Online communication is becoming central to most of our social and business lives. Face it – a laptop and smart phone/iPhone are the tools we use these days. It used to be the traditional telephone and the mail box, but now we have a lot of different ways to “explode” our messages, “go viral” and keep large groups of people updated.

The problem is… it’s really difficult to figure out what tools to use and how to stick to some habits and processes.

Here are five of my favorite tools/processes (I don’t have any affiliation with these co’s – I’m just an online tinkerer):

1)       Ping.fm – I use Ping.fm to update business messages to a variety of different social media/business platforms. I use the ping.fm toolbar to share stories that I find useful with my Twitter, Plaxo and LinkedIn groups. I find that some people are more active on certain networks, and I don’t want to have to manually update everyone separately. Ping.fm works great for this. I don’t update my primary Facebook page with this tool because those are mostly “social” friends in there. But I do have it set up to update my QualityWriter fan page.. which is really a nascent thing. There’s a good article about the best ways to set up Ping.fm here. Chris Brogan and ProBlogger Darren Rowse have good articles about how to structure your information sharing hub with a “home base” and “outposts.” They’re worth checking out for strategy purposes.

2)      Eye.fi – This is an SD memory card that goes into my digital camera. It stores photos and has a built-in Wi-Fi antenna (I’m amazed at how small the technology is – looks just like a regular SD card!). Whenever I arrive at my local network/home wireless network, Eye.fi auto-downloads all my photos and videos to folders on my computer and automatically uploads them to my services (Kodak Gallery, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) based on my settings. This thing is dynamite. This has changed my photo managing habits. I now try to delete all bad photos and videos off of my camera before turning it on near my wireless network… before the “auto-up-suckage”. Another way to handle this is to use the Protect feature on your camera. Only photos that are protected are uploaded to your folders and networks.

3)      Google Voice – Google has a voice/phone service that integrates your landline and cell phone and texting into a unified “inbox”. I give out my Google Voice number to select clients and friends. When they call it, both my office phone and cell phone ring. It’s like a “Bat Phone.” From my laptop, I can SMS text my Gmail contacts (which are really all my contacts). This makes it easy to type out longer txts without doing the big-finger-blackberry thing. All messages go through my Google Voice inbox. They’re transcribed into text and emailed to me, too. I think I can have them sent as texts to my cell phone, too (not sure about this one). There are lots of other cool features – check it out, you’ll see.

4) ShareIn – If I want to update Facebook and/or Twitter friends about a story I’ve just read or a video I’ve just watched, I use ShareIn. This is a browser bookmarklet that gives you a “one click” way to do so. No more copy and paste. I wrote an article on how I came to embrace ShareIn here: How to Simplify your Social Media Life: The Pros and Cons of Posterous, Soup.io, ShareIn and FriendFeed. Ping.fm does this, too. But Ping.fm is better for touching all groups at once. ShareIn is good when you know exactly who you want to send something to – Twitter folks (who are more business for me) or Facebook (who are more social friends).

5)      Posterous – This blog/hosting services is a quick and easy to share photos, thoughts, articles, sounds and videos with friends and associates. See the “How to Simplify” link above for more of my thoughts on Posterous. Essentially, I use Posterous as a place to update close family and friends with my videos and photos of family life. I wouldn’t do this kind of in-depth posting on Facebook, because I don’t want to spam a loose group of social friends with too much cuteness, kid soccer games and such. Posterous, however, is a great place to archive stuff and allow family members to catch up. My family and friends don’t need to have an account or log in any way. It’s just my Posterous URL. Simple… and I can update it via email or the browser toolbar bookmarklet. Easy peasy.

Check out these awesome services. They’re all free – except for Eye.fi, which is a one time cha-ching (mine cost $69.99 at Amazon – with free shipping – shipping is a little steep from the main eye.fi site).

Please let me know your tips and tricks too by commenting below and sharing this post with your networks and groups. Thanks. – Phil

Participating in social media activities is like participating in any other social activity. It can be as valuable as a lunch with the boss or as vapid as a breeze shooting session at the water cooler. Or vice versa.

What follows are some highlights and lowlights from a typical day of “connecting” in my life. I find the most value appears when I’m connecting with people who help me get my job done, of course. On the other hand, some exchanges are just plain fun even though they won’t help my business right away.

For starters, I posted a question to several of my LinkedIn contacts that I know have experience in the marketing and Web development field. I was looking for a WordPress developer that could help quickly launch Word Press Web sites. I’d need the person to “turn the lights on” every time I launch a new site or have a client that wants to transition to the flexible, powerful WP platform. I quickly found a great resource (in New Zealand of all places) that’s already helping out with a rather extensive client project. In the words of Jack Davenport on Britain’s Coupling, “result!”

Next, I read a bunch of links from thought leaders and link-sharers that I admire and trust. I use Seesmic Desktop and Twitter to do this. I follow quite a few people on Twitter, but Seesmic allows me to put them into groups (I think you can do this with TweetDeck, too). I have a group called “A-List,” and this is the place where I filter out those that consistently bring useful and entertaining links, ideas and articles. This can be a major time sucker, because if you follow a lot of the thought leaders on Twitter, there are a lot of tantalizing titles flying around. I try to limit my window for this activity to an hour or less. I like to take one action idea from each piece I read and get it into my calendar or task list. That way, I’m not just admiring articles. I’m actually using information to move my business forward. I came across an article yesterday that was really intriguing, How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet (by Zee on TheNextWeb). It shows you how to use Posterous and optimize WordPress for an ultimate SEO pick-me-up. I’ll be tinkering with those tools/tips today.

Then I moved into the realm of the unproductive. I put up some pictures of our kids’ soccer games [taking very little time, mind you: 1) Eye-Fi wireless SD card takes the pictures from the camera and automatically uploads them to my computer and Kodak Gallery, 2) A quick email puts the best ones on Posterous, which 3) automatically updates to Facebook]. Everyone’s updated in a matter of minutes, and I’ve only clicked a couple of times. The videos from the camera go to YouTube automatically, as well. It’s amazing.

Next, I commented on a bunch of inane but funny Facebook friend stuff. There were some good/ugly Kanye West/Michael Jackson funeral jokes and more of those silly Hitler videos from Valkyrie, where they put in subtitles about current events. I also caught up on friend photos, videos and whereabouts. I may score a ticket to the Cal-USC football game, as a result. That would be productive!

How do you use social media for fun and profit? Any stories or tips that are useful and insightful?

One of the biggest problems with social media communication is the drudgery of sharing links, making comments and updating groups.

Several sites aim to make this process easier… namely, Posterous, Soup.io, FriendFeed and ShareIn. I’ve tried all of them, and I’d say they’re “almost ready for primetime.” Each has value, and each has significant drawbacks.

This is a quick review that’s interested in answering the question: “How can these tools make my social media life easier to manage?” I’m not so much interested in questions like, “What’s the most powerful, flexible blogging platform?” That’s another issue together (and the answer is WordPress, btw).

I’ll start with ShareIn, since it’s the simplest tool of the three. Here’s how I use it: I opened an account, dragged their bookmarklet to my Firefox bookmark toolbar, adjusted my settings in ShareIn to update my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then started selectively posting links, videos and photos to my pages via the bookmarklet. It’s useful, because if I’m reading an article and want to share it with friends without emailing it (a less invasive or interrupting method of sharing), I can do this quickly with a couple of clicks.

ShareIn places the appropriate links and images in my Twitter and Facebook feeds. I can do both at once or just do only Twitter or only Facebook. I notice that there’s a delay for image loading within my Facebook page. During this time a ShareIn logo sits in the position where the media image or photo should go. That’s slightly annoying.

When users click on the links, they’re sent to the article or media. Pretty direct and simple. There’s a ShareIn banner at the top of the web page that can be clicked closed. I’m calling it a banner, but it’s really just a strip at the top which allows users to continue to share the link on their social networks. It’s viral that way. When you close it, you’re presented with the original URL and page. Either way – open or closed – you have a nice big view of the article or media. Here’s an example of how a ShareIn link looks.

This does make sharing info easier on Twitter and Facebook. It works as advertised and has some nice back-end reporting features that show you the popularity of your posts and so forth.

I tried ShareIn because I was frustrated with Posterous’s quirky linking practices. But Posterous has some nifty features and advantages. It’s much more than ShareIn, even though it does some of the same kinds of things.

What do I mean by quirky Posterous linking? Here’s the deal. When you link to online media and articles with Posterous, the link you share is a link to your Posterous blog… not to the original article. That’s problematic for me. This linking process (and the Facebook/Twitter integration) is done via a bookmarklet in Firefox, like ShareIn, and your “share” settings within Posterous (they include more services than just Facebook and Twitter).

[BTW – Posterous is essentially a blogging service, like Soup.io, Tumblr and other blogs.. but it’s different, because it’s primarily designed to blog things that you send in via email. You send content (photos, videos, documents, etc.) to post@posterous.com, and the information is nicely posted to your Posterous blog. Mine is http://phildunn.posterous.com/. It’s quick and easy to set up. Check out the Posterous site to see more of the benefits and unique features. It’s pretty slick.]

The way Posterous links is problematic, because of the way my Twitter and Facebook followers consume information. In Facebook, for example, the peruser of my content sees a nifty graphic or photo related to the story I linked to, but the link itself goes to my Posterous page, and on that page there’s only a tiny little link that goes to the original article (it’s easy to miss it). The common experience on Facebook is to click on the link and arrive at the article or media. With Posterous posts, I’m forcing them to jump through a multiple click process – if they even see the link to the original content in the Posterous post. The same thing happens with the Twitter links that are created by Posterous.

I didn’t like that – so that’s why I ended up at ShareIn.

Posterous is great, however, for sharing family photos and videos.. and then having them automatically blast out to Twitter and Facebook friends. That feature works great. Posterous makes slick galleries of multiple photos and those show up really nicely in Facebook. If you post from YouTube that shows up nicely in Facebook, as well.

My deal is that I want one tool to make all these things happen with a minimum number of clicks. Is that so much to ask?

Soup.io is somewhat different animal. It’s like Posterous in that you can send emails to Soup.io, and they’re posted on your blog page. In a way, it’s like Posterous in reverse, however. With Soup.io, you *import* content into your blog page from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed and so forth (I didn’t see Facebook integration available). This reminds me. I want to talk a little about FriendFeed at the end of this article.. coming soon. Here’s what my Soup.io page looks like: http://phildunn.soup.io/ (admittedly, I don’t spend as much time here as I do other places).

When I set up “import” with Twitter and YouTube, for example, Soup.io grabs all my shared content on those services and shows them in my Soup.io feed. This happens automatically moving forward. I’ve yet to see a way to click the “post to soup” bookmarklet and have that content automatically update my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

So Soup.io is not quite there yet, either. All these platforms have nifty features, but they’re not quite optimal for a user like me who wants to share articles, videos, photos and personal blog info, links, etc.

I’d say ShareIn is the best option for posting online content to Twitter and Facebook. Posterous is great for posting personal photos and videos and having that propagate out to Facebook and Twitter automatically (along with a host of other platforms – you can even have it automatically update your own blog, like a WordPress blog or Blogger blog). Soup.io is good for bringing everything to one place… the problem is that you have to update all the other services separately, and that doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I want a place where I can post once and forget about visiting Twitter and Facebook until there’s some interest or discussion going on those particular platforms.

Now this brings me to FriendFeed, which is kind of a hybrid. It’s half Soup.io because it allows you to import content from a lot of your favorite sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, etc.  And it’s half Posterous, because it allows you to automatically publish (export) your FriendFeed updates to Twitter. There are currently Facebook apps that appear to enable updating of Facebook via FriendFeed, but I’ve yet to see something that looks reliable (please let me know if I’ve missed something). The intriguing thing is that Facebook recently bought FriendFeed, so there’s bound to be better integration coming down the line… or a transformation of Facebook and the obliteration of FriendFeed. Who knows.

So there you have it. I’m sticking with ShareIn for most of my needs. But I am using Posterous for family stuff (photos, videos and such). One caveat: if you want all these things to work well together, you need to have your settings in each platform perfect. Otherwise, you’ll multiple post to different social media sites. And that’s annoying. It’s pretty easy, though, so I won’t get into it here.

I’ve got another post coming about Eye-Fi – this one is perhaps the best technology innovation for social media I’ve ever encountered (as it pertains to photo and video sharing). This falls under the same category of this post, which is “How to make social media easier.” Until then, enjoy.

New Post: Beyond the Smoke, Hype and Fanfare – What is Social Media?..really

UPDATE: The better way to accomplish this these days is with ping.fm or hellotxt.

One of my associates in the writing and marketing world just asked me how I link up all my social media accounts so I don’t have to trot around to each site/tool to keep everyone informed. At first, I started to scratch my head… How did I do that? It took place over several months, piecemeal. So I traced my steps, drilled into some menus and put it all together…

These will make your social networking/social media life easier:

• The following app updates Facebook with your tweets: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/?ref=ts
• In Plaxo, there’s a link to connect your Facebook status in Plaxo: It’s under settings (upper right) in Plaxo. Here’s the link: http://www.plaxo.com/settings/facebook
• Here’s a little setting where you can hide Twitter @ replies in Plaxo: http://www.plaxo.com/settings/filters
• The following page syncs Twitter with Plaxo Pulse: http://www.plaxo.com/settings/profile

I also use http://www.twitterfeed.com to update Twitter whenever I post something new to my blog.

If you’re doing video, the following site allows you to upload a video once and distritube it automatically to multiple video sites like Viddler, YouTube, Vimeo, Yahoo Videos and so forth: http://tubemogul.com/

Now, off you go… start communicating like an many-tentacled thing!

Most progressive companies are now blogging to drive thought leadership, manage public relations, sell products and provide customer service. Most simply post when they can.

A new study discovered that there are advantageous and disadvantageous times during the day and week to blog.

Ah data analysis. I love it.

In a nutshell (hey, I’m in a nutshell get me out of here)… here’s what they found:

After lunch, between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM (PST – Pacific Standard Time) is the best time to post on any given week day. Between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM is also good (after work). Thursday is the best day.

What’s the worst time to post? Between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM PST on the weekends. Everybody’s out doing something else. That makes weekends a good time to get posts together and then schedule them for posting on weekdays in the optimal time slots.

Now get out there and post.

Blogger Bar :: Firefox Add-ons

This is a handy little tool that allows you to write quick blog entries about a page that you’re visiting. I used it to create this post. You simply click the “blog this” button, and it pops up your Blogger account, with the title and link fields all set.

As a marketer/writer, you should always be blogging, posting and generally writing about your personal expertise to generate interest in your business and establish your authority. This makes it quick and easy.

The more you tell (even indirectly), the more you sell.