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!
Meet Wael Ghonim, Google’s MENA executive and the mastermind behind the above mentioned Facebook page. He was “kidnapped” by Egyptian authorities and recently released.
Gone are the days where only power and money controlled the media. Nowadays, people like you and I have our share. Read how few talented and devoted activists made #Gaza trend worldwide on Twitter to raise awareness about essential human rights violations by Israel.
Blogs speak loud.
The internet became the most efficient medium used by minority and oppressed groups. Take the lesbian and gay community in Lebanon as an example. Bekhsoos, a queer Arab magazine published weekly by Meem, gives a strong voice to Lebanese and Arab lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals. The Lebanese LGBT Media Monitor provides daily news feed read by more than 3000 fans on Facebook.
Then comes censorship.
No wonder the internet is the first to go down during uprisings (example Egypt, Iran and Tunisia) and social media is censored by many ruling regimes. The “Enemies of the Internet” list drawn up in 2010 by Reporters Without Borders presents the worst violators of freedom of expression on the Net: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam.
However, censorship is often futile. Look at how censorship helped a site like WikiLeaks become a global movement changing politics the way we know it, to say the least. Listen to why the world needs Wikileaks, by Julian Assange on Ted.
My Point!
The point I am trying to make is that social media is becoming a necessity. You need to hop on if you have not yet. It is an essential tool for free speech, spreading awareness, connecting people and gathering support for causes that you might otherwise feel detached from, like sexual aggression against womyn in The Congo or gay and lesbian rights in the Arab world.
I joined Twitter motivated by fear of lagging behind. I thought if 175,000,000 are on it then I should too. Initially, I could not understand the point behind twittering, but I still tweeted. This has changed significantly. THere is much more to Twitter than I ever conceptualized. Few weeks ago I attended a medical “symposium” or “chat” about Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease on Twitter, hosted by #MDchat in conjunction with Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Alzheimer’s Association. I even used Twitter to chat with tech support of GoToMeeting to troubleshoot a problem. A great part of my human rights activism is done on Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. This brings me back to my point:
A flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Beirut can cause a typhoon in Tokyo.
Typing a word can be the flutter.
All you need for change is a keyboard. What are you waiting for?
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.
