Take a look at this great infographic created by Pingdom:

With the growth of social networking, I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate business connections and personal connections. As social networking continues to grow, I’m sure many of you are facing (or has already faced) the same dilemma.

Initially, I used to get many “friend” requests from old friends and lost contacts. However, as I’ve been increasing my online presence through blogging and “Twittering”, I’ve been seeing more and more friend requests from people I don’t know personally.

For the record – I think this is a GREAT thing as I really like connecting with new people. I’ve created great friendships and found great business partners with people I have never met physically. But at the same time, I’m now finding it difficult to see the feeds and updates of my “real” friends as opposed to my virtual friends on Facebook.

You see, I used to add all Facebook friend requests (except for the obvious spammers) but I would use the “Limited Profile” feature for people that I have not met in person. But now, as I am approaching 1,000 friends on Facebook, this method is no longer feasible.

This has led me to the “Great UnFriend” exercise for 2010. I need to set some guidelines for who I add as a friend and how to manage other virtual connections. I also need to remove contacts that were previously added that do not meet these guidelines.

I apologize if this affects you. Its nothing personal, I still want to connect with you but in way that is more practical. I’m sure many people can relate to this exercise as quite a necessity.

Here’s what I’ve come up with…

Connect Rules for Facebook and LinkedIn – I will only add people with whom:

1. I have met personally
2. I have communicated with on Skype or email
3. I have been introduced to or is recommended by an existing friend

For all other requests, we can still connect:

1. On Twitter – http://twitter.com/brianwong
2. On Facebook Public Page – http://facebook.brianwong.com
3. On my Blog by subscribing and commenting at http://brianwong.com/blog

Do you have rules and guidelines for who you add as friends on Facebook?

Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, twitter, unfriend

Twitter has finally released official “follow me” buttons to add to your blog, Facebook or MySpace page. Go ahead, check it out.

I love blogging. But, I don’t want to spend time updating all my social media sites every time I write on my blog. I just want to focus on my blog and create awesome content. But what’s the point of great content if people don’t find my blog? Argh! The dilemma. What can I do?

Enter HootSuite and Ping.FM to the Rescue.

Ping.FM allows you to notify up to 42 social media sites about your status updates, micro blog updates or blog posts. See my previous post about how to use Ping.FM like a social media ninja!

Now, with Hootsuite integration, you can have more control over your content updates AND you can track click statistics with Hootsuite’s built in analytics.

Setting It All Up

First, log into your Ping.FM account. Then go to www.Ping.FM/key and get your Ping.FM API Key.

Now, log in to your Hootsuite account. Add a new network and select Ping.FM. Enter your Ping.FM username and API key as below:

Your Hootsuite is now linked to all the social media sites you’ve setup in Ping.FM.

Tip: I purposely do not add Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Facebook Pages in Ping.FM because I want to update these main sites directly from Hootsuite and/or Seesmic Desktop. I use both these applications interchangeably.

Connect Your Blog’s RSS Feed

Next, you want Hootsuite to send your blog posts to Ping.FM automatically every time you post. To do this, click on the RSS/Atom tab in Hootsuite.

Just add your blog’s RSS feed and select the services you want it to automatically post to. In this case, make sure you include Ping.FM.

Using Hootsuite and Ping.FM

Now you can post to Ping.FM by typing in a Tweet into Hootsuite and selecting Ping.FM or just create a blog post and let the RSS feed from your blog post update all your social networks.

Either way, this is a very convenient and very powerful way of getting your content syndicated once you’ve set it all up.

But the big question is, does it work the way its deigned to work? I’ve searched high and low and nobody seems to have actually put up actual results.

So I decided to put it to the test on my social media sites. Here are the results:

Social Media Sites Updated via Hootsuite and Ping.FM

Brian Wong on Bebo: YES!

Brian Wong on Blogger: YES!

Brian Wong on BrightKite: YES!

Brian Wong on Diigo: YES!

Brian Wong on Facebook Pages: YES! But this is a direct posting from HootSuite and not part of Ping.FMs update.

Brian Wong on Friendster: YES!

Brian Wong on FriendFeed: YES! But this not from Ping.FM. It is updated indirectly as FriendFeed picks up my feeds from Twitter and from my blog directly. There is a delay of an hour or so for the feed to get updated.

Brian Wong on HI5: YES!

Brian Wong on identi.ca: YES!

Brian Wong on Jaiku: NO!

After several tests, I found that Ping.FM was not updating my Jaiku account for all the type of status updates. I’m still not sure why.

Brian Wong on Koornk: YES!

Brian Wong on LiveJournal: YES! (But posts show up with no subjects)

Brian Wong on Multiply: YES! (all posts show up under “Notes”)

Brian Wong on MySpace: YES!

Brian Wong on MyYearBook: YES! But I am thinking of removing myself from this network. Just like Tagged, I get a lot of unsavory requests and the site looks like its for horny teenagers. I basically just turn off all email communications in my settings.

Brian Wong on Ning.com: YES!

Brian Wong on Plaxo Pulse: YES! But updated via a direct connection between Plaxo and Twitter

Brian Wong on Plurk: YES!

Brian Wong on Posterous: YES!

Brian Wong on Presently: YES!

Brian Wong on Shout’em: YES!

Brian Wong on StreetMavens.com: YES!

Brian Wong on Tagged: NO! (I suspect this site is a cest pool for perverts and adult services. Since signing up, I get a lot of unsavory requests. Am going to leave this account dormant or remove myself)

Brian Wong on Tumblr: YES!

Brian Wong on Twitter: YES! This is a direct update from Hootsuite and not from Ping.FM

Brian Wong on TypePad: YES!

Brian Wong on Utterli: YES!

Brian Wong on VOX: YES!

Brian Wong on Xanga: YES! Updates appear under the “Pulse” section.

Brian Wong on Yahoo Meme: YES!

Brian Wong on Yahoo Profiles: YES!

Brian Wong on Yammer: YES!

Brian Wong on YouAre.com: YES!

Conclusion

As you can see from my little experiment, the success rate of posting to multiple social media sites at once is pretty impressive. I definitely think that Ping.FM and Hootsuite makes a very powerful combination. I especially like the added advantage of being able to view the results of each post via the analytics provided by Hootsuite. So go ahead and register for Hootsuite and Ping.fm

Want more test results? Subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

Please ReTweet this post. I’ve made it easy with a one click-button below. The Tweet and URL links will all be inserted for you. Your followers will appreciate your willingness to share. :)

Technorati Tags: hootsuite, ping.fm, social media sites

Chances are you have more than 1 social media presence and that number will keep growing. Twitter and Facebook are most likely. You may also have a blog or Tumblr site. Perhaps you’re into photography and have a Flickr or PhotoBucket account. If you’re a social media Ninja like me, then you may have well over a hundred social media sites under your name.

Ok, before you say that I’m crazy to maintain so many social media sites, and that I have too much time on my hands – the truth is, its not as hard as you think.

There are many social media services that help you manage multiple accounts easily. I want to share one such site with you – Ping.FM. The idea behind Ping.FM is to turn a single social media update (like a status update) to multiple social media sites at once.

Getting Started

Signing up for Ping.FM is simple. Just create a free account here:
https://ping.fm/signup/

Ping.FM classifies your updates into 3 categories: Status Updates, Micro-Blogging and Blogging. Depending on what you post, Ping.FM can automatically submit these updates to 46 other social media sites.

Adding Social Media Sites

Now comes the tedious part. You need to start adding accounts that you want linked to Ping.FM. The good news is, you only need to do this once.

Adding each account is mostly adding your username and password for each of your social media services. Some services require additional info like API keys.

When you add these sites, some of them will allow you to specify whether to include them in the 3 categories of updates mentioned earlier. For example, in MySpace, you can specify whether you wish to include updates categorized as “Status updates”, “Micro-blogs” and even if you want to allow “Photos” to be posted to your MySpace page.

I just check every option because I want EVERYTHING to be updated. But that’s totally up to you.

Using Ping.FM

Ok now that you’ve linked Ping.FM to all your social media sites, its time to create a post. You can choose the type of post you want to add. For example, If you select “Micro-blogs”, then only those services that you have checked to allow “Micro-blogs” will update. As mentioned earlier, I selected all the options so I can leave my Ping.FM update as “default”.

Additionally, you can select to post the update to a single service by using the drop down menu. For example, you can select “@be” to ONLY post to your Bebo account and not the others.

Lastly, you could click “create a group” to create groups of social sites to update at once instead of all.

These posting options gives you a great deal of flexibility in how you wish to update your social media sites.

So posting is quite simple. Select what you are posting (or leave it on “default”), type your update and hit “Ping it!”. Your post will be updated to up to 46 different social media sites at once.

Posting by Email

When you register at Ping.FM, you will be given a “secret” email address that allows you to post updates via email. When you send an email to update your sites, you can again use the preset commands like “@be” to only update one service or use the “#” commands for groups you’ve created.

Advanced Ping.FM Usage

Now I don’t actually use the Ping.FM interface to manage my accounts. I use several other software services that integrates with the Ping.FM API and this makes managing all these social media sites even easier.

In fact, I have my blog automated to be syndicated to all these social media sites (see the icons on my Ping.FM site below) without having me to do anything. If you’d like to learn more about how to do this, let me know. Leave a comment,subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

Technorati Tags: ping.fm

I do wonder if it helped Sony sell any more laptops or if it had the opposite effect? What do you think?

How does this work? You search for a keyword or location and a dynamic scrolling area will appear among your search results. This area delivers relevant results will be displayed. This search is made possible via its partnership with social media websites like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca and of course – Twitter.

Take a look at how this feature could be useful to you in this video:

While the idea is great in theory, in reality it kinda feels like a celebrity tabloid magazine on steroids at the moment.

If you want to try it out, the way to do it now is to visit Google Trends and click on the trending topics.

So what is hot right now?

You guessed it. Tiger Woods.

Now we get to see the blow by blow as more of Tiger’s “transgressions” gets reported in the news. And most of the time, its not news. It’s someone commentary on the whole affair. It’s like extracting the gossip directly out of people’s brains?

Sigh! I guess there are some things that you can always count on in human nature. That is the morbid fascination of watching other people fall from grace.

The only difference is now, we get to use high tech for it.

Technorati Tags: google, real time search

In this case, some bright spark at an ad agency designed a way for Ikea to use their existing inventory and an existing feature in Facebook – photo tagging to start a viral campaign.

Aside from the idea, there’s really no additional advertising cost for this campaign aside from giving away one item from each their showroom photos.

I like this concept very much. I first learned about this from Jay Abraham where he talks about hidden assets and opportunities in your business. Its basically making money out of nothing (more accurately, out of assets you already own).

So here’s the campaign that they ran:

What do you think? Pretty neat huh?

Now, think of the smart they are. The campaign is over. Their cost is just giving out some furniture. Now they make the video above and post it on YouTube.

The result, they’ve got people like me talking about their innovation now. As of writing, the video above has had over 68,000 views in just a week.

This case study will be the example used by marketing specialists, professors, journalists..etc for a long time to come. Each time, it brings up the company brand name again and again.

So essentially, the campaign has taken on a life of its own and lives on to promote the Ikea brand, long after the actual work of running the campaign is over.

Conclusion: Genius!

Technorati Tags: photo tagging, facebook, ikea

But when it comes to Facebook, its a little tricky. That’s because you can have a Facebook Profile page and a Facebook Public Profile page a.k.a. Facebook Fan Pages.

Because your Facebook “Friends” are different from your “Fans” – a common question I get asked is how to automatically post an update to Facebook Fan Pages instead of the Facebook Profile Page.

This is very powerful because your blog posts will be broadcast to the activity stream of your fans and if they comment or “like” the link, it will then be broadcast to all of their friends stream creating much welcomed syndication to your blog post.

Overview:

Now, I couldn’t find a WordPress plugin that could post directly to my Facebook Fan Page, so here’s the workaround using a Twitter plugin and a Facebook App.

Setting it Up:

1. First, download the TwitPress plugin and install the TwitPress plugin on your blog.
2. Add the Selective Twitter Status.app to your Fan Page. Note, please make sure you choose whether you want to add the app to your profile page or your fan pages. Then go through the “grant permissions” process to allow this app to post to your Fan Page Status stream.

Making it Work:

Here You have two choices. If you want ALL your blog posts to be automatically posted to your Facebook Fan Page, then just add the “#fb” tag in the Twitpress plugin edit menu.

Now, all of your posts will have the “#fb” added to the permalink and will appear on your Facebook Fan Page automatically as a status update.

Now, if you want to DECIDE which posts to add to your Facebook Fan Page each time you post, here’s what to do:

1. After composing your blog post, click on the Edit Permalink option below the post title
2. Add the “#fb” text to the end of your permalink

That’s it.

Hope it answers your questions on this issue. If you like these kind of tutorials, please:
1. Follow me on Twitter
2. Follow me on Facebook
3. Subscribe to this blog

And if you like, please retweet this post. :)

Technorati Tags: facebook, wordpress, twitter

I would love to send you an invite but I only have limited invites. And only if you have a good use for it. No point for it to just be left idle. Right?

So, if you would like an invite to use Google Wave, please leave a comment here about why you want it and how you can make productive use with it. Cool? :)

If you need to know what Google Wave is, here’s some info:

http://brianwong.com/blog/is-the-world-ready-for-google-wave/

Also, when you register to comment, use your Gmail address so I can send you the invite :)

Technorati Tags: wave, google