How to exist online if you are lazy?

I gave a presentation at my favorite incubator on an original topic: how to maintain an effective online existence with very little efforts. I came up with four main angles:

Capture your latent content

By spending a few seconds here and there you can create an effective online presence. Our/think portal is a good example of capturing latent content. The idea is to identify a number of contributors and let them do what they always do (read articles, take pictures, go to events, etc…), adding a small step to their daily actions to recuperate the content and integrate it in a website.

Here is a screenshot of LIFT think:

This whole page is generated with very little effort:

• The pictures come from a flickr account. Add a picture and will automatically appear without any human intervention.
  Added effort: upload picture to LIFT lab’s account (1 minute in the worse case)
• Next events comes from Upcoming where, every time a member of the team adds an event to the LIFT lab profile, it will show up here.
  Added effort: add event to LIFT lab’s upcoming account (10 seconds)
• What we are reading is retrieved from delicious. A member of the teams reads an article, find it interested, all he has to do is press on a button to add the article to this section of the site.
  Added effort: add event to LIFT lab’s bookmarks on delicious (5 seconds)
• The we are showing all our blog posts reorganized by main news, topic, popularity or date. Yes, writing a blog takes some time, but you can also put a more simple form of blog here like a link blog or a micro blog as explained towards the end of this article.
  Added effort: tag content, and mark it as main news when it is the case (5 seconds)

As you can see, all this information is already here (the authors take pictures and read articles anyway), all we did was asking them to go one extra and short step to capture the content, and the result is pretty useful.

Augment others content and bring traffic back to your site

Find those who are talking about something relevant to your business on Technorati
Create a watchlist and subscribe to it via RSS
Visit these sites, and make a comment if you have something that adds value to say
Some readers will like what you say and want to discover who is behind the comment

Microblog

Twitter and Jaiku come to mind here, and the 160 characters limit will be welcome by those who don’t want to spend too much time writing. Update your flow as soon as you have something interesting happening to you (can be a thought, an impromptu encounter, a nice article). Then your friends and maybe your colleagues and clients can follow you and know what you are up to. Presence is an added benefit of this form of content, the fact that your followers will be able to know what you have been up to without actually seeing you.

Link blog

A nice way to blog is to only post links of things you found interesting, with or without comments. I don’t recommend using a script to generates automatic posts, but done smartly (mix of raw links and links with quotes and a one sentence comment) it is a nice and useful form of blogging that won’t take you hours.