Top Five Things I Tell Media Makers To Do To Promote Stories on Social Media

1. Archival content around breaking news events: You have it. Use it. Push to social media when something happens/changes. (Just like the obit system for news.) Crosspost on Reddit, G+, Facebook or Twitter as you like. Or all four if you have the wherewithal. 

   Priorities: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, G+, in that order. If it's a techy story, post link to Techmeme. If politics, to Drudge or any other blog that might be interested. HuffingtonPost/Aol. are still good traffic drivers - as are Yahoo. The more marketing, the better. You know your local audience better than I do - whatever you read should be where we send your story. 

2. Three-five tweets per story per day. Quote, Fact, Headline + Link. This should be about 20% of your content; but try not to tweet more than 25 link-type posts per day. Go wild on engagement and talking to your fans when you have time. Be very obvious about activity windows (eg 'we're tweeting now'; we're not tweeting now should be obviously different.) 

3. Facebook - every hour is the maximum. Once a day is the minimum. If you need to know details on how to post to Facebook correctly, here are instructions by me: http://j.mp/Inw1Mi 

   A few things need to be updated but ... you'll figure that out. Hopefully. 

   A note: post-timeline, you'll get a lot more traction from photos than anything else you do. They're definitely more sharable, and more likely to actually go viral on the site while crediting you. 

4. Things to remember: 

   a. Make sure [collective we] own the photo or that it's licensed creative commons and you have linked to the original owner. 

   b. Shorten the URL that you post in the photo description. 

   c. If your piece is old but you're resharing it via the photo, make sure you set the date properly, then go back to it on the timeline and reshare it on your page. (Post photo. Set date, description, time. If that pushes it retroactive, find it on the timeline and reshare to your page with a note about 'remembering when'). We do this so things are in order - for an experiment we may conduct this fall. 

5. Know your content: If something happens that's tangential to the story, link to the breaking piece first, then link to your piece about it. If you have the space/ resources, write a post on your blog about it, linking to both pieces, and directing traffic to the appropriate place to listen to the rest of the story as it develops.

Stained glass @ The Cloisters

iPhones enhance misspelling. 3128050115

Mass Twittering Questions: Ever wanted to sit down, write tweets and then forget about it?

Hootsuite and Socialflow do this in a couple of quirky Excel spreadsheets. Hootsuite is buggy but eventually works (the support forum is endless) - I generally have had trouble getting the timing function to work properly because of my own errors. Socialflow works much the same way, though its message template can be harder to find and it can trigger an issue with a lot of your other content (proceed with caution). 

Custom tagging & instaRSS: Making @delicious do the dirty work

The goal is to allow a group of people to contribute diverse (not-just-your brand) content to one RSS feed, which in turns feeds your social media platform. This, in turn, diversifies and expands the reach of your Twitter account and adds a dynamic element to it.

A)      Sign up for delicious. (delicious.com)

B)      Install Chrome plugin. (Chrome App Store in browser Find ‘Delicious Bookmarks Extension Beta from AVOS’; install)

C)      Come up with obscure but memorable tag for content.

D)      Open new tab; go to google reader/ news site. Tag three things on same ‘theme’ (eg green, books, aliens, graphic novels) (I use kgnerd – looks like this:http://delicious.com/kategardiner/kgnerd )

E)      Copy the ‘public’ RSS feed (should look like: http://delicious.com/rss/kategardiner/kgnerd)

F)      Paste into your distribution platform.

G)     Set up feed.

H)      Add Prefix/postfix ([From the Archives] or (via @username)

I)         Continue tagging in delicious. 

This is every tech/journo job I've seen posted in the past 10 days on a client's page. #recessionsnotoverbutending

Several of my current/former clients are hiring! It's magical. All of them create newsy content, some moreso than others, and in various media. I am happy to provide what little insight I can but really reach out to the people *you* know at these organizations for more info. 

Social Media? It's for the chickens

Random-but-fun:

Every year we buy a few dozen hens to add to the chicken coop back on the home farm. As we like variety - and don't mind intermingling, we go sort of crazy picking various chickens. Which brings me to this year's experiment: crowd sourcing chicken picks. 

To participate: 

Go to this catalogue of chickens. http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html

Pick one or two chicks that you think we should add to the flock on the farm. 

We will order them in late March, and then photo document their development.

The internet (and we) will be amused.  

My poor dog, Calvin, may've been spotted near the Nippersink Creek in Genoa City. I really, really hope it was him.

Calvin, our Personal Rin Tin Tin, MIA (Lake Geneva, Wisconsin) (cc @susanorlean)

Hey @pet_amber_alert: Calvin, Lake Geneva Wisconsin, Border Collie, has gone missing. Can you help us find him?

My thoughts on the impact of Steve Jobs...

There are hundreds of pieces about the impact of Steve Jobs' vision on technology -- on objects that facilitate the consumption of interactive multimedia. They are a big part of what he, and Apple, have done for us -- and they exist quantitatively.

But what's harder to explore is his, and his company's, impact on creativity - the actual act of creation - from a technological perspective as much as a visual one. 

Apple computers, and the software that has been written for them, have shaped, created, crafted the way we work online and offline. They have changed the way we are inspired. 

Jobs' gadgets have managed to make the act of creation within technology something we can all do - something that's cool to do - freeing our ideas from technological hurdles and facilitating the act of discovery, development and creation far beyond our expectations as technologists, creatives, and digital consumers. 

Steve Jobs built computers for the people who should use them - those who need to use them to explore, create, understand and shape the world around them. It was a unique way of building a product, and the impact of his 'should' on the world of technology will be felt for generations to come.