My pal Bonnie Ruberg IMterviewed me for this Forbes.com piece that she did on social networking yesterday. I hope I don’t sound like a total douche.
Freelance radio journalist Cyrus Farivar saves valuable time by bringing the power of many social networking tools to bear at once. To help him stay in touch with his readership while working from Lyon, France, Farivar took all of 10 minutes to set up a Twitter account, which blasts a post every time he writes a blog entry; the same goes for his Facebook page. Better yet, he avoids filling up his readers’ e-mail boxes, spam-style.
Farivar also keeps a profile on LinkedIn, the Facebook for business professionals, now with more than 24 million users. (For more, check out “What’s To Love About LinkedIn?”)
As for receiving myriad updates from the networked masses, Farivar relies on RSS feeds–lists of posts from across the Web. RSS “readers” aggregate all those messages in one place in real time, so Farivar doesn’t have to check umpteen Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. “To me,” he says, “anything without RSS is invisible.”
In the end, that’s what social networking is all about: efficiency. “It’s not something I’ve put a lot of time into,” says Farivar. “I figure another avenue [for] people finding me can’t hurt.” But not networking sure would.
