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Win the new HTC One!
I wanted a more catchy or original name for this post, but I wanted something that would grab your attention. Now that I have your attention, listen up. The cool folks at Telus hooked me up with a red panda critter (thanks a lot ). I got him just before our big California road trip [...]
Replying on Twitter is worth the effort
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me lately talk about the importance of having conversations with people on Twitter. This is really a no-brainer and people always agree, but I don’t think it happens much. There are a lot of tweets and retweets, but fewer replies and real conversations. Scott Stratten [...]
Six Benefits of Using Twitter at a Conference
When you attend an event, whatever the theme, you always have two goals: to learn and to network. In the past these goals were achieved by fervently writing notes and just as fervently handing out business cards. While these activities still happen, Twitter is a highly-effective tool for achieving those goals. More conferences are using hash tags as way for attendees [...]
You Don’t Control the Medium
If you seen the news recently, you’ve probably heard about the Twitter campaign that McDonald’s launched using the hashtag #McDStories. You can see one of their promotional tweets to the right. They had great hopes to inspire stories about Happy Meals. The campaign took a horrible turn and made news headlines around the world. You [...]
Social Media is About Conversations
I’ve written posts about how Jimmy Fallon and Ashton Kutcher have demonstrated the breakdown of social media. At it’s core, social media is about conversations – even if you’re a social media rock star. For a long time I’ve believed that people could not maintain relationships when their follower count reached a certain number. I [...]
The Double Edged Sword of Social Media
On Sunday, there were high winds (gusting at 117 km/hr) in the Lethbridge area. By the early afternoon, a fire had started west of the city (you can see footage of how severe the fire was). I first heard about the fire from my daughter, who heard about it from her friend on Facebook. I [...]
TD Canada: Great Twitter Customer Service
Businesses around the world are trying to figure out how to leverage Twitter in their business. One way that has proven extremely successful is in customer service. Comcast paved the way in this area in 2008 by reaching out to customers on Twitter. Since 2008, companies have been successfully using Twitter to offer another channel [...]
I Don’t Want 50,000 Twitter Followers
Two years ago I wrote a post about the failure of social media. Recently, I’ve been thinking about that topic again. I follow 1,900 people, which is almost impossible to be social with that many people. I’ve put people that I really want to listen to into lists to help raise them above the noise. [...]
Twitter: The Best Customer Service Tool
Years ago, before the rise of social media tools like Twitter, I had poor experiences at two different Arby’s restaurants. I sent Arby’s head office an e-mail to voice my concerns. I never received a reply. In all honesty, Arby’s executives probably realized the complaint ends with them and maybe a few of my friends. [...]
The 5 Types of Tweet Responses
I’ve blasted out over 4,000 tweets over the past few years and I’ve often wondered about the types of responses my tweets generate. There are five types of responses that a tweet can generate. The graphic below highlights them and their frequency and desirability. The more desirable responses are at the top of the pyramid, [...]
How To Get Value From Your Older Blog Posts
We all know the story; write your blog post, promote it, get traffic, end of story. What do you do with your hundreds of blog posts just sitting there collecting virtual dust? Recently, I started following well-known digital marketer, Jeff Bullas on Twitter. Many of his tweets have had interesting headlines, so I would end up [...]
How I Got 1000 Followers on Twitter
For many people, 1000 followers on Twitter is not a huge achievement, but for me it is. The number of followers you have on Twitter doesn’t indicate success or failure, but its how engaged your followers are. The more followers you have, the more likely you are to have engagement. Here are some strategies that [...]
Do You Have Twitter Success?
Since Twitter has been around, there has been a need to measure effectiveness. First it was the number of followers you had. Do you remember the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to one million followers? Quickly people realized the number of followers you had was no indication of your success on Twitter. People started [...]
To Retweet or Not
One of the advantages of Twitter is the ability spread information at very rapid pace. I actually like to retweet (RT) other’s tweets if I find the information interesting. As with everything we do online, our tweets should have strategy. Why are we spending time sending a tweet or retweeting someone else’s tweet? The bottom [...]
Twitter… The Best Traffic Source
I fully believe this statement to be true, with one caveat, which I will offer at the end of the post. The other day I was looking at the web analytics for my blog and noticed something interesting. I receive traffic to my blog from various sources, but I really just wanted to compare Twitter [...]
Twitter Contest Observations
I mentioned that I would share the outcomes and some observations from our Twitter contest we ran at the college I work at, so here is my report. Contest Background We ran the contest in conjunction with the launch of our new campaign microsite. The contest had three objectives: Increase followers of the main college [...]
Twitter Search = Fail
I don’t usually have negative things to say about Twitter. Yes I have drunk the Twitter kool-aid, but this time I can’t ignore this. We recently ran a Twitter contest where entrants had to send tweets using a specific hash tag. The intent was to search all the hash tags and pick winners randomly. Well, [...]
I Just Don’t Get Twitter!
Well, actually I do. But this is what I hear from family, friends, and co-workers when I mention that I use Twitter. Twitter has gotten a rough ride by media and blog posts as being a waste of time or a joke.
Weekly Video: The Marketing Office (Twitter Spoof of “The Office”)
Another hilarious parody from the team at Hubspot. Hopefully this isn’t how social media training happens at your organization. Effective use of social media does require understanding of the techniques, best practices, etc. But approaching social media training as portrayed in this parody is crazy.
Separate Personal & Work on Social Networks
I came across this post the other day – How To Lose Your Job Via Facebook Status. The post refers to a person who puts some very negative comments about her job and boss in her Facebook status. Unfortunately for her, she made her boss a friend on Facebook previously. Needless to say she lost [...]