Share / SML Network Theory

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
—Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Habit 5

”Seek first to share, then to be shared.
Seek first to like, then to be liked.”
—SML Network Theory

I know a lot of people (artists in particular) who are completely dumbfounded by social media. Following the advice of their friends, they signed up on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on Flickr, on LinkedIn, because their friends told them that if they sign onto one of these networks they will gain exposure.

Yes, you will. But you need to participate. Simply creating a Facebook account and a page and not participate in anything is much like appearing on an island in the middle of nowhere and expect travel tours to flight over as a travel destination.

If you talk about other people and be interested in other people’s work, people will be curious about your work in return. The same philosophy opined by Covey is the same in social media.

But be sincere about it — often I see companies / brands / people liking all kinds of random things in hopes of gaining followers. You won’t go far. You might be able to fool the dumb search bots in hopes of gaining linkbacks via SEO but ultimately humans are the ones who care about your content. If you want people to care, then care about others. Never follow accounts in hopes of being followed back.

That tactic is seen all over Twitter. I see it all the time—they follow you, as soon as you follow, they send you a direct message as spam and then unfollow immediately—it was so annoying that I have stopped seeing who is following me anymore. I blame that unhealthy number-game on Twitter to the promptly displayed stats. And is the number 1 reason why I suggest companies to not actively display stats visibly on people’s profile as it creates an unhealthy ecology.

In the hayday of social media analytics, the follower/following ratio is often used to calculate one’s influence and thus popularity. If being well-read is a sign of intellectual maturity, then one must question how logical that influence analytics data really is. Thus you will see that better analytics engines such as Klout calculates influence based on engagement, and I think that kind of calculation is much more accurate.

/ SML.20121230.PHIL
/ #smlphil #ccby #seeminglee #smluniverse #smlnet #smlopinions #smlanalytics
/ #network #theory #socialmedia #facebook #likes #twitter #flickr #LinkedIn #Klout #philosophy #marketing #strategy #opinions #analysis #analytics #influence #engagement
/ #HongKong #HK #China #CN

How to use Gmail filters to maintain sanity with social media

One of the unfortunate side-effects when you belong to many social networks and subscribe to many listserv is the insane amount of emails you get on a daily basis. In this tutorial, I will illustrate how you can track these activities at your own pace and keeping your inbox tidy and maintaining an overall sanity in your very active technologically sound life.

Gmail Filters, in conjunction with Gmail Labels is all you need to achieve this. And is very simple to use as illustrated below:

How to maintain a clutter free Gmail Inbox

This example illustrate how to take out those Twitter follow invites from your Inbox while allowing you to review them at your own pace.

1. Start by selecting Create a filter next to the search box.

2. In the Subject: field, enter "is now following you on Twitter!" and press Next Step > to continue.

3. Now choose the action you want to apply. You can do anything you want to it, but this is the common things that I do:

3A. Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it). This ensures that it will not show up in your inbox when it arrives.

3B. Create a new label in the Apply the label dropdown, or select an existing label that you would like to apply.

3C. If you are creating a new label, you might want to Also apply filter to conversations below. I guess I had 5000 follows on Twitter since I started using Gmail. Now *that* would be insane if I didn't use Gmail filters!

Don't be alarm if you think that you will never see them again since you have skip the inbox, they still show up in your filter list, and unread items still show up as bold.

I use Gmail filters for pretty much everything, and auto-archive most of the stuff that goes into my inbox, leaving it clutter-free only with important stuff that I need to get to. Here's a list of examples of where you would want to auto-filter:

Gmail filters examples

1. Social network activites. I label all of these with a prefix soc: so they are grouped together nicely in the filter list. Aardvark, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, or whatever. All gone. Best of all and especially for Facebook activities, I usually can just take a quick glance at the list titles to note the things that require actions, then select all and Mark as Read.

2. Listserv. Do you subscribe to a lot of listserv? Anyone of those IxDA list will turn your inbox into a nightmare!

3. Magazine subscription. I enjoy some of the publication alerts like MKQ and WSJ but they get scary very soon. I like keeping these as email items instead of just reading them in list readers so I can search for them later.

4. Google Alerts. Comes in thousands. Good to know when your stuff get blogged etc. This is especially useful if you license your content via Creative Commons.

5. Keywords. Some times come through in multiple places and does not have a particular subject / email address. Use keywords to bundle them up together.

6. Email addresses. Gmail support retrieving other external accounts. So you can use the same strategy to check your other mails, and also apply labels where necessary.

TwitterFeed = Great RSS to Twitter Tool

TwitterFeed (Twitter:twfeed) is a useful service which pumps RSS feeds to your Twitter account.

I tested out the server a couple of weeks ago because I wanted a separate feed for some more focus tweets, namely, for SML BW (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter), SML Fine Art (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter) and SML Graphic Design (Flickr Group / FriendFeed / Twitter).

Another reason I'm doing this is because, oh, my friends on Twitter was complaining that I tweet too much. So now I can be tweeting without getting massive unfollows: I think that interesting things deserve to be seen and heard. There are more than enough talented people scattered around the Net that are super-talented and waiting to be discovered. So for those who don't mind the extra infos, follow @smlbw (black and white photography), @smlfineart (art), and @smlgfxdesign (graphic design) which is an accumulation of stuff I blogged as well as the super talented folks who post to the Flickr pool. Since Twitter is not inherently visual, it might be easier to follow their Friendfeeds (links above).

TwitterFeed lets you connect separate Twitter Feed with different accounts, which is uber useful because that means that I don't have to create multiple accounts to do that. Additionally it allows you to use a myriad of URL-shortener services. I use bit.ly because it reports analytics data, but you can use pretty much anything available in the market.

If you are feeding with a FeedBurner feed, it gives you additional insights into the feed clicks as well, but it does not work with Feedburner's default settings:



In order to get TwitterFeed to report traffic data, go to Publicize > Awareness API and activate it.



After activating the FeedBurner Awareness API, TwitterFeed successfully captures click data via Feedburner vs bit.ly — which is useful if you are an uber data freak like me!



Related SML
+ SML Delicious: Tools
+ SML Flickr Tags: Tools
+ SML Pro Blog: Tools
+ SML Pro Blog: Twitter

Color Wars 2008

As reported by Mashable, the color war on Twitter is the latest collaborative fun to show your support for your favorite color.

Apparently how this thing works is you go through the list of color teams that exist, decide which one you want to back, and then follow that color. You get to choose between red, green, yellow, blue, orange, pink, gold, off-white, plaid, fuscia, clear, white, purple, stripe and puce (and Ze Frank is seemingly heavily supporting the green team)

See a list of all the teams at ColorWar2008.com



SML Universe, in association with SML AIDS and SML Life, is fully supporting the rainbowteam, because life celebrates diversity.

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.