feeding my tweets to my Facebook status. It’s the one way I can have an active presence on Facebook without spending too much time there.

Good point about Flickr. I did miss the red arrow linking Flickr to Facebook, although that isn’t updating – yet another setting somewhere? I’m reluctant to add the Flickr Widget to my blog because of potential accessibility issues, particularly for screen reader users – something I need to look into.

Interesting about TweetMeme. I’m not sure what what the deal is.

This is definitely a work in progress!

Comment by Glenda

January 24, 2010 @ 2:31 pm

Schmutzie, have fun doing the exercise. You might be amazed by what you discover!

Comment by Glenda

January 24, 2010 @ 2:42 pm

Mama Terapeuta, I always love reading your posts! Hopefully adding TweetMeme will extend your reach as well. I think I’ve joined TweetMeme, but I’ll double-check – so many sites to join!

Comment by Glenda

January 24, 2010 @ 2:56 pm

Eric thanks for the mention in your post – Social Media Marketing; Your Blog is the Center Hub. At present, Twitter and Facebook are my largest, most effective outposts. Linkedln is under utilized. StumbleUpon can be powerful in driving traffic long-term.

It really depends on which media/outposts individuals are most comfortable in using and then finding ways maximize those outposts, using the least-comfortable ones in a more complimentary/supportive role – if that makes sense.

Comment by Ari Herzog

January 25, 2010 @ 9:46 am

Wow, I don’t know where to start with this comment. I enjoyed reading it, but I enjoyed reading your reply to Ricky more — especially where you admit guilt to sending every tweet to your Facebook profile wall and confess it’s the one way I can have an active presence on Facebook without spending too much time there.

Maybe your Facebook friends are different and more tolerating than mine, but friendship is a reciprocal action. Unlike Twitter followers, one needs to be approved by you to “follow” you on Facebook. More to the point, the other person has to approve you. If you are only sending tweets there, or tweeting the majority of the time and spending little time posting anything but, and not replying to your friends’ wall updates, you’re not using FB and might as well kill your account.

Like Ricky alluded, I hide people from my Facebook stream if they automate too much.

On the other hand, if you create a Facebook page, e.g. facebook.com/ariwriter, then people can follow you without mutuality.

I also dislike LinkedIn connections who tweet every message to their LI status.

I grasp the point of crossing the streams but there comes a time when enough is enough. It’s one thing to use social media channels as outposts for your blog, but do you want to risk mutual connections of yours to hide or unfriend you?

Comment by Taylor Marek

January 25, 2010 @ 9:54 pm

Well said Glenda. That is exactly how you should treat these social media platforms. You are using all of them to drive traffic back to your new media hub, which is your blog.

Comment by Barbara

January 28, 2010 @ 2:13 pm

I am truly grateful for this, Glenda. Even though you and I are about the same age, you perform much more like a ‘native’ in the internet than I. I’m working on my media inventory map now.

I do not participate in some of the bubbles shown in your map. Some of my hesitation for using Flickr, for example, has to do with protection or security or risk of copyright infringement. Would you consider posting your thoughts on those issues?

Thanks, again.

Comment by Sal

February 11, 2010 @ 12:25 pm

Good post. Wrote something similar not to long ago: http://blog.poplabs.com/2009/12/social-media-for-business/

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