My Travels on the Net

The Natives Revolt
It seems like every one I talk to is fed up. For years they’ve been hearing about the latest “must do” to do to get clients from the internet and they’ve tried it. First, it was email. Gotta have email. Then it was a website. Gotta have a website. Then it was search engine optimization. Gotta get your website to rank well. Then it was a newsletter. Gotta keep in touch with a newsletter.

Then came blogs and people hit the wall. All the experts said you had to write a blog post at least twice a week which is no small time investment. When these experts couldn’t tell people exactly how blogging would lead to paying clients, many business owners said, “Wait a minute! I’m not drinking the cool-aid on this one.”

By the time social networking came along, the villagers had their pitchforks out and were ready to riot. When I talk to clients about using LinkedIn, Facebook, Biznik and Twitter, the most common reaction is, “No more! I can’t add one more thing to my daily to do list!” Social networking proponents aren’t doing themselves any favors either. The hundreds of articles written about how to use social networking to build your business assume you have the time - or will make the time - to do it. But that’s the problem. No one has any more time!

Keeping It all in One Place with iGoogle
In this day and age of constant information, value doesn’t come from providing information; value comes from filtering information and showing people how it’s valuable to them. But in order to do that, you have to sort through a lot of raw information first.

I don’t think you need to spend more time reading and researching to provide value. You just need to organize your sources of information better by putting your news sites, social networking sties, blog feeds, twitter account and everything else in one place. I use iGoogle —a customizable version of Google— to do that.

I’ve customized my Google home page so that I can:

1. Follow people on Twitter and even add my own Tweets


2. Monitor what my connections are doing on Facebook


3. Stay on top of news headlines with the New York Times, CNN and the BBC


4. Read the latest blog posts from all the blog feeds I have subscribed to


5. Read and respond to LinkedIn Questions about internet marketing


6. Search Wikipedia


7. Keep track of my To Do List


8. And even follow the phase of the moon

Each morning when I fire up my computer, I open a browser window. I have iGoogle set as my default home page and I see all this stuff first thing. Since I’m on the internet throughout the day, it’s really easy for me to keep an eye on my various accounts. I know many social networking experts say you should set aside time for social networking and blogging but I like to do it when inspiration hits. If I see something that sparks an idea that will take more than a few minutes to write up, I’ll make note of it and take care of it when I’ve got some time later to dedicate to it.

It’s really easy to set up and customize your iGoogle home page; you just need to have a Google account. If you use Google for email or run Google Analytics on your website, you already have a Google account. You can either sign in or create and account by clicking on the “Sign In” link in the upper right hand corner of the Google home page.

Once you’ve signed in, you can browse through and add gadgets (aka widgets) to your iGoogle home page by clicking on the “Add Stuff” link under the search box and to the right. Fortunately, there is a search box in the upper right hand corner so if you do a search on “Twitter”, it will pull up all the Twitter related gadgets you can chose from. You move things around so they’re in the order that works for you and you can even change how everything looks by selecting from one of the dozens of themes available.

A word of warning. These gadgets are not created by Google and they can “break” from time to time. Since there are typically several in each category, I recommend trying out different ones to see which work the best. I also don’t recommend adding too many because you can only fit so many above the fold and can lose track of the ones you have to scroll to see.

Feeling Adventurous? Try Flock.
I’m assuming most readers are using Internet Explorer and a few might even be using Mozilla. (Please for give me Mac/Safari users.) There is a great new browser called Flock (http://www.flock.com/) which is designed around the needs of social networking and social media. I’ve been playing with it for about six months now and I still don’t think I’ve figured out most of what it can do.

While with iGoogle you put all the gadgets on one page, Flock has separate pages for separate functions. For example, you can customize Flock browser so Twitter is on one page, your news feeds on another and your web mail on another. This enables you to monitor more accounts at more depth in one place. The combinations are practically endless and they are adding new features all the time.

While you can do a lot more with browser like Flock, you’ve got to pay close attention when installing it. If you’re not careful, you can inadvertently make it your default browser or disable features from other browsers and toolbars. It makes sense. Microsoft and Google don’t want to lose market share by making it easy for you to use another browser or search service. But don’t worry too much. If things get messed up, you can always uninstall it and start over.

Sure, there’s a learning curve with any of these options and time to set up the accounts and get them all talking to each other but it’s worth it. In just a few days, you’ll be doing a better job at staying on top of your social media and social networking. You might even feel like you’re in control of it instead of it being in control of you!