I confess – I’ve been too “digital” – up until now.  The following questions has been running through my mind over and over:  How will I do social media differently in 2012? That is such a loaded question.  What I’m realizing matters most, is the value I place on relationships. Quality – not quantity.  I think many of us, as we jumped on the social bandwagon in the last several years, have looked at numbers.

• How many Twitter followers can I amass?
• What’s the size of my network on LinkedIn?
• How many people want to be my friend on Facebook?
• What is my Klout score?

Those same statements can be said about any of the social network sites.  I’ve been really thinking about what I need to do differently this year to really grow relationships that matter to me, and seek out new ones.  I love “people.”  I love the word “social.”  Those two words play so well together, if done sincerely.  So this year I must confess… I need to be more of me, more personal, and less worried about the numbers.

Here are few random thoughts that got me to this point:

Twitter: As I thought about my followers and who I follow, I had to admit to myself that I have not spent nearly enough time paying attention to who was following me, and even asking myself why they would.  And along the same lines, who am I following that I gain value from their content and/or have developed a personal relationships with – or want to develop a relationship with.  So at the risk of losing thousands of followers, I am setting out on a journey to really look at each and every person I follow, get them on a list and figure out who they really are.  (I unfollowed over 700 yesterday, and will continue to clean house.)

If I have unfollowed you, and you feel we should remain connected, please tweet me.  I’d love to hear from you, and perhaps reconnect.

FourSquare: This is an interesting one.  I love Foursquare, and truth be told, I will probably continue using it – but I have cut way back.  My husband and I were competing for points and mayorships, as we do in Yahtzee and Scrabble – we compete – aggressively… It gets ugly.  But my husband is very wise and made a keen observation.  If we are going out to dinner, or church, or to the store – Foursquare has a definite impact on our experience.  If we are nose down to the mobile device trying to be the first to check-in or fighting for the mayorship – we are losing out on relational experiences.  If I am fighting with my Android, I’m certainly not holding my husband’s hand, and we are not taking in the sights and sounds around us.  So we have stopped that competition.

I will continue to use Foursquare, but more for outings like RocPeepsLunch, and a true desire to share my location for a reason – not just to let the world know where I went for lunch.  Though you may see my NASCAR check-ins.  Those are just fun – and we are headed to Daytona soon.

Facebook: I haven’t gone the route of cleaning house on Facebook yet.  I have not started removing “friends” – but I’m seriously considering it. The number of friends I have on Facebook does not equate to value.  I’m not going to mass-delete people, but what I am finding is that because I have a large number of friends, I am missing out on things that people are posting.  I often hear people talking about something that I knew nothing about, and when I speak up they say – “I posted it on Facebook, didn’t you see it?”  The reality is, my newsfeed is filled up with so much stuff, I often miss things.  I’ve used some of the new features for filtering and labeling friends, and I don’t like them.  (Personal opinion)

I do get a lot of value out of the business content I see posted on Facebook, and I really enjoy connecting with people personally, so this year I need to find some balance there.  I haven’t yet decided what that will look like – but it’s on my radar.   I think my Facebook Timeline layout is a good representation of me and what matters… I put a lot of thought into it as I pieced together my headline image in Photoshop.  I intend to stay true to that this year and strike a balance with my social business network.

Hand-crafted and hand-written notes.

The Power of Personal: What really got me here? A friend of mine who sends out only hand-made cards. She sends out Christmas, Birthday, and “just because she want’s to send you a note” cards.  I even got a hand-made Halloween card!  Who sends out Halloween cards?  (I loved it!)  These cards keep coming in the mail, and with each one I receive, I am more grateful for the personal touch.  These hand-made cards with… wait for it… hand-written notes… have reminded me of the importance of personal touch in relationships.  Checking the mail these days can be no fun.  Bills and junk mail (and at election time OYE) – but when there is the thought I might receive something personal, it adds some new anticipation. When I actually DO receive something personal, it touches my heart.  And while she is a friend, and not a business associate – she has taught me a very valuable business lesson.

So I confess that I have lost focus on what has mattered most to me in my professional life as a Social Media Manager.  I’ve been successful with social media marketing, but I think that this year I will evolve into something new and better.  This year I will narrow my focus and work to build more value in my relationships.  I will work to re-kindle old relationships that have fallen dormant, and will spend time seeking out new ones.

I will also be more true to my Twitter bio – which means more artichoke tweets  :)

PS.  I’ve decided I don’t care about my Klout score!  If you find value in the things I say, you’ll follow me.  If we’ve established a relationship, you’ll follow me.  Not because of some random number, based on an algorithm that frankly, just does not matter.  There I said it!

Ever notice when you click to share something on Facebook and it sometimes doesn’t display an image?  Does that make you as crazy as it makes me?  Or, sometimes it gives 20 thumbnails to choose from, but the one image you want to share is not one of the thumbnails you can choose from.  Well… here’s my helpful tip of the week!

If you are website builder, and take social sharing seriously – take the time to select which image you want associated with a given page when sharing socially.  Let’s review.

The following page is a gallery page of an Angry Birds Theme Cake (pretty slick cake too if you ask me!).

I want to share this to Facebook!

If I just add the sharing code without specifying the image, it actually displayed no image whatsoever.  Frustrating right?!?  Especially when the thing you want to share is all about the visual appeal!  The ShareThis tool (like many other social sharing tools) pulls the link title (display text) from your code META Title (so word it carefully).  But the image thumbnail also needs to be specified.  To do that you simply need to add a snippet of code in your header.  Here’s an example:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”images/angry_birds_theme_cake_1.png” />

That one simple tag will then pull that image and display it when someone shares your page to Facebook giving it more appeal and promoting further sharing.

By taking a few extra minutes to think through which image will best represent your page, you are creating a more socially appealing experience for the person sharing, and for their social networks.  It also stands to reason that the content you’ve shared will be shared again and again!

Hope this information helps!  Go get social!

A few weeks back I put together a SlideShare deck on Facebook application settings.  As a marketer, I knew how Applications worked inside Facebook, and that by “allowing” them, you give access to certain areas of your Facebook Account.

In going through and changing all my settings, I pulled together this info and shared it on our company blog Fifth Gear Analytics, and thought I would extend the same courtesy here.  Be sure to pass this on – all those “game players” on Facebook who are planting crops and raising fish may not realize what is being learned about them!

Hopefully you found a nugget or two in there that put your mind at ease about your Facebook settings, and perhaps made a change or two to your account. I am much more mindful of the applications that I allow to connect with my Facebook account.

This post was originally published on Fifth Gear Analytics.

There is so much hype these days about social media best practices. Some say it’s a waste of time, others say it’s just a bunch of noise. For those who believe either of those, you are entirely missing the point of social media. Print media and direct mail are most certainly not dead marketing channels, and brands are still sending messages through TV, radio spots, billboards, and paid online ads. What social does, is make your brand… well… social!

Social media channels afford a new method of two-way dialogue between brands and consumers, whether B2B or B2C, that did not exist a few years ago. The key is to deliver the same brand messaging through your traditional marketing channels and push additional interactive content through social channels that supports your communication strategy. But wait, there’s more.

To put the “social” back in social media means that the two-way dialogue becomes the key to your social marketing success. Chances are you already have loyal brand consumers, and they are most assuredly out on social media sites communicating with their networks about their experiences, likes, dislikes, victories, failures and so on. As a brand, why would you not want to engage in those conversations and truly get to know your community of brand loyalists?

At the end of the day, yes, you have a product or service to peddle and you want to generate sales through all of your marketing efforts. And true, you need to be able to measure the return on your investment on resources allocated, whether dollars or personnel – but where social differs slightly is the mindset you need to have when embarking on building a social community.

The power today is in the hands of the consumers, and with so much information being pushed at them from a million different directions, they are more educated than ever before (or have the ability to be). What is it now that drives a consumer to your brand over a competitor’s?

Today’s consumers expect more from brands in the way of quality communications. Here is my unofficial list of a few un-measurable results that social media can achieve:

• A positive emotional reaction when your brand is presented to them, whether it be in a Tweet, a Facebook news feed, or a comment on a friend’s wall.
• The feeling of not just being a dollar sign to a brand, but rather a person who matters.
• The feeling that the brand is transparent and open to incoming dialogue from consumers.
• The ability to complain about a brand, to a brand, and be heard by the brand.
• The ability to influence their network of friends because of their loyalty by sharing experiences and emotions about your brand.

All of these things can be equated to a friendship. Your friends, hopefully, make you happy and create a sense of joy. To your friends, you matter. Your friends are open to two-way dialogue, both positive and negative, with the end goal always being to maintain the friendship and grow your relationship. You and your friends share experiences – good and bad – and influence each other about what you do, eat, buy and where you go.

While I admit, most businesses are not into the whole “touchy-feely” scene, they should be about building relationships. You can touch your consumers through many channels, both traditional offline channels, and, on a more interpersonal level, through social channels. Your social strategy should not be one of just pushing content out to the masses and hoping that something sticks. It needs to be about sharing, listening, reacting, talking, and sometimes even laughing. Get to know your brand loyalists. They already love you.

The investment of social marketing takes time and resources, and does require a more human approach. Your social marketing strategy needs to be very tightly aligned with your overall marketing communications plan. Social channels are just that – channels – and should not be managed in a vacuum, but in alignment with all other marketing initiatives. There needs to be someone on your end of the line who is listening, reacting, measuring and adapting. As your relationships grow, your network and reach will grow – and ultimately that will lead to more dollar signs. These things take patience and perseverance.

As a business, of course you need to measure conversions, referrals, sales and other ROI metrics through listening platforms, lead capturing tools and web analytics tools. Just don’t lose sight of the people who you are trying to reach. If you don’t consider your audience of great human relevance, then you are just a media hound to the masses.

Put the social back in social media.

If you are a Twitter user in the Rochester, NY area, then you are what I would call a “Roc Peep.”  That being said, there is a monthly lunch that takes place called “Roc Peeps Lunch” or known on Twitter as #RocPeepsLunch.  This was a lunch group that started just over a year ago.

It was a totally random thing. I had been tweeting out to some new Twitter connections in Rochester that I thought it would be fun to meet up for lunch and do some networking. Immediately a hashtag was created (#RocPeepsLunch) and we started tweeting about it.

January 2011 #RocPeepsLunch at Aja Noodle.

The first RocPeepsLunch was more than a year ago at Plum Garden in Pittsford.  We continue to meet monthly, and try to patronize various restaurants all around the Rochester area.  This enables people to come to a lunch on a month where the location is perhaps more convenient for them.  There are a few die-hards, like myself, who try to get to every lunch regardless of the location, but the really cool thing is we get new people each an every month.

Over the past year, the group has evolved, and we’ve added a page on Facebook to promote upcoming lunches, allow people to RSVP (so we can call ahead and let the restaurants know we are coming), and allow folks to post photos and comments about these lunch meetings.

This month’s lunch meeting was scheduled at a Mexican restaurant in Perinton Square Mall.  Being one of the first to arrive, I realized the restaurant was out of business.  Hmmm, issue – what to do?  Another fellow RocPeep was also there, and we quickly chose another location in the same plaza.  Now we had to get the word out…  Simple!  FourSquare Check-Ins shared to Twitter with the hashtag #RocPeepsLunch!

Any of the RocPeeps who got to that Mexican restaurant that was closed, could jump on FourSquare, Twitter or Facebook (via their mobile device) to very quickly see that the lunch had been moved and to where.  We were able to still have our lunch and not miss a beat!  Thank you FourSquare!  (Three cheers for social media!)

If you are a “RocPeep” and have not yet joined us for lunch – we’d love to meet you!  How do you get in the loop? Follow hashtag #RocPeepsLunch on Twitter, or join us on Facebook!  I personally have made some great friends, job recommendations have been made, and I know that some business deals have also come out of these informal lunches on more than one occasion.  (Here’s the lo-down on March’s RocPeepsLunch – come join us!)

If you are anything like me, you are constantly reading blogs and coming across great info you want to share with the world.   In these social times, it’s easy to do, right?  Forget the days of trying to print and fax something to your distribution list, or scan and email a document, only to find out the recipient has a different operating system and cannot even open the article.  Today with social media it has become simple to share to our favorite social networkings sites like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

Many of the blogging platforms out there have made it pretty easy to publish content, with their easy to understand interface and wide variety of plug-ins.  When you decide you want to share something on Facebook it does all the work for you by pulling in the article’s title and a description with the link.

What do you do when you want to share something, and when it opens up the dialogue box for sharing — it only includes the URL — and no description? Well, unless the article was really really good, I typically just click “cancel” and go about my day.

It’s pointless to share something without telling anyone what it’s about.  Unless your followers and connections are so loyal to you, they will click on anything and everything you share, you’ll need to go back to the article and grab the title (or write one yourself), before you share the link.  Let’s face it… we are all in a hurry these days.  So I generally won’t bother.

But here’s the simple truth.  It’s all in the meta data.  Your Meta Title and Meta Description are the key to making your content well formatted for sharing, and potentially much more inviting to read than some nondescript shortened URL.  Blogging platforms provide the easy-to-use interface to create your Meta Title and Meta Description (most of them anyway), and this same rule of thumb applies to websites.  If your website or blog is designed to be shared (why wouldn’t it be?), make sure your meta data is in place, and makes your content inviting and easy to share.

Include descriptive keywords in your titles, and be clear as to what the content is about. Don’t mislead your readers by saying something that isn’t true just to draw them into your site.  Be transparent, and honest.

Most people won’t take the time to read the description, so the title should do most of the work for you.   The description, however, should not be ignored.  Meta Description is a critical element of search because when your site it listed in Google or any other search engine, that Meta Description could be the very thing that leads someone to click on your link over the others search results, if it’s well written.  Write a short, concise, first sentence that will display in the search engine below your link.

In this age of social sharing, there are enormous amounts of content out there being shared daily.  Chances are someone else is writing about the exact same things you or I write about, and that’s okay.  But, missing the mark on meta data could be the very thing that holds you back.  If you are taking the time to put your thought leadership into an article, take the extra few minutes to be sure your meta data is complete.

I’m not a fan of Facebook apps, and I typically block 99% of them from finding their way into my news feed. I  don’t accept Hearts, I don’t play Farmville and I don’t want to play Farkle or Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook.  (I will play Farkle in person if you ever ask, or Yahtzee or Scrabble – but I feel something are better left for human interaction.)

Once I year, I do allow access to photo apps and create my annual collage.  It’s a great way to look back and reflect on the previous year and what’s been going on in your life.  I have beautiful children, great friends, and an amazing best friend who made my 40th birthday very special, and whom I had the opportunity to get to a few NASCAR races with.   Below is my collage created with the Photo Collage App on Facebook.

Some amazing things are already happening in 2011.  Only 11 months to go until I can create my next collage, and I know it’s going to be a great one this year!  Big things happening!  I hope you can look back on 2011 as fondly as I do – even with loss and mourning, there is still joy in the memories.

This post originally appeared on Fifth Gear Analytics.

A challenge that many B2B social media marketers face is grabbing the attention of their employees in taking action to help promote a company’s socially relevant content.  For me, as a B2B social media marketer, content is king.  The very thing that lies at the foundation of a sound social media strategy is the content.  It is through content that we can begin to build connections and foster relationships.

Here are some common replies you might hear when asking your employees to engage in social media content sharing and other activities:

“I only use Facebook for personal reasons.”

“I don’t know the first thing about Twitter.”

“I don’t have time to get on LinkedIn.”

“I would have no idea what to write about for a blog article.”

“My social connections are not buying what we are selling.”

The above may all be true, and you may have employees who will never use social media for more than personal reasons and that’s okay.  BUT… Even for those who use social for strictly personal reasons, there are small things you can still ask them to do to leverage their social profiles, like providing guidelines for optimized profiles that are keyterm rich for search engine optimization.  My guess is that even those using social media for personal reasons, probably have their employer listed on their social sites.

Usually, the bottom line is that folks won’t adopt something new because they just plain don’t know about it, or how to do it.  This is often the case with social media.

Having been met with most, if not all, of the above comments – I am rolling out a competition that will hopefully encourage and excite our company personnel to engage in social media (following safe company guidelines, of course).

The competition is based on the popular Hasbro dice game Yahtzee.  This competition will span 13 weeks, based on the 13 lines of game play in Yahtzee.   The premise is this:

Each week employees who are participating must complete one social media task.  The social media tasks include things like:

• Optimize your LinkedIn profile
• Bookmark 3 blog posts on a social bookmarking site
• Submit a blog article for publication on our company blog

Every Friday afternoon there will be a time to roll for Yahtzee.  Each week the players will take one turn in the game if they have completed a task, and must fill in their score on one of the 13 lines of the Yahtzee score card.  Prizes are awarded for completion of the upper section, completion of the lower section, and completion of the whole game.  Special prizes are awarded when a participant rolls a Yahtzee, and, of course, we are giving away a Grand Prize to the overall score winner at the end of the competition.

There are several things I hope to accomplish through this process:

• Raise awareness inside our organization about our social media efforts and how they impact the overall goals of our organization.
• Educate employees on various social networking sites and how to properly use them.
• Increase traffic and visibility of our company blog and profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and so on.
• Increase the overall size of our aggregate social network.
• And most importantly, have fun! I want our employees to know that their involvement in social media can benefit our organization with just a little time, and can spark conversations and create new relationships!

I’ll be interested to track analytics on our various social networking sites over the course of this 13-week period.  I am confident that our employees are the most valuable assets we have in leveraging our social content.  This Yahtzee competition will enable me to show them all that they are each a valuable asset to the success of our social media team at SIGMA Marketing.

Check out a recent post by Gidgett Ingalls, VP of Human Resources and Strategic Planning at SIGMA.  She wrote about DISC profile assessments and people who generate content for social media.  Very insightful.

Update since the program launched:   We have roughly 40% participation from our employees who have embraced this.   They are asking questions and educating themselves on the tools that are out there and how to properly use them. It’s very exciting!  The only down side?  I don’t actually get to play Yahtzee with them – since I’m already getting paid to do the tasks that I’m asking them to do.  I love Yahtzee, so it’s a bit of a bummer.

So it’s that time of year again when the Shorty Awards ramp up and voting gets under way.  The Shorty Awards are the best of the best on Twitter.

I have been nominated in 2 Categories:

#SocialMedia (click to vote in this category)

#Artichokes (click to vote in this category – lets raise awareness about artichokes on Facebook!)

Here’s an overview of what they are and how they work (From Shorty Awards.com):

The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter and social media.  Nominations may be made through Twitter and this website, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in dozens of official categories , as well as thousands of crowd-sourced categories. For the first time, the Shorty Awards will also honor the industry’s best agencies and social media professionals.

The community is invited to nominate Twitter users for excellence over the past year. Each award recognizes each content creator’s entire body of work, not just an individual tweet. Nominations are made by sending a tweet, whether it’s through this site or on Twitter.

In February, the nominees will be narrowed down to six finalists in each category. Winners will be determined by a combination of popular vote and by the members of the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. An awards ceremony, complete with 140-character acceptance speeches, will be held in March in New York City.

So… I’d love your vote in either category – but ONLY if you think I’m worthy of a vote!  If you know me through through Artichokes on Facebook – mention that in your vote!  I’d love to raise awareness about our growing artichoke community through the use of social media.

Thank you all in advance should you decide to vote!

In recent months, there have been news stories about a major grocery chain’s reusable grocery bags containing excess lead.  If you read carefully, the issue is not a health risk, but more an environmental risk.  If you plan to eat the bags, I suppose it could be an issue, but from the way it sounds, it’s more an issue of releasing that lead back into the environment as the bags break down.

This all got thinking me about my love for artichokes and how I could create environmentally friendly shopping bags.  I have created my own reusable shopping bags with a theme “Eat Green… Shop Green.”

For those that know me, I have a relationship with Artichokes that is difficult to explain.  I am connected to over 4,000 mutual Artichoke lovers on Facebook (do you “like” artichoke?).  So in the spirit of that, I’ve created some new artichoke themed grocery totes which can be purchased at Zazzle.com.

These bags are made of canvas and are available in a variety of colors, sizes, and you can even customize your strap color.  They definitely cost a bit more than the reusable bags at the grocery store, but I have to believe they are better made, and will last longer.

They range in price from $9.95-$25.95 and would make a great holiday gift.  Order a bag for the artichoke lover in your life and stuff it full of fun things like socks, hand towels, lotions, or perhaps you can even fill it with Artichokes!  Who wouldn’t love that?

Zazzle has been running lots of promotions for Christmas, and you can usually find a discount code or free shipping code at the top of the store page in the yellow banner.  (For example – now through December 10, 2010 Mugs & Mouse Pads are 40% off and shipping is free on orders over $35.)

My Artichoke Store on Zazzle features other fun Artichoke themed products like mugs, mouse pads, apparel, iPad and iPhone cases and more!  And don’t forget the 2011 Artichoke Photo Calendar created by the fans of the Artichoke page on Facebook!

Shipping for Christmas is available through December 21st.  Economy shipping ends December 10th and standard shipping for Christmas is cut-off on December 16th.  2-Day shipping is available through December 20th and express shipping is available through December 21.