My husband and I adopted a three-month old puppy from K-9 Lifesavers this weekend and my productivity has severely suffered since, due in a large part to sleep deprivation. But she’s taught me a few things in the last few days so in homage to the old school posters “All I need to know about life I learned from my dog” here is my social media addition.
One toy isn’t nearly enough
Tesla and her toys
When she came home Sunday night she didn’t know what toys were, but now lies upon a mound of toys and sometimes tries to fit several in her mouth at time.
Social media has all kinds of toys – there are the primary services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, etc., but also a wide array of applications to integrate the various social networks though the web, desktop or your mobile phone. For instance Twitter services include:
TweetDeck – a desktop application that allows you to divide your contacts or lists up into columns for easy sorting. Easily integrates with Facebook and foursquare and is also available for the ipad or iphone.
HootSuite – Offers both free and paid versions and allows you to manage a number of different profiles with a plethora of features such as influence tracking, scheduled tweets and integration with a wealth of social media networks including Facebook, MySpace, Linked In and WordPress. Also available for iPhone and Android.
Twimbow – a brand new application for which you still need to request a test profile. Their big selling point is color-coding, allowing you to assign a color to each contact as well as keywords or search terms. They are still rolling out features so check out their blog for their current offering and watch for new releases.
There is an endless array of other applications for both Twitter and other networks; the best thing to do is play with the few and figure out what works best for you.
Tear up those newspapers
I hate to say it, but I got a newspaper solely for the purpose of house-training, as I haven’t read my news in paper-form for years. Funny enough the puppy has no use for the paper either. That’s not to say she’s anywhere near house-trained, but she would rather shred the paper than use it any other way. I hate to knock the hardworking people in the newspaper industry, but the reality is newspapers are just old news. By the time something is printed it has already circulated the web and many people are on to something else, or at least the latest headline in that story, which you guessed it, broke online.
Run with the big dogs
My older dog is about 50 pounds and the puppy can walk underneath him, but that doesn’t change the fact that she runs alongside him and jumps all over him. Apply this to social media, you might be a small fry now with only a few followers and feel intimated by some of the social media giants like Jeremiah Owyang or Wayne Sutton who have 67,000 and 30,000 followers respectively, but the wonderful thing about social media is that it is about the value you bring to the conversation. If you consistently bring value, you will see your influence grow, and pretty soon you have become one of the big dogs.
Sometimes you need a nap
This puppy makes me laugh because she is running all the over the place and then 30 seconds later she’s asleep. She also spends a lot of time watching my older dog to figure things out. Sometimes taking a step back to rest and just watch what everyone else is doing in social media can be an immense help to building your own social strategy.
Say Good Girl
The puppy is incredibly smart and learning quickly, and like most of us she responds well to positive reinforcement. Help shape the social media community by telling people when you enjoy their work and pass it on!
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[...] may have seen an earlier post of mine in which I talked about adopting a puppy. I adopted her from a group called K-9 LifeSavers [...]