How Do You Manage Social Networking Sites? Posterous. Or … Not
How’s Social Networking treating you?
It’s amazing, right? A click here, a snippet there, and all of a sudden the whole world knows you. Business Change is a dream. It’s easy!
It isn’t at all. Now that you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and wherever else, maybe writing a blog, and who knows what else, you’ve discovered how much work it is to maintain them all and keep them aligned. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a good way to post something once and have it show up everywhere?
There is. In fact there are quite a few ways to do this. And the best so far is Posterous. And it’s . . . not good enough.
Posterous has more connectors than any other service, and will even let you add your own. It does a pretty darned good job of getting your stuff “out there” in a way that will work (assuming you’re good at writing Twitter — style soundbites). And using the service couldn’t be any easier; you don’t even have to log in; just send your news to post@posterous.com, and the service recognizes the address you sent information from and goes to work putting everything you want everywhere you set up. It’s as easy as can be.
Until you want to change your mind.
I hooked up the Answer Guy Posterous account to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, and sent it information from both the Posterous web site and via e-mail. Everything worked perfectly, including embedded graphics, links, and text formatting. And then I took a look at what that meant.
Remember I mentioned that you needed to be good at writing short text bites? It won’t matter on some sites, like Facebook, but if you send something to Twitter or LinkedIn and it doesn’t “fit the format” you aren’t going to like the results. This makes perfect sense, but it shows once again why companies like mine get paid by companies like yours; this stuff is hard to figure out!
You’ll get past that one way or another. But if you decide you want to delete a post, things get tricky. I was able to delete my Posterous-created information directly on Twitter, and I could remove posts from this blog, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete the information that’s in my stream on LinkedIn or Facebook (and I figured out a workaround for one, but not the other).
Why can’t I retract everything I sent out using Posterous, from Posterous?
Technically I could if Posterous wrote the ability into their software, and to be fair to the folks at Posterous they’re best-of-breed as-in, but it just isn’t good enough.
Or is part of social networking never retracting anything? Is that part of this business change?
