Resources for social networks

Want to customise your business Facebook page but don’t want to learn complex new skills and techniques or pay out for someone to do it for you?

Take a look at the Facebook Timeline Toolkit, a revolutionary new way to fully customise your Facebook page using simple drag & drop functionality and a powerful dashboard to create a professional looking page that attracts customers and builds your “Likes”.

Sign Up at the link above!

The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, is the idea that roughly 80 percent of activity will be accounted for by 20 percent of the participants. Vilfredo Pareto’s initial observation at the start of the 20th century, that 80 percent of Italy’s land was owned by 20 percent of the population, has become a common rule of thumb in business, but does it hold up when tracking activity for the U.K.’s most popular social networks?

Reading books has just got social. Social media that is. Having just done a search on social media books at Waterstones I found that they were 529 books with social media in the title. Examples include The social media bible and Social media goes corporate. If we take a moment and think about what the landscape was like a few years ago one could argue that most of the books would not have anything to do with social media.

My Social Web Forum course, Social Media and Crisis Communication for PR is available under Creative Commons (Commercial allowed, Non derivative, must be Attributed). Purchase the book at Lulu.com or Download for free from Scribd. Link takes you to those links.

Fantastic one-page guides to using YouTube, Twitter and many other online tools.

Nice post from David Meerman Scott about online PR here:
http://www.webinknow.com/2008/05/top-ten-pr-tips.html

I don't know David, but I liked his statement: "I realized that sometimes there is value to top-of-mind ideas. Nuggets of value may be lost when you obsess over getting every detail perfect." Couldn't agree more.

Here's his list:

1. The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products. The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.

Really good set of practical tips for everyone looking to get online and get started with 'web 2.0'.

Nice paper by Luke Razzell about Twitter, how it's being used and what it's really useful for. (Thanks Euan!)

Just stumbled on 8Notes, a UK-based social network for musicians. You can upload your own music, share and download sheet music, and talk to other musicians via a lively forum.

They have a good-sized collection of not very printable musician jokes too. When I was learning classical violin many, many moons ago it was always viola jokes - from a quick glance round it looks like nothing much has changed...

http://www.8notes.com/

I've been chatting to Pearl Blay, a beading craftswoman and teacher, about her passion for beads and how she uses the Web to pursue this.

http://schoolofeverything.com/blog/beading-gem-how-web-transforming-crafts

Just came across this great online community for people learning or looking to learn guitar. It's run by Jason Shadrick of US-based National Guitar Workshop, and is powered by Ning.

When I signed up to take a look round (I'm always interested in communities of people teaching and learning) the founder friended me immediately (and not as an automatic response either. And he messaged me back too!

So if you're after a friendly online guitar community, go check it out.

http://guitarworkshopcommunity.com