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| Image courtesy of rafiki270 on DeviantArt CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Choose three of the Social
Media Tools presented on this website to try. Post links to your attempts.
Share your thoughts about which new social media tools will reach audiences
most effectively. Explain your rationale.
Of the sixteen social media tools described on the AIDS.gov
website page “New Media Tools,” I will be exploring six: Social Network Sites,
Blogs, Twitter, Social Bookmarking, Photo sharing Sites, and Widgets. I already
have personal experience with the first three classifications of tool, and I
have tried out the last three for purposes of this blog post.
Social Network Sites
I have existing social network accounts with Facebook,
Google+, and LinkedIn. I use each in different ways: Facebook for personal
contact with family, close work colleagues, and friends; Google+ for connection
with groups about shared interests and for less personal acquaintances; and
LinkedIn for current and former work connections and professional networking.
My Facebook account is more private, personal, and informal—I don’t grant
access to that to my students, strangers, or people that I don’t know on close
terms. I am more open about my Google+ page, allowing some of my posts there to
be posted publicly and adding less personal connections to my “circles,”
although that is still a less formal site with some content only shared privately. I also have a publicly available LinkedIn
page, but that is much more formal in tone and more limited in scope
(career-related information only).
Facebook: [private]
Blog
In addition to this blog for a graduate communications
program, I maintain a blog about cyberculture and digital technology. As I
have, over the past year, been experimenting with a variety of wearable
computing devices and personal digital gadgets, I christened this blog
“Augmented Me.” Although I have not been able to create one-tenth the content I
would have liked to—between my full-time job, graduate studies, home
improvement projects, and family life as the father of two young daughters—I have
taught myself quite a bit about blogging, image attribution, and SEO techniques
during my time working on this side project.
Augmented Me blog: http://www.augmented-me.com/
Twitter
I created a Twitter account in conjunction with my blog. It
is intended not as a personal account but as a space for both promoting my blog
and sharing links and information about topics related to digital technology
and cyberculture. I have followed tech blogs, select media sites, and
influential figures in the industry as a way of keeping my finger on the pulse
of the emerging wearables space.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AugmentedMe
Social Bookmarking
Using Pinterest as a visual bookmarking medium, I set up a
new account today for my Augmented Me blog. I created two boards: one for me to
organize bookmarks to my own blog posts and a second for pins to interesting
pages related to wearable technology (a topic related to the blog).
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/augmentedm/
Photo Sharing Sites
I created a Flickr account under my blog name and uploaded
several initial photos. I had to set up a Yahoo! Account to create my Flickr
page, but that only took a few moments. I was unable to figure out how to
customize my Flickr URL, however, so (at least for the moment) I have an
awkward and cumbersome link.
Widgets
I discovered a Pinterest widget page and am experimenting
with them on this blog. One widget is designed to embed a single pin on a
website:
Another widget I found shows up to 30 of the user’s most
recent pins:
Most Effective Social
Media Tool?
Each of these social media tools has a group of dedicated
users, and each has the potential to be discovered by internet users from links
or web search. However, if one were to use only a single tool, blogs seem the most ideal
resource for sharing ideas because of their ease of access, more developed content,
and ability to incorporate several multimedia elements in one post. Social
media networks are more likely to have access limited by privacy settings, and
they are less likely to be found from a search engine request than blogs. They
are also typically brief, with even the longest not more than a few paragraphs.
Twitter is, of course, limited to 140 characters; although a tweet may
incorporate an image, blogs can contain numerous pictures, as well as video and
other content. Images are useful, but they can be incorporated in blogs;
widgets, too, are also useful but also work well within blog posts. Social
bookmarking sites are great tools for finding other content—which, again, can
take the form of a blog post.
The best way to reach an audience, of course, would be to
maximize the number of tools used to publicize one's message. I would begin with a blog post with solid
content, eye-catching images (preferably of my own creation, hosted on my own
Flickr account), and useful widgets, which I would share via social networks,
bookmark sites like Pinterest, and a Twitter update.
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