My Posterous Theme

Posterous is a good tool in your arsenal- it can be used to try to tame the Social Media Beast. You are on the road, you take a cool local-interest picture or shoot a minute’s worth of video with your phone. From there, you can selectively shoot it to your blog, Flickr, or YouTube, just by sending as an attachment.

So in addition to creating an online photo gallery that can be updated through the day- very useful for creating an image gallery for a two or three day function without actually having to email or upload pics. Or selectively pop off content:

Posterous posting

So, good enough. But many people don’t like the PlainJaneness of the platform- they have added a few themes to the original but they are only minorly customizable. You can pop in a header and change some of the colors and layout, but you might want to be that person who makes a smashing first impression, or you want your Posterous to reflect the look of your blog or website. What to do?

I considered learning coding for this then realized, “Yeah, right.” Probably not going to happen. Then I heard about Tumblr.

You can import Tumblr themes to the Posterous platform, and pretty easily. The photo at the top is a theme I imported.

From Blog In Isolation :Tumblr have even helpfully created a theme repository for Posterous users. You just find a Tumblr theme you like, copy and paste the HTML, dump it into Posterous and you’re done.

And here’s how:

Go to the theme page link above. Browse through the themes and find something you like, then Install it to your Tumblr account (yes, as far as I can tell you will have to make one.) Next, click Customize, then click Theme, and when that window drops down, click on “Use Custom HTML” at the bottom. Copy all of the code.

Back over at Posterous, go to settings, then click the “Theme and Customize my Site” button. When the new window opens, click on the “advanced” button all the way on the left. Replace all of the code in there with the code you just copied from Tumblr

Voila!

Social media addict

Top Ten Ways you know you are addicted to social media:

10. You know what hashtag and retweet mean.

9. You know which side you are coming down on in the number-of-followers v. quality of followers debate.

8. You head home early from a party so you can tweet about it.

7. You no longer send kisses or throw sheep at your Facebook friends.

6. You know who Scobleizer is. You even follow him.

5. Some of the wildest nights of your life have happened on blip.

4. You understand the relative merits of TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Streamy, and wonder if Co Tweet really is a better business solution.

3. A friend tells you that they just don’t get twitter, and you smile slightly and say, “Don’t worry. You will.”

2. The doctor put you on paxil at the beginning of 2009 because of frequent FailWhale sightings

and the Number 1 way to know that you are a social media addict:

1. You google yourself.

Fail whale

Your responses have to be under 140 characters. If you don’t understand the acronyms, www.urbandictionary.com is a huge resource for all modern permutations, although keep your blinders on- it tends to be NSFW in parts.

You sign up at twitter.com. For company use, you probably want to find a name that can be used across all platforms, so if you decide to build a facebook page or expand your presence, you can consistently use a name. To search to see if the name that you like is actually being used anywhere else, try http://knowem.com/. I run my name through every now and then for the fun of it to make sure that someone else isn’t using it on other sites that I don’t frequent.

Sign-up is simple:

Twitter Sign in Screen

Does an online presence work?

Here’s one example of a success story- and there are many others. Do you have fond feelings for your cable company? Most people don’t- and Comcast wanted to change that. They developed a twitter presence, choosing ComcastCares for the twitter name instead of just Comcast. This was actually a very smart move, because each time the individual trying to reach Comcast on twitter typed that name, he or she reinforced that idea.

Frank Eliason uses a search to track comments about the company: “Eliason discovered that by doing a search for the word “Comcast” (and occasionally “Comcrap”), he could find tweeters who just happened to mention service complaints he could address. In December 2008, he celebrated the handling of his 22,000th tweet.”

Instead of waiting for contact from the person who is unhappy with service, Eliason monitors a search and proactively deals with problems. This is very important in creating a strong customer service social media program.

Companies like Comcast are dealing with an individual’s issues very publicly in the twitter offer to help, as all conversation is seen in the public stream. Additionally, press releases announcing the addition of a social media component to customer service will reach a large audience in a more effective way than advertising. And Comcast itself has been the subject of a multitude of news articles, again more effective than advertising.

What does this mean? A company can add a whole new layer of publicity- but this can be a double-edged sword. You need a plan in place to be able to address any complaint that is brought up. Comcast’s offer of “Can I help?” would not be effective if systems for dealing with problems were not in place.

From http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/10/30/why-does-comcast-care-about-twitter-video/ by Jeremiah Owyang ]]> http://twitterdiaries.com/2009/08/12/hello-world/feed/ 0