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I’m assuming most of you already know what podcasting is, but just in case one of you has been living under a rock, podcasting is essentially your own downloadable radio talk show. You can do everything from talking about the hottest industry news to interviewing experts in your field. You can promote your podcast through your blog, website, iTunes, and other places.

A number of businesses have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon, and those who do it well are reaping several benefits. Here are just a few of the biggest podcasting benefits.

1.    Increase your authority—Just like blogging or writing an e-book, podcasting is another way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. The best way to build your authority is to give your unique insight on relevant industry topics without sounding like a constant advertisement for your services. By providing quality discussions to your listeners, your words will start to carry more weight, and over time, people will begin to trust you.

2.    Connect with a new audience—With the ability to place your podcast on iTunes and other websites, you have an excellent opportunity to reach an entirely new audience. Some of your listeners will be people who would have never found your blog or website. And once you have them listening to your podcast, you can direct them to your website, thus increasing your traffic in the process.
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We’ve talked a little about the sizes of social media networks in Part One and the types of social media networks in Part Two, so now we’ll take a look at some tools that can make managing your social media empire a little easier. You know about the types of social networks and why they’re important, so here are some must-have tools to keep you profiting from your social media experience.

TweetMeme – If you’re looking for an easy way to see “what’s hot” on Twitter, this website will easily show you what’s popular amongst Twitterers all over the world. This can be really useful information for a lot of reason. Unlike Google Trends and some other websites, Twitter usually allows for a feeling of the pulse of the world “right now” not a few hours ago. If you’re ready to tap into the interests of the world at the moment, this online tool is going to help you.

BackType – This is a really useful online tool that will let you “follow” your comments on multiple social media sites easily. From Blogger to Wordpress to Friendster to Myspace and more, BackType will let you follow comments tied to a keyword or phrase as well. Want to know when your company is mentioned in a comment? No problem.

TweetDeck – While this is still in ‘beta,’ that isn’t necessarily a bad thing in today’s world. This tool allows you to do a lot more with Twitter – which is quickly gaining relevance as one of the main “titanic” social media networks. From creating Twitter groups to previewing those sometimes annoying (but necessary) ’short URLs,’ TweetDeck can make your Twitter life a lot easier.

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While in Part One we talked a little about MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks, we didn’t really differentiate between them. In Part Two of this series on social media and building a smart network, we’ll take a look at the types of property in the social media landscape.

Titanic(s)

When it comes to social media, there are the big three; MySpace, Facebook, and newcomer Twitter. While there are other really large social media networks out there, these are the ones that get the most press and are talked about because they attract very large numbers of visitors on a daily and monthly basis – tens of millions. This is a lot of people with varied interests, but is there a viable future for big social media networks?

Are these big types of social media networks headed for an iceberg they can’t see? It’s a possibility. While there’s a good chance these big networks are going to be around for a long while to come, as more and more micro niche social networks open up, more and more people are going to flock to smaller sites of people that more closely fit them. They’ll still most likely have accounts on the big social media networks, but for the most part, their participation is going to be on the micro-sites with people who have very similar interests.

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It’s not just the size of your network, it’s how you use it. For example, here are some pros and cons for different type of network sizes.

Large Networks:

Think of MySpace accounts with hundreds or thousands of friends. This is true for Facebook, Twitter and most of the other social networks. Some people think that it’s good to have the biggest number of friends, but there are cons as well as pros to this approach:

Pros: You can reach a LARGE amount of people quickly and easily. If you have a generic message or site you want to get out in front of the people, having a large MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter following can make it easy to get your information in front of a lot of eyeballs.
Cons: While you can reach a lot of people, they’re usually not very targeted. So, while you send out thousands or tens of thousands (or more) messages or bulletins, you might not get the types of return you think you might get.

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I have been eagerly watching the development of this project for quite some time now, so I am pleased to share the release of BuddyPress 1.0 with all the readers of this blog.

As we all know, over the last few years, social networks like Facebook and MySpace have completely reshaped the experience that people expect to have when they get on the Internet. As a result of these social networks, not only do people expect to be able to interact with the content they are looking at, but they also expect to be able to interact with other people.

Because of these expectations, if you want to help increase the loyalty of the visitors who come to your web site, it is quite useful to give them the opportunity to interact with each other. Unfortunately, up to this point, while there is great open source software for creating a blog, web site or both, getting your own social network off the ground was quite a bit more difficult.

Fortunately, BuddyPress is looking to do for social networks what WordPress did for blogging. In a nutshell, BuddyPress (which is an official sister project of WordPress) “will extend WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation.”

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