Category — Twitter

Two of my very favorite bloggers and social media dads have been battling it out to see who would give in first to Twitter Peer Pressure. Matt McGee and Jeff Quipp have finally decided to start conversing in 140 characters or less and are now racing to see who can reach 500 followers the fastest. The winner will get $500 sent to the cause of his choice by the loser.

While both Jeff and Matt are passionate about social media, in their efforts to avoid wasting time on Twitter they may have just found a way to make this very useful tool work for them in the long run……

“It’s no secret that I’ve been trying to be the last person on Twitter for some time now. You may also know that Jeff Quipp (of the Toronto-based agency Search Engine People) was also not on Twitter, and has been challenging me to see who could last the longest without joining.

Well, we’ve put out heads together and have decided to sign up, and raise some money in the process. Here’s the scoop:

1. We’re both putting up $250 for a total of $500 on the line.
2. We’ve both chosen a charity that we like and want to support.
3. We’ve both (finally) signed up for Twitter.
4. Whoever gets 500 followers first is the winner, and all $500 will be donated to that person’s charity.

Essentially, there are no losers in this game and that’s what I love about Jeff and Matt. Each will gain something, whether it be loyal followers or $500 to his favorite charity. Certainly, The African Well Fund, which is Matt’s charity, will benefit by being able to bring clean water to parts of Africa where it doesn’t exist.

And also, the Tuberous Sclerosis Canada, a cause near and dear to Jeff’s heart, could use some financial help as well. The people that suffer from this horrible disease need awareness, support and most of all…a cure.

I am following both Matt and Jeff on Twitter, not necessarily for their causes but because they are awesome guys who care more about others than themselves. Good Luck Guys!

You can follow them both here and here!

Are you using Twitter? Are you following so many people, in hopes to have them follow you, that you can’t keep track of even one conversation? Are you following people you don’t even want to follow out of guilt because they are following you? If you answered yes, to any of these questions you may be experiencing Twitter Bondage and there is hope!

Twitter pro, Kim Dushinski, has a fantastic post on the Twitter Do’s and Twitter Don’ts that will not only encourage you to say “no” to people you don’t want to follow, but explain how to escape Twitter bondage by just being “yourself”……….

“Tweet what you want about whatever topics you want. It is up to your Followers to decide whether or not they want to join in. If you have a multifaceted life (like we all do) it is OK to tweet both personal and work related topics. I would suggest finding a balance if you are using Twitter for professional reasons or you might drive away work-minded followers. But don’t be afraid to share some of yourself too.”

“You don’t have to follow everyone back who follows you. Certainly not the bots or the spammers, but even real people. Maybe someone tweets about something all the time that is simply not of interest to you or maybe contrary to what you believe. Just don’t follow them and don’t feel guilty about it. They chose to follow you. Also, it is OK to give yourself a limit of how many people you want to follow.”

I am somewhat relieved that Kim put this great list together. I have read countless posts that tell you you must follow a gazillion people to get a gazillion to follow you, or that you should definitely follow everyone who follows you. The truth is, no has the time to read everyone they follow so why not just follow the ones you want to read?

This last weekend I was out of town and I came home to about 25 new Twitter followers. Once I weeded through the Twitter spam (personal yachts.com), I was able to decide who I wanted to follow. Kim’s post made me realize that it’s not about following people as much as it is about following conversations and I have been feeling guilty if I did not follow everyone who follows me. Now I am happy to say that I am free from Twitter Bondage and able to enjoy the conversations of my choice.

BTW, If you want to follow me on Twitter……

photo via eMoms at home

Yesterday I got inundated with new Twitter followers and I thought for sure I had been targeted for some authentic Twitter spam. Upon further investigation, I happened upon Wendy’s Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter and realized that this was where all my new followers were coming from.

I love the idea that moms are Twittering and I can only imagine what life would have been like if they had had this back when my kids were babies. It would have been a great tool to keep me connected to the “real” world among diapers, bottles and nap time.

If you are a mom, you definitely should check out Wendy’s list and get to know some of these great moms. If you’re not on Twitter…..well you should be.

There’s a great discussion going on over at Dosh Dosh about whether or not one should display their Feedburner feed count on their blogs. Evidently, Maki is questioning the purpose behind it……

“Is it just for bragging rights? Or does displaying your feed count encourage more readers to subscribe to your feed while revealing the popularity of your blog?”

According to Maki, a thousand subscribers is a good indication of a blogs influence and therefore he is waiting to hit that goal before displaying his readership.

This got me thinking about the fact that I don’t even really use my RSS reader anymore to find out what is being said in the blogosphere. In fact, I go to Twitter when I sit down at my computer to get the latest and greatest news in the blogosphere every morning. So what if bloggers were to display their Twitter followings instead of subscribers? It certainly does seem to be evolving into a measurable analytic for a blogs popularity to say the least.

For example, Mark Dykeman is doing an interesting Twitter experiment that I believe will prove my point. Mark is increasing the amount of people he follows on Twitter to see if they come and read his blog. Mark’s experiment is based on Kevin’s experiment on the BuzzNetworker blog……….

“Last weekend in a fit of boredom and procrastination I decided to follow around 1000 Twitter members on my twitter account just to see what would happen.

Statistically the results can be measured as:

1) I gained over 300 new followers on Twitter, basically gave me a 33% success rate. In all my time of playing around on social networking sites that is the highest rate of acceptance I have seen.

2) I received over 400 page views to my blog within a week of adding these Twitter members.

3) There was a small bump in RSS subscribers to my site, but I can’t say with any certainty that it was from twitter followers.”

Twitter is the epitome of blogging and networking not only because it gives you quality information in 140 characters or less but it’s more personal than an RSS reader. It also gives people a chance to be the first to Stumble new posts and promote fresh topics in a way that RSS can’t due to time and space perimeters.

So, what am I saying? What if, instead of displaying how many Feeburner subscribers we have, we displayed how many Twitter followers we have. Would that make you stop and consider becoming a follower and regular reader? Would having a thousand followers increase your influence in the blogosphere like page rank and subscriptions do? Maybe not in every niche but certainly in social media and I believe it is leaning in this direction. What do you think?

Tiny polls in 140 characters or less. Now, I have heard it all. Doug March, founder of Twittertale, forwarded me a link to the new micropolling site, StrawPoll……..

“The premise is simple: each day, we ask an interesting question. Reply to strawpoll
and tell us why you voted the way you did. StrawPoll tallies the votes
and displays the most recent reasons for each response. To get started,
all you need to do is sign into Twitter and start following strawpoll.

The founders of Strawpoll are Rob Goodlatte, a web and graphic designer, and Dan Romero, a student at Duke.

StrawPoll keeps track of the poll by voter percentage. Very fun. The poll they launched yesterday was what superpower you would rather have: invisibility or flight? I chose flight and so did 53 other people. Invisibility had only 39 votes. I guess more people would rather escape into the friendly skies than sneak around spying on people. I can’t wait to see where this site goes, I have always loved participating in polls.

The Twitter API has evolved into yet another way to communicate what you are doing, except this time it’s not about telling others what you are doing but showing others what you are doing……….

“A global community of users answering the question……What are you doing? Answer by sending a picture from your camera phone.”

This technology operates with your current Twitter account, all you have to do is enter in your mobile phone number and be logged in to your account for your pictures to show up. I’m not sure what they are doing to monitor any x-rated photos but you can bet Doug March will think of something that captures all the naughty pictures that come in. A Visual Twittertale perhaps? How ’bout it Doug?

Okay, so I am beginning to sound a bit obsessed with Twittertale. I can’t help it. Doug and his team at Character140 keep coming up with such innovative ideas that greatly affect social media that I simply must share it!

His newest project: A site much like Twittertale, in that it tracks words on the public time line, however this time it is political. The site is called Politweets and it combs Twitter for citizen journalists talking about the primary and presidential campaign season and catalogues their comments…….

“We saw a great need for one site where users could find more
information about the presidential race,” said chief strategist behind
Politweets.com, Doug March. “We tracked candidates on the local level
and found many Twitter users asking, ‘Does Hillary Clinton have a
twitter account?’ As social networking plays an increasingly important
role in online campaigning, we wanted to offer Twitter users and voters
a political forum to help inform their Election Day decisions.”

Already, there is quite the chatter going on, with the center column on Politweets showing the most popular candidates
on Twitter. This list will reshuffle the candidates in real-time if one
candidate is talked about more than another. Prominent Twitter
users include presidential candidates, John Edwards and Barack Obama
with more than 6,000 Twitter followers.

Evidently, as more candidates join in the conversation, more and more features will be added to the site and Doug assures me, that just because the political season is upon us, they are not turning their backs on Twittertale. In fact, quite the contrary, Doug and his team are going to continue creating new sites using this micro-blogging technology to bring us all kinds of interesting topics to Twitter about…….

“Ultimately, the technology on which Twittertale and Politweets was built could be used in a variety of ways. We want to take this technology to public relations and marketing companies so they can track the success of their clients’ campaigns, create online visibility and benchmarks, and access real-time market penetration statistics.”

What do you think the next Tweet topic should be for the brains over at Character140? Let’s see….we’ve got swear words and politics, it seems only fitting that religion should come next.

No, I’m not going to tell you a tale about Twitter. However, if you ever use swear words on Twitter someone could tell on you!

Evidently, if you’re an avid Twitter user and have a pottymouth to boot, Twittertale will be notified every time you use a bad word. Kristen Nicole, over at Mashable, gave it a deliberate try and she says, “they are fast“……..

“I updated my own Twitter account and admittedly used a naughty word (it
was only 3 letters!). You can imagine my surprise when I saw it nearly
in real time on Twittertale. Yes, I totally just told on myself.
Thanks, Twittertale.”

Even if you’re not into using swear words to update your Tweets, you can still check out all the choice words your fellow Twitterers have used………….

“Down the center of the page, you’ll see the recent curse words various
Twitter users have employed. Along the right side of the page, you’ll
see the words that are most often used, as well as the most frequent
offenders.”

Twittertale gives a list of the top 5 naughty words as well as the top 5 habitual offenders. Although, this could ignite some privacy issues in the future, for now, I am hoping Twittertale will actually set up a Twitter account so I can follow all the bad-word posts that come in. I agree with Kristen, that would be hilarious. After all, sometimes a descriptive four letter word is just what an update needs to express the emotion of “what we are doing right now”!