Quick review from the introduction to the 8 Spokes on a Social Media Dial:
- Your blog is the hub ad foundation of your social media play
- The tools in the social media landscape are still launching at a frenzied pace
- You don’t want to get caught up in the frenzy
- Rather than focus on the individual tools, we focus on the 8 spokes
Clicking on the Dialing 8 image will take you to a fuller explanation of each spoke.
Our hope, our goal is to simplify things as new tools come our way. Overwhelm comes quick these days – and just wait until day after soon, because the pace will continue to rise. Some tools become yesterday’s news lickety-split.
By having a sphere at the end of each spoke, we can quickly ascertain which spheres we’ll invest most of our time. When a new tool comes out, we decide which sphere it would fit in if we use it – and go from there. No overwhelm.
Eight Spokes on a Social Media Dial.
So the dial was the bird’s eye view. The map, but not the terrain. Here’s the side view:
To review the 8 spokes:
- Streams – Includes Twitter, Facebook, some of what Google Plus does, a bit of LinkedIn, Blip.fm, etc
- Video & Audio - YouTube (yours and your favorites), UStream or LiveStream, SlideShare, Blog Talk Rado, etc
- Images – Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, Fotobabble, some of what Google Plus does
- Networks - Most of LinkedIn stuff, Ning, Active Rain, some of what GooglePlus does w/ Circles
- SoLoMo – your Mobile app, Foursquare and other LBS, Groupon, some of what Google Plus does
- Resources – Delicious, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Google +1, RSS subscriptions, Your Kindle page
- Bio/Hire – Your about page and your profile pages on Facebook and Google+, etc., a Hire You menu or page
- Products – Your ebooks, whitepapers, newsletter, Speakers media kit, membership site, books, etc.
Every profession is different. Most companies within a profession are different. Goals are different. So let’s acknowledge this is a framework, not a blueprint. A real estate agency or restaurant is probably going to invest more time into the video/audio or images spheres, whereas the accountant or business coach is going to be more text heavy. Just as you are unique, so is your Dial of 8.
The Dialing 8 framework also relies on solid time-management within each sphere. You might invest three 12-minute chunks daily into your Streams and a just a weekly single 12-minute session into your Social/Local/Mobile (SoLoMo). Got 12 minutes?
Your blog is the centerpiece, the foundation, the core of your social media presence. It’s the one space you own. Everything else is borrowed real estate on the web. All this other stuff we do – while very important – should act as a feeder into your blogsite.
These spokes and spheres are places to engage and amplify relationships, build credibility and findability, and feed leads into your blog to generate new and better customers. This model also acts as a funnel, each sphere feeding into your blog. On the blog is where you have your products and services and events.
The reality is, change – improvements – are happening fast and the rate-of-improvement is changing. It’s getting faster. It’s not just new tools and stations, but changes to the tools and stations as well. The spheres help you keep things calm and in order.
As an example. I just heard about Flipzu, a mobile, real-time record-and-publish you voice app. As Robert Scoble said recently on Google+: “I love that I have a radio station in my pocket.” (context).
I can hardly wait to try Flipzu. Another tool? Well, I can throw it on a list with dozens (hundreds?) of other cool tools, or . . . or, I can simply place it into the Video/Audio sphere and give it a go during my time working on that sphere.
With this framework, you can bend and benefit from these rapid-fire improvements rather than break. No overwhelm. Anticipated additions.
Related articles
- 8 Spokes on a Social Media Dial (converstations.com)
- Kung Fu Panda on Social Media: There is no Secret Ingredient (converstations.com)
- Dialing 8 in Social Media: Strong and Long (converstations.com)
