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Twitter as a Game Changer

July 20, 2010 By James View Comments

One of my favorite shows, Pardon the Interruption, hasn’t recorded on my DVR for the past two days which was pretty frustrating. It’s my go to, catch-all sports shows that I record and then watch after work while I’m winding down.

Occasionally they get bumped by a tournament or bass fishing special but, for the most part, they’re on like clockwork. After they weren’t on again today and I saw SportsNation in its place I had a mild panic attack thinking ESPN had somehow made the worst programming decision of all time.

Immediately I knew where I could get the answer without having to Google and click on links or go to ESPN.com and find the PTI site I hopped on Twitter and went to @PTIShow. 

That’s what a good Twitter feed should do. If you want to find out the latest on a company or brand you’re following this is exactly what you want to see on their Twitter feed. Part of engaging is disseminating information without sounding like a shill.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: espn, pardon the interruption, pti, Social Media, Sports, twitter

Matt Barnes Challenges Groupies and Tricks on Twitter to Keep Their Legs Closed

May 31, 2010 By James View Comments

I don’t know what you groupies and or tricks did to piss off Matt Barnes but he’s madder than hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

In what appears to be a random tweet sent around 1:50 a.m. EST Barnes unleashes some serious anger on women whom, it seems, he feels make their way through life by having sex with people who make their way through life by playing basketball.

Maybe I’m old school, but if I my team had just gotten beat down like you guys just did by Boston, I wouldn’t be talking shit to anyone, not even groupies and tricks. What’s the old saying, “you can’t talk like a pimp and get beat like a ho”? I don’t know, something like that.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: basketball, matt barnes, orlando magic, Sports, Tech, twitter

Kim Kardashian Gets It

May 13, 2010 By James View Comments

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Kim Kardashian. Say what you want about Kim but one thing is for sure, you don’t build a business empire as successful as hers without having something very special to offer.

Earlier today Kim tweeted this:

Which cover? Follow @JasonBinn, let him know the best cover of me @KhloeKardashian @KourtneyKardash 4 VEGAS Magazine http://ning.it/9LiPrl.

That’s it, it was so simple but in that one tweet Kim showed why she’s been such a success. Having the ability to connect with your users/fan base/clients etc. is the key to success in any industry and Kim is a master at it. There was no walled garden, no funneling people back to her own website, just a simple, authentic connection.

Kim has over 3.5 million followers on Twitter. How many of them, who may otherwise never have thought of it, are going to go out and buy that magazine as soon as it hits the stands because they felt like they were part of the decision making process?

At the end of the day when can quantify and try and hash out the ROI of what we’re doing but if you can make a legitimate connection with readers/users/clients/fan base etc. you will have earned a loyal (fill-in-the-blank) for life. Let your users know they’re more than just a statistic, a page click or a possible sell, they’re more than that. That right there is what social media is about and once you can do that you’re halfway to success already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: kim kardashian, Media, Social Media, twitter

Should you sell your tweets?

November 27, 2009 By James View Comments

sponsored_tweetsOne of the many hot topics surrounding Twitter lately is the discussion on whether or not selling your tweets as ad space on Twitter is a good idea or a bad one.

Sites like Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets offer people the opportunity to post ads in their Twitter stream. Usually the more followers you have, the more you can charge for ads, the fact that the number of followers by itself is an extremely poor indicator of influence doesn’t seem to matter much right now to the people buying and selling tweets. You can set your rate at whatever you’d like and if the advertiser thinks it’s a good bang for their buck, so far at least, they’ve been eager to pay some pretty audacious prices for a single tweet on the more popular streams.

Some Twitter users have made upwards of $3,000 a week using one or both of the services I mentioned before. Obviously this is a pretty enticing figure considering we’re only talking about a few tweets at the most. I can’t say that if I had the leverage to make that kind of scratch off of a couple of tweets that I would definitely turn it down. Unfortunately I’m a pretty late adopter to the Twitter scene so I don’t have nearly enough followers for that to be an issue for me. Which is also great for me because, for now at least, it takes the decision on whether or not to sell ads out of my hands.

What do I mean by that? Well, since I’m still in the process of building up my Twitter network and engaging the people I’m already following the amount of revenue I could generate with ads is insignificant enough that it wouldn’t be worth me potentially offending and losing people that have chosen to follow me.

That being said, that’s a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. Does the potential financial gain outweigh the potential loss of followers or loss of credibility with your followers?

I don’t think there’s a clearly defined answer to this question, although I do believe that in-tweet advertising is not going away and will only continue to grow as people acclimate to it and it becomes less of a hot-button issue.

While there are no clearly defined boundaries for tweet selling, I can think of a few good rules of thumb that should be adhered to.

  1. More than any other form of advertising, selling tweets has the potential to seriously damage your personal reputation so you better be damn sure that the product you’re hawking is something that you actually believe in, have experience with or at least researched heavily, otherwise people are going to be PISSED when they get a hunk of crap in the mail that they bought based on your personal recommendation.
  2. If you’re not going to be making some pretty serious, legitimate cash by selling your tweets, it’s probably not worth the risk. Serving up ads in your tweets could not only cost you people who are already following you, but it could seriously effect people’s decisions on whether or not to follow you in the future. If you’re only making a few bucks, why not just work on connecting with your followers and leave the ad considerations until you’ve got a much larger, more stable group of followers.
  3. If you’re a corporation or organization, you should never sell your tweets. Your goal is to engage your clients and build trust with them. Selling ads will pretty much accomplish the exact opposite of that.
  4. No matter who you are, do not tweet more than one ad a day.
  5. If you do decide to sell ads ONLY sell ads that are relevant to the rest of your posts. If you’re a tech/gadget guy and all of the sudden I see an ad for Victoria’s Secret in your stream that’s more than likely going to get you an unfollow.

One of the reasons this is such a sensitive issue is the nature of the medium. If you sell ads on your blog, it’s understood that you are selling inventory and filling it with pretty much anything you can. When you sell ads on Twitter the implication is that you are personally recommending this product to your followers and it just so happens you got paid for it.

At some point everyone on Twitter will make the decision (or not make a decision at all) on whether or not to sell their tweets. Each person needs to seriously weigh the pros and cons. Think about your audience and how they will react to ads in your stream? Are you willing to risk losing some of your followers for the sake of a few bucks? Chances are, if you follow the advice I’ve already given, and actually wait until you are in a position to charge some serious cash for selling your tweets you will already be able to answer these questions because you’ve already connected enough with your base to understand what the expect from you.

It seems as if monetizing tweets is part of the natural evolution of Twitter, what you have to decide is whether or not you’re willing to follow people who are trying to hawk their #ads to you, or are you going to chain yourself to the base of the Twitter tree and roll around in patchouli with the other “Twitterhuggers”. To be honest, I haven’t made up my mind which group I’m going to fall into for now. Have you?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: adly, ads, Social Media, sponsored tweets, twitter

Brizzly: What Twitter would be with a Facelift and on some Steroids

November 20, 2009 By James View Comments

brizzlyFor the past year or so I’ve been making a concerted effort to move everything I do into the cloud. I love knowing that I’m not tied down to one machine. It’s very freeing to know that I can log on from any computer in the world and have access to virtually everything I need.

The more I use Twitter, the more I’ve been searching for the perfect web app to handle my Twitter needs. A few days ago I wrote about Seesmic’s Twitter Web App, which has pretty much become my default app of choice. But as I mentioned, Seesmic is still missing some basic functionality that I’d like to see added and until I find an app that can handle everything I need I’m always going to be on the lookout for new innovations.

The other day I got an invite to another Twitter web app called brizzly and I have to say, wow. Not only is the design drop-dead gorgeous, it’s loaded with features. It’s by far the most powerful Twitter web app I’ve seen. Not only does it have many of the features some of the more robust desktop clients have, it even has some unique features that are pretty cool too.

Brizzly not only supports multiple accounts it has facebook integration as well, both of which are big pluses in my book.

Screencaps and more details after the jump.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: brizzly, twitter, Web Apps

Tweckling? You’ve got to be twucking twidding me

November 19, 2009 By James View Comments

presentingJennifer Preston of the New York Times posted a tweet about “tweckling” with a link to this article in The Chronicle for Higher Education. The article is about tweckling.

I would imagine your first two reactions to that last sentence are, “what the eff is tweckling?” and, “why the eff should I care?”. Well, to answer your first question, tweckling is the act of using Twitter to heckle speakers at conferences. The answer to your second question is, you shouldn’t, at all.

Now I don’t pretend to understand the world of academia or their high-falutin’ keynote speaking ways but I am shocked that any of them would actually give a crap about what some people in the audience would have to say about them on Twitter. But apparently they take this stuff pretty seriously.

One reaction was, “It appears that the nasty, vicious, backstabbing academic culture has reached a new low with the pack mentality of tweeters who vilify a speaker contemporaneously. Have intolerance and incivility reached the point where humiliating and attacking a speaker who does not ‘respect’ their time and expectations has become a new sport? I guess common decency and polite behavior fall to the wayside in the presence of the towering intellect of the elite and sarcastic critics who know it all.”

Well if the keynote speaker sounded like half as much of a douchebag as that I can’t say I blame the audience for tweckling them. God, I can’t even write the word “tweckling” without wanting to punch myself in the face.

At least someone seems to have some common sense on the subject, “The main impact of the Twitter backchannel will be an improvement over time in the quality of the presentations at conferences like this. I’ve experienced this several times. The Twitterverse is highly complimentary when such compliments are earned, and they are critical when the criticism is earned. How exactly is that a bad thing?”

Seriously, if people are making fun of you and talking about how bad your keynote is on Twitter, maybe it has a lot more to do with your keynote sucking and you being a douchebag than with “the electronic ‘Pack’ formed and attacked. Cowardly, cruel, Tweeters are hastening our rapidly declining social and moral standards and turning us into hateful boors.” (seriously someone said that).

And to the dolt that responded with this, “I have attended this conference in the past, and have even presented there (in a session, not as keynote). I wonder how hard it will be for the conference committee to get keynote presenters in the future. I wonder if people will think twice before submitting a presentation proposal – I know I will.”

You can’t even get a keynote in the first place! Pfft, a session? I could present at a session and I’m an idiot. If “tweckling” or throwing tomatoes or whatever is effective in making people think twice before going up and giving the same old rote keynote with no new information and expecting people to sit there like quiet little puppets until it’s over then so be it. If your skin is so soft and your foundation so weak that you’re actually bothered by what people are tweeting about your keynote, then it’s likely you’re not coming up with any groundbreaking ideas anyway so I doubt we’re missing much. Good riddance.

You know who doesn’t get “tweckled”? People who connect with their audience. Bottom line. If you’re giving a keynote and you can’t connect with your audience then the fact that they’re talking about you on twitter should be the least of your worries.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: audience, connection, keynote, speaking, tweckling, twitter
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