Category Archives: social

Control your social network

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Recent headlines of Twitter Scandal 2011 shouldn’t stop everyone from using social networking responsibly. As for what happened to NY Rep. Weiner, it is a perfect example of what NOT to do on social networking sites especially if you are well known. Even if you are only known online by your friends and professional colleagues, it is important to take steps to control your social network.

  1. Check your privacy settings
    • almost all social networking sites have settings that you can enable to include or exclude from your posts for the rest of the world to see
  2. Ask your friends to look out for you
    • sometimes it takes a really great friend to point out that you have a run away zombie profile (remember those spam and phishing messages you get?)
  3. Google yourself
    • Search for your name and any keywords that you are associated with. There is more than one Roger Renteria out there on the internet, but I am more closely associated with Roger Renteria STC. I am ME, right?
  4. Clean up your profile
    • Most of us may know to avoid posting party photos, but you can clean up your profile. Potential clients and employers can use the internet to find more about you.

Posts stay forever. What you delete from the internet can’t be guaranteed that they will be expunged from other computers.

One last tidbit to remember–mom, dad, and grandma are also on Facebook.

Failbook - Grammar Momzi

Failbook - Grammar Momzi

In Internet We Trust

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We have been warned over and over: don’t talk to strangers, don’t trust people from the internet, use caution when sending money for items or services on the internet. What happened to most of that hype?

Thank Chris Hansen from Dateline for warning us about scammers on the internet.

This year I took a great leap of trust and met an online friend in person.  It was really cool that I could connect with someone online and later meet them in-person and it was like nothing strange or weird happened during the encounter.

First, we were told as kids to never speak to strangers. That didn’t stop me from corresponding with people I met via the internet. This year, I met an online friend in person who I had known since 2002 and been Facebook friends since 2006. Given we are both of the opposite sex, it turned out to be an awesome experience to finally meet in person. We had a few phone calls before and we had a positive feeling about meeting up . Sometimes it may not turn out that way, but it worked out because we both shared similar interests, known each other for a long time, and are nearly the same age.

There have been stories of people scammed out of thousands of dollars, presumably because of a fake internet girlfriend or banking scam which the con-artist asks for money. There are probably worse stories circulating the internet, but I won’t go into details.

Why are people so gullible and fall for these types of scams? In that same regard, why do people participate in online dating? It’s a double-edge sword that can either lead you to meet a great person or run back home to lick your wounds.

The internet has distanced regular intimate relationships with people and with the same token has brought people closer together. I would not have imagined ever visiting a person who I only corresponded through my computer. I was always in contact with my friend yet we never met in real life until this year.

There are good people out there on the internet; you just need to trust yourself and your intuition.

Social Promoting and Sharing

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I’ll take a page out of my social media life and point something out that was an obvious oversight on my part and a great story for anyone who wants to share information on the internet.

Where were the RSS/Share buttons on this blog?

Ben Woelk pointed out that I didn’t have easily accessible means to share the content that I publish. That was true because there was no RSS link anywhere on the site, neither a FeedBurner link, nor a link to send an email to a friend. Thanks to his suggestions, I added HTML to the right-column with RSS feed links and reviewed a couple of WordPress plugins to make sharing my blog easier.

I narrowed it down to a couple of plugins and I may flip/flop with two of them for a while until I am satisfied with the results (unless someone has a better plugin). The two WordPress plugins are AddToAny and AddThis. What I love about these two plugins are three characteristics: free, simple, and customizable.

Both plugins are free via the WordPress.org/plugins site, which have received numerous downloads and popular ratings. Each of these plugins work almost the same way; it displays buttons and links for sharing blog posts and pages to 300+ sites on the web. Some of the popular places to share information are Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and Digg.

AddToAny and AddThis are simple to install and run. Through the WordPress Dashboard, I can instantly download the plugin and voila! Now my readers can share content with hundreds of websites should they choose so.

The last aspect that these plugins have is the ease in which I can personalize individual features such as visual display, custom icons, and links, without looking through the code and ripping it apart in order to make it show up a certain way. This makes it simple and easy to place buttons without destroying current theme layouts.

What does this mean for TCers? A lot. Consider using social sharing tools to drive more traffic to your sites. My example and thoughts are for WordPress, but there are similar social plugins for content management systems like Drupal and Joomla. These features are helpful because if you run a business, organization, or blog, any reader can share their interest in your products, services, wisdom, philosophy, or advice. Perhaps the next business or professional opportunity may arrive from a reader who came across your website that was shared on another site.