Posts Tagged ‘ Social Media ’

Good Advice – You must give to receive

I am a regular contributor to UK Business Forums, and quite often respond to queries, mostly to people who are having problems with their Sage software or bookkeeping, and then move on and forget about it.

I was really surprised and pleased this weekend to get a thank you message for a post I wrote in 2009, answering a query about the difference between using Sage batch invoicing options or creating order,  invoices and purchase orders in Sage.  The reply I made came up in a Google search 3 years later, in May 2012, and my advice has now helped another Sage user.

I have had direct queries for work as a result of the contributions I have made to the forums on this site before, the answers given seem to rank high in Google searches, meaning you get noticed, and with good contact details in your signature line you can benefit from the advice directly.

So, is there a subject you know a lot about?  Find a suitable forum and see if you can help people too – you never know when you may benefit in the future.  And remember, if you have a question too, you might just find the help you need.

You can see the thread and the advice given by looking at the forum thread.

Follow Friday Farce

If you are on Twitter then you cannot miss the endless streams of names that get tweeted and re-tweeted on a Friday with the #FF hashtag.  But how many of you ever click on the names and pay any attention to them?  I have to admit that I now skip over and totally ignore them, and I would guess many of you do too.

Follow Friday Helper

I think the problem is that, rather than being a true recommendation of great people worth following, follow friday has become a habit or a tit for tat thing, especially with people using the Follow Friday Helper app so they can send them out without even thinking.  You can use the app to send individual clarified follow friday recommendations too; but it seems that just too many people take the seemingly easy option.

Also, when you receive a follow friday recommendation, it is polite to thank the sender for mentioning you, but this is often done by a re-tweet where all those names in the list are again repeated.  You have to look really carefully at your stream to see if you are suddenly very popular getting recommended again, or you have just been caught up in the thank you messages as a passenger!

I am not being all bah humbug about follow friday, as Twitter is after all a social media tool and all about making connections with people and sharing those tweeters who you really connect with, but if you give a reason why I should follow someone,  I am far more likely to take a look at that Twitter account and perhaps add them to my own following list.

My ideal type of #FF

And when you say thank you to someone who has included you in a follow friday message – please just thank them personally and remove all the other Twitter names from the list so we don’t all get our feeds clogged with fake follow friday messages.

I would like to thank @PilgrimChris for being the inspiration to this post via his audio boo entitled No More #FF For Me! , and the follow up audio boo #FF – A Clarification.  If you have not come across Audio boo before, it is a mobile and web platform for recording and sharing audio – and can be used like an audio blog.

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