Tag Archives: social-media

Et tu, Twitter? – Will New Social Media Render Blogging Obsolete?

7 Replies

With the amount of publicity in old guard mainstream media (late night talk shows, old line newspapers), you’d think that Twitter was the best thing since sliced bread, which leaves some wondering if the death knell has been sounded for bloggers.

Take a look at the signs of the impending apocalypse, once proud A-Lister bloggerati have taken a hiatus, stopped blogging, or are pummelled over the twitterstream into irrelevance. Is blogging, once the circa 2006 golden boy of mainstream media, now it’s whipping boy?

dinosaur

More importantly, is anyone going to read more than the 140 character limit imposed by micro blogging platforms like Twitter?

Are we destined to become a SMS/text nation?

Gee… Continue reading →

Why It Pays to be a Twitter Snob

13 Replies

A Twitter snob is someone who has a large gathering of Twitter followers, but yet is too “uppity” to follow many of them back. So is this going to hurt your brand on the micro blogging platform? Not really, and here’s why…

So in recent weeks, there’s been a spate of discussion about “Twitter Snobs” – twitter users who don’t follow many people back. Maybe following 200 people and have 20,000 follow them.

snob

Todd Friesen AKA Oilman was analysing how he could get into SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin’s twitter cliche. Rand  follows 11 twitter uses and has about 5,200 followers.

Likewise, other bloggers have been Continue reading →

TweetDeck Users Read This…

51 Replies

I’ve discovered a major problem that plagues Tweetdeck users who use the free Twitter client to access and post microblogging updates. TweetDeck is bugged by a fairly major issue which will require a solution pretty soon.

Background: I’m an active Twitter user and have been using what I would consider the best Twitter client, TweetDeck, for a couple of months.

Sure it’s had some weird idiosyncrasies like having to shut it down so I could run more bandwidth-intensive applications or MMPOGs on my system, but on the whole, it’s been a pleasant experience (read my earlier review)

I may or may not be the typical Tweetdeck user – here’re my usage habits:

  • My computers are on 24-7. I run mainly Windows XP operating systems (a combination of Professional and Home editions). I reboot when virtual memory drops “dangerously low” or I get a BSOD (blue screen of death).
  • I follow about 200+ Twitter users, some of whom tweet as many as 50 times a day or more.
  • I live in a GMT+8 timezone (which is 13 hours ahead of EST now. My night is your day. I’m snoozing while you’re working)

As a result, it’s not uncommon to wake up to 500+ tweets during the 6 hours I’m sleeping.

Particularly today, my machine crawled to a grinding crawl, and pulling up the Windows Task Manager (hit alt-ctrl-delete to see this):

tweetdeck memory leak

Coming in at #1, TweetDeck with a pretty monstrous 334 MB of memory usage (followed by Firefox where I had about 30 tabs open).

And a screenshot a few Continue reading →

Another Twitter Toy For Marketers: Twitter Grader and Twitter Elite

3 Replies

Deep down most marketers are stats junkies at heart. Even though we realize that your Alexa ranking may not mean a whole lot, especially since a number of Facebook games and applications have muscled their way into the top 50,000, we still look at our Alexa rankings every now and then.

So with micro-blogging platform Twitter providing API (application programming interface) access to developers, it was only a matter of time before a slew of twitter “stats” and “analytics” services made their way onto the market.

Do they really mean anything?

Is it statistically significant?

There’s still a big question mark in that area.

What has happened though is that these services have turned out to be great linkbait, and they seem pretty viral too, with various twitter users announcing/bragging about their “Twitter Elite” status (even if you are the top Twitter dawg in your village of 500….)

The Twittersphere has been abuzz with various users announcing their “Twitter Elite” status.

twitter grader

Are you a member of the elite? Check out the twitter grader and find out.

The service seems simple and Continue reading →

Social Media Menace: A Guide To How To Irritate Friends and Make Enemies

2 Replies

If you use social traffic channels and social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, it’s not uncommon to receive junky marketing message from strangers promoting acaiberry, dating offers, viagra, gaming and adult offers.

But what happens when friends send you these messages?

irritation

Granted, it won’t be as overt as a “Hi, I’m Natasha, I would like to chat with you

Talk to me now at: [Adult friend finder affiliate link]”

But still, some of the things that rankle my Continue reading →

How To Make A Fool Of Yourself With Social Media

6 Replies

I gave Shawn Collins some feedback about what I thought was some spam on one of his blogs and was trying to define what is clearly spam, and what treads the murky waters of spamdom.

Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”

That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).

What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.

I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?

If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?

Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?

funny face

Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.

Even if the blogger doesn’t Continue reading →