Social media engagement can be a rewarding and profitable venture to your brand or business. It also has the potential to siphon away most of your free time – time that you’d rather spend with your family or on exploring new ideas to grow your business.

You know what I’m talking about – uploading a videos in YouTube, posting profile updates and pictures in Facebook, tweeting about something interesting every now and then, etc. These tasks are all necessary as you grow your tribes in the different social media sites, but if you can, to some extent, automate the process of updating your accounts, would you do it?

Don’t get me wrong, automation in ostensibly personalized messages to friends is one of the surest ways to get you unfollowed or unfriended. But posting content that’s viewable to everyone, in my opinion, can and should be fully automated.

This is where Posterous comes in. Here are 3 top reasons why you should use Posterous in your social media engagement:

Convenience

Setting up your very own Posterous site is as easy as sending an email to post@posterous.com.  To configure autoposting, rename the site,  and enjoy the other great features the site has to offer, you’d need to claim your account. Afterwards, you can start sending updates to yourname@posterous.com.  You can email all sorts of files (as email attachments) to them – .doc, .ppt, .pdf, .jpg, .gif, .mp3, .mpg, etc. – and they will process and post these files for you. Your email subject line will become the title of the post, the email text becomes the article body, and pictures are posted in gallery format.

Save time by Autoposting

Autopost everywhere – that’s the vision of the people who created Posterous.  Once you’ve claimed your account, you can now configure which other social media sites or platforms you want to autopost to. Your pictures will appear in Posterous, Flickr, and Facebook by sending one single email. You want to post a .pdf document to Scribd or a video in YouTube? Send these through your Posterous. The cool part about this system is that while you’re updating your other sites, you’re also growing your content in Posterous, hopefully building up your own community there and getting your Posterous ranked by the search engines.

There are some things to consider before doing Posterous autoposting. Depending on your content, frequent posting of generic message to all of the sites may not be appreciated by your friends or followers, especially if you’re trying to engage different groups in different sites. To tailor your message to a particular group, you may need to set up another Posterous site.

Privacy is another issue, you’d need to address. If the pictures you’re posting are intended for viewing by family or close friends only in Facebook, you shouldn’t autopost these. Everything at Posterous is public.

Tribe-Building

Your Posterous is also a good venue to hold forums, collaborate with with your peers, gather ideas from your customers, start a wiki on any topic, or simply hang out with friends or distant family members. How? You can actually invite different users to become authors in your Posterous, updating the blog with text, pictures, music, etc. through email.

How powerful can the effect be of an easily-accessible multi-user blogging platform to your business? It’s the idea of ownership and participation that you’re leveraging here. The more your customers or audience feel that their ideas are being heard by you and provided a venue for others to see, the closer they will identify with your brand.

If you aren’t using Posterous yet, you should start one today. The three features discussed here are powerful enough to make a difference in your social media campaigns. If you’re already enjoying the great features in Posterous, I’d love to hear from you how you’re making the most out of this platform, please leave a comment below.

Popularity: 24% [?]

If you’re planning to take a break from work and stress, and see an entirely new perspective, joining the Turtle Island Team may be the ideal nature trip for you.

My friend Violeta Imperial, of the Philippine Ecotourism Paradise, has announced that there are still 10 slots open in the Turtle Island Hopping Galore ecotour scheduled for October 29, 2009. The trip is designed to have the lowest possible impact on the environment, hence only a maximum of 20 people may participate.

The Turtle Islands are located in the town of Languyan, Tawi-Tawi province in southern Philippines, about 1000 kms. from Manila. It’s close to the maritime border with Malaysia, and is accessed from Kota Kinabalu by bus and fast boat. It is home to the Turtle Island Marine Sanctuary, which protects the breeding grounds of marine turtles.

View Larger Map

Ecotourism is “responsible travel to natural areas that conserve the environment and sustains the well-being of local people” (EcoTourism Society). Activities include island hopping, swimming, water sports, ecotour, cultural immersion, etc. If you’ve been dreaming of taking your well-deserved vacation in October and just relax and unwind in a remote tropical island beach, this is the trip for you.

For more information you may also want to visit the group’s main site: Tropical Paradise of Asia. Image courtesy of Philippine EcoTourism Paradise.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Marketing begins with research. Every person or company out there that has achieved success in web marketing has done some amount of market research long before the first sale was ever made.

Your market is not a set of cold numbers that you can dispassionately experiment with. It’s a group of people sharing common interests, opinions, and buying preferences. Depending on the size of your company, you can either do research on your own or hire an army of market research firms to find out what your market really wants. Only when you have a firm and highly specific idea of what your market is looking for, should you go into the next step of product development.

No research, no marketing

This is actually where many of us get it wrong. We spend a great deal of time and money to develop a product, write a book, or launch a site – only to find out that no one, save your mom and girlfriend, wants to use that widget, or read your book, or visit your site. Not to belabor the point, but market research should come before anything else.

If you’re thinking of starting your internet business, but have no clear idea about what to sell at the moment, don’t worry, we’ll soon find a profitable niche for you. Again, a niche is a group of people sharing common interests, opinions, buying preferences, age, or problem – whatever it is that sets this group of persons APART from the general population. The narrower and more defined these interests are, the better for you.

Focus on your passions

Some people suggest that you focus your efforts on things that you’re interested in and passionate about. What is it that you really enjoy doing? Fishing? Golf? Photography?

The reasoning behind this is that, unless you have the means and systems in place to outsource everything, it would take a great deal of your time and energy to accomplish the tasks ahead. And, the surest way to maintain your enthusiasm for the project, is to focus on things or activities that you love doing, in the first place.

The truth is, you’ll have a better than fighting chance to succeed  in ANY market for as long as you’re willing to do your homework and find out, from the very start, what it is that your market really wants.

So, where do you find your market? Here are a few places you’d really want to look into:

Magazine subscriptions

Why magazine subscriptions? The magazine publishing industry is a hotly contested and highly-competitive environment. Only the toughest survive here. These magazines have perfected the art of defining their market and by considering the top 100 most subscribed-to magazines in your niche market selection, you’re basically leveraging – to your advantage – the market research they’ve already conducted.

Browse through the top 100 best selling magazines in Amazon. See which one stands out or is related closely to your areas of interest. You can also visit other sites like Magazine.com and repeat the brainstorming process until you’ve come up with a list of possible niches you might want to explore further.

How-To Sites

More and more people are flocking to online how-to sites like eHow.com and Dummies.com to find how-to or do-it-yourself (DIY) information. If you’re an expert at something, or if you’re planning to sell ebooks online, these are the places you should go to. People here are basically telling you what kind of information they want and are willing to pay for. Again, our goal is to find topics or niches that have the highest demands, so it’s best to search for the most popular articles and most “… for Dummies” books in these sites.

Shopping sites

These are places where people go to with their credit cards on hand, ready to make online purchases. It’s an essential stop in your market research – the results you’ll get from looking at eBay Pulse or Shopping.com’s Consumer Demand Index are highly product-specific and accurate. These sites actually record transactions as they occur online and rate products  accordingly. This is where the market tells you, “Hey, this is what we want to spend our money on.” As a soon-to-be internet mogul, you should listen.

Trends sites

If you’ll take a look at Google Trends, you’ll see that the trending topics or searches are being updated constantly. This is mostly news-driven and rates the most popular search terms people are currently using worldwide on Google. Yahoo Buzz and Lycos Top 50 are similar search engine-based services giving you an idea what the current hot items or topics are. Since you can actually obtain the trend statistics on any given search topic or keyword going back several months or years, you can see which ones are popular throughout the year and which ones are seasonal – providing you with an idea on when to conduct specific marketing campaigns for best results.

Now that you’ve finished visiting these sites and compiling your list of possible niches to market to, you’re ready for the next step in market research. This time we’re going to drill down to specifics and validate the items in your list to see if they’re worth pursuing. We will be covering that (keywords research) in our next post on marketing.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Yesterday, @GuyKawasaki posted an update on Twitter about SocialToo, which promises to effectively filter out spam from your direct messages (DMs) on Twitter. The buzzword was “SocialToo declares war on Twitter spam.”

I’ve stayed away from my DM box for a few weeks now – I get tons of automated messages and unsolicited offers of “free gifts” from thinly-disguised marketers in there, and legitimate messages were getting lost in the muck. I’ve been exclusively using the @reply format to communicate with friends since I gave up on the DM.

Of course, I wanted to reclaim my DM box from spammers and MLM marketers, so naturally, I was interested in this new tool.

I logged in using my Twitter account (through OAuth, which is a good thing, for security reasons) and immediately set my filter options under the Preferences tab. Here’s a screenshot of some keywords I used in the filter:

The result?  Zero automated DMs in the last 24 hours!

It’s good to have my DM box back, so thank you SocialToo.  Yes, this tool actually works to effectively filter out spam from your DMs. If that’s all the utility you need right now, I strongly recommend SocialToo.

How about the other features? Unfortunately, the filter function appears to be SocialToo’s only useful feature.

You can login using only one site, so it’s either you log in through Twitter or through Facebook, which effectively removes available information about the the other not logged-in site.

The premium features are practically useless and designed for people who just want to gather as many followers as possible on Twitter, without any concern about quality. No SocialToo,  I don’t want to pay $20 and let you send me daily emails about my followers.

Since I don’t use auto-follow or auto-unfollow, I’m left with the Social Survey feature where you can post a survey question with a set of choices for your friends to answer.

Interesting, but what’s not cool is that the system sends auto-DMs to all your followers, which practically defeats the purpose of why I’m using the tool, in the first place. You filter out spam from other people, but you spam your friends with a survey out of the blue. In fairness,  you may have a more receptive audience if you warn them beforehand, that you’re sending out a survey through SocialToo.

So, will I continue using SocialToo? Yes, if only for the filter function. I can’t imagine spending any significant amount of time on that site, there’s nothing else to do or utilize in there.

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you’re reading this, and you still haven’t updated your WP version to 2.8.4,  STOP! There is an ongoing attack against self-hosted Wordpress sites, and so far, it has already affected hundreds of blogs worldwide. Go to your admin panel right now, update to the latest version. Other highly recommended advice are to change to stronger passwords for all your blog users, FTP and data base access. Then come back and let’s have a nice chat here.

I know, I know. Easier said and done, if you’re running just one or two personal sites. Sorry about your long working weekend – if you have hundreds of sites running older versions of Wordpress. There’s no two-ways about, it just needs to be done.

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of Wordpress, stresses this point in his latest update:

There is only one real solution. The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading.

The warning from Wordpress came out several hours ago from Lorelle VanFossen, detailing the nature of this ongoing attack and how to respond if your site’s security has already been breached.  According to Lorelle, the telltale indications that your self-hosted Wordpress site has been compromised are:

• strange character or code additions to your permalinks
• a second “backdoor” admin account has been created

Wordpress excels because of it’s usability, configurability, and security. Leading web security experts are constantly monitoring the software and has been pointed out, this attack has been “anticipated.” If you’ve been using pre-2.8.4 versions of the software, you must be seeing daily the upgrade nag on your admin dashboard.

You can also learn more about your software’s vulnerabilities and how to “harden” your Wordpress through this article on WP security “Hardening Wordpress.” Good luck and happy weekend!

Popularity: 37% [?]

Welcome to my blog, friends! I’ve finally decided to gather everything – tips, tools, hacks, ideas, etc. – together in one place, and a blog appears to be an ideal place for this purpose.

It’s actually more like practicing the advice I’ve been freely dispensing to people everywhere – “if you really want to get serious about creating an online presence, you must blog.”

As someone much wiser and experienced in the web observed the other day, your blog is your “mothership.”  It’s the central location where you can publish all ideas and information that you want to share with your online tribe. It’s also the place that can bring in the most traffic to your site(s) and be the reference point around which all your social media profiles revolve.

So, what will this blog be about? Primarily, it’s a big demo site – to show potential clients how I might be able to help them.  I’ll also be focusing on social media information and cutting edge ideas from people who are pushing the social media envelope farther and farther every day.

SEO and marketing will also be covered, as well as my personal passion for efficiency and productivity, health, and wellness. This blog would be incomplete without the occassional foray into the green lifestyle – environmental advocacy and evolving technologies designed to protect our children’s future on this planet.

That’s a huge plate for one person, but I don’t intend to write volumes about each of those areas of interest. Social media, SEO, and marketing will still be my dominant theme, but I’ll post updates about the others, as I encounter interesting tidbits every week. Hey, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

So, that’s it. Again, welcome to my blog, and I sincerely hope I’ll see you again here in the days ahead.

Popularity: 37% [?]