I see it everyday: somebody posts a compliment of somebody and the person who has been complimented retweets it. I have no idea why people do this because the last time I received a compliment, my response was “Thank you!” Twitter most definitely has its own etiquette but is the best way to thank someone really by retweeting their compliment to you? Testimonials are great but they work best when combined with other information.
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“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.” ~Arnold Edinborough
To all the people on the social web and to those that I’ve met at events around the world: I’d like to thank you for being passionate and being interesting. In the social media space it’s extremely easy to get caught up in everything taking place around us however we often forget to realize that the rest of the world is not like us. Passion and creativity are unique traits that are too often lost as children and students fall through the cracks. Whatever the reasons are for so many people not being “interesting”, I’d like to thank you because you are.
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“An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.” ~Edward de Bono
Want to boost the number of clients your company has? Want to attend industry conferences around the world for free? If you want to boost your company’s presence within an industry you need a “known” expert within your organization. While topic experts are not the fast route to riches, becoming known as an expert is a great way to promote your organization and build lasting value for yourself.
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Delicious, one of the more widely used social bookmarking services, is undergoing a few changes. And it’s about time. New enhancements to search, tweet, and discover bookmarks have been added to the site, making it even more social and readily able to recommend content to users.
The new search tools include an advanced time line along with tag filtering controls, so you can determine a date range among other filter options for the content you’re seeking. Other updates to the search results page include inline playback for YouTube videos, Flickr images, and Yelp local data.
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Twitter can be a great way to gain feedback from customers, clients and consumers of your product or service, as many brands like Comcast are well aware. But if you’re looking fr a more direct and dedicated way to leverage the Twitter community for brand feedback purposes, a new tool called TwitFeedback is looking to make it drop-dead simple for you to do so.
Managed through a widget, visitors to your website can say in 140 characters what they think of your product or service. If the concept of garnering feedback directly from your site sounds familiar because of a certain side tab that became popular, you’ll be happy to know that TwiFeedback uses a similar tab that appears on your website. Non intrusive but inviting nonetheless, clicking on this tab will open up the TwiFeedback widget.
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MySpace has teamed up with business directory Citysearch to create a socially-oriented search portal within the MySpace community. The result is a new section called MySpace Local. This new directory is not yet available, but will be launched in beta later on this week.
Citysearch is bringing its database to the table, while MySpace is going to be “socializing” the whole affair. In doing so, businesses will be able to connect with each other, and users will be able to connect with businesses. MySpace Local will over listing pages for small businesses, which will cover three categories at launch: Restaurants, Bars and Nightife. On each listing page, users will be able to rate, review and share media for each business. Users will also be able to add the business to their profile, share a business listing with friends, and add it to their bookmarks.
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Are you working at a job where there is no end in sight? Has all the economic doom and gloom got you down? Have you ever started project only to start ten more and never get a single one of them complete? I’m happy to say that there is always a way to get through the confusion, to get past the pessimism, and to develop a vision which will succeed regardless of external forces that are out of your control.
You may be wondering why I’m talking like this since this is not a site typically meant for distributing motivational speeches. Let me give you a little background and then I’ll explain why I’m writing this, and how to get past all of the hurdles facing you to accomplish things you never dreamed possible.
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If you’ve been following along with the Social Times for the past few months, you may have noticed that the volume on this site has gone down somewhat. Why?!? Where did we go?!? Well, there’s clearly still articles thanks to the help of Kristen Nicole who has been doing a killer job. I intend for this site to provide even more value for the readers than it currently is providing though. Back at the beginning of the year I wrote about “The Curse of the Shiny Object“.
Little did I know that within weeks I would have figured out the most effective model for making a blog explode practically overnight. No, not this blog. AllFacebook has increased 500 percent in the past 30 days. It’s been great but I also realized that blogging “until your face falls off” (as Gary Vaynerchuk says) is not a very scalable business in itself. That’s why I’ve been spending the past few weeks building something that I think is much larger than these blogs and everything that’s been built over the past two years by Social Times, Inc.
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A new study from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the United Kingdom reports that more British parents are using newer technology to stay connected with their children away at school, according to AllHeadlines.
Now, my mother and I weren’t always the best of friends, but while in college I still called her every Sunday afternoon. Back then, I called her on her landline. She rarely used her cell phone and had no idea how to send or receive text messages. Things have changed in the past few years, and my mother now happily embraces her Blackberry, email and LinkedIn. But how much easier would things have been if my mother had been on an online social network when I was in college?
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The past year has been an incredible one but over the past few months I’ve begun to lose sight of my vision and things have become increasingly unclear. What once started as an inspired attempt to build a successful blog, turned in to a never-ending daily grind, the exact thing I was trying to avoid when this all began. I increased my daily blogging volume from one post a day initially (back when I was writing TheWebpreneur.com), to eventually 10 to 12 posts a day at my max.
It’s clear why I was doing so. When I started blogging two and a half years ago I started after reading people like Mike Arrington, Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Richard MacManus, Robert Scoble, and the numerous other thought leaders in the technology blogging space and said to myself “I can do that!” Ultimately I think I’ve proven to myself that anything is possible and I’ve also learned some important lessons from following this industry obsessively.
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