Use Memolane & Patchlife To Improve Your Social Media Presence
A recent blog post by Wes Davenport put me on to a couple of free services that should be of interest to anyone wanting to get a better picture of their social media presence. Patchlife and Memolane treat social media posts as events to be displayed rather than items to be tracked statistically thus providing a more qualitative overview.
Both Patchlife and Memolane require access to your social media accounts in order to give you a calendar or timeline of past posts. Both include a number of services on which to draw, though Memolane is a bit ahead with possibly more services of relevance to musicians, and both include the option to add RSS feeds.
Wes discusses Patchlife as a "social media journal" that can be used for self-reflection on one's social media presence. He suggests taking time each week to look at one's comments and conversations and then to ask yourself such questions as "Would I follow/friend/subscribe to me?" and "What lessons can I learn from these experiences?"
Wes also advocates giving yourself a break if you don't like what you see and instead focus on learning from your failures as well as your successes.
In some ways, Patchlife works best for this process with its combination of a calendar plus the ability to add notes to the calendar. However, I find Memolane a bit more conducive to getting a sense of one's flow of activity with its timeline display though their option to add stories doesn't seem to show up in one's timeline.
While Wes' approach is admirable, I think these services would also be useful for folks who aren't so interested in increasing "authenticity" but are interested in staying on message and crafting their communications.
For example, one music marketer I've been watching writes ranty and somewhat abusive comments about other music marketers and industry bloggers. This seemed counterproductive to me until I read a blog post of his that did the same thing and, after reading the comments, I realized that he was consistently presenting a voice that would fit his target market of musicians who seem to read his statements as a form of cutting-through-the-bullshit. And, actually, that's probably related to this individual's take on authenticity.
Such tools as Patchlife and Memolane can give you a sense of your major communication patterns by pulling together the fragments that make up the whole. And that's a great way to be able to step back and decide if your approach to communication is what you want it to be.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project. To suggest websites and related topics for review, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
