Posts Tagged ‘Posterous’

Woops.

I’ve written in the past about how much I love Posterous. I still love it, but had an interesting learning experience, that I’d like to share.

I ran a 10K on 7 February. I wanted to write up a race report for a Posterous site that I started for some friends with whom I’m training for a race in April. I usually just post via email but I wanted to include some links to maps etc. and wanted to see how they looked so I  posted via the web interface. I didn’t like what I’d done so I edited and posted again. And again. And again. And again.

Each post went out to the world and landed in my twitter stream, my FaceBook page and on another blog that I’ve connected to Posterous. Posterous didn’t send the same link, or even overwrite the old post, but rather created a separate entry for each post, on the site, and the various other channels I’ve attached to the Posterous account. So, the lesson I’ve learned, if posting to Posterous, via the web interface, is to turn off your announcements (this would have been complicated because this is a team blog and lots of folks get it via email… each time I post, sorry team! Not reporting it to the world would have been nice, and once I had one that I liked I could have made one more small tweak, turned on share everywhere, and shared that, and I also could have deleted the posts I didn’t want.

This is an OK solve, I think, for a blog amongst friends. But it got me thinking how I’d approach it for a client, to help them avoid such a fiasco. My thought on this is to create two versions of a Postersous site under the account (which is what I have, my personal Posterous and my team Posterous) but make the second one private, and password protected, and invite no one to it, and add no subscribers, unless it’s a couple of test emails to see how things look as they go out (make sure only the editor’s eyes see the tests). Post things to the test site, tweak it and adapt it and when it’s ready for prime-time, copy the content and post it to your main site and share it with the world. I believe that this is good solve for email as well, if you are trying something that you’re not sure how it will come out you can test it on this test setup, then resend the email to the public site.

One of the nice things about Posterous is the immediacy of the posting, and typically I do only do email posts, but there are, and will be times, like February, 7, when I want to use Posterous a bit more robustly. I’d recommend learning from my minor gaffe and set yourself up with a test site where you can experiment in private. A nice possible future feature (are you listening Posterous folks?) would be a preview feature to avoid this sort of thing, but in the absence of that feature users will have to experiment.

That's a Phone, Watson?

Attribute it to preoccupation with other things — summer, life, jobs, the general hustle of starting your own business. I ignored Twitter, this blog, my Posterous account and some new developments in social media through late July and into early August. I was awash in a sea of informational ennui brought on by a general lack of interest in the perceived-dross that was washing over the transom of my social media platforms. I broke out of it though by really focusing on the group I’d set up in Seesmic entitled “friends.” Some of these people are real friends, people I’ve know for years. Some are friends I’ve only ever interacted with on Twitter. Regardless, I call them friends because for whatever reason I caught a spark from my interactions with them that really opened up to me the possibility and promise of social media, when I first jumped in. These people say things that matter to me. They’re not selling me something. They’re not telling me how to act. They are sharing information, insight, links, pictures and asking for feedback. They are initiating conversation and interaction and sharing.

One Tweet in particular helped me snap out of it because it brought me to a wonderful, thought provoking post, Search as Research by Richard Reeve (@CCSeed) at his blog, Catskill Cottage Seed. Writing about the vast oceans of personal information that folks share, and how it can and will be used down the road — by not only marketers (of course) but also by sociologists, anthropologists, historians and psychologists — Richard ends by asking “who will effectively learn to read” this sea of information? The post sparked a tremendous discussion, and sharing of ideas that helped to snap me out of my social media torpor. I stopped watching the data stream by in my various interfaces and instead engaged, and remembered that it is engagement that draws me to this space and this business.

In the world of social media (really in any world) it’s all about engagement: with people, their ideas, their points of view, opinions, photos, work, trials and triumphs. Marketers have been striving for decades to engage customers to sell clients’ stuff. The name of the game hasn’t really changed; but, the tools have, and the communication channels have proliferated and how and where and when we consume information and connect certainly have (Imagine A.G. Bell looking at a Blackberry or an iPhone: “you mean that’s a phone, without a wire and you hardly talk on it because you’re too busy using it to type messages and read articles and take and send pictures…?). But, for now, tonight, I’m not concerned with how marketers use social media — that’s covered, ad nauseam day in, and day out, c.f. Twitter. Richard’s thought provoking post (and he’s always thought provoking) rekindled the joy that comes from engaging with people in conversation about things — and I mean things, stuff, the weather, whatever. For all of the technology, and systems and interfaces this is really a tremendously humanistic time. Never before have we had such ability to interact with other human beings. On the most basic level people are talking. As Richard mentioned in a comment:

So again, it comes down to
people interacting in the digital marketplace regardless of the
platform, but here with sense being that of the Athenian agora

Some are selling and promoting and others are offering me free access to hot singles in my area . . . but most of us are just talking. Engaging. I’m not sure why I forgot that — chalk it up to Sirius, maybe — but once I remembered what was important, the engagement with real people, social media and it potential came back to me. What one does with that engagement, is up to the individual and their own personal needs, wants and desires. For me, I’m going to talk.

Image via CrunchBase

Posterous is my new favorite social media tool. While it will never replace Twitter as my platform of choice for communicating and networking,  it has made it super simple to post content to various social media outposts. To do so, I send an email to a Posterous email address, and, to paraphrase the site, they “take care of the rest.” Typically, I tend not to post the same thing to the same places — my Twitter updates are different from my FaceBook updates and my blog posts are typically unrelated to either of those things. However, when I’m out and about I do like to snap mobile shots and send them to my blog, or to Flickr, or occasionally to TwitPic.

When we took our road trip through the American South in April, I posted frequently to Twitter and Flickr and my fun blog. It was a fairly laborious process as I would have to access three different apps from my hand held to place my content on these various outlets. Needless to say, I didn’t post as much as I could have to multiple sites, opting instead for one, usually Twitter. Had I had Posterous, I could have posted all of my shots, and observations from the road to three, or more places, all at once. When I talk to my clients about social media strategies and tactics I always mention Posterous when I notice them calculating the time it will take to update their various outposts.

To get started, set up a Posterous account at posterous.com. Associate your various social media accounts with this account. Start emailing Posterous and watch your content magically appear across your social media outposts. It is truly that easy. The hardest part about set-up is remembering your log-ins for your various social sites. If you don’t want to take the blanket approach, then you can email one specific community (facebook at posterous dot com, say) and your post will appear only there — because, let’s face it not everything you post needs to go on each site, and in some cases should not, depending on your audience.

Your Posterous site is fully RSS enabled, and you can subscribe to others sites and see who subscribes to yours. There are analytics included so you can see views, visits and favorites, and all posts are comment-able. The layout is clean. Multiple image attachments on an email appear neatly above the image and permit easy navigation through the photo string. The Posterous API is open so there is no telling where the user base will take it.

Posterous is clean and nimble, simple to use and a great tool in any organization’s social media toolkit. It’s a great way to extend a client’s footprint online and increase links to their site as well as their social media sites. Posterous’s use of email, the grand-daddy of Internet communication technologies, makes it an ideal tool for the social media skeptic, and it can help to maximize the time a client, or their staff spends on day-to-day social media efforts.

Please check out my Postersous site, if you have a moment, and open your own while you’re there.*

*I’m not paid by Posterous, just a big, big fan who really does recommend it to my clients.