Tag Archives: social media

Seth Godin on “just being human”

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The hopelessly clueless should avoid letting Seth Godin know:

“You can contact just about anyone you want. The only rule is you need to contact them personally, with respect, and do it months before you need their help! Contact them about them, not about you. Engage. Contribute. Question. Pay attention. Read. Interact.

Then, when you’ve earned the right to attention and respect, months and months later, sure, ask. It takes a lot of time and effort, which is why volume isn’t the answer for you, quality is.

That’s a great way to get a job, promote a site, make a friend, spread the word or just be a human.”

Clever use of Twitter by a Florida stop-smoking group.

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QwitterQwitter lets you keep track of how many cigarettes you smoke each day; keep a journal of your thoughts an feelings (“I’d KILL for goddamn cigarette!”); view your progress and follow and support other fiends.

All kidding aside, I can see how this might actually work. If I tweet, “It’s three o’clock and I have not smoked all day” …and my friends George sees that, it might help him hang on.

I could see this working for any number of support groups. “I’ve lost 5 pounds this week and had 3 Ritz crackers for lunch.”

Will Twitter be bigger than Facebook?

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The guys (no gender implied) at AdRants are big fans of Twitter:

“Writing on Entrecard Graham Langdon makes the argument Twitter will be bigger than Facebook. He’s right. Twitter is many things but it lacks the baggage and some of the “creepy” aspects of Facebook. All within 140 characters, Twitter is IM, email, mobile app, chat room, focus group, news source, a wall on which to bounce ideas, a research resource, presence indicator.

It’s usually the simplest of things that have the most value. Facebook is bloated. Twitter is Internet Lite (I refuse to dub it anything with a 2.0 attached). It’s a simple but ever so powerful interface that brings so many things together and functions as a jumping off point to an endless collection of resources and information.

It’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll interpret this as idiotic puffery but until you use Twitter, really use it for a while, you won’t really understand what you’re missing and you don’t realy have the right to comment. Seriously. Give it a try.”

I confess I’ve given up trying to explain Twitter. And it took me more than a year to come around.

Twitter growing on me

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It started working for me when I stopped thinking about what I was doing and turned my attention to what my friends are doing. I’m only “following” a few people so far (Jamie, David, Andy, Kevin, Jackie, George). For me, this works a little like the Buddy List in iChat. Knowing that George is attending a conference in California or that Kevin is looking for interns, is useful or –at the very least– interesting.

I’m still getting the hang of Twitter but if you are a Twitter-er, let me know so I can “follow” you. Trust me, it’s not as dip-shitty as it sounds.

Diggnation in St. Louis

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Me and a couple of pals drove over to St. Louis this week and stood in line in the bitter cold for most of an hour to watch a taping of Diggnation. If you’re not familiar with Diggnation, think Wayne’s World for the Internet with lots of beer. And in this case, a live audience of 300+ screaming, twenty-something fans. Almost all male. I’ve seen less rowdy hockey crowds.

I found this video of the pre-show (we had much better seats) on Digg (appropriately enough). As I watched the taping, I had the sense we were seeing a new kind of entertainment for a new audience. This is not your father’s TV. Freed from the constraints of networks and the FCC, the hosts can guzzle beer and say whatever comes to mind. And the crowd was very much part of the show.

Tweeting the Iowa Caucuses

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A couple of weeks ago I wondered if we’d see any live blogging from the local precincts that make up the Iowa Caucuses. I figured someone must be trying to pull this together and found this post by Patrick Ruffini at Hugh Hewitt’s Townhall.com:

“On Iowa Caucus night, I’d like to launch a little experiment in citizen journalism. Mobile technology allows anybody to communicate from anywhere, including from inside a caucus. Any caucus goer can become a citizen reporter, relaying key facts to the outside world instantaneously. I’d like to recruit an army of caucus insiders — both Republicans and Democrats — to report results instantly and share tidbits on what the campaigns are doing to sway last-minute undecideds.”

Caucus bloggers can participate via Twitter, email or by texting.

Not sure how busy I’ll be helping with RadioIowa.com, but I’ll try to keep an eye on this experiment.

Podcast Audience Continues To Grow

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The Diffusion Group reports that, based on their latest research, 11% of adult broadband users (some 12 million US consumers) listen to podcasts at least once per month. They also predict that the podcast audience will more than double in the next five years, to 24% of broadband users (38.5 million Americans) by 2012. [Podcasting News]

Google Reader share feature

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I am a Google Fan Boy. I can’t help it. I love most of the Google services I’ve tried. And I keep discovering new ones. The "Share" feature in Google Reader is not new, but I just got around to playing with it and I love it.

I frequently come across a story that I’d like to share. I’ll sometime email it to friends and –if I have the time– post on it here. But there are times when I just want to point you to the story and have nothing to add. With one click in my Google Reader, I can add the story to a public page ("Steve’s Shared Items"). The five most recently "shared" stories also appear in the sidebar here at smays.com.

This simple tool extends my role of "who asked you?" editor/aggregator. While I cannot post on everything I find interesting, Google Reader has made it easy to share.