nowEurope

If you look at the bottom of this or (any other) nowEurope post, you’ll see a green icon labeled ‘Share This.’ Ages ago, I added this feature, but I have to confess I’ve only recently started to use it. Suddenly I find myself becoming a fanatic convert.

Over the years, I’m made a habit of forwarding useful information to my friends and business contacts. This habit is a friendly way of keeping in touch – the digital equivalent of saying ‘hello, I remember you.’ It’s also clever way of offering value, provided I don’t overwhelm my friends with irrelevent information. The key is moderation, as well as relevency.

Playing with Share This, recently, I discovered that I could also add this feature to my browser. (In Firefox, it’s a plugin, in Safari it’s a bookmarklet on my toolbar.) What’s more, Share This also includes a contact manager. You can import your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail and many other services. Before I discovered these features I used to copy and paste URLs into an email, the copy and paste bits of relevent text. Who has the time for that? Now, from any web page, I can open Share This from the browser, select a friend’s email address, and add a personal message. Away it goes.

I admit, Share This might not appeal to everybody. But then again, you might find yourself liking it. Why not take a minute to play with the Share This feature at the bottom of this post. If you find it useful (or anything else you read at nowEurope) take a half minute to let your friends and colleagues know about it.

I’m one of those rare people who will register and try out pretty much every new website I come across. That’s because I work in social media. However, I don’t always end up using all of these sites on a regular basis. In this series of posts, I’m going to write about what services I do use, and why I use them.

Tumblr is best described as a micro-blogging service. Rather than essay style blog posts (such as at nowEurope), a tumblelog consists of brief text messages, quotations, links, images or video. It took me no more than a few minutes to set up my Tumblr site. Once I realized I wanted to use the service on a regular basis I set up a custom domain (the company might charge for this feature, but they don’t). You can see the result here: http://stevencarlson.org.

At first I saw my Tumblr experiment as an easy way to run a vanity website. However, as our social media universe continues to evolve I have discovered that my tumblelog is also something different (and even more useful) than what I originally thought.

Continue reading ‘Social media experiments, part one: Tumblr’