Lessons In Social Media
June 22, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Social media doesn’t have to be intimidating, in fact it’s very easy to get started and build a base of information and conversation upon which to learn and grow. As an active participant, researcher, and social-media based employee, I use social media for both my personal life and professional growth.
There are numerous opportunities to get out there and explore, by reading through these basic lessons and tip sheets I hope you can take better advantage of the soon to be ubiquitous social side of the Internet.
I wrote these tip sheets and information pages as one of my final projects at the Missouri School of Journalism in the spring of 2008. They are written toward an audience who may have heard about social-media but isn’t sure how to get started.
There will be follow up and additional information added to this resource as I have time to expand the series. If you have any questions please contact me. And as always, comments are open, leave your thoughts, edits, and changes below.
Lessons In Social Media:
- The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
- Social Networking Quick Tips
- How To Get Hired Using Social Media
- Google Alerts For Personal Branding Management
- More to come!
links for 2008-06-04
June 4, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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This is a pretty cool data visualization strategy on the part of Dipity.
Are Podcasts Dead?
April 7, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
In case you didn’t know, I’ll be in Las Vegas Sunday-Wednesday for the NAB conference (National Association of Broadcasters). The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism is sponsoring my trip so that I can present Contributr to the masses. (Let’s hope Contributr is ready, more on that tomorrow!)
As I was looking through the available sessions trying to schedule myself into some I noticed a recurring theme, podcasting. Now I hate to rain on anybody’s parade but aren’t podcasts dead? Haven’t they been deemed not conversational enough?
I mean sure, we all are subscribed to a few in iTunes, but how often do you actually listen to one? Let alone actively look for more? I know I don’t. I’ve moved on, I’ve moved on to try to create and examine the semantic web. And podcasts just don’t fit into that strategy very well. They may not be static in location but they are certainly static in content. One you publish an episode to a podcast it just sits there… and people listen to it… but what else? What’s the extra step? … Well I just can’t seem to find it.
So you might imagine my disappointment when I am going through the NAB sessions schedule and see multiple sessions on podcasting each day, and only 2 or 3 sessions on ‘blogging’ total for the entire conference.
Is this where journalism is? Is this what the journalism folks think is hot? Haven’t they found Twitter, haven’t they found Facebook, haven’t they found that conversations are the latest and greatest things to hit the web?
Apparently not, and in my conversations with Jen Reeves it seems that the ‘industry’ is doomed to be 5-years behind as she puts it. Here I am creating wikis, blogging daily, coming up with user generated content solutions, enhancing new-media workflows, and creating conversations around my own life and here is the Journalism Industry just now trying to figure out podcasting.
There’s disconnect somewhere. That disconnect is what is holding back journalism and the news media in general, they’re not in touch with what consumers are using technology for.
As all of my recent blog posts do, I’ll link this one to my current job-search. There are quite a few journalism web content editor and producer jobs out there. Frankly, they’re almost a dime a dozen, news organizations realize they need to staff “the web” so staff “the web” they do. But where is the innovation? Where is the commitment?
Part of the struggle I have faced in my job search is that there’s plenty of work to be had out there, but very few newsrooms and very few news people “get it”. It takes more than just repurposing content from your printed newspaper or broadcast TV show onto the web anymore, that’s just not enough. People want to have conversations, they want to change, edit, manipulate, share, and copy your precious content. Are you willing to see what your public can do for you?
That’s the future of journalism. Don’t just talk to the public, let the public talk to you. If you “get it” email, call, IM, or @jdcoffman me. I’m listening, are you?
links for 2008-03-16
March 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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I just joined this NING social network for journalists in the 21st Century.
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Beautiful, Beautiful fonts
Personal Branding Knowledge Is Still Just Beginning…
March 16, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
UMass Students Are Sucked Into the World of Personal Branding « Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel: “Blog About Dan Schawbel Publications Press
I often read Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog for insight and tips on how to improve my own personal branding. You did realize that I have a personal brand didn’t you? 
I do in fact have a brand that is pretty apparent right here on JonathanCoffman.com. It’s one that encompasses my abilities to take new and in-the-pipe technologies and make them work in the real world, right now.
In the blog post that I’m linking to, Dan tells the story of a recent visit to the University of Massachusetts and how the student he talked to almost all were on Facebook, but very few had even heard of LinkedIn.
This really exemplifies the need for personal branding and social-media strategy to be a part of the final curriculum at our nation’s universities. These students know and understand how viral messages get spread, how to network online, and how to control how they look, but they don’t understand quite yet how to apply those skills to multiple outlets across the web.
For the last 2 years I’ve offered extremely cheap web hosting to my peers at the Missouri School of Journalism. What I offer them is 10 gigs of storage space, email, etc all for $20 per year. $28 if they want me to buy and manage their domain name as well.
It provides plenty of space and help for building a personal portfolio (which every grad needs) and it’s not going anywhere, I have too many personal and professional sites to just walk away from the web.
But here’s the real story: I’ve gotten several signups lately and I setup times to meet with each student who wants the deal to talk to them one-on-oine about how they want to use it and how I can help.
One actually emailed me last week saying she was going to have to wait to get a portfolio because ‘I’m saving up for Spring Break and I didn’t realize I could move my files around so easily.”
Well I’m sorry folks, but if you can spend $20 for a full year of online personal web presence, (2 or 3 drinks in Cancun for Spring Break of your senior year in college), you probably don’t need to be trying to get any job that would require an online portfolio or web presence.
Let’s just hope this particular person is smart enough to not post all of those crazy Cancun pictures to Facebook after the vacation.
This is just yet another example of why we need proactive education on social-networking and identity management. Firms like Google, Facebook, etc all have enormous amounts of data about US, and if you’re managing that information yourself, you’ve left yourself open to all kinds of abuse and inaccuracies.
My Social Networking Workflow
February 7, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. I hadn’t largely because it takes time, and time is something I haven’t had in quite some time! But I have renewed my commitment to blog early and often. Believe me, I love to write and this blog is perfect for that.
So I thought I’d take you through my typical social-networking workflow. To be honest, there are plenty of people out there who do much more than I do. I am however active in quite a few social networking sites and communities, I think the difference between me and some of the ‘rockstars’ out there is that I do as much as possible in as short a time as possible. And I don’t just mean working harder, no I like to think of it as smarter.
Here’s my strategy:
- Subscribe to as many RSS feeds from ‘friends’ lists as possible, this includes mostly blogs, but also Facebook and Twitter. I currently wake up to around 300 RSS entries each morning, and gain another couple hundred through the day.
- I only login to Facebook when absolutely necessary, I get a limited number of messages and friend requests weekly, so I take advantage of text messaging to approve people, and email to read messages. If you send me ‘zombie bites’ or whatever other crazy application you’ve got running in your profile, I’ll probably ignore it. (This is one workflow that I wish there was a solution for, ignoring all the bacn and spam that Facebook apps send).
- Twitter, wow Twitter can get overwhelming really quickly, but it’s largely worth it. I’ve got a fair amount of followers, and I’ve had the Twitter folk set up my account with ‘auto-follow’ so anyone who follows me, I automatically follow them back… Not to be confused with auto-notification, there’s no way I could keep up if I got text messages every time someone I follow updated.
- Trick 3, I generously use Twitter Mobile and Twitter txt to keep tabs on Twitter, when I’m at my computer I usually have Adium open and get my tweets that way.
- Other social-networking sites I only visit when I absolutely have to, but I do make generous use of MoodBlast to allow me to update multiple services with status messages and information at once, it’s always a keystroke away.
So there you have it, that’s my daily social media workflow, wasn’t very exciting was it? But most of the time it works just fine for me!
Have a wonderful day and be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date!
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2007-12-28
December 28, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Watching Hoodwinked with Madelyn #
- Morning Twitterville! long time no see #
- Anyone buy a BluRay player yet? I’m shopping around for one for the fam. #
- Have you made progress on your social media strategy? #
- @gspn that’s a lot of pics at once, I’ve got about 300 that need to be uploaded to my account. #
Social Media Strategy, What’s Yours?
October 11, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
One of my favorite things right now is social-media strategy and figuring out how and what is going to make people take actions in response to a social-media application or device. It’s something that has interested me for a while now, and honestly, I probably should spend less time thinking about it, and more time acting on it and of course finishing all of my other projects!
I would like to encourage you to take a look at this link from Chris Brogan’s blog, he’s typically quite insightful when it comes to new-media and cool-things-on-the-web. His social media strategy is that of branding himself as a thought-leader more than likely in order to advance his career options. I also think he has some fun with it too!
If that’s not his strategy, well I just gave you mine then. I use social media all the time, I create new avenues for social-media, I use social-media, why else do you get over 1,000 results when you Google my public Internet Identity? (no, not all of the 1300ish results are me, but pretty close to it!)
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2007-10-01
October 1, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Enjoying Chicago’s night life, so what if it’s sunday? #
- Back in the hotel room, had a great time with one of my colleagues #
- Good morning, another beautiful day in Chicago #
- Writing some emails #
- live Tweets from the adobe max general session start in 30 minutes. Pending cell coverage in the ballroom #
- piepper jaffrey is surveying heavily, my answer: heck yeah we’re buying more Adobe #
- in the room now. Looks like a movie premier #
- the pre event video is mostly AIR products #
- everything is very blue, an ocean of possibiities maybe? #
- keynote computer is an iMac ! #
- Intro video is playing now #
- Kevin lynch is on stage now #
- adobe developer connection site officially launches today #
- intro networxs next gen social network launches with adobe #
- shantanu on stage now, connect and engagdge your viewers with rich hybrid applications. #
- 70 percent of video is Flash based #
- Adobe makes h.264 the he standard #
- adobe media player takes on iTunes with rss video feeds via AIR platform #
- CBS signs on to be featured netwok provider on an ad based strategy for video #
- flashLite 3 delivers video to mobiles including streams #
- CF 8 can compile flex apps on the fly. #
- ebay and aol AIR apps beta released today #
- Disney travel launches air apps for boiling and crm tools #
- adobe acquires buzzword word processing apps company #
- upgrades from flash 8 player to 9 reaches 90 percent inone year #
- flash astro will include multi lingual text engine #
- Next ten flash player brings 3d to the masses #
- @jchenard thais what I was hoping for! #
- in a designing Flex apps workshop. #
- Chatting with air developers #
- so tired, got a lot of info today though. #
- I can’t believe that between an iPhone, wifi laptop and cell data card that I can’t get a connection #
- @newmediajim where are you at? #
- Back at the hotel #
- Relaxing in front of the tube for a minute #
- Going out to dinner #
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