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Leverage – the Power of Social Networking
By Mike Mindel | August 1, 2007
I’ve summarised the content from Ed’s excellent preseason leverage video.
Note that I use a PC at home and not a MAC. So I slightly deviate from the video in that this blog is PC specific.
People tend to do things individually. They don’t recognise the power of leverage.
If you’ve set up your Firefox browser & all the plugins (see previous post) then you’re all set to take advantage of the power of leverage.
Say you find a cool site www.lensroll.com. You visit the site and think it’s good. You click on the Stumble Upon button:
Then you look in the top right hand side of your address bar and see the little orange feed button:
Click on that and if you have Bloglines set up in your browser you can add the feed straight in:
Now go to the top of your browser and click on your del.ico.us tag button (the one on the right):
Add the name, notes & tags & submit to del.ico.us with one click:
Now I’ll go to Scribefire by clicking on the icon in the bottom of my browser:
I can start my blog entry using ScribeFire:
When I need to add a link, I’ll click on the link button:
I can add www.lensroll.com directly to the Lensroll text. See how the text is now highlighted in blue:
The blue means the text is a link which points to a given url on the internet.
Now this is where the power of leverage really ramps up. Make sure you’ve signed up to skitch:
Skitch allows you to snapshot portions of your screen, make adjustments and then upload it straight to mySkitch or Flickr – the photo sharing site.
You can then locate the url and plug it straight into your blog post (see below).
Be aware that Skitch is in closed beta right now so you’ll have to either:
- sign up and wait for a beta slot to open or
- get a friend with Skitch to send you an email invite.
For the moment I’m using SnagIt:
from the same team that bought you Camtasia. SnagIt does the snap job just as well.
But it’s slightly more annoying as I have to save each image and then drop them all into the Flickr desktop uploader.
I can view all images on my Flickr account:
Click on All Sizes:
Select the size that’s good for my blog say Medium (462 x 116) and then cut and paste the embed code:
straight into my ScribeFire.
See how I use the word INSERT as I go. I replace the word INSERT with the url when I’m finished typing up the post.
Note: With skitch you can upload straight to Flickr in one go. But no kind soul has invited me to use the beta yet so I can’t use it. Aaaahh.. Hint. Hint. 
Note: Once you’ve uploaded your image, you can click on StumbleUpon ‘I like it’ again:
and when people Stumble Upon your graphic they can use it too. Which means more traffic…
Also check out the Jing project:
which allows you to capture images (presumably the same way as Skitch, record videos like camtasia & then share).
Note to self: I could probably have captured my images in Jing but I’ve only just noticed they capture images too.
So we’re back to ScribeFire.
Lets add some Technorati tags to the ScribeFire post:
Then I click ScribeFire Publish button (bottom right):
When done just click on the ScribeFire button again and the window disappears.
Locate your blog post. Click on StumbleUpon ‘I like it’ again:
Tag your post and submit. Now other people can find your post.
Imagine if you shot out an email to your team mates and told them about your interesting blog post. Then you have extraordinary leverage & extraordinary power at your fingertips.
Do you see how leveraging all these applications together is working for you to help you bring more traffic?
P.S. Don’t forget to refresh your bloglines to show your new post!
P.P.S. Don’t forget that everyone else will also see your new post because they subscribed to your feed in their bloglines.
Now go do!
- Mike
Technorati Tags: social networking, leverage, social services, sharing
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Topics: Key Concepts | 8 Comments »
August 1st, 2007 at 11:02 am
Note that this post is all about LEVERAGE. It’s how you use all the tools together to save time.
Also note that I got a couple of things wrong in the post. I didn’t realise that I could have used Jing for my images instead of Skitch. But that’s all the process of learning.
It just doesn’t matter. I wrote my post and now I’ll either use Skitch or Jing in my next post. I don’t know yet. Whatever does the job first.
The key point here is to be PROACTIVE. Get started, stop watching. Do and learn. That’s the only way to succeed here.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:51 am
You’ve missed out the social engineering step.
What if your team mates also blog? Maybe a few have tumblelogs of links. You could Stumble the permalinks there too.
Have you looked at channels like Twitter, Facebook (you’re already on that one, which is how I’m here!), Pownce, etc? I guess you’d need to be very careful with how you approach those though, since you risk annoying your friends.
I’d recommend ditching Bloglines, incidentally. I still like Rojo but I’ve switched to Google Reader for the sheer speed of it. Learn the keyboard shortcuts and you’ll fly…
August 31st, 2007 at 1:59 am
[...] Leverage – the Power of Social Networking [...]
September 3rd, 2007 at 11:12 am
Mike, I appreciate all these notes very much! I am linking to them from my own blog so my readers can see them also.
Thank you. The notes are terrific!
Julieanne
September 19th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Hi Mike,
I just want you to know how much I appreciate being able to come back to your site to review and get a better understanding of things I have an incomplete grasp on even though it is a month and a half later.
Thank you so much.
I am trying to find out how to put an RSS feed on my baby boomer life blog. thanks again
Alexandra Barrett
November 10th, 2007 at 6:04 am
What a great idea!
March 15th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Great post! I missed out 30DC last year but will join 30DC in 2008 for sure.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:50 am
[...] For a very detailed overview of the days events in the Thirty Day Challenge. Mike Mindel’s blog is the to go. [...]