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!

Sometimes you need to connect to your desktop from a remote location in order to access files or data on your main computer. Many of you  pay Citrix and do this with GoToMyPC. Others use Microsoft Remote Desktop from within Windows.

IMHO, the easiest, and cheapest, way to do it is with LogMeIn Free, however.

I installed it, and it works just like GoToMyPC.

I did hit one stumbling block, however, because I’m using Window 7 RC (release candidate) on several of my computers.

There’s a trick to logging in. You have to specify the name of the computer as well as the login when you’re logging on (and the password, as well).

Here are the instructions from LogMeIn support:

If you are using a Windows account username and password to access your Windows 7 host computer, you will need to enter the username in the format that includes the computer or domain name.

For example:

• You normally log into your host computer with the username  David and you are not on a domain.
• Your host computer’s name is  HomePC.
• When connecting to the host computer, you would enter  HomePC\David for the username.

If you don’t know what your host computer name is, you can easily find out by going to that computer, clicking Start/<right click> Computer/look under “computer name.” That’s the name that is equivalent to HomePC in the example above. You can find your name by clicking start and looking under the icon in the upper right of the Start pull-down. You know your password already, because you logged in .

Hope this helps out. It took me a while to figure it out (Googling and such), but the best answer came straight from the support folks at Logmein, who were nice, personable and helpful, btw.

Enjoy!

This post, which shows you how to change your default browser to Google Chrome in Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista, may not initially appear to fall under the marketing category… however, I’ll explain further in a minute.