UpYourSocial

This is my weekly round up of social media links that I’ve bookmarked in Diigo over the past week. You can get this list every week by subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing through email. You may also follow me on Twitter or join the Facebook Fan Page to get some of these links throughout the week.

• 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers
• Ning Proves That There’s Life Outside of Facebook and Twitter | Brian Solis
• Backupify offers free lifetime backups of GMail, Flickr, Twitter*
• Want to commit Facebook suicide? No, really, there’s an app for that!
• 15 Free Services to Schedule Tweets on Twitter
• Pepsi to Skip Super Bowl Ads in Favor of $20M Social Media Campaign
• 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers

Getting your Facebook Fan Page to grow can be easy at first.  You pester your high school and college friends to join, so you have more than your wife and mom as your Facebook Fans.  You might also do a quick blog post (see here and here) or blast out a message to your Twitter followers.

All of these are great places to get your fan base started and give you a nice starting base.  Recently, I did an experiment on my other blog, LostInTechnology to get people to join my Facebook Fan Page for that blog.  This experiment centered around Google Wave.

To set the story up, Google Wave is a new service that has generated a lot of buzz.  It is also, currently, invite only.  I was fortunate enough to get a Google Wave invite, and once I got the invite, I had several more to give away.  Instead of being nice to my friends, I decided to give them away to my dedicated reader base at LostInTechnology, but I didn’t want to give them away for nothing, so I asked my readers to join my Facebook Fan Page in order to receive an invite.

It was a simple task that people were willing to do in order to get an invite to Google Wave.  One thing to consider when giving away something to your readers is to make sure it fits the audience.  Google Wave is a new technology product that is in beta, and it fits right in with what my audience is interested in at LostInTechnology.  They were very excited about the technology and wanted to get involved with it an learn about how it worked.  I made it easy to get in on the fun with very little investment.

Giving back to your readers is something I recommend you always do, but a lot of times you can ask for something in return if you are giving away something with enough value.  How do you drive readers to follow you on Twitter or join your Facebook Fan Page?

This is my weekly round up of social media links that I’ve bookmarked in Diigo over the past week. You can get this list every week by subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing through email. You may also follow me on Twitter or join the Facebook Fan Page to get some of these links throughout the week.

• Conversation Agent: Ten Ways to Spot a Fake (when hiring a consultant)
• 10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement
• How to hide your Facebook friends list | Safe and Secure – CNET News
• 9 Tips for Enriching Your Presentations With Social Media
• 10 Twitter Avatar Creators | Image Yourself | Bit Rebels
• The Social Media Marketing List: 45 things you should be doing but probably aren’t
• Why SEO is Easier than Social Media Marketing » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg
• Two Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Its Social-Media Agency – Advertising Age – DigitalNext
• 7 Ways to set up your Auto Tweets | Bit Rebels
• 10 Ways You’ll Know Santa’s Embraced Social Media « Social Media Monitoring and Engagement – Radian6

The other day at a local Social Media Club meeting I had a great conversation with Melissa Taylor.  We talked about how your brand now has lots of homepages (Twitter, YouTube, etc.).  This is definitely true, but the idea of this isn’t very new.

It started several years ago when people started going to Google for information about your brand instead of your brand’s homepage.  Google search results became a billboard for your brand, and consumers associated whatever Google returned with your brand.  If you weren’t working on SEO, you may have lost some brand equity over the years by consumers seeing varying search results.

Today, social networks are now doing the same thing.  Consumers will search for your brand or talk about your brand, no matter if you are involved or not.  There are conversations and pages built around your brand, and if you aren’t there to speak to those conversations, someone else is defining your brand for you.

I’m sure you’ve probably heard all these things before, but Melissa referred me to a great video that has Adam Brown from Coca-Cola talking about this very issue.  It’s definitely worth a watch. The video and slides are embedded below.

This is my weekly round up of social media links that I’ve bookmarked in Diigo over the past week. You can get this list every week by subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing through email. You may also follow me on Twitter or join the Facebook Fan Page to get some of these links throughout the week.

• Case Study of 4 Companies on Twitter — AriWriter
• Why Corporate Social Media Policies Are a Must | Mark Evans Tech
• 10 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Isn’t Working for You | Traffikd
• 5 Reasons To Write Guest Posts | Bit Rebels
• Conversation Agent: Are Your Facebook Fans Truly Engaged?
• Twitter Tip: How To Ditch Any Twitter List
• No Pain, No Gain: Lessons Learned From My Year With Twitter – The Buzz Bin
• Social Media Metrics Superlist: Measurement, ROI, & Key Statistics Resources
• Top 50 Twitter Tracking and Analytics Tools
• The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009

I have been taking part in 12for12K across my social media accounts and my other blog, LostInTechnology, and this month I wanted to make a post here on UpYourSocial.  The 12for12K Challenge is a great program that is using the power of social media to raise awareness and funds for some great charity organizations.

This month 12for12K is doing the 12 Days of Christmas Homeless push.  This month is less about the donations and more about getting out there and doing something for the homeless.  To do this, 12for12K came up something to do each day.

Here are the first 6 days.

1. Day 1. Contact your local homeless shelter(s) and ask what they need. Make a list and work from there.
2. Day 2. Gather 10 friends each (family, friends, colleagues) in preparation for Helping Day.
3. Day 3. Challenge these friends to a bake-off. Bake a bunch of homemade goodness – soup, stews, cookies, etc – ready for Helping Day.
4. Day 4. Clean out your closet (especially your husband’s, 12for12k wives!), and pack up all the old clothes that you find. Coats, socks, underwear, shoes, jeans – anything and everything.
5. Day 5. Go through your linen closet and think of what blankets, sleeping bags, duvets, etc, that you no longer need.
6. Day 6. Check your pantry – do you really need all these tins of soup or canned stew? Collect and store.

To see the rest of the days and learn more, go check out the rest of the 12for12K post.

A week or so ago, I set up a Facebook Fan Page for UpYourSocial.  Since this is a blog about social media, I thought it would be great to have a place where the fans of this site can interact.

The page is really simple right now, but I hope that we can get some conversation going on the wall.  Also, feel free to provide me with any feedback or suggestions you may have.  I look forward to interacting with everyone.

To become a fan, just click on the badge below.