Keep Your New Year's Resolutions Using Social Media

Whether you're looking to make a big change, or just tweak a few little things, the new year gives you the perfect opportunity to reflect on your behavior and resolve to do better going forward.

Of course, it's one thing to say you want to tackle a typical resolution like get in better physical shape, get in better financial shape, of like many of us who work on the web - get your social media presence in order. It's another thing to actually accomplish those big, broad goals.

SO this year, instead of making your goals big and broad, why not take a page from the web world and use analytics to pinpoint the specific stuff you want to change? And, by the same toke, why not use data tracking to hold yourself accountable for keeping all those resolutions too?

Physical:
Try keeping a food and exercise log. Foursquare actually lets you see your entire check-in history and, if you do a quick search, you can find it so you can easily see whether you're really been going to the gym or frequenting your fast food runs.
Similarly, there's a site called weeplaces that lets you turn your Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla check-ins into graphic visualizations.
Google Maps also lets you search your own history, so you can get a visual reminder of the places you've been searching for and start picking up on trends in your own behavior.
Then, once you establish things, you still need to track those changes. Apps like LoseIt, Weight Watchers and LiveStrong let you log calories you eat and calories you burn via your smartphone. Fitango prescribes personalized plans to help you get in shape, and gives you a forum for sharing milestones you meet with your friends. Similarly, Phitter is like a fitness-focused Twitter stream where people share weight loss tribulations and tips to help keep each other going.

Money:
To help you get a fresh financial start, you should turn to a site like Mint.com. Mint aggregates all of your various accounts, including credit cards, bank accounts and assets, and then turns your spending habits into easy-to-read charts and graphs that show you where you're spending and where you could be saving. It even lets you compare your shopping and spending habits with other people in your area, so you can see how you stack up.
Once you've nailed down how your money is going out the door, you can start figuring out ways to keep ore of it in your wallet. Again, this is where tracking will be key to actually keeping those resolutions. First, you can establish your financial goals via an online calculator, which lets you figure out exactly how much to start saving. Once you're figured out your goals there are more than 50 great, free mobile apps to help you track your spending. On Facebook, the BillMonk app will help you keep better track those tricky situations where you're sharing a bill with your friends, and you need to make sure everyone knows what they owe. XPenser lets you record your expenses from any divide, including via tweet and e-mail, and TweetWhatYouSpend gives you a forum for sharing your expenditures with everyone on Twitter, so your friends can help hold you accountable when you blog your budget shopping those post-holiday sales.

Social Media:
Since you're reading this blog, you've probably already established yourself in the social media world. However, there probably are changes you can make to your profiles to better your social media presence.
Turn to Top Words app to figure out the topics you talk about most on Facebook. Klout tells you which topics you talk about the most on Twitter, and all sorts of other stats that will help you pinpoint what it is about your social media presence that you may want to change.
BackType analyzes your Twitter profile and tells you what percentage of your tweets are replies, retweets, links, etc. Like Klout, it also tells you who you're influencing and who your influencers are. And, it shows you your most shared sites.
Finally, ViralHeat gives you in-depth analysis of the sentiment around your various social network profiles, which really lets you hone in on how your social media behavior is being received by your followers on Facebook, Twitter and across the web.
If your resolution involves blogging more often, there are plenty of apps to help you do that on the go, right from your phone. Another way to remind yourself of things you want to blog, tweet or post about is by using a service like TwittRemind, which lets you tweet yourself reminders to do things throughout the day.
Once you've established what you want to change, set up alerts through ViralHeat, Klout, BackType and Google Alerts to track all the activity around the various topics you want to cover.
To make the most of your many profiles, consider setting up a hub page via a service like about.me, which lets you showcase all your profiles in one place. Or, sign up for a social network aggregation service to make it easier to make changes on all your profiles at once. You also might want to consider setting up a targeted Twitter list of friends and followers who can help you hold yourself accountable and focus your social media efforts so you can minimize the number of relationships you're managing and maximize the return you're getting from all these changes.

Happy New Year 2011!

Google Takes on Facebook

"Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon" tweeted Kevin Rose, the tech entrepreneur who founded the content-sharing site Digg. The message that the online world that we all have come to love may drastically change sent a shiver up most social media enthusiast's spines.

Search engine giant, Google, is going to take on social networking powerhouse Facebook with a service reportedly called "Google Me," but hasn't disclosed yet how it will be different. This of course leaves all of us in the blogosphere wondering. Will it integrate Google's existing social networking services like, Orkut or Buzz? Will it build onto Google Profiles?

Just recently my friend and I tried out Google's newest innovation: A Gmail feature that allows you to place a phone call through your computer. The service is free in the US and Canada for at least the rest of this year and costs as little as two cents a minute to dial countries such as Germany and Japan.

However, the most radical idea of the year was Google's jump into social gaming. (Currently, Facebook is the most important platform for this kind of game.) Google has already taken steps onto 'Facebook's turf.' In August, Google announced that they were buying Slide for $228 million, a start-up that makes apps for social networking. Also, Google recently invested in Zynga, the company behind the popular Facebook game, FarmVille.

So, why is Google doing this? Google wants your time. Networking and playing games takes more of your time than searching, and time is money.

According to Nielsen Co. report, Americans spend 22.7 percent of their online time on social networks and blogs, compared with 3.5 percent on search-engine sites. Further, social networking sites have boomed more than any other category that Nielsen tracks for share of US Internet time; they were up 43 percent in June of this year compared to June 2009. In contrast, search engines only edged ahead one percent.

Facebook is definitely enjoying its glory days, but will they last forever? I'm not sure. I do believe that if any other company is to take on Facebook, it should be Google. It will be interesting to see how they differentiate their social networking site. I predict that this element will be the key factor to the site's success or failure.

Take Advantage of Increased Time Spent on Social Networking

The small business I currently work for has started using social media marketing and all I have to say is that it's about time! A new Nielsen study titled "What Americans Do Online" shows that Americans spend a growing percentage of their time online visiting social networking sites. Businesses need to be aware of trends like this in order to focus marketing efforts where the target audience spends its time.

Social networking and other next-generation Web tools and services are changing the face of the Internet. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are growing exponentially - Facebook just passed 500 million users, and Twitter just sent it's 20 billionth tweet. Companies need to grasp how to take advantage of these platforms to effectively communicate with customers.

The Nielsen study tracked the online activity of 200,000 uses -comparing to June 2010 against June 2009. What Nielsen found is that the portion of online time invested on social networking sites grew nearly 50 percent, from 16 percent to 23 percent, and that social gaming surpassed 3-mail to take the number two position.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the Nielsen study also revealed that the use of Web portals is on the decline - dropping from 5.5 percent to 4.4 percent of online time. Ironically, Yahoo beat out both Google and Microsoft to be the captain of that sinking ship, as well as the leader in both e-mail and instant messaging.

It is also worth noting that the social network audience is getting more mature, and culturally diverse as well. Nielsen found that twice as many uses over the age of 50 are using social networks than uses under age 18. For businesses looking to use social networks as a marketing platform, these types of demographic details are important.

The only other area that saw growth from 2009 to 2010 was the viewing of online video such as YouTube. It is a different type of platform than Facebook or Twitter, but still social in nature. Just look at how Old Spice managed to combine YouTube videos with social network messaging to create an Internet marketing sensation overnight.

Companies still spend lots of dollars paying for placement in the Yellow Pages. (You know - it's that giant stack of paper that a random stranger litters your porch with, until you eventually throw it in the recycling bin?)

If your customers are spending more time online, and most of the time is spent on social networks, then that is where the marketing and advertising budget should be spent.

Is RentAFriend.com Taking Social Networking Too Far?

Need a friend? Instead of wasting time trying to meet someone the old-fashioned way, why not just pay someone to spend time with you?

I stumbled across this website, maybe you've heard of it, RentAFriend.com. RentAFriend.com is a website that allows you to rent, or should we say hire, local friends from all over the US and Canada with prices ranging from $10 to $150. You can rent a local Friend to hang out with, go to a movie or restaurant with, someone to go with you to a party or event, someone to teach you a new skill or hobby, or someone to show you around an unfamiliar town.

I was amazed to find out that this site has been around for about six months and already has 200,000 members.

It's not a dating or escort service. According to the web site's founder, he screens each potential member's information before it's made live on the website, and if anything is sexual or sketchy, he immediately bans them from the site.

Even though some of the suggestions for the site seem rather practical, many of them seem a bit like a crutch. Has social networking changed real-life interaction to the point where we need to pay someone to be a real-time friend? Is this the next step in social networking fads that continue to kill, you know, being social?

Check the website out for yourself: http://www.rentafriend.com/