Social Media

It’s all fun, good news, and games until you read the fine print and FAQs.

The #squarespace story. Super-simple website creation and hosting company SquareSpace is the latest company to throw out a twitter gimmick.  For each of the thirty days running between June 8th and July 7th, SquareSpace has committed to give out 1 new iPhone 3G S.  All that must be done to win is to write a twitter update containing the hashtag #squarespace.  Sounds cool and simple right?  It is.  But then we read the official rules and detials.

5. Winning prize will include a $199 gift certificate to the Apple store, which may be used toward the purchase of an 8GB iPhone, or toward any other official Apple products or services. This is currently the price listed by Apple of the most expensive new iPhone, and we were advised by Apple that this is the best way to conduct the giveaway.

6. Should the daily winner choose to purchase an iPhone with their gift certificate, he/she will be responsible for establishing and paying for their own cellular/data network plan through AT&T (or whichever provider supports the iPhone in your country).

So, you don’t really win an iPhone. [click to continue...]

Back at the time of it’s inception, gather.com was one of the premier websites for writers to showcase their work and abilities – and snag a few rewards for doing so.  As time rolled on they remained the same and added an element of “newsiness” to their site by incorporating the Gather Essentials (major categories for posts – Money, News, Politics, Food, A&E, Movies, etc.)  In recent times, it seems that gather has moved away from any sort of creative or writers showcase and has become in their words “the premier social networking website for the 35+ crowd”.  Now that the social networking giant FaceBook has all but snagged every last bit of that crowd and allowed them to socially network in a popular and much easier way than was available on gather, it seems that gather is somewhat lost yet again.

I will give credit to gather for [click to continue...]

Twitter has long been heralded as a valuable marketing and lead generation system for businesses, and for all practical purposes it is.  Business or marketers seek out and follow other people with similar interests or tweet subject matter, and slowly work their way into a relationship which may or may not result in sales.  The great thing is, this whole process works in reverse and often to the benefit of the shopper/service seeker.

I have been thinking about switching things up soon webhost-wise, and so decided to tweet about it making sure to contain the key words “web hosting”.  Sure enough, within 5 minutes I had the first hosting company contact me in an effort to promote their service and sell me some hosting.  Not long after I got a second hit, and then a third.  The trick is to turn these marketer’s solicitations into deep discounts and product trials.  With just a little pushing and interaction I was able to manage a 10% discount – nothing too much, but it could be much more if you are into haggling and deal hunting.  The key is to make yourself the target rather than becoming one at the mercy of a pushy marketer.

And with that, I will try to come up with some content that is a bit less twitterish…

Susan Boyle completely owned the Twitter Top 10 trends list once again on Sunday.  Susan Boyle is still a trending topic, but she is now at about number eight and will most likely fall off the map at the mercy of a few sporting events yet to happen this week.  Twitter trends are a great way to find out what the majority of twitter users are talking about, but the trends are only temporary.  It would be nice if someone developed a twitter app to track the most consistently tweeted words or phrases.

If someone were to develop such an app and perform the analytics I am almost convinced that, excluding all articles and pronouns, the “f”-word would be near the top of the list – if not at the top.  Now, the f-bomb is no Susan Boyle, but [click to continue...]

A growing trend amongst the increasing amount of social media adopters is to take advantage of integration tools which cross-network certain social networks and social media applications.  As more internet users (namely those from FaceBook) adopt twitter, they are making an attempt to kill two birds with one stone by porting their twitter updates to FaceBook.  It is my position that those who use social media in this way to not have an accurate understanding of the services that they are using.

Whether intentionally or not it seems the the prompts for updates are somewhat reversed based upon current usage of the services.  Twitter begs of users “What are you doing right now?” where as FaceBook kindly wonders “What’s on your mind?”  More often than not users are more apt to tweet what is on their mind in the form of [click to continue...]

Ben Kauffman, entrepreneur and founder of mophie and Kluster, has struck again.  Quirky.com is somewhat of a  follow through on Ben’s original mental concept of Kluster.  Kluster was originally meant to be a platform where ideas and inventors collaborated with designers, engineers, creative namers, etc on product ideas.  Kluster quickly morphed into an online collaboration platform and their software is now used by many for such collaboration.  Kluster’s NameThis.com has seen moderate success for both business owners seeking to name their product or business.

Quirky.com takes a few elements of both of the Kluster platforms and combines them into one stunning product development service.  Quirky.com’s main purpose is to address the common inventor’s conundrum.  People have ideas, but lack the capital and perhaps innovative improvements and feedback needed to bring that product to the market.  For $99 [click to continue...]

Writing/Knowledge

Wikipedia – also known as the brain of the internet, contains information about almost any topic, person, or event worth knowing about.  The amazing thing is that it is completely written, edited, revised, and moderated by the public.

HubPages -  At HubPages users can create single web-pages (hubs) about any topic.  Users are compensate with a percentage of advertising revenues.

Squidoo – Squidoo works much the same way that HubPages does, except they prefer to call their pages “lenses”.  Squidoo also compensates users for contributions.

Knol – Knol is google’s attempt at building a sort of hybrid between WikiPedia, HubPages, and Squidoo.  Knol encourages experts in their field (i.e. PhD and other credentials) to write and share about topics relating to their fields of work.  However, Knol is not exclusive and does [click to continue...]

It was not too long ago that FaceBook overtook MySpace as the most popular and used social networking website.  FaceBook was a breath of fresh air to the social networking scene and stole the hearts of college students who in turn passed it on.  FaceBook has also enjoyed an almost complete measure of success in the age 30+ group of social networkers – a virtually non-existent group of users on MySpace.

Twitter enjoyed moderate success and a growing momentum for the past several months.  In the past two weeks Twitter has completely exploded thanks to a couple of celebrities and a national news network.  Twitter’s user group is similar to that of FaceBook as they enjoy [click to continue...]

Numbers are a difficult thing to ignore.  In any social situation, it is generally understood that quantity prevails.  Many have bought into this idea on the microblogging service Twitter, and have lusted after large amounts of followers to the point of paying for a report about how one user managed 19,000 followers in 30-days.  While many people are placing stock in the number of followers they have ammassed on the emergent and just-about-mainstream social network Twitter, they are missing out on Twitter’s most valuable asset.

Twitter’s search feature is buy far Twitter’s most valuable asset, and could possibly be the internet’s most [click to continue...]