Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/02/2011 - 13:35Back in August, I took a look at Google Friend Connect, Newsletters, Drupal, and other stuff. At the time I decided not to use the Drupal module and to simply hard code some Drupal blocks. Since then, I’ve played a little more with newsletters and Google Friend Connect, and talked about it over on the Adgitize Forum, including sending out a Google Friend Connect newsletter targeted to my readers who have said that they use Adgitize.
Then, I stumbled across a question on Quora, What is better: Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect? An anonymous person commented
Facebook Connect is about a million miles ahead.
Google Friend Connect is pretty much a failed product that has been abandoned.
Well, I seem to see a lot of blogs that have various Google Friend Connect gadgets on them and I seem to get more people ‘liking’ my blog with Facebook Connect. So, I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the data.
As I write this, I have 3191 followers on Twitter. TwitterCounter shows 47 Twitter users. However, only 12 of these are people that actually follow me on Twitter.
On Facebook, I have 1863 friends. 231 people have followed my blog via Networked blogs. 11 have connected with Facebook Connect and three have liked the Orient Lodge Facebook page I’ve set up.
With Google, there are currently 292 people that have connected. It seems to be better at making connections than Facebook or Twitter. MyBlogLog is another site where I’ve gotten a lot of connections. Currently, the number stands at 700. We shall see what happens if MyBlogLog goes away. There are also 80 people reading Orient Lodge listed via BlogCatalog and a handful on BlogFrog. What is not explored is the overlap of these communities.
I installed the Facebook Connect Drupal Module and you can see a few new link and share options. So far, I haven’t seen a lot of interest with Facebook Connect, other than that it seems to connect a little more nicely with Drupal than Google Friend Connect. I have left on the Facebook Connect Comment feature, so now people can leave comments in Facebook, Disqus or Drupal.
Bottom line? It sure doesn’t look like Google Friend Connect is a failed product that has been abandoned. There are plenty of social network graph recent reader and everything else widgets and gadgets around. Each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. I’ll keep exploring many of them. So which tools do you like and why?
Year End Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/31/2010 - 11:58Stace has a blog post up about her top ten blog posts of 2010. So, I thought I’d take a moment and review my blogging.
This blog post will be my 494th blog post of the year. If you include the seventeen posts I wrote for the around the towns column on Bethwood Patch, and a few posts that I wrote for on my new internal blog at Community Health Center, Inc. I am well over 500 posts for the year.
The blog posts on Orient Lodge that have gotten the most traffic are
My New Nokia #N900 #Android Phone
Running Java on an #N900
My Update Adventure #N900 PR 1.3, NitDroid, Titan, and MeeGo
Configuring the Nokia #N900 Chameleon for Mer, MeeGo and Fedora
MeeGo 1.1, Partitions, Bootmenu, Kernel Power, Flasher, and All That Stuff on the #N900
Hmm... I think I see a trend. In fact, the top twenty blog posts, in terms of traffic, are all about the Nokia N900. Coming in at 21 was EC Analytics. This was a program I wrote for people using both EntreCard and Google Analytics to find which sites on EntreCard have sent the most traffic to a blog according to Google Analytics as opposed to Entrecard’s own analytics.
I used this program fairly extensively from time to time which is part of the reason it is high on the list.
By the way, these are the EntreCard users that have been most engaged in Orient Lodge over the past year according to my calculations using Google Analytics:
First Door on the Left
Fatherly Yours
Small Town Mommy
Parent Times
The Sewing Mom
With the exception of The Sewing Mom, all of them had over 200 pageviews on Orient Lodge over the past year. Sewing Mom is one click away. Thank you to all my regular readers.
It seems like there are at least two very different audiences, one for blog posts about the Nokia N900 and one from regular readers from sites like EntreCard.
Coming in 23rd was Google Maps and Drupal Location; not about the Nokia N900, but geeky nonetheless. At 24 was The Death of Jeter and Jezzebelle. Stories about dogs, while not as popular online as geeky blog posts often get a lot of traffic. At 25 was yet another Nokia N900 story.
There are probably a few other year end topics I should explore. We’ll see if I get another post or two up by the end of the year.
Facebook and Identity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/24/2010 - 10:50How do you see yourself? How do others see you? How would you like others to see you? There are not new questions brought in by Facebook and the Internet, however the way we approach them may be changing as a result of the Internet.
I started thinking about this when a new member joined a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists that I read. Besides the welcomes and as part of the good natured joking, the new member was asked how we knew who the new member really was. I piled on saying that we can’t really be sure about who some one is until we’ve checked their Facebook page.
There are many older members of the mailing list who are not on Facebook and responded with comments like “I guess one can’t be sure of who I am or whether I truly exist because I am not on Facebook.” The discussion waxed philosophical and folks pondered not whether a person exists, but where they exist. One person asked if people exist in the group’s mind or the mind of individuals in a group. This lead to the great sentiment about people existing in the hearts of those that love them.
All of this resonates closely to me as I glance at the book “Samuel Mendelsson: A Man Who Must Not Be Forgotten” sitting next to my computer. It is the story of a man who died during The Holocaust and was given to me by his great granddaughter, a noted therapist on the list whose friendship I have come to cherish. Samuel Mendelsson, as far as I know, does not exist on Facebook. He exists in different books and in the hearts of those that loved him.
The same applies to my Aunt Susie who passed away last week. Yesterday was her funeral and I had been asked to read my blog post reflecting on her life. I learned about her death from her grandchildren on Facebook. Susie never had a Facebook page, but she is memorialized on Facebook and in the hearts of many.
Yet it is not only in memorials that we exist in Facebook. The new member responded “You gave me great awareness and questions about how I show up to the world on face book. needless to say I thank you for the chance to take a closer look at me. FB Revisions are pending.” Another friend of mine is a young high school teacher, the kind that all the students worship and want to be friends with. I heard him speak once about how he handles Facebook friend requests from some of these students. He reads over the student’s Facebook pages very closely. If he finds inappropriate behavior, he highlights it to the student explaining that he would like being friends with the student on Facebook, but he can’t because of the inappropriate behavior. It might jeopardize both the student and his own career. Many students have cleaned up their profiles as a result of this and thought more about how they wish to be perceived by others and how they present themselves online.
The discussion brought out another new member of the list who works with adolescents who suffer from eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and body image concerns. It made me stop and wonder how these adolescents portray themselves online. How do they view themselves? How do others view them? How do they wish to be viewed? The same old questions in a new format.
It would seem as if this could lead nicely into other topics, like cyber-bullying. Another topic that it might lead nicely into are the cartoon images many Pinay mommy bloggers have of themselves online. They don’t look Philippino. One Pinay mommy blogger wrote an interesting blog post about why skin whitening lotions are so popular there. How do these Pinay mommies view themselves? How do others view them? How do they wish to be viewed? Yet another version of the same set of questions.
I don’t have any great insights to offer. Perhaps some of my friends will have that to share. Yet these seem like important questions to be thinking about.
Playing with Email Marketing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/18/2010 - 11:34Back in August, I wrote a blog piece about Playing with Google Friend Connect Newsletters and other stuff. It turns out that if you have Google Friend Connect set up on your blog, you can use it to send newsletters to people who have opted in. At the time, there were 49 people that had opted-in and I sent them an email.
I haven’t sent another email blast using Google Friend Connect since then. Email blasts just really aren’t a high priority for my blog. Since then, the number of newsletter subscribers has grown to 80 out of the 289 people that have joined Orient Lodge on Google Friend Connect. I’ll probably send them an email about this blog post and random other updates.
At my new job, we’ve been talking about improving our email marketing, so I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at different email marketing systems. I’ve asked a bunch of friends, done a bit of testing and have some initial thoughts and a further request.
The email marketing system that has the greatest mindshare is Constant Contact. If you ask people about email marketing systems, just about everyone will mention them. They are very good. People also mention that they are the strictest. If you want to do anything more than very straight forward opt-in email marketing, they are probably not the folks to use.
The other email marketing system that got a lot of comments was Vertical Response. The comments I received were unanimous. Avoid them. Most of the complaints were about usability. It is just too hard a system to work with.
GetResponse got some good reviews, but I haven’t really spent time exploring them. There was one other system that was recommended called Emma. However, they seemed awfully pricy and I decided not to use them.
The two systems that got the best response and seemed to fit best with what I’m looking at are MailChimp and Mad Mimi. Mad Mimi seems to be better oriented towards building up new lists. They are pretty straight forward about who you can contact:
To add audience, each person must either:
Be a customer, member or subscriber of your organization.
Have asked to get your emails by signing up in some way.
Have bought something from you in the past 18 months.
MailChimp says
No 3rd party lists, no prospects, no lists that you scraped from websites, no chambers of commerce lists, etc
The two statements are perhaps not all that different, other than the tone, but for someone interested in building their lists, they should look at these policies to see which system feel more comfortable.
One other system I started looking at was CoreMotives running as part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There are some really interesting aspects of embedding an email marketing system within a CRM, but it probably doesn’t work well for smaller bloggers.
In terms of ease of use, I found Mailchimp pretty nice in terms of constructing nice emails. On a first pass, Mad Mimi doesn’t seem as strong in this area. I also like Mailchimp’s SocialPro. It pulls data from different sites, including Rapleaf and Gravatar so that you can better segment your lists. SocialPro is free until March, but still needs some work. They have some other nice integration with social media, Google Analytics and other tools for tracking and interacting with the system.
Mad Mimi does some really nice social media integration, and may be easier for some sorts of email blasts once you get everything configured just right. I’m told they have some other interesting features that are worth exploring.
Both Mad Mimi and Mailchimp put up the emails as webpages and you can see my first attempts here and here.
So, that’s where I’m at right now with testing these systems. I’ve added sections in the lower left hand part of my blog where you can subscribe via MailChimp and Mad Mimi. If you’re interested in participating in my testing, please consider signing up. Also, if you use any email marketing system to promote your blog, share your thoughts.
Community Health Center
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/02/2010 - 07:15So, it’s official. I am now the Social Media Manager for Community Health Center. I’ve held off saying much about it until now while I talked with folks at CHC about what they are looking for, tried to figure out how well it fits with what I want to be doing, started, got oriented, and started developing a sense for how we will go forward with social media.
After my first day, I see lots of great projects to work on and I’m trying to figure out the best way to pull it all together into a quick description. Here’s what I’m thinking right now.
I will be helping CHC use social media to improve community health. It is wide open what that can mean. How do we use social media to reach kids to help them live healthier lives? How do we reach people who qualify for various health care programs in Connecticut? How do we connect with nurse practitioners about a new residency program? How do we reach health care professionals and further engage them in symposia with thought and innovation leaders in health care from around the country? How does this relate to HealthCamp, including the one being scheduled for next year in New Haven?
How do we establish online spaces where we can engage in discussions and listen to everyone involved with health care from patients to practitioners?
On a personal level, there is the question of how all of this relates to my own online presence; my blog, my twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. I plan on doing much of my social media work from my existing accounts. I think it is is important to have a personal voice, but at the same time, I don’t want to overwhelm my friends and followers with CHC stuff.
There is the time management of how it relates to my writing here and other places, my participation in blogging and other online communities, as well as my personal and family time. I started this blog post last night and am finishing it up in the morning before heading off to work.
How does it relate to my varied interests, such as politics and group psychotherapy? I think there should be some good overlap. Social media and health are both topics that relate to all aspects of our lives.
It looks like it is going to be a lot of fun thinking out all of these things, and I hope it will be fun and interesting for you as well.
As a final note, I want to thank everyone who has sent me warm wishes about my new job on social media already. And yes, I’m open to talking about the details as much as time and confidentiality permit.
Most importantly, any good social media campaign is about conversation and listening, so I’m eager to hear thoughts and ideas from all my friends in social media. How do you think we can all work together to improve communities’ health?
