Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Twitter has been giving my @jesseluna account the cold shoulder, not displaying tweets from others for over 8 hours. It’s 9:09AM Pacific Time and the last tweet update was at 35 minutes after midnight.

Apparently I’m not the only as The Next Web reports that many accounts have been affected. TheTwitter blog has not posted any information on this freeze out yet.

I can see Replies and tweets that use hashtags that I follow but that’s it. The Next Web also points out that you can see updated tweets using the Twitter Lists feature.

Hopefully Twitter can patch things up soon. Until this gets resolved, I’ll focus on conversing (not just reading posts or retweeting) then probably head over to Facebook to see what’s going on in the world.

Did your account freeze up? Did you jump to another social networking site? If so, which one?

2009 was full of twists and turns. Big deals, big plays, and big hearts, on all fronts. These are my predictions for 2010.

1) Users learn to own their stuff
As we continue to see companies like Twitter and Facebook grow like crazy and start monetizing at every step, we’re going to realize that they are growing because of OUR content. Are you leveraging your own content, whether for business use, charity, or for you own personal purposes?

2) Twitter will become the number one news service
Users will organize to be the first to cover global news and be able to bubble that information up so that emergency, government, and traditional news outlets can jump on the news faster.

3) Augmented Reality marketing is going to be HUGE
Augmented Reality is a relatively new technology for displaying image content and tools in a live context. For example, Yelp, a restaurant/hotel rating site, allows you to use your smart phone to look through its camera and see an overlay of ratings information tied to your current location. The video below has an example of me using Yelp in my small town of Santa Paula, CA.

4) CEO’s from Fortune 500 companies will start to get fired for not having a strong social media strategy.
We saw this in 1997 when some slow executives decided to “wait out” this whole Internet thing.

5) Spiritual networks will become prominent and widespread
There are many folks who don’t prescribe to a particular religion but are extremely spiritual. These networks will do things like support the ill, be activist for social causes, and push for legislation (whether progressive or conservative). Take a look at spiritjump.org (@spiritjump on Twitter) as an example of it’s potential.

6) In the boxing world, Manny Pacquiao will beat Floyd Mayweather in a close split decision.

7) In politics, Immigration Reform takes center stage and the associated hoopla makes health care reform look like a cake walk. By the end of it, tens of thousands of awesome and deserving students will be on the road to conditional permanent residency.

8) The top 5 “TV” shows will be primarily seen via computer screens.

9) Video bloggers from different disciplines are going to crush it in 2010 and people will be talking about movie deals, instead of book deals.

10) One or more of my videos will hit one million views on YouTube and I’ll get a cameo role on someone’s rock video.

Visual Communications Company (VCC) has an opening for a Social Media Manager.

I’ve been working with folks from VCC for many years via my Web development and marketing role at Component Distributors, Inc. (CDI). VCC is a great company to work with. They’re fun, energetic, and smack in the middle of the LED solutions revolution.

Please forward this post if you know of a good candidate!

View or Download – Social media manager job description (PDF).

Related Link:
* VCC Opto Blog

I love using Blip.fm to listen to and share music with my Twitter and Blip friends. Over the next day, I’ll be using Blip.fm to post Gratitude related songs to help promote Tweetsgiving, a charity event that is seeking to raise over $100,000. You can visit their Web site and follow along by using the “#tweetsgiving” hashmark on Twitter and by giving thanks for something in your life.

Yesterday I was asked how to automatically post Blips to Twitter so I created this quick video tutorial. Enjoy, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and follow this blog for more video tutorials.

I met a ton of people at Blog World 2009 this past weekend. Some were new faces, others looked familiar, and others have been online buddies for many months. I’m still putting my thoughts together on all that transpired during Blog World, but the most important part to me is all about the people.

It’s great finally meeting people that you have only known online. For example, I’ve know Christine Lu @christinelu, Chris Noble @cfnoble, Calvin Lee @mayhemstudios, Sugar Jones @sugarjones, and Irene Koehler @irenekoehler for over a year but barely met them for the first time. These folks all have in common that we’ve know each other enough to have seen each other change, to evolve.

Christine Lu

There were also some Twitter peeps that I’ve occasionally tweeted with, but with whom I’ve mostly acted as a fanboy. This includes Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki who has influenced my thoughts on marketing for the past 10 years. This category would also include Darren Rowse @problogger whose co-written book on blogging is always near my desk.

Guy Kawasaki

There were also a lot of familiar faces that I didn’t get to chat with or was too shy to approach. I wasn’t too shy to meet Kevin Pollack @kevinpollak though.

The Usual Suspects is one of my top ten favorite movies so there was no way I was going to pass on introducing myself.

I shook his hand and asked if I could take his picture.

He chortled, “I don’t know, can you? I might be like a vampire and my image not show up.” Yes, he was messing with me since I used “can” instead of “may.”

I’m just glad he didn’t say “Hand me the keys, you F****** C*********!!”

Kevin Pollak

One of the biggest obstacles for new Twitter users is figuring out how to best use the medium to serve their needs. If you are looking at building your influence on Twitter, it’s helps to see how top influencers do it.

Web Ecology Project’s recent report, “The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter, takes a new look at ways to measure influence.

Pure follower counts and follower ratios as measures of influence are not enough. With more sophisticated spam bots and spam networks, influence should be measured based on how people interact.

The authors define Twitter influence as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user.” The study looked at 12 influential Twitter accounts over a period of ten days, then sliced and diced Twitter actions which include Replies, Retweets, Mentions, and Attributions. Depending on how these actions were viewed and their relations between follower counts, the report came up with different ways of measuring influence.

The study’s profiled accounts are: @BarackObama, @CNN, @MCHammer, @Scobleizer, @THE_REAL_SHAQ, @aplusk, @chrisbrogan, @cnnbrk, @garyvee, @ijustine, @mashable, and @sockington.

One way to measure influence is via pure follower count (see below). This is the “old” way of looking at influence since it is possible for spammers to “game” Twitter and work their way to relatively high follower counts. Twitter has been cracking down on this kind of activity but it still exists.

A key observation in the report is that people tend to interact with top Twitterers in different ways. For example, people will retweet or mention news sources like @cnn and @cnnbrk but are not likely to Reply to them. On the other hand, people are very likely to Reply or make and attribution (“name drop”) to social media analysts like @chrisbrogan, @scobelizer, and @garyvee. By looking at these interactions, we could categorize accounts as being Conversationalists or Content Providers. Of course there is overlap but for now we’ll separate them.

If we say that Conversation is gold on Twitter and all influence should be measured on that basis, then the influence chart takes on a much different look.

In the above chart, the tables are turned almost 100%, with super conversationalist @chrisbrogan and @scobleizer leading the pack.

If we analyze things from the Content Providers perspective, then we get the following chart.

It’s interesting to see that @chrisbrogan and @scobleizer are major influencers in this view as well. Not only do they engage but they also provide information that users want to retweet and share with their own networks.

So if you are working on building a strong following on Twitter, you’ll need to have some outstanding content and/or have authentic and powerful conversations.

If you are interested in more of the report’s findings, you can either download the PDF or view the full report online.

The Influentials:
New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter
By Alex Leavitt
with Evan Burchard, David Fisher, & Sam Gilbert
http://www.webecologyproject.org