In yesterday’s soccer game, my son Peter scored three goals. It was the second game of the season and his team lost 4-3. The impressive thing about this, as a proud soccer dad, is that he has not played organized soccer in 5 years. Soccer was his first organized sport at 4, and I was one of his coaches. He developed a love for football, and started playing when he was old enough (seven). Now that he has discovered he is more interested in watching football than getting pummeled in football, he’s back to soccer. And at the rec league level so he doesn’t humiliate himself. His words, not mine.
As a social media guy, I am armed with my iphone, ready to share his accomplishments with my online friends and followers. Who knew it would turn into a blog post about ways to share photos and updates? But isn’t everything in my life fodder for a blog post?
So the first thing I do when I arrive at a new place is to checkin on Brightkite. This way if I post any photos, they will be tagged to a location and distributed to my selected networks.
After Peter scored his goal, which was done at the far end of the field, he came out of the game and got some water. I took his picture with my iphone and posted it to Brightkite. Here’s how it shows up on the location-based service. And there is a place for people to leave comments. I have Brightkite set to post notes and photos to Twitter as well.
Here’s the post to Twitter, which includes a link back to Brightkite and an indication that this is a photo.
After he scored his second goal, again at the far end, I took a picture when he came out again to get some water. I asked him to raise his hands in celebration. He humored me. Since I take photos using the camera function of iphone, rather than within any application, I can take multiple shots and choose the best one, and even change how I want to share it. For this second photo, I chose to post it to Posterous. This site allows you to post by email, which is super easy. This is now my preferred method of posting photos, as it can function as a photo blog for my mobile photos, although you can post anything there. Here’s the photo. Again, a place for comments, and again it posts to Twitter.
Here’s the post on Twitter with a link back to Posterous.
When Peter scored his third goal, I did not have a picture to post, so I just sent an update to Twitter.
Additionally, when I post photos to either Brightkite or Posterous, I have them set to also post the photos to Flickr, my main online photo repository.
And, I have all Twitter posts set to update my Facebook status as well.
And finally, FriendFeed is set up to aggregate all my content, so this is what that looks like. Since my Posterous site is new, I need to link that here too.
So that’s one way the flow of sharing information that works for me. There are lots of other flows and connections as most sites can be integrated to others. My two comments are that you don’t want to overload people and connect everything to everything as that can create duplicate content, and don’t post updates to places where you never go and interact with people. You need to respond to comments or updates about your own updates.
Let me know if you have any questions, and happy sharing.
