UpYourSocial

This is a guest post by Chinmoy Kanjilal.  He is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.

Twitter has grown into a powerful microblogging platform and an extremely important tool for bloggers. Twitter lets us market our business in the fastest manner.

One defining characteristic of microblogging is the character limit. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. This is one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Twitter, as the 140 character limit ensures that the message is filled with great content.

This character limit, although good, can sometimes get in the way of us sending our complete thought.  Now, there are no real ways to send more than 140 characters in Twitter, but there are ways to pack in more content within those 140 characters.

TweetShrink

TweetShrink can shrink tweets by using slang and abbreviations that are common in sms messages.  It works by replacing numbers in words with numeral numbers, and shrinking words like ‘over’ to ‘ovr’, ‘here’ to ‘hre’.

I really like the way it works, because there is very little loss in readability and people can understand the message just by reading it out.

Maxitweet

Maxitweet allows us to tweet more than 140 characters, but in a different way than TweetShrink. Maxitweet allows us to tweet in characters other than standard ASCII characters allowed by the Twitter applications.

Both TweetShrink and MaxiTweet are popular and free services.  The TweetShrink service is popular enough to be included in Seesmic Desktop.  Do you ever find yourself needing to use one of these services?

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 FriendFeed to get some of these links throughout the week.

• 7 Traits Of A Good Twitter Friend | Bit Rebels
• 20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion | Brand Elevation Through Social Media and Social Business | Altitude Branding
• The Hardest Part Of Social Media | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
• 8 Tips For Managing The Twitter Backchannel During Your Presentation
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Comment on Blog Posts | Bit Rebels
• Customer Engagement Survey Shows Twitter is King of ROI
• 8 Tips for Managing a LinkedIn Group

I’ve read lots of posts around the Internet about how blogging will help improve this skill or that skill, and I completely agree with almost all of those posts.  Blogging is a great way to improve your problem solving, writing, marketing, social and all kinds of other skills.  Today, I’m going to take the idea of those posts, but instead of telling you how it will help you, I’m going to tell you about a real life example.

A Little Background

I don’t blog full time.  I have a day job, and that day job is in the market research field.  I also only graduated college a little over a year ago, so I’m a little bit of a newbie when it comes to all the responsibilities of a market researcher.  Recently, I was tasked with writing an RFP.

What is an RFP?

Well, here is what Wikipedia had to say.

A request for proposal (referred to as RFP) is an invitation for suppliers, often through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service.

In most RFPs, you need to be very specific about the type of service you want and the things you want to be included.  This RFP was no different.

The Situation

My experience with writing was limited to blogging and technical writing (my undergrad degree is in engineering), so writing an RFP was going to be a completely new challenge.

I’m going to be honest with you and let you know that I was a little scared at what seemed like a very difficult task.  What made it more scary was that my boss told me that it was going to be very difficult.  So, I went back to my desk with about a week to put together a two page RFP.

The Assignment and Process

Let’s see.  I needed to let suppliers know what my company needs in very descriptive terms that are also easy to understand.  Where had I done that before?  Then, it hit me.  I write guides and tutorials every day on my tech blog that are made to be easy and descriptive.  I just found a new level of confidence.

I proceeded to structure it like a blog post with fairly short paragraphs and a few headings to allow for quick skimming.  I came back and edited a few times to add a little extra polish.  Now, it was time to meet with my boss.

The Results

Needless to say, my boss was blown away with the quality and structure of the document.  He did have a few minor changes and additions, but overall, he was impressed.  What had typically been a hard task for most people to accomplish, I had made look easy.

Getting to a place where writing comes naturally wasn’t easy.  I’ve blogged for almost two years now, and I have had plenty of time to hone my craft and improve my writing skills.  Because of that previous effort, I was able to effortlessly leap past some of the growing pains of writing an RFP.

Image by TMAB2003

Today, I did a little sping winter cleaning (Who does winter cleaning?) of some of my social media profiles.  I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but I did make it a little easier to navigate around my profiles.

The cleaning was needed badly, because I kept adding recommended friends, friends of friends and local friends.  I thought I was only adding people that could add value to my network, but there comes a time when you no longer have the time to see the value they add.  Their thoughts and links just got lost in the rest of the stream of data that is constantly hitting me in the face.

How did this happen?

Fast Expansion

I see recommendations everyday from friends and influencers about new people to follow.  It is great to follow all of these recommendations, but I quickly got overwhelmed and never got to meet or introduce myself to the new people I was becoming friends with.  That’s not a good thing.

It’s called social networking.  Not introducing myself or joining the conversation with new friends meant that I wasn’t doing a very good job on the networking side of things.

Cleaning Up

In order to clean up, I did a few things.  First, I made lists on the social networks that allowed for it.  The process of making the lists helped me go through all of my friends and see which ones I really know.  If I didn’t know them, I just unfriend them.  The unfriending part of list making is almost as good as making the lists themselves.

Lists give me the power to filter my friends’ updates into nice buckets, so I can easily switch from list to list and keep up with only the stuff that is most important to me.

Future Prevention

Going forward, I am making a better effort to not recklessly expand my network on any social site.  I need to be more strategic on certain sites than others, but as a rule of thumb, anyone that I add I want to interact with them in the first week.  If I don’t, they will get axed.

That’s my new rule, but you can make your own as long as it keeps you organized.

Conclusion

It takes time to clean up your profiles, and I know that we all don’t have much of it.  However, it is really worthwhile to go through your networks from time to time and just clean them up, or I guess you could just manage them better from the start.  Either way, keeping your network manageable lets you build better and stronger connections with the people you friend online.

Image by juhansonin

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 FriendFeed to get some of these links throughout the week.

• Remove Yourself From Twitter Lists Created by Others
• 10 Link Building & Tracking Tools for SEO – Online Marketing Blog
• Social Media & PR Strategy in 3 Steps
• 15 Most Popular Facebook Desktop Applications
• 6 Twitter Apps for Marketing Your Business
• Curing Social Media Burnout | Convince & Convert News | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert
• How social media optimisation is useful?

A few days ago, I shared some Google Wave invites on LostInTechnology.  I have a few left, and I want to share the rest with all of my readers at UpYourSocial. In order to receive an invite, complete the following 2 steps.

• Join the newly created UpYourSocial Facebook Fan Page
• Leave a comment telling me you joined

That’s it. I will send the invites out until they are gone.  I look forward to having more people to talk to on Google Wave.

Just a few hours ago, I launched my first ever LostInTechnology Holiday Gift List.  After I finished making that list, I thought that I should make one for my readers at UpYourSocial, because my readers here need gift ideas as well.

The list I built for UpYourSocial only contains books, but that’s because books are always a great Christmas gift, especially when they teach you a lot about social media.  The books I’ve recommended are all fantastic and will surely please any social media addict you might know.  You can click on the widget below or go straight to the UpYourSocial Recommended Reading Store.

Disclosure: The store was made using the Amazon Affiliate Program.

Image by Mr Wabu