Cribbed Content for August 15th
Friday
Aug 15, 2008
it’s been a crazy week, but a lot has been going on in the business world (not to mention my world lol)
- CVS Pharmacy bought small California chain Longs Drugs this week for $2.9 billion. Growing up with Longs, I’ll miss seeing the name around but they’re not one of the better stores so I don’t see it as a loss.
- AOL jumped into life streaming with their acquisition of Social Thing this week as well. I’ve never used Social Thing much, but I definitely won’t use it if it just gets pulled into their system.
- Affiliate Summit East 2008 in Boston wrapped up – I’m slowly getting all of my coverage posted. The next time I go to the show I hope to have a better laptop with a better battery and better wireless card so I can blog from the sessions instead of taking notes and blogging later. So much for live & current coverage!
That’s really about it this week since I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to antyhing outside of the summit. I did pick up some good tools, so the Free Toolsday column should be back soon!
Social Media Pays Off
Thursday
May 1, 2008
Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:
- Fun.
- Traffic.
I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.
But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.
That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job 
