The 30–Day–Challenge–Chronicle

Oftentimes folks who have been Twittering have a problem getting their heads around FriendFeed, thinking this to be just a Twitter alternative. Nothing could be further from the truth and I thought it would be a good idea therefore to pull in a couple of the videos from Ed’s Thirty Day Challenge pre-season series, which explain these distinctions perfectly.

The first of the videos is Follow People Using Friendfeed

and then you are given some tips on how to get the very best out of this essential networking tool.

Tips For Using FriendFeed

Those looking to connect with me can do so at: http://www.friendfeed.com/diogene1.

In these next two Thirty Day Challenge lessons Ed gives us a guided tour of his Friendfeed and emphasizes that with Friendfeed – you really do need to know how to drive it. It is important to take it all very slowly – and not try and just consume from it .. because the sheer volume it sends out will really get to you. He goes on to say that in truth – it is not that volume it sends out but your ability to create conversations around bits of content which is important. It is here that Friendfeed excels .. by achieving what many folk try to achieve on Twitter, even though Twitter was designed to be a micro-blogging platform and was never designed as a conversation platform like Instant Messaging, Skype, Friendfeed or even blogs for that matter.

Ed explains that Friendfeed can take any piece of content and provides a mechanism for us to filter and stream and then allow people to vote on whether they like it or not and it also allows people to comment on it, in a central place. We are taken by the hand and shown how to filter and dice and slice content to provide just the information that we are wanting our niche to see.

Friendfeed takes content from a whole bunch of different places and then provides a feed of everything we are doing. So, when someone is following you on Friendfeed they are seeing pretty much everything you are doing .. whether you might be using Flickr, YouTube or ‘Stumbling Upon’ a piece of useful content. The feed can also be imported into Google Reader.

The more contacts you can have with your market in a non ‘in-your-face’ way – the more successful you will be and in this regard Twitter and Friendfeed are two of the most powerful tools which have been implemented in internet marketing, this year, for fulfilling that exact purpose.

The ‘rooms’ functionality is going to be very useful for this years Thirty Day Challenge. Already our recently formed 30DC Kick-Ass Kiwi Ockers group has a room set up .. and I sense that it is going to be set a buzz.

After showing us how to sign up to YouTube and how we can integrate our Google Account with our YouTube account, Ed has given us a first-hand glimpse of the many powerful marketing and networking features of YouTube.

The YouTube user page has a feed available which we can of course add into Google Reader and the YouTube video search can be included in our drop-down search menu. It is quite amazing just how many people are waking up to the power of YouTube and just what a splendid tool it is for promoting product.

I particularly like the blog option for automatic framing up of videos – something I will certainly be availing myself of in future.

If you are registered in StumbleUpon and can set this up in your user profiles you can actually stumble your chosen video. Ed did just this with one of his vids where thanks to the magic of FriendFeed which we have yet to address, his review ended up going out to literally thousands of viewers. To coin his phrase “How cool is that?” It doesn’t take too much to realize how powerful this can be for marketing purposes.

The thing that really hit home with me was when Ed mentioned that most people don’t have the time to go charging off searching for information and don’t know how to do what he has been showing us .. and that is part of the magic .. in that it makes us a recognized expert in our chosen niche. Folk come seeking us out.

And isn’t that just what we are wanting them to do? A wonderful tool in our marketing and networking arsenal!

Three further videos warm Thirty Day Challengers to the all powerful features of Twitter and Twirl.

Rather than go back on it to the Twitter website to start using Twitter we can do things in such a way that we now no longer have to interrupt what we are doing to head off elsewhere, but can access Twitter via the sidebar and the Twitterbar. Tweeting in a millisecond!

We are shown how to set up the add-on Twitterbar; – and are shown how to use it without being taken out of our work flow. Note, Flock IS compatible with Twitterbar.

Participants in the Thirty Day Challenge are also introduced to the Twitter client, Twirl and shown how to download and instal this ‘cross-platform’ application. This can be configured for both Twitter and FriendFeed which we are to be introduced to shortly. The Twirl protocols and natty features are explained.