Effective Outposting Woven Through Twitter

Chris Brogan taught me how spread my social media activity across multiple platforms and develop a practice where value, regardless of where it takes place, can add pieces to the elusive puzzle called personal branding.  (Here the link for Brogan’s eBook on personal branding).

Effective use of outposting carries your mission into different streams, engages different audiences, and if effective, generates interest.  Friendfeed can currently capture feeds from 59 different outposting sites.  Therefore, the first question to ask: which sites will work with your strategy in the social media space?

Here’s my outposting work with links to my accounts in order of importance and why:

Twitter: Clearly my main outpost, it’s gets the majority of my effort.  It’s where I gain community, meet and learn from amazing people, and build readership for my blog.  For me, what takes place here is as important as all the others outposts combined, which is why you will notice all my other outposting services get woven through Twitter.

Backtype:  Many have pointed out the importance of leaving comments on other peoples blogs.  With Backtype, I can automatically generate a tweet that tells my twitter network that I have posted a comment.  This does two things: it makes me craft my comments knowing they might be read without the accompanying blog post, and it helps drive traffic to the blogs I visit and engage with.

Google Reader Shared Items:  I posted on this practice two days ago.  I feed my shared items into friendfeed, which is set to automatically send a tweet to my twitter network.  These links brings folks to my friendfeed acount, showing any comments I might have added and providing a further link to the blog site I am sharing.

TwitPic/Flickr: Currently I post my photos to both services.  TwitPic auto-generates to tweet, but Flickr is clearly easier to use as an album of the entire photo collection.  I haven’t abandoned TwitPic because I get such nice traffic viewing the images I share on it.  I address the same email to both services with the attached file from the Blackberry.  Also, I’ve chosen to post all my images in this space using the digital pinhole camera that comes in the Blackberry Curve.  The limitations add a consistency of look and feel and push me to work to get halfway decent shots.

Utterli:  An easy to use audio player, I’m able to call my utterz in by mobile phone, and they create the audio player.  It’s a simple step to have a link tweeted, either by email or on the web. It’s also very easy to add the code to the blog so that the audio player can be posted there as well.

I’m currenly exploring both seesmic and viddler as I prepare to incorporate vidoeo in 2009. While I have Linkedin, Facebook, Stumble and Delicious accounts, I am not active in those spaces so will not comment further.

Generating tweets with my outposting activity says that I value this activity with equal importance to the work I do on this blog.  It also means I need to be mindful of creating a consistant rhythm releasing these items to my network.

What are your outposting strategies?  How do you develelop personal branding through outposting?