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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Meetup.com

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Meetup.com is a Social Networking community whose main premise is to suggest “meetups” for people and groups with common interests and the goal seems to be to get the bodies out supporting the shows, events or establishments that are featured.  I joined a Metal related one a couple of years ago and can tell you from experience with it that it can be effective.  The members of each group can be emailed about a particular function, and let’s use a Metal concert as the example.  So the main person behind the group is The Organizer and they often control the happenings and how they are broadcast across the Group.  So the organizer puts this event up as a listing on the calendar and then shares the information with the rest of us.  The folks who are interested can chime in and say that they are going and with how many guest are joining them.

Even though I created a profile for myself on Meetup.com, I don’t get to use it as much because there are not a lot of functions on it that I am all that interested in and at other times its stuff I am already doing.  I know that sounds weird, but its a 50/50 thing with me in terms of this particular social network.  I belong to two or three of the Meetup.com Groups but as I stressed my overall participation in them is minimal. Sometimes when I am going a ticket giveaway I will message the whole group but even those kinds of things direct them over to the official PiercingMetal.com Facebook page since that who is doing the freebie. I do like its angle of generating support for events because that is always necessary. The idea of meeting people before shows led me to start a series of narratives on what I felt were great Concert Pre-Gaming spaces. Feel free to check out those continuing tales via THIS LINK.

Click the logo above to access Meetup.com and to see if this is something you want to examine a little deeper for yourself. To learn more about Meetup.com you can click their Wikipedia entry HERE.

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Google Buzz

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“What’s Buzz, Tell Me What’s a Happening, What’s The Buzz” – Sorry, that is actually a line from the “Jesus Christ Superstar” original cast soundtrack and the line just came to mind when I realized I was adding some thoughts about Google Buzz to this serialized overview of the Social Networking mediums and how we apply them to the PiercingMetal adventures.  So what is it exactly?  Well, its defined as a Social Networking and Communication medium and similar to how Twitter works, you “Follow” those who you have some interest in.  The difference is that you seem to be able to reply to their “Buzzes” a little differently that you would a Tweet.  You can also continue someone’s buzz by sharing or emailing it.  This works within your Gmail.com account which I think at this point almost everyone in the world has.  Some people love it, and some do not.  For me it has worked out and I have used it since it launched in February 2010.  Right now it is connected to my personal Gmail.com account and I have set it up to share my Twitter postings and blogs.

I also added Google Buzz to my “PiercingMetalNYC” Gmail account for good measure as that email is a little less private, so anyone who has an interest in Following me may easily do so from there. Bear in mind that it is also connected to my Twitter account which will take those posts and show them in the Buzz feed. I do NOT generally type in new thoughts to the Buzz but love that it extends the Tweets to those users who might not have a Twitter account and instead only check their Gmail.com resources.   For what I intended to use it for it has done the trick.  Perhaps it will work for you as well.  You can also read more about Google Buzz by clicking its Wikipedia entry HERE.

IMPORTANT NEWS (12/1/2011): I’ve been receiving the notification that Google Buzz was going away within the coming weeks for the last few weeks so I am not sure when the exact D-Day is for their experiment. In my humble opinion they should have worked it better into their Google+ accounts and pages since those are growing rapidly each day. My view is that this could have worked much like Twitter does in terms of its communication with Facebook Profiles and Pages. I’ve connected mine to the Official PiercingMetal.com Page and loved how it saved me a step. Anyway, since my Google Buzz repeated my Tweets to those who followed my posts I will miss it, but I do encourage site supporters to “Follow” the Official PiercingMetal Google+ Page now to keep up with the happenings.

Goodbye Google Buzz. We hardly knew ye.

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: MySpace.com

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MySpace.com is without question the former Big Kahuna of the Social Networking sites and at last check had over 150 million accounts signed up for it. When I first heard about the service I created a personal profile for the chance to network what I am up to in real life as well as reacquaint myself with long lost friends from the past (barring one or two minor exceptions).  This would essentially replace my use of Friendster and slowly start to dominate the time I was spending on Tribe.net.  Since I noticed some music related profiles existing on the at the time exciting service, I created a profile page for PiercingMetal.com and this profile became the one that I primarily used when I would log in.  In the beginning we were interested in adding everyone and anyone if the belief that it would expand the reach of PiercingMetal existed but over time we realized that most bands were just posting show announcements for areas we weren’t near and limited the adds to individual accounts or bands that had written to our headquarters in search of coverage.   When it came to the addition of bands we just had one criteria, and that was to please at least contact us like a professional medium that you wanted to work with.  Too many bands were starting to add everyone they could to post tour announcements or gigs they were doing that were not accessible by most of the people in their friends list.

I stood by that rule because it was becoming rude to just get blasts of emails that expected you to investigate on your own and learn about who was contacting you.  When one is trying to work through a pile of CD’s from label representatives and publicists, your free time to be a researcher is not always a large window.  In terms of its popularity, it has waned quite a bit from its original heyday but there are those who use it still and get what they want from it.  Many of the sites truest believers have our profile on the top of their friends list, and are always telling their own friends to come check us out which is never a bad thing.  I used all the aspects available when I saw that we could use them and while we had both a Group for the site along with a Blog, each of them were used to direct people right over to the main site where there was more PiercingMetal.com action to enjoy.  Bands of the world started to jump on MySpace.com with levels of zeal and would use this medium instead of paying for their own secure domain site. That made sense in some fashion since they were able to load in their own music and tour dates for free instead of paying for it. The down side was that for every great band there were hundreds of crappy ones and as more and more accounts got created, just try and find something with any ease. At the time of this writing, the rising star for Social Networking was quickly becoming Facebook.  The roller coaster of this new realm continues it would seem.

There were sweeping changes to the resource from top to bottom and many will tell you that simple maintenance became an impossible task and it was so annoying that many decided to drop their page and delete the account entirely but not before telling their fans, friends and family that they were exclusively using Facebook for future promotion.  As far as PiercingMetal.com is concerned I have left my account alone because the status now allows me to broadcast what is being posted on my sites official Twitter account.  Since the Twitter often refers to our Facebook page or Blog, I feel why delete something that reaches a few more people every day. At this point its just there and we politely ask those interested in PiercingMetal to come find us on either the Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Official Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

UPDATE 12/3/2017: Despite leaving it in place for years after this narrative went live, today the two long standing accounts on the medium have been deleted in full. Goodbye MySpace, we used to really like it over there.

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Tribe.net

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Continuing the series on the existing Social Networks and how they are being used by the PiercingMetal outlet. This is Tribe.net

Tribe.net was my new Friendster when it came down to it, and I really enjoyed the network.  I added several dozen friends and interacted with some cool new ones.  The network offered a very “artistic” grouping of people and had far less commercialization than the already in place MySpace.com page that I kept for myself.  I had not yet dove into creating a page for PiercingMetal.com on that service but would create a Tribe.net community for PiercingMetal.com on this one.  It seemed to be easy to navigate but time began to escape me for additional toys to play with while starting to push forward on my own website domain so my account went un-managed and the Tribe.net community for PiercingMetal.com unmaintained.  Oh well.  That was going to happen a lot more than I would imagine given the nature of how fast and furious all of these things were popping up. After having the special group aspect for the site in this medium, I had to admit that I liked being able to offer possible readers a means to find us.

Tribe.net still exists but it is in no way as powerful or as popular as sites like Facebook, and perhaps even MySpace.com in some sense.  Those who loved it, continue to do so and those who have moved on, I do not think returned after cancelling their account. Like Multiply.com which I discussed in a different chapter, the folks at Tribe.net began to offer a paid membership in addition to the free one that you can access upon signup.

Official Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net

UPDATE 5/6/2011: After a longtime period of this profile not being used I have deleted my account in full.

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Multiply

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Continuing the series on the existing Social Networks and how they are being used by the PiercingMetal outlet. This is Multiply.

I am not too sure which I created first, my Multiply account or my MySpace.com account and since they were so close I figured I would toss in my observations about Multiply.com first. I forget who first turned me onto the particular network but I did like the overall feel of it and it was not as cludgey as I was now finding Friendster to be. It seemed to be heavily focused on getting people interacting with each other and it was very easy to showcase photos and thoughts. I only added a few handfuls of friends and much like I had started to do in Freindster, had also posted a number of review articles in the hopes of building some larger interest in my at the time new website.

The network eventually became a pay for premium use kind of thing and I left my account as a free one since surplus cash for something like this did not seem to be what I was interested in doing. My own personal account went unmaintained for a long period of time but I did post a blog notice informing whoever “found me” there that I had a blog of my own over on PiercingMetal.com- Click the logo above to go to Multiply.com and browse around and learn more about it on its Wikipedia entry below.

Official Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply_(website)

UPDATE 5/4/2011: After far too long a time passing since using the now pay medium, I decided to delete my account. It was a logical decision as it had been unmaintained for well over a year. Some might like it, but it never really grew into a personal preference for me.