Tag Archives: social networks

PiercingMetal & Social Networking: About.Me

August 1, 2012 Ken Pierce Leave a comment

Alright, now this next one is not as much of a Social Network as it is a means to put up a signpost that will show off how people can network with you socially. Does that make any sense? I found this one while clicking around in Foodspotting and was reading the profile page of one of my contacts. I was directed to this medium and thought it to be very interesting, depending on just how much you actually want to put out there. Since I have a few different interests and spaces online that direct you to my adventures in music reporting or photography, I felt that I should examine it a little deeper.

With this being in mind I did a test run of this resource with an account for myself and used my real name as opposed to the pen name of Piercing Ken or my PiercingMetal brand identity and listed my WordPress Blogs for PiercingMetal, my site Twitter and Instagram accounts first. You have a score of options to choose from and right off the bat for me there is stuff in those networks that I want people to find and hopefully enjoy the most. I opted to NOT add my personal Facebook Page and instead chose to add the two Official Facebook Pages that I maintain for each of my websites. Like many friends of mine, I am becoming a lot more strict on who I want accessing my personal happenings but if it is the media stuff that you enjoy then by all means hit up our official pages. You appear to be able to add a Google+ account along with a Tumblr and while I have these I essentially repeat many postings that you see on Facebook in those mediums. There are Last FM and Reverbnation accounts for the website, but each are used sparingly. Check out the graphic below to see the menu. Pardon the grayed out ones, this is from my profile and hence the ones I am using.

When I compiled my apps I was surprised to learn of two new Social Networks that I had not yet explored but they really don’t seem like ones I will tinker with anyway in all honesty. I am speaking of both Smarterer and Trippy and since I didn’t see how I would employ them as a media person you shall NOT be seeing overviews in this little set of observations any time soon. They had something related to food and drink called “Forkly” but I am a die hard Foodspotting dude now and shall stick by them. This looked exactly the same as far as interface went. Since I run the main PiercingMetal.com and PiercingKen.com websites I used the option to add the two links so perhaps if you have any number of domains under your command that you should do the same thing for good measure. They offer the ability to find ones friends but this is where I ran into an issue. I clicked “Find Your Friends” and while it worked on finding a couple of my Twitter connections, it took forever and then failed on my attempts to import the contacts on both Gmail.com and AOL.com. There is also a means to use your Yahoo.com email but I do not use that account at this point in my life. Its a redirect for me like Hotmail.com is. I didn’t get an error message – it just failed on me. So much for that. I guess anyone who searches for my name on this can find me with little incident or just CLICK THIS since they are right here already 🙂

So what made me add this to our little rundown of Social Networking sites and the like? Well, considering this resource amounts to a signpost of what you have going on in the online world, I felt that it helps you reach new people that might be of like mind or reconnect with friends who might be out there as well. Depending on what you want to share you can post it on this page and let yourself be found. You can even toss in a brief bio to cover all the bases. They seem to have the chance to get some business cards with this information on them but I already have a ton of cards with my branding already and I don’t post any of my social networks on them since it is secondary to what I am doing out there. You might feel different and that is alright with me. The link below brings you to the service so give it a whirl and if you add us to your favorites we hope that you click our links and find out more about what we are doing. Have fun.

Official Website: http://about.me/

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Staree

July 1, 2012 Ken Pierce Leave a comment

This news might surprise you but “Yes, there is now one more Social Network to learn about”. Oh come on, did you not think that this was going to happen? I hate to alarm you but while the world currently finds itself entrenched in Facebook and Twitter, these networks are going to keep coming at us and vying for our attention. So now let’s welcome to the fold a new networking site called “Staree”. I first learned about Staree from the fine folks at Blog World Expo (which is now going by the name “New Media Expo” in case you have not heard) and like all new launches you needed to “apply” or “request” an invite to sign up. After I tooled around the screens and saw that I could list my Official PiercingMetal Twitter and also make mention of the various other networks where you could find the brand I pressed “submit request” and waited to see what would happen.

Since this is new and only at the “invite” time of its existence there is not a lot of playing around that I could actually do since I don’t have anyone connected to me, nor did I see a means to find ones existing friends by searching via an email address. I copied the screen for my profile for your examination and found a couple of interesting items on it that I was not able to find any more information about. Take a look at the image and know you can make it larger by clicking on it.

Did you see the part on the side that showcases a dollar value? That is apparently one of the aspects of this network as it said on one of the screens I found that you can “take pictures and earn money”. Believe me I am always game for making a little side scratch since PiercingMetal.com does NOT pay its bills by reaching into the money tree branches. If the images they pay you for somehow become the exclusive property of Staree then this doesn’t interest me at all, since my images are mine and no one else’s. The first post I did was to show my “Official Photo” that Skeleton Pete took for me about a year ago as a test sample. I wanted to post some text and do a little introduction to say who I was and the like but it seems at this point the only options are to post a photo or a video. Visually this first struck me as very similar to Tumblr and I would have hoped that we would find the means to RSS some posted content into our own streams in Staree as we once were able to do in Tumblr but that did not appear to be the case.

I’ll keep experimenting and you readers are welcome to find my profile via this LINK but do be aware that the best place to keep up with the website is via the Facebook Fan Page and the Official Twitter because they are used quite a bit to tie all of our adventures together. Even though Facebook made some serious changes to the reach of its fan pages unless you paid, you can still be in the loop if you check back with it on a regular basis. Should I learn anything else that is cool about Staree I will append that information into the narrative for your indulgence.

UPDATE 5/3/2013: I’ve never found any positive use for the website brand via Staree and decided to cancel my account this evening. The interesting thing was that there was NO means for me to login and go to account settings and choose this option on my own. Instead I had to search around on their Facebook to hopefully find someone who had inquired about the same procedure. This exploration found me learning that a ticket needed to be drafted to their support desk who would address it in the order it was received. Wow. Talk about effective. Goodbye Staree, you appear pointless to me.

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Official Facebook Fan Page

June 19, 2012 Ken Pierce 2 Comments

For a number of months I have been offering up our readers a veritable cornucopia of Social Networking posts here in our our sites blog and speaking in relation as to how we were using them to better generate attention to the PiercingMetal.com brand identity. Since site launch back in 2005, I’ve seen networks come and go and while some have even remained active all this time, their own reach and considered impact on the larger geography has waned while others took the reigns and rose to new heights. MySpace in particular was one that is no longer deemed relevant by a large faction of Net savvy people. On the other hand, Facebook is now without question one of the most popular, if not THE most popular and powerful Social Network that is currently online. It seems that everyone you encounter in your travels has a Facebook page and while people used to ask for telephone numbers, I now hear “can I add you on Facebook” much more. Not long after I created my own personal account, I learned of being able to create a focused page that could be dedicated to my website and this community page was limited in its quantification and use to the readership. That left me with some serious doubts about its benefit. Our first posting on said page has been embedded for your perusal below.

Hopefully you already know by now how the Fan Pages work out but if you don’t, all you have to do as a user on Facebook is go to the page for the resource you enjoy and click “Like”. As time goes on, the various visitors to the page see how many people “Like” the page and perhaps are encouraged to click that button themselves. I took a snap when our official page reached “2112” because we are Rush fans over here at the PiercingMetal Command HQ, and also because our reaching a Metal “666” happened too fast and was gone before I thought to screen capture the visual. For the longest time I was only using it sparingly and certainly not as much as my Metal Media peers were. I was instead opting to keep my head focused on as much content creation as possible more than tinkering about on these external mediums.
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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Soundcloud

May 2, 2012 Ken Pierce Leave a comment

Alight, so perhaps this is another case of my using this little section of narratives to speak about something that is not quite a Social Network but please indulge me since I did this for the Instagram application as well. Soundcloud is not a social network per se but really does help those who are musically inclined get there songs around the vast and varied social networks a lot easier.

For years the bands and performers of the world have been using either their own website/blog to showcase their music or the likes of MySpace, and now Reverbnation to do it but with the latter two programs you had to fill out a whole profile and upload stuff. At the end of the day it can be a little bit involved, especially if you only want to share a new song with your listeners, fans and immediate circle of friends. Once you are logged into your Soundcloud account you will be able to have a specific URL to share with your fans and that is great for posting on an Official Facebook Page which many bands have now as well. They can even Tweet it to the world which is the hot thing to do right? Over the course of the year I have been sent links to enjoy from bands that I was interacting with and I like the idea of it. Like most of these services it has a free feature and a pay one that offers you additional features.

Take a look at it if you are at the level where you are building up your fan base and see if it works out for you. That’s all I have about this one but you can learn more by clicking the links below and signing up for an account.

Update 11/25/2020: Since the time of this original narrative the PiercingMetal Soundcloud has been repurposed to work in a broader sense under the Ken Pierce Media branding.

Official Website: www.soundcloud.com
Official Ken Pierce Media Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/kenpiercemedia
Official Wikipedia Entry: HERE

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PiercingMetal & Social Networking: Foodspotting

April 1, 2012 Ken Pierce Leave a comment

Continuing along in my little series of narratives that briefly discuss the Social Networking mediums of the day I get to a site/service that I actually first learned about at the NY Comic Con back in 2011. Perhaps you recall one of the photos that referenced them if you have a very focused and attentive eye and if you do not, this is called Foodspotting. So what is it and why am I even discussing it on my Metal Sites blog you might be asking.

Foodspotting (which I think is one word) is what they are calling a “visual food guide” and of course “there’s an App for that”. The premise is kind of cool and appealed to me quite a bit since I like to go and meet friends at various bars or restaurants before hitting the Metal shows that we are all attending. Sometimes you find an amazing place to hang and start to call it home, and such practices led me to do my other series of narratives in my “PiercingMetal Pregaming” series. New readers might not know about this one unless they are digging deep into the blog, but they were done to discuss the various places my friends and I would convene before shows for food and drink. I’ve not done one of them in awhile and will likely create any of the new ones in my personal blog since I discuss food much more often over there; but I digress let’s get back to Foodspotting. The site works with the idea of our not only recommending a place to go and eat but also a particular dish that you or a friend might have ordered. Let’s say I ordered a burger at Smith’s Bar and wanted to share my thoughts on it with anyone who follows me. I can snap a photo with my phone and then upload it to the site and line out some comments about the order itself. Was it good, was it crappy, did it leave me wanting more or just left me cold? Whatever it was you can say it here. That’s pretty cool right? I think so, since the best way to find awesome things is through our friends in many cases.
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