You’ve seen the social image sites such as Flickr, but have you seen one that is geared more toward cell phone pictures and social networking? The San Francisco company Tiny PIctures, Inc. has created a company that uses uploaded cell phone pictures as a method of social networking.

The idea is that you take a cool picture with your phone and you want to tell your friends about it. Instead of sending to 50 different friends texting and using up all your credits you can send it to your Radar account and the same 50 people can see it on the website. Even people without camera phones can use the site. Just send a picture with your email client to the site and it will post to your account. Once a picture is posted then your friends on the site can make comments.

Friends are made the same way as with MySpace and FaceBook: People see your link and add you as a friend and you either accept or deny their friendship. Pictures can be made public or private. The pics can also be posted to your blog as a single photo or as a ‘latest picture’ widget in your blog or website as shown below:

I haven’t seen too many widgets similar to Sociable or Social Links that have the Radar code yet. It would be nice if they would add the code so we can add the link to the page. It’s not exactly as the same kind of marketing, but if someone does come up with a great picture I’m sure that the masses would like to know about it.

If you’re proud of the number of Twitter friends you have then you might want to consider adding a widget called TwitterCounter to your blog or webpage.

TwitterCounter keeps track of the amount of friends following you on Twitter.

There are two different ways to add TwitterCounter to your site. The smallest and least obtrusive is the badge. While you can modify the look of the badge, it still remains small enough to not take over the whole look and feel of your site. An example of the badge is shown below:

Unfortunately, you cannot change the colors of the small badge and people have claimed that updates to the amount of followers does not always update right away. I have found this is true. TwitterCounter responded by telling members they do update every 24 hours, however there are millions of follows are it might not always happen for everyone. At the time of this writing I had 712 followers and my TwitterCounter gave me a count of 672. I believe that was the count for the day before.

The next option is the Twitter Remote widget. By adding this to your site your visitors can see who the lastest members are that follow you. As you can see in the example below it is quite large and may not fit all blogs.

With this tool you can modify the colors and personalize the look and feel a little bit more than the badge.

There is also a TwitterCounter plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you options for either the badge or the remote widget to act like the originals yet they give you more options for design and make it easier for those who prefer to use widgets instead of code to add to their WordPress blog.

You can add your own code. The bit of code below just gives my follower count. If I felt like updating the HTML around it I could make it look really pretty.

The last option is a very basic Twitter badge with a bird and the follower count. It is the least configurable and probably the easiest to deal with:

Will TwitterCounter help you get more members to your Tweets? It is possible. If people click on the badge to see what it is then they might find your Twitter account on the list.

A lot of people are confused about social networking and how to treat their contacts. If you think about it, why would people visit your site just to buy products? Simply sending product information to people through Twitter or mail lists doesn’t make a good marketing plan. I’ve seen it happen and all it did was make me want to remove the person from my friend list.

Take a good hard look at what the name of your friends list is. That’s right, it says friends. So how do you make a friend out of a person you don’t even know at all? You do it by personalizing yourself. Make your brand a friendly brand. Make people get to know you by being open about who you are.

If you thought about who you are will turn people off from your niche then maybe you’re in the wrong one. For example, I’m a very political person and many of the people who think the same as I do love to make money. These two niche blogs go hand-in-hand so I blog about some politics on the blog. My thought is that I will attract others who think the same as I do and the people who don’t, well that’s okay because they might even think what I say is funny. I never flat out call names out to the people I disagree with because I do value their opinions even if it is different. Plus, if I did call them names then they might never come back.

An example? I make a joke on Twitter about dating and voting. A few people came around and said how the joke was funny yet we would never last as a couple because of their political standing. They did end up visiting my site and still subscribe to my tweets.

Let your readers know who you are. Be honest and tell them why you like what you are selling. Don’t be shy about it. It will make them want to come back again.

Are you still copying and pasting URLs to Twitter for social marketing because you can’t find the plugin that you want? If you own your own WordPress blog on your own domain there really is no reason to duplicate the efforts of your blog.

The WordPress plugin Socialite will help you get the traffic from the three major social networking sites by posting your latest blog updates automatically to Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook. You will no longer need to maintain three individual plugs or do the posting manually.

Not only can you post your latest post, but you have the ability to tell others when your posts are edited. What I did not see that other similar plugs have is the ability to tell readers when you are writing a draft. For my needs that is fine because I scrap a lot of articles that my audience never sees.

What I would like to see form Socialite is the ability to update more than one Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace account. I would love to see this posted to the Twitter account for this blog and to my main blog account at geekmom. I am sure I have readers on geekmom that are not interested in Social Networking and SEO but would still like to update different Twitter accounts from one blog.

You can download Socialite at www.gilfether.com/socialite. It takes a few moments to setup as there are a few options, but ultimately it will run smoothly in the end and give you the ability to update the main social networking sites.

I can’t wait until they add more.

Added Note: One thing about Socialite that I wish I could change is the linking. Since Twitter only allows for 160 characters anything over a certain amount is redirected to another service such as tinyurl. I don’t want to show tinyurl links on my posts because people might think it is a worm or some other type of post and not go there. I’m hoping there is a change or some sort of work around similar to Akra’s Shorter Links modification. I’ll keep you updated if it works.