I have a new social media friend and no, I’m not talking about the tons of random friends requests you get on a daily basis. I’m talking about a piece of social networking software that can help you get your arms around the online social scene. I’m talking about Flock, the web browser that’s based off the Mozilla project.

I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Here’s a short video I came across that explains some of the new features in Adsense for search. Custom search can be a great way to integrate another method of monetization into your site. It’s also a great way to help visitors find what they’re looking for on your website.

Personally, I like the fact that Google is moving a direction that lets publishers (that’s you and me) decide how they want to customize search widgets to best serve their blog visitors. It is a real good step in the right direction for Google and for website owners.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com 

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Recently Paul Collier, author of “The Bottom Billion”, gave a talk on Ted.com where he outlined a high level plan to improve the lives of what he calls the “Bottom Billion” of people who live in developing countries and are unable to affect change to improve their situation given the current political and economic systems.

What Mr. Collier discusses is fascinating not only from a real world stand point, but his ideas also have some interesting implications in the online social networking world as well.

If you are unclear how to best use social networking sites or unsure of the direction of these sites, then watch this short video about the great need for social interaction among real world groups and you will begin to get a sense of how these systems might effect change on society and business online.

“Paul Collier studies the political and economic problems of the very poorest countries: 50 societies, many in sub-Saharan Africa, that are stagnating or in decline, and taking a billion people down with them. His book The Bottom Billion identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape, with a mix of direct aid and external support for internal change.

From 1998 to 2003, Collier was the director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group; he now directs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, where he continues to advise policymakers.”

Source: Paul Collier’s Profile on Ted.com

Leave me a comment after you watch this video and tell me how you think his ideas apply to social media and online social networking in general.

Speak soon,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Coming up this weekend is the World Internet Summit in Dallas. In case you haven’t heard of this event, it’s one of the premium places to go to connect with other Internet marketers and find joint venture partners. There will also be a list of well known “guru” marketers there that will be presenting information on how to make money online.

Here’s a pre-event video describing what you will see at the summit.

Get More Information About The World Internet Summit in Dallas

If you plan to attend, here’s a few things that I suggest you take along.

• Your laptop (this should be obvious)
• Laptop power cord and spare battery (again, obvious)
• Business Cards (print them at home if you don’t have any)
• A Camera for photo opportunities (you’ll put these on your blog later)
• A backpack to carry what you bring and what you take home.
• An audio recorder or video camera (if they are allowed)
• A friend, they will hear all the things you miss and you can speak well of each other in front of other people.

Be sure to make a list of items before you go to help you remember everything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attended various events only to find out I forgot something.

You might have your own personal list of items that you like to bring to events so be include those in the list as well. Check everything off before you go and you’ll have a much better time.

The Dallas event is four full days worth of information which is nothing compared to the extremely low cost. If you’re in the Dallas area and plan to attend, let me know. I’d love to connect with you and get your thoughts about Open Source Marketer.

Waiting patiently,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Think you can’t do it?

Think Again!

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If you run any type of offline events to promote your blog, and you collect phone numbers from your meeting participants, then you might want to take a look at phonevite.com. This handy service helps you automate your call list so all you have to do is record your event announcements once and then have them broadcast to your call list automatically. This would even work if you had an online membership base that provided you with their phone numbers.

The basic service offers 25 calls for free and the Premium service offers calls at a nickel per call. You can even schedule calls in the future. So, you can record a message, schedule it to go out at a preset time, and then forget about it.

The best part of the process is that it’s your voice and your message. So, the person who receives the call will hear your voice, but you don’t have to make a hundred calls to get a voice message distributed. It’s genius!

I promote Open Source Marketer through offline events using Meetup.com and you can bet that I’ll be using this service to remind participants about upcoming events, remind them to leave feedback on past events, and to interest them in speaking at future events.

If your concerned about do not call lists or people not liking automated messages, remember this is just one tool that you can use to communicate with people. If you let them know ahead of time and tell them why you use the service, then they will be open to it. And as always, don’t add people to your list that you don’t have an active relationship with. Keep your list clean and responsive and tools like this will serve you well.

Remember, it’s your voice, your ideas, and your message. Make it unique and make it available to those who will listen.

Being creative,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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