Mastering Marketing with FriendFeed.com
Let’s talk about some brilliant ways to use FriendFeed…
Across the top of your Home page on the left half, you can see this:
The search feature is self-expanatory as it is a simple site search engine for your FriendFeed. If I want to find Seth Godin or maybe subscribe to people who are talking about him, I would type his name into the search engine and see what I can find. If I find someone worth subscribing to, I simply hover my mouse over it and click the subscribe plus sign that pops up.
Apart from using the search field let’s talk about the posting and advanced marketing options.
Post: Message
If you click on Post: Message you can do a quick, on-the-spot entry like you might in Twitter.
As an example, say you just read a bit of news or marketing related gossip that got picked up in Google Reader that was worth mentioning. Drop a line in the “Post: Message” box and send out in your FriendFeed feed.
At the bottom of this box it offers a place to insert a link, photo or comment. At the top, where you see a drop down menu, it allows you to post to your group rooms if you have made them.
Post: Link
The “Post: Link” option looks a little different as it has a link field.
Just like posting a message, here you can simply leave a text link ‘message’ about a site you want to point your friends to. What’s cool is that you can go to your browser bar, grab the bookmarklet icon and drag it into the http:// box.
Just keep in mind that all the text inside the message area becomes a hyperlink, so here is where you may want to exercise your SEO skills a bit and type in a text link.
For example, if you want to point out a particular launch of a product to call attention to, simply put in the name of the product in the blank and then paste the hyperlink into the URL box.
Then to clarify what you just hyperlinked, you can add a comment by clicking the comment button on the bottom. You can even add a photo of the product if you want to.
Can you see how powerful this could be? If you have 100s of friends that you follow and who follow you, you have quite a captive audience.
Blast out an interesting URL and start a conversation. This is just one of the many features of FriendFeed that make you more reachable as a marketer.
Finally, the “Post: Import Site” Option
This is a very powerful, often overlooked option in FriendFeed. Here you can add a feed from one of the many social sites featured in FriendFeed. Suppose you just signed up with Mister Wong. It is through this feature that you can enter your username or feed URL (depending on the site), and FF adds your Mister Wong bits to your FriendFeed stream.
Getting Personal on FriendFeed
Comments and Rooms on FriendFeed are where you can interact and position yourself as an expert in your field.
Me (Meaning You) on FriendFeed
Below the lists is “Me”. This is where you see all of your own feeds from wherever you streamed them in. In “Me”, you can see Tweets from your Twitter account, your latest YouTube features, any blog entries with comments, any photos you put up at Flickr and so on.
This is nice because you can see if you’re getting any comments or kudos for your marketing efforts. This is a way to have interaction with your peers and other loyal followers.
As marketers, we can use this to effectively monitor the pulse of anyone following us or any of our products. I can’t stress enough about how important it is to be “real” and reachable and here is just one of the many aspects of FriendFeed that does just that.
On your Me page, you can also post to your FriendFeed account, but we’ll cover that shortly because it’s also on your Home page.
Rooms on FriendFeed
Next you will see Rooms, a super cool feature of FriendFeed. Now, this feature alone makes FriendFeed stand out in the crowd. A Room is a place where you can create a smaller, tighter FriendFeed feed that is on one topic or group.
It’s not part of your main FriendFeed list (although it can be if you choose it to be).
A Room can be Public, Private or Semi-private (public can read or comment, but only admin posts). Here you can have a Room devoted to just one idea like discussing your:
- Favorite sport or sports team
- Politics
- Favorite college or frat/sorority house
- Hobby
- Antique car buffs
- Inner circle of a business
- Religious groups
- Clubs
Let your imagination run wild.
Let’s talk about how to make a room…
Click on “Rooms”. Then at the bottom of the page click on “Create a Room”.
- You’ll fill out the standard information almost like you were creating a new FriendFeed account.
- You’ll give the Room a name and a nickname (which becomes its FriendFeed URL, so you have to make sure it’s not already taken).
- You’ll set the permission levels for access – choosing between public, semi public, and private.
- Then you’ll invite people to the room. You can invite FriendFeed users or people whose email address you know.
- You can customize the invite with some special words.
So as an example, I’m going to create a room for women Internet marketers (sorry guys). Once it’s created I can customize it by changing the picture of the group:
To the right of your Room page, you’ll see that you can manage your Room by un-joining it, inviting others, seeing who is currently a member, and going into manage mode, which lets you alter the Room settings, manage members (remove them or make them an administrator), add or edit services just like you did for your own feeds, and change the picture if you want to.
One Master marketer, Ed Dale, is wild about this feature. Imagine your Room as a “gathering” of a team or mastermind group for your business. If you have a bright idea, just pop it onto a message to the feed in that Room. All other members of the Room will get a chance to comment. You can keep up a somewhat “instant” message conversation with your whole group.
On the other hand, say you need a pep talk, drop a line in your Room in FriendFeed and before you know it, and there is help.
The idea is beginning to spread that FriendFeed Rooms could just possibly replace mailing lists. Something to think about. Maybe you will be one of the ones that give this idea a real try?
Why not use your Twitter influence to get your followers onto FriendFeed, and then begin a mastermind Room on, say “how to use social marketing most effectively” or whatever topic your followers tune into you for.
Rooms have the potential to actually be the feature which sets FriendFeed apart from all the rest of the social networking sites.
There are still more ways to use FriendFeed to your advantage – for targeted traffic, for branding, for networking with others in your industry and much more – but we’ll have to save it for another day. Spend some time adding all of your content feeds (including bookmark, blog, and social networking accounts) to FriendFeed – that time will serve you well.
