Posts Tagged ‘Foursquare’

A personal assistant to manage your social networks!?

Posted: February 17, 2011 in Social Media
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You do not need a personal assistant to manage your growing list of social networks. Here are few tips that might help you multitask:

1. Use the same username for all your accounts. Many providers allow you to sign in using a Facebook or Email account. (Yahoo and Quora, to name a few.)

2. Use same or similar passwords for all your accounts. For better security, consider coding your passwords. Let’s say your password for Gmail is “123G”. Make your password for Twitter “123T”, for Facebook “123F” and so on.

3. Network your different networks. Most providers allows you to connect your account to other sites. For example, when I upload a video on YouTube, a link is automatically sent to my Google Buzz, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

4. Consider using a social media dashboard to help you manage all your accounts. I prefer Hootsuite which manages my personal and volunteer Twitter accounts, my personal and volunteer Facebook pages, my Linkedin, and Foursquare among others. Hootsuite can translate any text to any language. This comes handy when I want to Tweet in Arabic.

I have to say though, I am an amateur when it comes to social networking. With only 256 followers on Twitter and frequent visits to Quora to figure out how things run here, I do not claim to be an authority in this field. I just wanted to share with you few things I found helpful. Share yours!

Please comment below with more tips.

Can we survive offline!?

Posted: February 5, 2011 in Social Media
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This went viral on Twitter. Here is my clean version of it:

Photo from Flickr

Twitter: “Let us all do it!”

Foursquare: “I am doing it here.”

Quora: “Why do it?”

Facebook: “I did it.”

Youtube: “Watch me do it.”

Linkedin: “I do it well.”

So if it is all done there, can we still survive offline? The change is happening so fast, you almost feel you are always behind.

My parents did not have internet. “I am on the phone” could only mean “I am talking on the phone”.

Their parents did not have cell phones. “I can’t reach her” could only mean “She is not home”.

Their grandparents did not have home phones. “I gotta drive there”

Their grand-grandparents did not have cars. To go meet someone in the city was considered “traveling”.

So now we e-meet someone on Facebook, socialize on Twitter, geotrack their daily activities on Foursquare, look up their house on Google maps, check their Curriculum Vitae on Linkedin, listen to their favorite music on Ping, and meet their family and friends on Flickr. All this before we even “meet” them.

So is this a curse or a blessing? It can be a double-edged sword. The cons are obvious: issues related to privacy, addiction, paradoxical isolation to name a few. In my following post I will discuss what else social media has to offer, how to make the best out of it and  how to manage multiple accounts without investing additional time.

Stay tuned!