After hearing about how social networking sites can be used for more than sharing what you had for breakfast I’m finally getting serious about building out my network of friends on such Web 2.0 type sites. The three that I’m going to start with are Twitter, YouTube and StumbleUpon.

I must admit that I didn’t know too much about Twitter before this weekend. I knew what it did and I thought I knew what it was all about but I was wrong… again. It is so much more than sharing mundane thoughts and boring day-to-day activities. It is actually pretty fun and I can see how it could become addictive.

I just signed up with Twitter this morning, searched for and added less than ten friends, posted my first ‘tweet’ and went out for a couple of hours. When I came back I had already made 22 new friends (followers) and they were doing some cool stuff. I just made my second post and I’ll keep you posted with how this works out for me.

In the meantime, I’ve also added TweetThis buttons on all of my post pages so if you like any articles on this blog please be sure to “tweet it up” for me. It would really help.

I’m going to treat YouTube a little differently. I am slowly getting hooked on Camtasia as a marketing and educational tool. The more I get into online marketing the more I want to share what I know with other people. Camtasia is the perfect tool to do that and YouTube is the perfect channel. I’m going to also use TubeMogul to make sure that my videos are seen by as many people as possible.

Finally, StumbleUpon is the other site I’m going to use. I noticed the other day that I had received a small spike in the traffic to this blog and I found out that someone had “Stumbled” one of my articles and I had received nearly 300 visitors from StumbleUpon that morning. Pretty cool but I have to find out a little more about how it works and how I can make it happen on a regular basis.

The point with all of this is that marketing, business and even life is about relationships. I’m a foreigner in Notthingham, England and I’m a dozen years older than the people I hang out with on a daily basis. I need to cast my net out a little wider and the world wide web (get the word play there? He he) seems like a great place to start.

I’ll keep you posted on how it all works out.