crboynton’s blog

If you’re one of the few remaining that hasn’t ventured into the world of social media yet, this post is for you. Here’s a ranked list of the easiest to most time consuming methods of getting involved with social media, based on my experience.

• Facebook/Linked In (create a profile, import your contacts and you are good to go. These sites require very little maintenance going forward other than, perhaps, accepting friend requests. Facebook in particular makes it extremely easy to participate with myriad games, apps and activities that don’t place any effort on actually creating content, which makes it easy. Take it to the next level by adding photos to your FB or asking for recommendations from colleagues on Linked In.)

• Twitter (as a microblogging service, it’s great for those who may have the desire to blog, but are a little gun-shy in their ability to write wordy/frequent blog posts. With 140 characters or less, you can’t be verbose. At times though, filling a mere 140 characters with something that other people actually will want to read can be challenging so this service is not for the terminally shy. Note while you certainly can lay low by just following others and not tweeting, it’s likely you will get “unfollowed” by strangers quite a bit as this type of behavior creates suspicion)

• Picture sharing (Flickr, Shutterfly, Facebook, etc. I rank this as just slightly more difficult than Twitter because of the hassle involved with getting pix uploaded to the web. Although most services these days, like those above, do have featrues that allow cellphone driven email or MMS of pictures, but that’s really only practical for single images and not the album you want to create with your 542 Hawaiian honeymoon pix)

• Posterous (an in between of microblogging and blogging, this service makes it easy to send in pix, comments, thoughts remotely and display your written wisdom. Longer form than Twitter and with the expectation of a shorter form than a blog, this is a great place to play for those with slightly more courage to “put themselves out there”)

• Blogs (the grandaddy of social media, blogging provides the ultimate canvas for you to paint your picture with words an/or visuals that you wish to describe at some length. As blogging had grown in acceptance and become a staple of the new media more and more mainstream consumers start blogs. Most are abandoned though within the first month or two because of the effort required to maintain the living, breathing nature of the blog. You can choose to post daily, weekly or monthly, or even some other non-regular time Interval, but once you set the expectation with your “readers” (or future readers if you are just getting started) it’s upon you to honor that comittment…which is where most lose interest. Finding suitable topics to opine about is also another challenge that feeds into this tactics difficulty)

• Video sharing (the most difficult of all as a creator because not only do you have to somewhat plan and then film your content, you also need to get that content on your PC. The truth is that most camcorders do not make this process easy so many are disheartened and look elsewhere for social engagement. Note that some mobile phones are capable of capturing and MMS’ing video and some video sites like Youtube who accept mobile video remove these participation barriers, but that is functionality which is still in early stages of adoption.  On the consumption side, socializing around video with comments is a lot easier and is fun and rewarding)

So that’s my two cents around current social media options and where you may want to begin based upon the level of challenge and commitment you seek. Of course these are not all mutually exclusive and once you get going with one profile it’s easy and natural to add in a 2nd or 3rd on other services. In fact, most people do because it increases ones level of human connection, personal satisfaction and plain old fun! But let’s start with baby steps and pick one for focus and experience.  I’d love to hear thoughts from any first timers that heed this advice or any social media pros who have comments to share about the proposed rankings, participation details, etc.  Cheers!

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