I wrote back in July that we must be diligent with keeping up with who we’ve given access to our Facebook and Twitter accounts, but what about your email and contacts?

I’m writing this partly as a reminder, but also because I could not find the answer. I ended up posting the question on Google Plus, where Rob Blatt quickly provided the answer. Thanks Rob!

How do you see which sites you’ve given permission to access your Google account? How do you revoke access? 

The answer is a single link. Be sure you’re logged in to your Google account first and then visit: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en

Take a scroll down the surprisingly long list of connected sites, apps and services. Consider whether you still use them, if you don’t, be sure to choose to revoke access.

A note first. Be sure you know what each service is before removing its permissions. I accidentally revoked access to my iPhone, so that I wasn’t able to send or receive email for a short time.

Also note that most of these services are good, but it’s still best to protect your account. The same applies to your favorite social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Photo from Flickr by: Frank Gruber

There’s something we teach clients and our employers about social media marketing, it’s a basic rule that’s important. Just as in traditional marketing, the same rule applies.

Know who (and where) your target market is.

This makes complete sense when developing a marketing strategy. We determine who we want to reach, then we plan to reach them where they are. Makes sense, right?

This doesn’t totally apply to the early adopters though. The social butterflies who are early to test the waters on the latest social networking sites end up with their wires crossed eventually.

The Facebook Wires

You see, I have 1,582 friends on Facebook today. I started adding anyone who friended me very early on, before there were pages or options to subscribe rather than friend.

In retrospect, your personal profile on Facebook should be reserved for just your friends and family.

The Twitter Wires

Early days on Twitter meant you always followed back who followed you, it was considered rude not to. I’m following 4,509 people, some of which have nothing to contribute to the conversations and content that we all share. Nothing against those people mind you, but now I regret that my main stream contains content that’s not relevant to me.

Twitter is a great place to share what interests you, promote your work (in a non-spammy way) and follow events and breaking news live. Maybe it’s how you got to this post in the first place (thanks for coming by).

Looking back, I wish I had just followed those I had actually engaged with. I’m not prepared to pull a Brogan and do a great Twitter unfollow experiment just yet though.

The Google Plus Wires

Now we have Google Plus. A place where the early adopters are hanging out. There are plenty of great conversations on an array of different topics that are mainly technology focused on G+, which is great.

I have many people in great circles, but I still haven’t found the perfect (most time efficient) way to bring G+ into my daily social networking. The best content on G+ is the conversation which stems from the content that is already in my Google Reader. It’s like G+ has replaced blog comments in some ways. Do you find this too?

As an early adopter to social networking sites, my communication wires seem  crossed lately. I’m working on fixing this.

How do you do it?

How are you managing your personal profile on Facebook, personal Twitter account and Google Plus? Have you found a balancing act yet?

Our last minute getaway also happens to be our 10th year wedding anniversary. With more vacation days a year and better planning, we could have gone somewhere more exotic, but a weekend relaxing by a pool without kids was just fine in our books.

Unfortunately, we left booking the hotel until a week before and it was fully booked for the weekend. We checked online, through several hotel booking sites, we called several times, but we got the same answer every time.  no vacancies.

Taking it to Facebook

As a last resort, I decided to post a message on the hotel’s Facebook page. It was one final desperate attempt. The outcome is preserved in a lovely screen shot just for you!

I love it when a plan comes together!

Have you had any great Facebook customer service experiences? Do you think excellent service will scale as more people turn to brands on Facebook pages?

If you have a business Facebook page, or if you’ve been creating Facebook pages for clients or friends you need to know about HyperAlerts.

Being a Facebook page admin can be frustrating, because there is no RSS or alerts when a fan posts a comment or responds to something on your page. You simply have to login several times a day to keep an eye on things.

I am throughly impressed with Hyper Alerts, the Facebook fan page notifier. Just sign up and give permission and you’ll receive new wall posts, comments and more in your email. It’s not quite real time, but you can set it up to check and notify you pretty frequently.

The best part is that it’s free! Although I think they really should consider charging for it, I’d be willing to pay for this.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. If you have trouble, Mari Smith has posted a tutorial on her blog.

Have you found alternative ways to keep an eye on your Facebook fan page?

There’s so much talk these days about blogging being dead. Many people are turning to microblogging or using free services like Posterous or Tumblr instead of hosting a blog of their own. Quite a few people who are still keen to blog turn to free blogging services like Blogger or WordPress.

These are all great services! They all rock for different reasons, but what happens to your content if they close their doors? You get what you pay for.

Here’s how to Backup your tweets

I use Tumblr and Tweetake to backup my tweets. This way I have an archive of the content I created over the years. It is our content that we must protect. Twitter owns your tweets, you don’t. Facebook owns your status updates, you don’t.

When you write a blog post on your blog you control your content. You can send your friends, fans and followers to your blog post via Twitter, Facebook or however else you choose, but the point is that you control your content.

I use WordPress, but I pay for my own hosting. I backup my content regularly, so I am confident that should something go wrong, I’ll be able to restore things.

Ask yourself this: Am I in control of my content, or is someone else?

How comfortable are you with your answer?

Photo from Flickr by: tarop

We throughly enjoyed the Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Time exhibit, and the kids loved the interactive Martin ArtQuest Gallery. Did I mention the gallery was free today!

Being your neighborhood social media monkey,  I simply couldn’t resist checking in to the gallery on Gowalla and Foursquare.

As we were leaving the gallery I happened upon a digital frame in the lobby of the beautiful building. The frame included these three slides:

I’m so proud of Ellen Jones Pryor, the Director of Communications, who clearly is kicking butt by including some very popular social networking sites in the galleries marketing and promotion.

As we were departing the Frist I checked my phone for any messages and found this. Nice touch!

What’s your local museum or art gallery doing in this space? Are they tweeting and promting the different channels that so many of frequent these days?

One thing though, SocialToo gives you the option to send a direct message when a person starts following you – PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS. I had a poll here a little while back to get a feel for what you thought of this, the results were an outstanding no to auto DMs. Please tell Pistachio what you think about this too.

On that note, I have already begun unfollowing people who auto DM me when I follow them back. I encourage you to do the same to help combat this. It’s not just the annoyance, but it can be costly to those with limited mobile plans. If someone does this to you, you may want to send them this link: http://turnthisthingoff.com.

Check out SocialToo to find out more.

Jan 19th 2010: UPDATE: Per Twitter’s Request, We’re Removing Auto Unfollow, however you can try Huitter, which I understand still works.

I’ve written a fair amount about Twitter, you may be interested in checking out these posts too.

I’ve used Facebook events many times. I organize the monthly Nashville Geek Breakfast using Facebook, I organized the Toronto Twitter Tweet Up last month using Facebook too. Most people are on it, so it’s an easy way to create and manage events. That is unless you’re creating the event in a Fan Page.

I am in the middle of trying to organize a Twitter meetup in San Francisco during MacWorld. I created the meetup event through the Griffin Technology fan page and all seemed to go well. The RSVP is growing (like crazy) every day, so much that I need to change the venue.

That’s when I discovered a major flaw in how Facebook Pages handles events. There is no option for me to send a message to RSVP’d people. I can’t contact them to let them know that the venue has changed. The only way I can send them all a message is to cancel the event.

If I’m able to find a venue that can handle a group of 200+ people, I’ll cancel the event and send the up date details to the group that way. Then I’ll have to create a new event for each person to RSVP, probably using Anyvite.com or Pingg.com this time around.

Side note: Do you happen to know a good location to have a Twitter tweet up near the Moscone Center for 200+ people?

Thanks to Adam Jackson for all of your help.

Also of interest, you should really check out Ping.FM to instantly post to Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Facebook, Jaiku, your blog, etc. You’ll need the code: landofping.

Have a great weekend.