I’d been thinking about a Web 2.0 / social media post. Unfortunately, Andrea has forced my hand by tagging me on the five favourite social media tools meme. I confess I’m not a technology pioneer (a fellow blogger described me as a ‘pragmatist’ the other day; I’m happy with that description, but the downside is that I tend to be sceptical about ‘the thrill of the new’). I have been blogging for five years, after all.
Here, instead, are five social media tools I’ve got wrong or missed out on. You may be able to learn from my bad practice:
- RSS. Good in theory, rather kludgy in practice. Works well in Firefox; OK in Internet Explorer 7; but I want it integrated, not in a separate program (and at work we still use IE 6). Simon and Owen have pointed out that my own RSS feed has been unreliable: I confess the problem was with my impatience to set it up, rather than with Feedburner. I trust it’s working now…
- Search. Since I no longer have commercial clients and I don’t have much vanity (obviously), I’ve been slow to monitor what’s being said about me in the blogosphere. Yet I’m hugely impressed when others (eg Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis) pop up minutes after a reference to their name in a random blog like this one. Blog search should be a competitive advantage for PR practitioners: I use Technorati and Google blog search but don’t yet have a favourite. Perhaps RSS (see above) is the answer…
- Missing the paradigm shift. When I noted the decline in visitors to a number of blogs last year, Stephen Davies put me right. It must be, he suggested, that people were relying on RSS rather than clicking on sites to check for updates. A shift from pull to push, and I’d not even spotted it happening.
- Podcasting. I’ve not integrated podcasting into my schedule in the way that I have blogging. (Blog reading is an early-morning task like reading the newspapers.) Podcasts frustrate me because they’re too linear and too hard to reference. Besides, I don’t own an iPod, I don’t do much jogging and I love listening to Radio 4 on the way to work…
- Tagging. I have got my head around the idea of a folksonomy (you need to know what a taxonomy is before trying this at home). But still feel that del.icio.us looks like some infectious disease. My loss I know.
Let my confession be a lesson to you all. But I’m not tagging others; let me hang my head in shame all alone.
PR Studies 
So far I like your list best. I don’t even know what half the stuff *means* that other people are listing in their top 5!
ah, no need to be so impressed with me, maybe with Jeff, one of the best media commentators around.
Craig
That wasn’t so painful, was it? Thanks for participating!
Richard, I have come across a widget that combines Google blog serach and Technorati. It’s called Blogbar. It is free from http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/ and is on my site where I am trying it out right now.
Very much agree with your comments about podcasts. I just don’t see how I could ever find time to listen to them. My free “listening time” is already too full. That’s why the main benefit for me is simply listening to Radio 4 at a time I choose via the podcasts of existing programmes.