Yesterday I talked about some twitter marketing ideas at digitalks. In my presentation I referred to the page howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com. All it shows is a big fat “Don't” and I highly doubted this thesis. Luckily my namesake Richard Pyrker aka @cycus has done a fantastic pundit-kitchen-digitalks-xsara-photoshop mash-up:
As social media services grow, they become more and more interesting for advertisers. Magpie, a brand-new “twitter advertising network” (and in no way affiliated with the RSS-parser library bearing the same name) is offering tweepers money to embed spam ads in their timeline. This sure was unavoidable, but at first glance, the European-based network is doing a pretty nice job.
Since I'm an online entrepreneur, I'm naturally very interested in new ways of monetizing my social media activities – but I would never recommend any service which I'm not a fan of, which ultimately leads to the one requirement that any ad network *must* take serious:
Psychologically, Magpie is doing quite a great job: new twitterers are encouraged to enter their username, based on which Magpie displays the amount which “could be earned” – I guess that this is a pretty rough and very optimistic approximation, since the systems tells me that I could make nearly 2.000 Euros a month. The tutorial video explains how the exchange of attentions actually works:
The sign-up process is really simple – advertisers need to apply for a dedicated log-in, twitterers have to deal with the ol' trust problem: Magpie requires them to enter their passwords; I hope that an authentication-token is on twitter's top priority list.
That's pretty much all there is – and since the publisher's terms and conditions do not require you sell your soul to any kind of devil, I became curious and signed up, as it is possible to pause one's account at any time. I'm really curious if Magpie will be able to turn tweets into bling-bling or if users will rejects ads at all. This is what the dashboard looks like:
You have to be aware though that Magpie is discussed quite controversially: While Marshall Kirkpatrick senses dark-side qualities and Dave Fleet feels abused, Studio Rizzn explains the truth about “evil Apple”.
Magpie is using PayPal, you have to earn at least 50 bucks to qualify for your first virtual paycheck. Besides from intercultural gaps (European users tend to be a lot pickier about commercial tweets and US citizens), I guess that Magpie's success will largely depend on the advertiser pool: if they offer enough interesting contents and manage to successfully pitch their system to the right advertisers, this could be huge. I'll try Magpie for the next two weeks and keep you updated, or you might want to start your own experiment: Sign up for Magpie
The Easter bunny had a great present in store for me this year: a couple of days ago, I was about 100 followers short of 5k. So I announced that my 5.000th follower would receive a free review of a site of his choice – but instead of a text review I am going to show you some pictures, and I'm honored to announce that the said person is not a human being, but a famous internet dog. Welcome Archie! And Archie does not run a blog himself, but he stars in a large number of great pictures, so I decided to post a selection of my favorite Archie photos. All shots have been taken by Phreak 2.0, the other end of Archie's leash.
Of all twitter add-on services, Mr. Tweet has surprised me most during the last week. That basic aim of the service is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be interested in. Since twitter is still growing so rapidly, topic-specific selection becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I'm quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter's “backlink factor”, Mr. Tweet introduces a well thought-through recommendation system.
Basically, Mr. Tweet is one of those services you have to trust enough to hand over your twitter account data – that's the one thing I don't quite like about it, yet still the surplus value is great. On each twitter users profile page a number of statistical data presents an overview of the type of twitter who's at work here: Updates per day, percentage of conversations, posted links plus additional notes (like “usually follows back”) give a better impression about the realness/spammyness of any account:
And there's more: the service regularly provides very interesting twitter tutorials as well as suggestions for new follows – and these work really well in comparison to what Twitter itself has to offer:
Twitter's suggestions for me include a grocery store, the microblog of an online shoe store CEO and a mommy blogger. On the other hand, Mr. Tweet has actually recommended people I have met or at least know professionally.
The founders of the company refer to their service as a personal networking agent, yet while this label sounds a bit exaggerated, some truly juicy candy is hidden inside the recommendation system: Mr. Tweet encourages its users to ask for recommendations by other users and to issue these to their own favorites users. Such recommendations are tweets which look like this:
#MrTweet I recommend @username because [insert reason here]
Not only do these messages raise awareness for ones account, their overall number is also used by Mr. Tweet's follower algorithm which determines the follow-suggestions. Besides, you get to know some nice bits and pieces about other tweepers – so in other words: please go to Mr. Tweet and recommend me! :mrgreen:
Since I really like the service and the idea, I'll recommend one of my favorite twitter friends each day for the next two weeks. Using Tweetlater, that's a breeze – even the scheduling option of the free version are great, but to harness the full power of pre-tweeting, I highly recommend the pro version, which enables you to schedule replies and direct messages.
Want some recommendation love? Since I'm a big fan of reciprocal network building, of course I'll gladly return to favor if you write a recommendation for me!
Comedian Jon Stewart has his popular character “Old Man Stewart” explain our favorite Microblogging Service. Why is everybody at congress going crazy about 140 chars, especially congress? And why is everybody on Grunter these days? This is just hilarious! Read more
Yesterday, Vienna's first twestival took place at WerkzeugH. In more than 120 cities, twitterers joined forces to have a good time and raise some money for clean water projects in Africa. Dan, who organised the Viennese event, raffled off a Nintendo Wii and a Logitech Squeezebox, and we managed to collect almost 500 Euros.
The event was streamed live on the official Twestival Page. And indeed: we tweeted, we met and we gave. I hope that we can recruit some more people next time, but considering the impromptu approach and the short time span, I think it was quite a nice result. Thanks a lot to Manfred of WerkzeugH, DJ Smartula and fatfoogoo for sponsoring the Wii.
I'm not too big a fan of mixing personal twitter accounts with automated postings, so I set up a dedicated twitter account for this task. If you prefer to receive datadirt postings via tweet, just follow @datadirtrss. Of course I'll continue to use my personal acccount @datadirt for manual updates, while the frog-bot will send out automated updates via the new account.
Of course I set the profile to auto-follow – by the way, let me remind you of the twitter auto-follow accounts list, which keeps growing and gives you some instant followers (which is especially useful if you're starting a new twitter account and want to “polish” the numbers a bit: it's a psychological issue, as most users won't follow an account which has less than 10 followers).
If you run a WordPress blog and want to set up your own posting-bot, this is what you have to do:
So good luck with all your twitter endeavours – seems like building an additional traffic stream always pays off!
PS – Note to twitter-spammers: I realized that many accounts follow fellow tweeters who have their account on auto-follow. After waiting till they receive the follow-back love, they quickly unfollow. I regularly (about twice a month) go through my “following” list anyways – I simply used to kick out the bottom-feeders, but since many are trying more than once, I've started blocking everyone who unfollows me quickly after the follow. And I urge you to do the same if you want to keep your account clean.
Auto-follow is a great feature for twitter, because it helps you save a lot of time. On the other hand though, plenty users are afraid of automatically following the likes of spam-bots and such. TweetLater, one of my favorite one-stop-shop twitter mash-up, updated their auto-follow feature today: users may now chose to moderate who to follow and who to keep a respectful distance from. It's called “vet new users” and you have to turn it on once if you're already using a TweetLater account.
And if you use twitter to market your page, you probably already do – besides from the auto-follow, TweetLater offers a couple of other nice features like scheduled tweets and multi-account administration. The new moderation features puts potential auto-follows in a queue first and lets you take a peek before making a decision:
In keeping with TweetLater's mission to provide Twitter productivity tools, I have added a feature where you can still configure your Twitter account for auto-follow and/or auto-welcome, but that allows you to manually vet new followers before your desired actions are executed.
TweetLater keeps a new follower on hold for 72 hours so that you can log in to TweetLater and tell us what you want to do. If you don't log in and record your decision within 72 hours, TweetLater will go ahead and apply your selected automation options. This is done so that new followers don't pile up and you having to wade through hundreds of approval pages if there's a period of time that you cannot do the manual vetting.
You have three options with each follower, namely: a) approve, b) ignore, or c) block.
To me, twitter definitely is a two-way street: I just love the auto-follow feature, and I don't use the new approval system, as Socialtoo.com's Auto-Unfollow feature basically achieves the same results without me having to invest any time. But for those who like to carefully chose who they follow, it's a great add-on, especially since TweetLater puts all new followers from all accounts into one big list. And this is how to turn on the new feature:
- Log in to TweetLater;
- Click the Accounts button in the sidebar;
- Click the Automate button for your Twitter account;
- Scroll down and click the “Manually Vet New Followers” option box; and
- Click the Save button.
From now on you can click on the “main” button in the sidebar, and then on the “Vet New Followers” link in the menu to see if there are already new followers waiting for you to vet.
Good luck building your twitter-followership! Micro blogging is a great conversion tool, but requires a lot of manual work. So any mash-ups that take the hassle out of boring “farming quests” are highly welcome.
Lookin' forward to Barcamp Klagenfurt – it's been a while since the last un-conference, and I'm expecting an international crowd: after all, Slovenia is very near, and I'm quite sure that some Swiss, Italian and German web entrepreneurs and bloggers will drop by. If you've never visited the city of the “Lindwurm” (a mythological dragon, the town's landmark), there's a good reason now to travel to Carinthia.
The actual Barcamp takes place during the weekend, but we will all hang out together on Friday – so it's very likely quite a few folks will be hang-overed on Saturday, which is why I might consider doing my presentation on Sunday: I'm planning to speak about future micro-blogging scenarios and I will introduce my “3 twitter strategies”. The perfect chance to test Prezi under live conditions :mrgreen:
The participant list is 51 names long by now, I'm sure there will be at least 100 attendants. Of course the entry is free – it's an unconference. If you want to join, just add your name to the list of participants in the Austrian Barcamp wiki. Big Shout-outs to Georg, Ed and all others involved in the organisation of this event!
Need a place to stay? Klagenfurt's Youth Hostel not only offers very cheap accommodation (EUR 34,- for a single room), it's also located very close by the university, where the BC takes place – reservations can be made via e-mail: Youth Hostel Klagenfurt.
Nothing like listening to old-school dubstep mixes and surfing the net on a lazy Sunday afternoon – even though I have to admit that turning up the music is kind of my only option right now, since the new Samsung LCD screen I bought yesterday experiences some kind of identity crisis, confusing itself with some kind of alien sound-device by producing a constant annoying noise. But enough complaining, let's turn our heads and look back on the 7 deadly sins of online-marketing compiled by Shoemoney.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to include tweets about your postings directly into the comment thread? tweetbacks by Smashing Magazine does just that:
This plug-in imports tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
The implementation requires a bit of template-fiddling, but the explanations outlines the necessary changes very well.
“My paper shredder cuts 100 sheets per minute!” “Mine only cuts 0,02 sheets per minute, but it's hamster powered!” This fictional dialogue could soon become office reality, as London design consultant Tom Ballhatchet invented the prototype of a “Hamster Powered Paper Shredder”: it takes the little fellow about three quarters of an hour to tear one DIN A4 sheet to pieces, which then become his bedding – the Lauging Squid knows more.
In the last week, Twitter's security loopholes have been discussed everywhere: tweeters are used to performance problems (“fail-whale”), but the recent hacks of popular accounts, among them Britney Spears and Barack Obama, created awareness for the basic problem: there is no Twitter API, most 3rd party mash-ups require you to gladly hand over your login to some total stranger. Nick O'Neill posted some interesting thoughts on allfacebook.com:
Why would developers build for a platform that has only a few million users when they can build identical tools for over 140 or 150 million users? Yes, Facebook can keep the statuses private, and all comment replies as well and they
How you're doing? I hope you had a great start into the new year, and believe me: 2k9 is gonna be a wicked year for web 2.0 folks, and I mean “wicked” in the good, old-school jungle way. I do have the impression that the European commercial community is just waking up, and I'm seriously looking forward to bigger budgets being spent on web 2.0 advertising as this will boost the whole scene. My personal 1st of January had a very nice surprise in stall for me: datadirt received a Pagerank update and is now proudly sporting a 5.
My German blog datenschmutz is now a member of the quite exclusive PR6 blogs club – this did not come totally unexpected though, yet I'm still really happy about it. Now I know that good ole PR neither reflects a real-time value nor is it the most relevant SEO factor: but I like to think like some kind of nice, expensive watch: no added value, but it looks nice and gives a great first impression :mrgreen:
Super Affiliate is a stupid buzzword used in the affiliate marketing blogging community by bloggers who want to make you think they make more money or are somehow better than you. When I had my first $1000 week at one of the very well known affiliate networks, they said I was now a “Super Affiliate,” which showed me that it means absolutely nothing. Anyone using the term “Super Affiliate” in a non-joking manner, especially when referring to themselves, has no credibility, and is an idiot.
Says NickyCakes of Reformed Blackhat on Jeremy's Blog That's a short yet very concise way to put it – I have nothing to add :mrgreen:
Jeremy took the time to do a proper all-year review which is also a very smart idea in terms of internal pagerank distribution by the way.
TechCrunch publishes an article on a mash-up that forwards tweets to e-mail adresses. Asks Babou:
I really enjoy your blog for your insights and the posts of your team of writers but there is one thing: you really speak a lot about twitter.
Now I understand Twitter has become an important medium of communication but does it really deserve so much attention?
Well… that depends: I guess that twitter deserves all the attention that fits into 140 characters – a couple of times per day.
You don't want to get that job? By all means, watch and learn from this brilliant job interview video by Ben Schwartz:
So much for the first weekly blogosphere review of the new year – as always, comments and feedback are highly appreciated. See you next week!
Got any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.
