Tag: LinkedIn

Adding and Returning Value to the Community via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Twitch

Twitter-512Twitter

Goal: Grow our follower count and reach, entertain, laugh, make hot takes – as one does on Twitter, educate, and get value out of it ourselves.

Don’t!

  • Don’t buy followers (i.e. don’t pay anybody that promises X followers, market share, or whatever it is they’re selling). We can’t trust this method as it’s often just a pile of Russian bots or other garbage followers. This does nothing to increase visibility and penetration to those that want, are interested in, or need to communicate with us (i.e. customers and fans).
  • Do not just repost things via RT or use tooling to just post arbitrary things. People notice this and won’t follow or will unfollow you. It’s a sure fire way to be blacklisted as *marketing* which will involve going to zero eyeballs, even when the account statistics keep showing people see it.
  • Do not post identical or similar content one tweet after another. i.e. Don’t post a marketing blurb with one image, then post another marketing blurb with another image that’s exactly the same size, theme, and fill up the entire tweet stream this way. The followers you get will not be active, will not be who you actually want to speak with or interact with, and don’t really add value over time if this is all that is done. It’s similar to those blog theft sites that just re-post the exact RSS stream and then, by proxy, get blacklisted and erased from Google/search results.

Do!

  • Just make it about you. Grow your personal brand first and foremost. Such as “Dern this is a wicked awesome band.” or “Wow, best burger in the world” and add pictures, content, and other interesting things for people. It doesn’t have to be “I just cured all diseases yo, check me out!” you can, and people will follow based on honesty, integrity, taking a stance, being informative, and providing useful information of all sorts. But more than anything they’ll follow the person not any specific *thing* you’re selling, pushing or what not. So be yourself, share, and be involved with the network you create.
  • Build things you’re interested in, especially when they’re related in some way to products and services you like to use and find interesting – i.e. Apache Cassandra, DSE, Databases, Application Development, etc. Build on these things via threading, via initiating discussion with others that are discussing these things, and among all this find valuable fellow Twitterers that you want to be connected to. This helps all involved, you, your network, the company, the people and companies you connect to, and more. Bringing the network wide with an on point effort around topics will dramatically increase your collective opportunity but also anything and everybody around you.
  • When retweeting, intersperse it among other things, and happily add content to RT’s. In other words don’t just make it endless retweets, but just throw in a few retweets for things you’re interested in or support, and then have your regular stream of tweets, links, and other content.
  • Use emoticons, use pictures, and definitely blurt memes out there. Aim to have fun with Twitter.

Examples of good Twitterers that really provide high value to followers, but also back to the Twitterer themselves in the way of speaking opportunities and all sorts of other things:

LinkedIn-512LinkedIn

Goal: Build an extensive professional network and return value to the LinkedIn Network of connections you have.

Don’t!

  • Don’t use LinkedIn like Facebook. This is obvious but for some reason much the world doesn’t seem to get this, so it feels like it needs stated for the LOL’s. i.e. Don’t hit on people, don’t ask people out on dates, just talk business. Ideally leave politics out of it too.
  • Ideally, don’t send droves of InMail messages to people unless that’s specifically the game being played on LinkedIn. For more grassroots and non-marketing community focus, just interact with people directly, that you know, and don’t arbitrary chase down people you do NOT actually know. This is another thing that decreases authenticity, and makes an individual – even if not – appear like they’re shilling for something.

Do!

  • Post content regularly about what you’re working on, provide links, and provide respective researched content for other mediums you might have like Medium, a blog, Twitter, and all that jazz.
  • Talk about your professional achievements and whatever else that might come up related to your work, hobbies (pending some business relation or something you do/did professional, i.e. like the music you play, or other hobby of sorts). Sometimes hobbies count too, so put that content into rotation now and again too. But do remember, if it fits better on Facebook than LinkedIn, just don’t post it on LinkedIn.
  • Reach out if there is legitimate business that you are both involved in. Start that as a simple conversation, not a sale, not something pushy, just simple, friendly, curious conversation.

Examples of good LinkedIn Accounts, that use their accounts for benefit for themselves but also provide benefit directly or indirectly for all of us:

iconmonstr-twitch-5Twitch

Goal: Grow our follower count and increase our collective content and work material to show, teach, work, and hang out with viewers to build tomorrow’s best, most kick ass, wicked awesome applications, data science analysis, and more!

Don’t!

  • Not a whole lot here yet. Twitch is kind of wide open and not a lot of no no’s here. Don’t do illegal things is all I’ve got at the moment.

Do!

  • Setup your OBS or streaming process so that you have chat on screen, chat somewhere you can monitor it, code is clear and fonts are readable, you add all the interaction content you can for new follows (alerts), subscribes (alerts), and whatever else comes up.
  • When on stream, take your time, interact with people that follow, subscribe, or chat/whisper with you.
  • Don’t worry about making mistakes, just work through them, let the audience help if they offer it. Even if you know that they’re wrong, work through things with them and let them get involved. Then lead into the correct fix, etc. This is a great way to teach and build involvement on stream so that everybody gets a win, and you get an advocate to your own advocacy.
  • If you’re going to heavily curse or do anything even slightly liberal/conservative/religious/ideological etc it’s probably best to mark one’s stream as 13 or older (I think that’s the setting).

Some excellent Twitch streamers to reference for their involvement, OBS setup, configuration, and general awesomeness in the community.

That’s it for this post. Got more do’s or don’ts? Lemme know, will start a repo!

A little lagniappe for ya, that hygge feeling.

Putting Together Medium Lists of Mediums

Recently I tweeted this, mostly in jest of the plethora and confusion of mediums in which to publish content, but also as a kind of reminder to get things straight for myself. Then, by order of that get something written so I could tell others where I put what, and what is what that I publish. Here’s the details.

Medium — i.e. this blog, is a place where I’m going to journal about whatever and I do mean whatever. I might write about cycling, tech, coding, city planning, music, or all sorts of things. No topic is going to be off limits but the one overriding theme here is this will be off the cuff, spontaneous, quickly written and probably completely unedited content that I post. More simply, this is going to be where I write out my stream of consciousness. I have no idea, especially since this is a new effort on my behalf, how frequent it may be. I am guessing I may post 1–4 times per week.

Composite Code — This is my technical blog, with a touch of metal monday, and other things related to my technical interests and my technical work. This is mostly going to include things like conferences, meetups, and where I’ll be speaking, technical docs, write ups on how-tos with languages, tech stack deployments, site reliability engineering, and related material. I post a blog entry here about every ~10–15 days I believe. However I am working on making a much more regular post to this blog to the frequency of about 1–3 times per week.

Twitter— This is my twitter feed, it is indeed merely a twitter feed. It includes a host of tech related things, but also I engage, use it as a primary communication medium with the tech community, and sometimes ramble on about a few other random thoughts or post some solid, brutally awesome, heavy as heavy is, heavy metal. Twitter tends to be my highest volume medium in which I post things to, at about 25–30 tweets per day.

Thrashing Code News — This is my newsletter. I use this to get subscribers first details on upcoming conferences I may be involved in organizing, or conferences that I find that are must attend events. I also post some minor summaries of blog entries for the month (sometimes) and also post about upcoming meetups I’ll be speaking at or other travels out and about where we may be able to meetup, hack some code, enjoy a coffee, have a round of beer, eat, or otherwise get together and nerd on tech, code, and related things. I generally publish a new newsletter every 40–60 days. It’s very low volume!

LinkedIn — I don’t really do much here besides receive emails from tons of random recruiters who 94.6% of the time never actually read my profile, but send me stuff for jobs like “C# Code Janitor” and “Trash Fire Putter Outterer”. My real use for LinkedIn tends to boil down to two specific things: one is a place to put work and resume descriptions and such, and two I use it as an way to manage some auth and interactions. I check this about once every 4–20 days.