How the internet works
Nice and simple explaination. But it happens really quickly. Thanks to @andrewsayer on Twitter.
Nice and simple explaination. But it happens really quickly. Thanks to @andrewsayer on Twitter.
I attended my first session at the Creative Performance Exchange this morning. You can find out about the meeting on Twitter via the hashtags #cpx, #cpx1, #cpx2, and #cpx3. It was thoroughly enjoyable and there's a real commitment to keep trying new formats so I'm looking forward to something different next time.
One quick exercise I got involved in was called "creative writing with constraints". It was a seemingly simple challenge - write six lines of anything coherent, but every word has to use the letter 'e'. We all came up with something interesting and worthwhile; here's my offering:
The craziness created tension except - exception makes excellence. Realising those features examining everyman's experience. Struggles. Stuckness. Then freedom. Then stuckness again. Determination leads those examiners true. These experiments are extraordinarily horrendously exasperating. Strive. One endorses these challenges. True creativity lies herein. Three minutes goes like treacle. One more minute expounds the slave driver.
There's a view in the modern western world that we require freedom to be creattive. In this exercise, the constraint enabled our creativity. Interesting.
Is this the future of lift / human interaction? Somewhat difficult to understand at first but OK after that. Don't change your mind as to the floor you're going to because there are no floor buttons in the lift itself - just door open and close buttons. Presumably this results in a more efficient lift service and if that saves CO2 emissions then that's a good thing.
By the way, don't look for a "G" button for ground, it's 0 (zero).
For one young man who spoke to PM today, there is only one question left.
"Does this mean you can now use 'soz' and 'meh' in scrabble?"
Loving these dictionary updates. Especially 'beer o'clock' and 'meh'. Via @abcnews on Twitter.
Many companies want to start using Twitter to promote their brand and business, but don’t really know where to start. As most companies are starting to realize, Twitter is a great way to reinforce your brand, share news and important information, gather feedback , advertise and most importantly, start a dialogue with your customers and prospects – and the only cost is the time of the people involved with managing the Twitter feed.
Here is a short list of best practices for corporate Twittering that I compiled for one of my clients. Most small-to-medium businesses should be able to achieve results with a couple of hours of effort per week.
I'm in two minds about this item. On one had there is some good advice such as building up your level of tweets before you try to engage. But then there's a couple of real clangers:
Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message – the others should be tweets about related topics that provide value to your followers or show a more human side of your company; people will stop paying attention to you if you use Twitter exclusively for self-promotion.
and
Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business.
Too me, these just illustrate what makes me uneasy about this article. It's not about real engagement person to person, despite the final advice:
The implied message in this article is "here's how to use Twitter for marketing while hiding the fact that you're tryng to market to people". Not the sort of people that I want on my list of Twitter friends.Be honest Be responsive and human Be nice
Sourced via @kimmar on Twitter.
They key to being followed more closely is to say and share things that others care about. This requires a great deal of focus and an awareness of the subtle tendencies that can cause others to begin to tune out, consciously or not. Here are eight things Twitterers do that tend to diminish the attention they receive from others:
Wow, just wow.
My criteria for an instant unfollow are pretty simple:
1. If you talk about making money on Twitter at all, you’re gone. This is the fastest and easiest kill of all.
2. If you talk without listening – meaning your stream has absolutely no conversation, you’re gone. Doubly so if all you’ve got are sales and promotions.
3. If you just retweet with nothing else, nothing original, not even “my cat just threw up!”, you’re gone, because you’re probably a robot.
4. If you’re a robot, you’re gone. Robots are fairly easy to spot – unlike humans, they typically truncate tweets mid word over and over again in their stream.
5. If you’ve just got stuff I don’t care about in your stream, you’re gone. One person had nothing but quotes from Jesus in their stream. Not my cup of tea, being Buddhist and all. Another person was a true cat blogger and cat tweeter with nothing else. I have a cat, so rather than experience their cat vicariously, I’ll just peek at my lump of gray fur.