The whole world is using twitter so why aren’t you?

It’s fun!

There are so many reasons for you to be tweeting these days.  I don’t know the exact statistics but from what I have noticed, Twitter is on the rise and Facebook is on the way out!

Now, I’m not stating here that you should abandon Facebook. That platform has a very specific set of uses.

For my personal uses, Facebook is good for:

1. Browsing through a more manageable list of people to see what is going on in their lives. Most likely, you have added your friends and we can assume that you care what is happening in their lives. But just in case you don’t and you do not want to offend them…you should DEFINITELY unsubscribe from their feed.
2. Posting pictures…Facebook is a great place to have a repository (not suppository!) of your pictures and where your friends can go see what you’ve been up to lately.

Some things to hate about Facebook:

1. We all have that “friend” who thinks that their off-color, or sometimes even racist humor, is something that they should share with the world. Personally, I REALLY don’t like these posts. What do I do? I ALWAYS call them out! If someone posts an ignorant comment on their wall, I feel it is my duty to make them look as ignorant and bigoted as they really are and to point it out to others.
2. Posting can create drama. There are many times that you just want to say you are having a good day. But the whole world feels they have to tell you why their day sucks or ask why you are so damn chipper. My advice…tell them to GO AWAY! Or be super nice and piss them off even more.
3. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Sometimes I just want to send my little sister in college a message to see what is up. Now it is interesting that these young kids are more often of twitter. If I send her a tweet, she answers immediately. If I send her a text….not so much! And if you wanna follow a great person, she is @brookexkaitlyn and she has been tellin it like it is since 1991.

So what do you do now?

If you haven’t tried twitter yet, grab that bird by the neck and tweet its heart out. Next week, we will talk about finding what you want to know on Twitter!

Of course you are! Didn’t you mom always tell you that? 

But are you really special?

I think any of us in social media want to know that we have influence in our network. After all, what is the point of just tweeting randomly if no one is listening? Really…does your network need to know that you are blowing up the bathroom with the stomach flu?

Some tips…

1. First, if you are wanting to be a social media marvel, you need to push out content that your network will find not only interesting, but useful.
2. It is OK to be off-topic. Not everything needs to be the latest and greatest social media ideas. You are human, and your network likes to know that as well.
3. You are on Twitter to grow a network, not be a bot. Nothing bothers me more than reading articles from self-proclaimed social media experts that tweet 50 times a day and just push out old content that everyone read LAST YEAR!

So here is a great tool to help you measure your Twitter influence

TweetLevel is an awesome tool that allows you to quickly measure your influence. A lot of us have used, or heard of Klout, and a lot of people think it is a worthless tool.

This is what TweetLevel says about me.

Head on over and check out your influence score! Let me know in the comments how you do!

Social media consultants, or even enthusiasts, must be able to make the contact and seal the deal immediately! Time is always of the essence. 

How is a social media expert to keep up with everything?

One great tool for many types of entrepreneurs  is a fantastic service called Text Marks.

With Text Marks, businesses are able to create a group and allow others to join. Once your members or clients have joined, you are able to send unlimited texts to your group. And let’s face it. How do most of us still communicate? We text!

With Text Marks, it is easy to build your contact list and communicate to your group. You can add your group number to your blog, website, newsletter, email marketing, etc.

What could be easier?

Give it a try today and see how this simple, yet effective service, can grow your  subscriber base by leaps and bounds.

I apologize for being “gone” for so long. I’ve been working on a blog redesign, had a nasty case of bronchitis/sinus infection/flu, and myriad of other excuses.

This is fantastic!

We all know that social media is on the move and taking the world over by storm. I hope that you saw this mashable article last week about the Secretary of State playing along with the folks that created the Texts from Hillary Clinton tumblr blog.

If you haven’t read about this site yet, I highly encourage you to take a look at the site. The site owners say they are finished with the project, so head over now before it is gone.

For full disclosure purposes, I am a huge fan of Secretary Clinton!

It is the love of my life…my iPhone 4S.

 So why am I thinking of getting a droid?

The same old problem…the battery is terrible! On a daily basis, my phone sits unused at work all day (at least 8 hours) and one would imagine that it would keep a full charge, right?

Wrong! I know that there are settings that can be tweaked and other tips that I can use to extend the life of the battery.

But why should I have to do this?

I absolutely love the iPhone. In my mind there is no competitor that comes even close to making such a perfect piece of technology.

But I’m really tired of not being able to make it through a full day with limited usage. Do you have any tips for me to extend it’s battery life?

*Photo Credit- Engadjet

Batch is something that everyone should be using!

Stop wasting your time!

Let’s face it…we are all way too busy in our lives these days. Right? We at least delude ourselves into thinking so. I know that realistically I have a ton of free time, yet I’m running around everyone like a chicken with my head cut off.

Are you not batching?

Batch is an awesome app that allows users to upload several photos to facebook, or other social platforms, in a, well, batch.

Everyone wants to see your pictures, right? It makes us all feel like minor celebs.

If you have not yet given batch a try, you definitely should. Do you have any apps that you think I should try also?

I’ll be the first to admit it here…I just don’t get the fascination with Pinterest.

Is it just another waste of time?

According to a recent USA Today story:

Pinterest is a visual bulletin board for the Web. It thrives on beautifully simple images of ideas for the home.

These images are grouped together on a user’s page, creating an inspiration board of ideas.

The website is a “virtual pinboard,” which lets users organize images, recipes and other things they find on the Web. When it called Pinterest one of the “50 Best Websites of 2011” in August, Time magazine wrote: “The basic idea behind Pinterest — which lets you create and share collections of stuff you like in any category you choose — has been tried before by startups that didn’t make much of a mark. This time it might take off.”

Pinterest has been around for almost two years, but has seen a meteoric rise in interest over the last couple of months. In December, Pinterest became one of the Web’s Top 10 social networks, according to tracking firm Hitwise.”

I believe that most social media enthusiasts do appreciate aesthetic beauty to a great degree. We like to look at beautiful things on the web, dream that one day these things could be ours when we hit it big, and like to organize our total lives on a platform which speaks to our need to share every minutia of our existence.

Although Pinterest has been around for a while, now all of the cool kids seem to be using it. Personally, I have had an account for a while but haven’t done much with it.

Just like other social media evangelists, I want to be the first to try everything…and let you know what I think about it of course.

But with Pinterest, I have failed. I would rather learn about developing social media from my favorite blogs or news articles.  I’d rather tweet you that I am having a delicious burrito from Chipotle. Or I’d rather spend some rare time with my loved ones.

My big question?

What am I missing? How are you using it?

Everyone likes to communicate, right? If you are planning an event for a group, a non-profit, or even something like a birthday party, there are several channels you can use to help get the people that you want at your event.

Social media to the rescue…

There are a ton of tools out there to help you reach your targeted audience and today I will discuss two.

Evite – Invitations sent via email to your event might sound a little old school, but truthfully, there is practically no other method to target a specific group of people then a personalized invitation that lands directly in their inbox.

The only thing you need to do ahead of time to make this work is have a robust email contact list that contains your loyal group of followers. There are many ways to develop this list through services such as Aweber, Constant Contact, Icontact, etc.

Check out evite.

Twitter – Face it…all the cook kids have finally migrated over to twitter. Young adults these days seem to be much more into twitter than facebook. To use twitter effectively, you need to have the information posted elsewhere on the web and include a link back to your page. You only have 140 characters…so use them wisely.

My takeaway

If you aren’t using various forms of social media to promote your events, you are working too hard and inefficiently. Remember with twitter to tweet often, and change the content of your tweets. You don’t want to bore your audience so use various messages, but always link back to your homepage.

I’d love to hear how you promote your events comments.

Since childhood, we have all wanted to know how popular we are, right? Whether or not you want to admit it, we know….oh we know!

What about me?

There are various tools out there that will help you measure your influence on the interwebz. Many people use the services of Klout. This is a fantastic service, but I see only one real drawback to the service…you must sign up.

But I am sooo sick of signing up for services!

Me too! It seems like every site that you visit these days makes you sign up for a free account. You fill out the form and then what happens? Give a password.

I’m sick of stupid hackers!

What invariably happens is that you use the same password over and over for all of these different sites.

Then the hackers come after you.

I’ve had my gmail account and yahoo account hacked three times lately and I’m really sick of it. I am almost ready to go back to the pen and paper to communicated.

Tweet Grader is different!

I highly suggest that you check out Tweet Grader if you have never seen it. Once you arrive on the very simplistic and minimalistic homepage, you will be asked to enter the twitter username and sit back and you will receive a score out of 100.

Give it a try and see how your tweets are influencing others today.

Oooh…the age old question, is the customer always right?

Yes…if you want to stay in business

Recently I have been having a lot of trouble with my AT&T U-Verse services. For over a year, I have loved their service. It is more expensive than other local cable companies, but the service has been outstanding and the product very good.

But things change

One of the power cords on a DVR no longer functions. I know that it is just the power cord, because I used one from another unit and it turns on completely fine.

I contacted AT&T Uverse over the weekend and asked them to send me a new power cord. Simple, right? Wrong!

First, for some reason they can’t just replace the cord. They need to replace the entire DVR box. Economically, I don’t really understand the point of replacing the entire box, but what do I know?

So great. They can UPS a new box to me and it will only take two days. Fantastic!

Waiting…waiting…waiting

Box never arrives. Wait another day. No dice. I did an online chat with AT&T and had to speak to two different people before I was told that my box hadn’t shipped yet. Fantastic. Did they let me know not to expect it anytime soon? Nope!

At the end of this article, I will copy and past the transcript of my last chat session where I was told I may incur a $55 charge for a service call to correct issues that are occurring with the wiring.

My takeaway…

The customer is always correct if you would like to stay in business. Although little ol’ me isn’t going to put a huge conglomerate like AT&T out of business, this is a lesson for anyone in business.

More than likely, you small business thrives on the recommendations of others…which is free advertising people! Treat the consumers of your services like a king, and sit back and wait for their friends to sign up with you.

Treat them like crap at your own peril. I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section.

Thanks,

Tier2 – Lawrence (lr7563)

That is correct, thank you for confirming the security of the account.