Hey all,

This is my last post for this Wordpress blog. I’m moving all my content and comments over to Tumblr. I didn’t need as much as Wordpress gives us and I love how Tumblr streamlines the entire process. Definitely come check me out over there and subscribe to the blog!

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

is a phrase that I’ve been getting over the last few weeks from my friends of various social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. I didn’t think anything of it at first and chalked it up to it being about a topic they weren’t interested in but having a couple conversations offline it appears that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t understand all the @ this and # that you update. And the links you post I never click on b/c of it.”

Well, that’s no bueno. I’ve always used Twitter to automatically push updates to all other networks regardless what it’s about but realized that even though there is some overlap in my friends, each network has its own specialties. So whether they were mainly friends, professionals, or somewhere in between, I needed a way to be able to easily publish from one place yet push messages to only the networks that make sense. So here’s the solution I came up with…

It all starts with Twitter

Twitter is my publishing start point. I use a 3rd party application (same for desktop and iPhone) called Tweetie. I love it. It’s easy to use and has other integrations that make it perfect for me. I post everything here and then add hashtags or ‘#’ to tell Twitter to go to other networks.

When I post to Twitter without any special hashtag, it just stays on Twitter and that’s it. Easy peasy.

Facebook

So to send to Facebook, I just had the #fb hashtag at the end of my Twitter update and it’s good to go. Now, it is able to do this via an Facebook application called ‘Selective Twitter‘ and it looks at every tweet and only publish the ones to Facebook that have the #fb attached. Make sense?

LinkedIn

For posts to LinkedIn, it’s a bit more simple. No special setup required. Just add your account to your LinkedIn profile and tell it to only post updates that include the #in tag in the update. Easy as that.

*Optional: We also have a company social network we use called Cubetree and it does the same thing. I just use the same #in tag for that as well since when I use that tag, it’s generally professional in nature anyway.

So here’s the breakdown in visual form:

If still confused, please post a comment below and I’ll clarify. Now, onto my next hurdle, considering aggregating my blogging into one tool either Tumblr or Posterous and getting away from Wordpress all together. Hmmm, what to do….what to do.

I had lunch yesterday with a business partner (we’ll call him Scott) and we got to discussing our businesses and how they are doing and all that ‘entrepreneurial type’ discussion. He owns a small 6-person audit firm and works mainly in the Texas region. So, in our discussion, I asked him how much he is looking into growing his business this year and he said he’s not. “Huh?!”, I said. He said actually over the past two years he’s been letting clients go. At one point, he had close to 50 clients his firm worked with but realized a couple of things:

1. He wasn’t happy that he was never home.
2. He was not seeing his 3 girls enough.

So, very simply, he decided to just stop growing and get back to a number (around 35 clients) where he could satisfy both those criteria. In the circles I’m in, you often hear and become excited to hear stories of meteoric rises, VC funded companies, and entrepreneurs building a company from nothing to IPO but, to me, this guy is just as much a superstar. It’s the lifestyle entrepreneurs that don’t get enough credit for building businesses just perfectly sized for them. I really respect that mentality. I’m still working on my business plan for my next business but I don’t know, maybe something small and big enough just for me is a good fit.