The New York Times decided this week to put a human behind its Twitter feed, to see if this is a more effective approach for their social media. The previous system automatically tweeted links to NYT articles.

It seems amazing that a media institution like NYT could have had such a limited approach to Twitter so it will be interesting to see how it improves. The NYT tweets will now be chosen by a (very busy) human and written by hand, so we can expect something a lot more personal, including deeper interaction with followers.

Photo by Annie Mole on flickr under the CreativeCommons license

People who use tumblr (let’s call them tumblrs) tend to post short updates on a wide range of topics. It’s not just limited to text – you can post images, video, audio and a few other formats too. It’s great for finding inspiration and uncovering interesting and useful articles. The tumblr framework encourages the rapid sharing of posts – it’s super-fast for commenting and liking and you can reblog other people’s posts too.

So here’s the list, not in any particular order:

1. Follow other tumblrs and you’ll see their updates on your dashboard page. Their avatars will appear on your profile page too (look under ‘Following’) and so this provides a nice and easy way for other readers to find and follow them too.

2. Vote for other tumblrs’ submissions using the ‘Like’ button. Your Like appears under the original submission and so provides a path back to your profile.

3. Reblog other people’s submissions. There’s always a simple button to do this in one click. The post will appear on your profile and dashboard and so this is a nice way to promote other people’s work.

4. Avoid twitter-like status updates. Tumblrs don’t really care about what you’re doing right now. What they do like is stuff to reblog.

5. Trick out your profile page with a custom layout and some static pages, such as About, Contact, etc. This gets you a unique-looking page that you can brand with your own style and logo, while also allowing you to talk a bit about you, your website and your business.

6. Check out your sidebar to see your own followers. The more you have, the more people will get your posts delivered straight to their dashboards.

7. Submit pretty much anything you think is inspiring or interesting – text, photos, quotes, links, audio or video. Tumblr works best when you are discovering exciting new content yourself and reblogging other people’s submissions.

8. Choose a custom URL for your profile page. This helps with branding and name recognition and uniqueness. On the other hand though, I think it can make it less clear that this is a tumblr-powered page.

9. Find interesting tags and follow them using the ‘track this tag’ button. Posts with this tag will now appear on your dashboard. To find an interesting tag just click on the tags listed under a post, or try typing this link into your browser for a pot luck guess (change the word ‘tag’ to whatever you’re looking for)

Why not give it a whirl? Like any social network, your success depends on (a) frequent, interesting updates and (b) interacting with others by voting and following.

Here’s another really handy list of Do’s and Don’ts for tumblr.

Image by EraPhernalia Vintage on flickr under CreativeCommons

Link shorteners like bit.ly are great because (a) they let you fit long links into the tiny space allowed for Twitter updates and (b) most services allow you to track clicks on the links, giving you valuable insight into who’s interested in your updates. I wrote about shorteners in a recent infinite42 newsletter.

Until now, you had to go to an external service to do this if you were using Twitter direct – not a huge problem, but every step counts in the social marketing game, so I like this update.  Many Twitter client tools have their own shorteners already, so Twitter is really just filling an obvious gap in their product.

Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: would you share your bookmarks with a friend? How about 100 friends? How about 1000?

If the answer is no then don’t worry. It doesn’t make you a bad person. There are some good reasons why it can happen so read on…

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon allow internet users to vote on their favorite sites. You can even start your own based on Pligg. If these bookmarked sites get lots of votes (or tags, or diggs, or whatever you want to call them) they will make it to the top and get noticed. This is web2.0 in action.

How do you share your bookmarks? It’s very easy to do this. On most of these sites you have a profile page which stores all of the tags that you have created. Sharing or promoting your bookmarks is just a case of sending people to this page with a link.

So what would 100 people think of your bookmarks? Would they think you are a good Digger or a great citizen on StumbleUpon? Are you consistently tagging interesting sites that are relevant to the category that you choose? If so then the answer to the first question should be yes!

If the answer is no, it might be that:

1. You are bookmarking for the sake of it
2. You just Stumble your own stuff to get traffic. If you do, and it’s good stuff, then this seems OK to me. It can look a little self-centered though
3. You are bookmarking to try to raise your profile

Here’s an easier question: if you don’t feel happy sharing all your bookmarks with friends then how about sharing a subset of your bookmarks? Maybe they are tagged with the word “proud”, or “worth sharing”. Many of the bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, allow you to use tags.

If you can consistently show that you are finding interesting pages that are relevant to your group of online friends then you will get a good reputation and people will start to look at what you are up to. This leads to more visitors and more traffic to your own sites. That’s a good thing, and means you can say yes to the original question.