Making Sense of the Web
Practical Use of Social Media and Web Services
As one of nearly 3 billion Internet users, my story is likely not unique, but it’s my story, my method for making things works, my way of leveraging free and paid online resources that have been evolving for nearly two decades. Hopefully, you will find a use case nugget below that you can extract and assimilate into your own use.
First, I am a blend of digital native and immigrant, a tweener, who has flattened the learning curve considerably in adopting a variety of useful web services since the dot-com bubble burst. While I’m figuring the Why in all this will sort itself out, please allow me to explain my version of What, How and When. The Who is me (theoretically YOU), and I will just assume we know who we are, our likes and needs. These do iterate — and so do web services, so here we go.
Excepting Amazon, which I started using in the days of AOL dial-up, I began active use web services in 2002, accessed via institutional and residential WiFi. I had just re-entered full-time graduate school studies and Plaxo became my first contact management source. Eighteen months later, in the final semester of my MBA, I stepped into LinkedIn and the web floodgates opened from there.
The Personal Landing Page: If you need a sincere, unique digital footprint for whatever professional or personal reason, there is no better aggregator, no better way to tell your story than a personal landing page. I use a template-driven landing page with a personalized URL, FrankBonsal.com, pegged to the premium service at About.me, now part of AOL. Other than building your own page from scratch, it is the best service I know to aggregate web services and tell your story. Apparently, if you want people to find you, the SEO is decent, too.
Professional Networking: There is no better place than LinkedIn for professional networking. I keep it open on my browser and use it many times a day, via desktop and iOS mobile device, for human capital validation and verification. I also leverage the Pulse function for sharing — and maintain a Towson University Incubator company page as well. Presentations (via SlideShare), panels or speaking engagements, and media references are listed textually or visually in my profile. I have been enjoying LinkedIn for over ten years, have 4,000 well-validated contacts, and find it a critical part of the people equation, which is everything for this edupreneur. I also use Facebook groups for professional sharing and comment and like on various personal walls, too.
Microblogging: I spend a super-majority of my professional social media time on Twitter, although I do tweet or retweet on topics of a more personal nature, i.e. education, healthcare, sports, life messages and civility. I manage a personal account (@FrankBonsal) and co-manage a few other accounts (@edtechmd, @TUincubator, and @TUlaunchpad). I like Twitter for events, broadcasting, and getting to know people and topics via the follow function. My early teen children use Tumblr for personal use and are driven largely by its visual nature and a prevalence of peers. Perhaps this is where Pinterest fits in, too, but I just have not figured out how or why I need to use it.
Blogging: Wordpress has been the king of highly interoperable blogging platforms for 5+ years, although I choose to use a simpler, the more recently launched web service Medium, which, with applicable edtech or entrepreneurship post, gets extracted for publishing into a TU Innovates blog for parallel display. Whatever you use, make it simple and focus on the thoughts and the writing, not the technology.
For Q&A sites, I use Quora with a heavy professional tilt, mostly on a mobile device, although it’s beyond me why there’s no iPad app. Want to know about venture financings, tech HR, or most things entrepreneurship? This is your place. The only other site that came close was LinkedIn Answers, which has since been shut down.
Location-Based Services: If you like to know where you’ve been, want suggestions or believe that LBS has relevance for place-based behavioral analytics, then Foursquare is your service. I’ve been using Foursquare (more recently the Swarm extension) for digital breadcrumbs, discounts, time tracking, place-based or event-based marketing, etc. I believe that LBS could well be used in education for blended learning, for utilization and correlation of online and offline time and content, but that’s a story for another post.
Photo Sharing: I use Flickr, and Facebook for a blend of personal and professional use (began with Flickr in mid-2005; Facebook in March 2006). Flickr is my one place for photo storage and segmented sharing whereas Facebook tells a chronological story and is more of the social backdrop. I have very recently begun to use 500px for professional use and frequently share professional messages and images via the social networking king, Facebook.
It’s apt to include Google as the web service standout, the only company that has a broad spectrum of my interest and usage across products. While Google+ receives little of my attention, it is well integrated with the Google product suite and useful for batched, segmented sharing. I’ve used Gmail as a personal if not professionally differentiated email account for over a decade. I depend heavily on a shared Google Calendar for family scheduling and coordination. I maintain an active YouTube account, although currently as a viewer versus producer. Google Maps and the more robust Maps Engine are my number one geolocation services, and, of course Google Docs is my number one document sharing and collaboration place. It remains to be seen whether Google will heavily step into verticals such as education, so I continue to use as many products in the G-suite as possible and nudge education end users toward inexpensive, interoperable web services therein and hope that the telcos and device makers can get a grip on impact and the long tail.
Overall, what is most critical about the Web is not letting it take over your life, not letting it distract you from achieving your goals and dreams, but rather allowing the right web services and sites to become invisible resources. Oh, and privacy, that, for me, is what is NOT on the web but is shared in person with colleagues, family or close friends.
I tend to cordon off early morning for emailing, planning and blogging, whereas mid-PM hours are used for sharing, phone calls and emails again. Best thing to do is make a pattern of usage where you get traction and stick to it — until there’s a good reason to change. We should all recall Darwin who posited, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
