I’ve got 25 invites to Kwippy, which is a Twitter-esque service.
How is Kwippy different from Twitter? You can find out more at their blog here. I don’t think it’s a “Twitter Killer” but I’m willing to give anything a chance at this point. Clearly, there’s a need for a Twitter-like service that has constant uptime and widespread adoption. Whoever figures out those two variables will be the next web giant.
If you’d like to get an invite, send me an email, direct tweet or leave a comment here.
So true…
The Toad Stool by Alan Wolk: Social Media Cards
Red cards will be issued for the following violations:
* Four or more tweets plugging one’s own blog post within a 24 hour period, including tweets from automated services like Twitterfeed.
* Use of the word “monetize” in an unironic way
* Posts mentioning surprise at the number of followers one has, provided that number is greater than 1,000
* Using a bot or interns or both to follow 1,000 or more people in the course of an evening.
* Issuing 50 or more consecutive tweets without ever once responding to an @ tweet
* Using Twitter for the sole purpose of promoting links to stories and/or posts that directly plug yourself or your company.
* Tweeting the UUSWVW (Using Urban Slang While Very White) violation “My Tweeps”
Twitter meets open source meets stable Jabber client??
Say it ain’t so!
I’m at identi.ca/samharrelson if you join up. Feel free to add me. I’d love to see this take off because of the potential of open source to provide the kind of stability that proprietary code (as in Twitter) can’t.
Dave Winer has more.
Twitter is broken.
I used Twitter primarily because of its incredible Track function which allowed me to keep tabs on my own name, brands I’m associated with and things I’m interested in through my GTalk client.
Since that feature was taken offline last month in a last-ditch effort to save Twitter, I’ve been hurting.
Summize is rapidly becoming an essential browser tab auxiliary to Twitter.
Steve Rubel is reporting that Summize is now auto-expanding TinyURL links from Twitter into its search results, which makes the service even more handy…
Summize now shows where Twitter TinyURLs go
Now, if we could only get Track back soon, I wouldn’t be so tempted to say the hell with Twitter and just move over to FriendFeed.
First, congrats to my pals Lisa Picarille and the FabulousSavings team for winning Linkshare Golden Links last night. Also, a big congrats to the excellent nominees like Mike Allen, Scott Jangro and Stephanie Agresta.
Second, this year’s Linkshare awards event was made possible by the live tweeting of people like Missy Ward, Stephanie and Lisa P. That was a tremendous service and all of us following you thank you three for doing that. It’s amazing to me how events like the Linkshare awards take on more of an industry wide communal feeling because of something like Twitter. Now, just fast forward a couple of years into the future when we all have live streaming video capabilities on our phones and we’re live broadcasting from events like that (or is that even kosher?).
Nevertheless, boundaries are falling and Twitter has become a big hammer between that wall of attendees and remote viewers who wish they could be there.
Third, Shawn, Lisa, Jim and I made a friendly wager on this week’s GeekCast regarding the results of the Linkshare awards. Needless to say, I won (since I clearly know more about the industry than the others on the show):
Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins: “Prior to the awards, Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille, Sam Harrelson, and I shared our predictions for each category on the weekly GeekCast show.
Below are the picks each of us made, as well as the winners (in yellow).
* Jim: 8 for 14
* Lisa: 7 for 14
* Sam: 9 for 14
* Shawn: 5 for 14 “
So, it looks like free drinks for me in Boston on behalf of the other GeekCasters. OR, if you’d like to get tons of exposure for your business, you can sponsor GeekCast for that evening and we’ll mention you a few dozen times during a live taping. Get in touch with any of us if you’re interested. Great chance to get your name out there!
And of course, thanks to the Linkshare team for putting on what sounded like another great event.
Got my copy of FeedFront in the mail a few weeks ago and I wanted to give a quick review with my thoughts and whether or not we need “offline” magazines in a digital world.
This most recent episode of GeekCast is the best we’ve done.
We spend a great deal of time talking about the ABW and Performance Marketing Alliance controversy and our own frustrations with how things are playing out.
GeekCast 23: Can’t We All Just Get Along? : GeekCast.fm: “The show kicked off with discussion around the ABestWeb forum thread on the Performance Marketing Alliance initiative and whether or not affiliate marketing as an industry is being helped or hindered by the organization and whether or not some of the comments there were helpful to the industry as well. This theme comes around at the end of the show. So, make sure to listen to the whole thing for the proper context.”
Be sure to listen to this one if you’re interested in the industry organization movement.
There’s lots of other good stuff in the 80 minute podcast as well (you can find the whole description on the GeekCast page as well as link to the streaming player).
And here’s the mp3 for your downloading pleasure
I’ll be leading a workshop on social networking stuff for affiliate managers at the AffiliateClassroomLive event the Saturday before Affiliate Summit in Boston this August:
affiliateclassroomlive.com | Home: “Join us for a half-day workshop dedicated to Affiliate Managers. In the past, our LIVE Affiliate Manager Workshops have taken place over a full day and have been comprised mainly of presentations.”
And here’s the description of my session (no, I didn’t write this or refer to myself as an extraordinaire!):
Web 2.0 Practical, Successful Applications for Affiliate Managers
Sam Harrelson
Web 2.0 extraordinaire, Sam Harrelson, will talk to you about the various community networking platforms, applications and systems. He’ll discuss how affiliate managers can apply Web 2.0 techniques to their jobs for more effective affiliate recruitment, communication and motivation.
Lots of good people leading workshops like Trisha Fawver, Peter Figueredo, Heather Paulson, Lisa Riolo, Brad Waller and Lee Gientke.
I promise mine will be interesting, so stop by if you’re in town that Saturday.
Over in the sidebar, you might notice a neat new chicklet that shows the amount of followers I have on Twitter:
I’ve been pretty prolific on Twitter since 2006 and have written extensively about it here, so it’s definitely an important component to my online existence. Now that Twitter is recovering from its recent troubles, I’m back to using it regularly.
Most of the people that read this blog follow me on Twitter (and I reciprocate if you’re not a bot), so please consider doing the same here.
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We (Shawn Collins, Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral and myself) recorded GeekCast this afternoon and it’s a great show…
GeekCast 22: iPhone 2.0 and It’s Still Useless : GeekCast.fm: “The show kicked off with talk of the iPhone 2.0, and the virtues like 3G speed, as well as the negatives, such as the keyboard, lack of copy/paste, etc.
The rumored ability to capture video didn’t pan out (did RIM start that rumor?), which was a letdown for your loyal GeekCasters.”
This is one of my favorite episodes yet because Jim and I basically come to blows over Zobzee and mandles.
So, I’m goofing around with possible Twitter clones and decided to leverage FriendFeed‘s aggregation of GTalk’s status update messages and see if that would work.
Here’s what it looks like:
Pretty nifty if you are using FriendFeed’s web service or using Twhirl to watch FriendFeed.
Plus, there are comments and groupings ftw.
After my whuffie post last week, I had a number of people ask me how to keep track of their social reputation beyond just doing Google searches on yourself or your company’s name.
First of all (and perhaps most importantly), you have to get an RSS reader (aka feed reader). You don’t have the time yada yada yada, but if you care about your online reputation or who is mentioning you or your company, then you certainly have the time. If you’re on Windows, grab FeedDemon (free). If you’re on a Mac, use NetNewsWire (free). If you’re on Linux, grab Liferea from the depositories. If you want to live “in the cloud” and use a web app, you can’t go wrong with Google Reader.
Got one? OK, next step… actually find places that have the data your’e looking for. Here’s how I do it for myself, CostPerNews, my podcast and Motive Interactive:
1. In your feed reader of choice, create a folder called “Vanity Searches” or “Social Graph.”
2. Grab the “Google Alerts” for all of the terms you need to watch. This is social reputation 101 and chances are you have heard of Google Alerts. However, it’s amazing to me how many online marketers don’t use the service. You can get email. This is delivered by email instead of RSS as well.
3. Google Blog Alerts works similarly to Google Alerts but is a little more comprehensive. There’s some redundancy with Alerts, but it’s still worth watching.
4. Another oldie but goodie is Technorati. While not always up to date or accurate, there’s still some value in watching your brand there. Just put in whatever term or name your watching in the search bar on the upper right and grab the feed on the results page by clicking the RSS button.
— Now that we’ve gotten the foundation out the way, let’s go to the good stuff —
5. Here’s an excellent “Yahoo Pipe” for keywords that monitors news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News. Just put in whatever term you’re looking to watch, hit “Run Pipe” and then click the RSS button beside “More Options” on the right. This is probably my favorite way to track things on the web.
6. The grandaddy of all Yahoo Pipes for vanity searching is the Social Media Firehose. Works the same way as the keyword pipe above but gives a wide blast of data. It’s valuable, but you have to weed through a lot of duplications. Still recommend.
7. While you’re at Yahoo Pipes, grab the “Twitter Reply Sniffer.” Basically, this is a way for you to stay aware of anyone that @’s you in Twitter (you’re not on Twitter? Geez). Put in the terms or names you’d like to keep track of and you’ll get a custom URL. You then have the option to receive new alerts via Google, email, phone or RSS. Click on that orange RSS button called “more options” over on the right and add it to your “Social Graph” folder in your feed reader when the prompt comes up. Presto.
8. If your company might have some mentions on YouTube, you can track user tags and mentions using this YouTube tag Pipe. Not useful for everyone, but still good to have in the old feed reader.
9. Along those same lines, you can’t go wrong with Summize. Instead of just monitoring @’s on Twitter, Summize notifies you anytime a term you specify is mentioned. Grab the RSS feed on the right and add it into your feed reader. Highly valuable.
10. FriendFeed is becoming a great way to keep track of how others perceive you in the social media space because it is one big aggregation ball of goo. However, you can make some sense of out that with FriendFeed’s nifty search feature. Just put in whatever you’re keeping track of and grab the RSS from the page (should be in the URL address bar). Add that to your feed reader for sure.
If you follow those 10 steps, you should have a pretty good grip on what people are saying about you on the social web from Twitter to FriendFeed to blogs to Digg to YouTube. My “social graph” folder in my feed reader is increasingly becoming the first place I go in the mornings for news just to see if there’s anything going on that I’ve missed or to see if there are any conversations I can have with fans, friends, foes or potential evangelists.
Hope this helps!
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Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille and I recorded GeekCast 21 on Tuesday. If you’re interested in how to recruit affiliates in this changing landscape, give it a listen…
GeekCast 21: The Art of the CPA Pitch : GeekCast.fm: “The first few minutes of the show describes innovative ways to recruit affiliates outside of the traditional emails and cold calls (which are becoming increasingly ineffective). The conversation steers into the direction of why companies like Apple and Microsoft fight over the ‘cool’ factor in their marketing campaigns.”
The show runs about 80 mins and is filled with all sorts of geeky goodness (Twitter, video, stats, etc).
Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) is the most interesting of the Twitter desktop apps. I’ve never been a big fan as I relied heavily on Twitter’s GTalk integration to get real time updates and use Track via XMPP.
However, for FriendFeed, Twhirl rocks.
So, I found this note from Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur interesting…
I’ve been playing with FriendFeed’s Room feature in the Affiliate Marketing Room. It’s fairly nifty and should only get better.
Loic mentioned on a Gillmor Gang podcast a few weeks ago that Twhirl is working on a feature to allow for XMPP to flow through its service in Twitter as well. If that happens, I might be using Twhirl a great deal more.
For any affiliate marketers who are also FriendFeed users or fans, I created a public room called “Affiliate Marketing”:
FriendFeed: “Affiliate Marketing” Room
Why would this be useful? Well, you get the best of FriendFeed (comments, sharing of interesting or relevant stuff from around the web, some aggregation, RSS etc).
No high expectations for this, just thought I’d put it out there for any aff marketers already on FriendFeed (and if you are, make sure to friend me at samharrelson).
I’m doing a solo presentation on the Sunday of https://www.fusionquest.com/cgi-bin/main/hotlinks.cgi?aflt=afc1&client=affsumAffiliate Summit East in Boston about how to use “social” media in the context affiliate marketing.
My opening line is “you probably know of and maybe use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Ning, but you are probably using them wrong if you’re connecting them with your affiliate program…”
I’ve got a rough sketch of how the rest of the hour will go, but I’d like to make sure I cover the bases you’d like covered. So, comment (or email, call, twitter, etc) below and let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to hear about using social media in an affiliate program.
Affiliate Summit East 2008 Agenda: “Leveraging Social Media
Location: Harborview Ballroom 1
Time: 1:30pm-2:30pm(This Session is Open to Full Conference Pass Holders Only)
This session helps affiliate marketers, networks and merchants recognize the power of adapting and adopting social media platforms into their programs for increased traffic, conversions and profit.* Sam Harrelson, Director of Performance Marketing, Motive Interactive”
For instance, I’ve got close to 2,500 people following me on Twitter and the platform provides a nice stream of passive and active traffic (when Twitter is up). However, I don’t just throw affiliate or even site links up to get that traffic. There are very specific and practical steps that you can take to be a productive part of a community like Twitter and still derive benefits.
So, let me know what you’d like to hear…
kwiry is a neat mobile based service that I’ve been following lately. In essence, it turns text messages, emails, voice calls, or photos, into online reminders by texting anything to 59479 (k-w-i-r-y).
Those notes, emails, photos, etc can be shared or sent to iCal, Twitter, RSS, Facebook or a user’s profile page for later access. The service reminds me of a cross between Jott and Evernote.
I’ve been using Jott and Evernote (both together and separately) everyday for the last few months and find the ability to create notes on the go, both visually and audio wise, incredibly helpful to my workflow.
So, when I found kwiry I was hopeful that it could do in one application what I was doing with two separate ones. However, the initial limitations of not being able to grab photos and send to my own kwiry page and the lackluster mobile page itself led to some frustrations.
It looks like the kwiry folks have been working on those improvements and they are rolling out to the service. So, users can now take pics on the fly and send them in with a specific email address along with the text and audio notes.
kwiry also has a much improved mobile site at m.kwiry.com with a nice iPhone interface (even though I’m on a BlackBerry, it’s still much improved).
So, with these improvements I’ll probably give the service another shot and see how it can hold up to my Jott / Evernote paradigm. There are still things that Jott /Evernote does better (Evernote has incredible handwriting and tagging as well as a fantastic desktop app for the Mac that I can’t put away and Jott integrates nicely with my RememberTheMilk todo lists and GMail), but kwiry could serve as a nice on the fly notes grabber.
This iteration of the Affiliate Summit Network is really taking off.
I think a good deal of its success so far has to do with it being hosted on Ning instead of Confabb as in years past. I love the integration of RSS, Twitter streams, Flickr, YouTube, etc that Ning provides and it makes the entire network feel much more robust and inviting than years past.
There are already over 70 pretty active members (growing daily) signed up and we’re discussing the NY state affiliate situation, how to market to marketers and all sorts of relevant topics that will surely be hot buttons at the conference in early August.
So, if you’re going to https://www.fusionquest.com/cgi-bin/main/hotlinks.cgi?aflt=afc1&client=affsumAffiliate Summit East (15% off if you use that link plus the code ase08afc15), make sure to join up on the network.
And if you do, make sure to add me as a friend.
The 21st century has brought us many great wonders… like new ways for phone companies to charge outrageous prices while locking us into contracts (at least here in the US):
Scientist Says Texting is More Expensive Than Downloading From Hubble | Universe Today: “One space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester looked at the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble and compared it with the cost of sending a text. His calculations? ‘The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.'”
I guess this adds new fodder for the people who claim that Twitter is a huge waste of time and money.
Hopefully, the invisible hand of the free market will one day deliver us from our overcharging mobile overlords.
If you have followed me for any length of time, you know that I’m a chronic social networker. I jump on things like Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, FriendFeed, Seesmic, etc and often call them the “next big thing.”
I know it’s annoying, but sometimes I do get it right (like with Twitter).
So, I’m particularly excited to see the new Affiliate Summit network being moved to Ning…
New Affiliate Summit Social Network | Affiliate Summit Blog: “Affiliate Summit has launched a new social network for conference attendees on Ning.
Based on a poll, as well as feedback on Twitter and directly to us, Ning was the clear favorite over the previous social network technology from Confabb.”
If you’ve never played with Ning, you really should. It beats forum software like phpBB etc hands down and offers a number of options for integration with things like your blog feed or Twitter or Flickr.
And I’m especially excited about the Summit’s move to Ning because the previous Confabb system was atrocious from a usability standpoint.
This time around for the ASE Boston show, I really think we can derive some benefits from this iteration of the social network.
Head over and sign up. You just might like it (and find it profitable).
I’ve been arguing that Twitter users should abandon desktop clients (until Twhirl gets their xmpp gateway going) and use GTalk for Twitter. Not only is the GTalk gateway real time, but there are a few key benefits that enhance the Twitter experience.
Here’s a great post from @tw3nty3ight about how he uses Track and GTalk for Twitter in a similar fashion that I do (on the desktop and on the BlackBerry):
Tw3nty3ight.com: How I Get The Most Out Of Twitter: “There is a very useful Twitter command that is overlooked by many. The TRACK command is the most underused command on twitter. In order for me to be notified of someone mentioning anything pertaining to myself I simply utilize this feature. There are two main ways to use this command, text (SMS) or IM with Google Talk. “
I follow around 1500 people. Watching that kind of a stream all day would render Twitter pretty useless for my needs. So, with the device updates setting on IM, I’m able to “turn on” just the 50 or so people that I’m really interested in following and use Track for my name or topics I want to hear about to catch the rest.
Give it a go if you need to cut the signal-to-noise ratio.
FathomSEO has a nice new clean WordPress theme geared towards businesses that need a pressroom design:
Social Media Pressroom Theme WordPress, Social Media Newsroom Template: Theme Name: Media Pressroom
Description: A clean, minimalist theme designed for use as a media pressroom.
Author: Fathom SEO, which offers search engine optimization and other online marketing services.
Author URL: http://www.fathomseo.com
View a live demo of this theme.
The simplicity and focus on social media is really compelling.
It’s increasingly clear that companies need to be approachable beyond just a “Contact Us” form. The integration of social media (networks, video, Twitter) present on the theme is a nice touch and positive step towards PR2.0.
On Saturday I noticed that my tweets were being repeated by Twitter user @panopticons (if you’re curious about the name, it refers to an 18th century jail design based on seeing every prisoner that has been extended into a metaphysical metaphor). I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but as the day went on, the retweeting was constant and annoying.
It was annoying because I use a function of Twitter called “Twitter Track” on GTalk which allows me to track terms that I am interested in such as “Wilco” or “Nascar” or “Obama” or “Ryan Adams” or “Asheville” (btw, if you use Twitter Track, I do not suggest tracking “affiliate”… omg). I also track people’s names that I am interested in, so that I can see both sides of the conversation that person might be participating in and not just one way conversation. And of course I track my own name in case someone I’m not following, etc tweets me so that I can see them and respond.
I prefer using GTalk as my Twitter client because even though I follow close to 2,000 folks I can turn device updates on and off for close friends or people in town. That makes the Twitter stream much more controlled rather than a firehose. Plus, I’m able to use the GTalk app on my BlackBerry to stay in the stream when I’m mobile.
It’s a perfect system… or so I thought until Saturday night.
I dug a little deeper into the @panopticons account and found that the account and many similar ones were set up by a guy named Noah David Simon in order to prove a (misguided) point about privacy and information:
My aliases on TWITTER are listed on my website. I’m keeping it transparent so it doesn’t bite me in the ass. Eventually I assume most of you will unfollow n block me… but by that point I will have perfected the craft of puppet accounts! puppet accounts can be fed N2 a root account, where I can follow all fools that thought they could block me. there is NO blocking! the final account will take the RSS feed of multiple accounts and run it N2 one account. you will not realize the new account is me.
Please understand that I have absolutely no problem with protests, satire, uncomfortable demonstrations with a sharp edge of irony, etc. There is a needed place for those sorts of things in every aspect of society, especially something like Twitter where the micro nature of the platform often engenders a feeling of unnecessary importance (even more so than Techmeme and the blogosphere).
However, the point being made here about privacy is just mean spirited (especially with some of the back and forths that have developed on Twitter and in the GetSatisfaction forum for Twitter) with no real point to be made beyond who can yell the loudest and longest.
Simon and his supporter (no plural there) @prokofy (see the GetSatisfaction forum if you need more) suggest that if people don’t want to be troubled by the retweeting of their messages, they should stop tracking their own names and that if you’re tracking your own name, you’re doing so just for vanity purposes. That’s a ridiculous premise to begin with, especially for people like myself who use the track feature to engage in conversations with other users we might not have otherwise met. Then, using bullying tactics and spewing pretty hateful messages (calling specific Twitter users who object Nazis, etc) is just immature and shows the lack of a well thought out intention behind this sort of purposeful abuse.
After being pestered by @prokofy, Steve Gillmor had Prokofy on an episode of NewsGang Live last week that pretty much sums up the situation (be warned if you listen… the podcast will make your ears bleed).
I use Twitter on a more than regular basis for a number of reasons. Twitter has transcended the realm of social networking or messaging for me and has become a neural center for my activity on the web. Because of the track feature, I’m able to keep up with a variety of topics throughout the day or at my pleasure through RSS. So, interruptions like this are costly both time and gesture wise for me.
And now for the final act.. it looks like the issue has caught the attention of the often hands-off Twitter staff:
We believe these accounts are in violation of the terms because the cross posting of updates from multiple accounts is a way to undermine the block and unfollow functions. Twitter is a recipient-driven service and when abusers seek to negate the ability for users to choose what content they receive from other users, they degrade our service. This is the stated intent of the abuser in question in this thread.
There’s also been a thread set up to discuss Twitter’s stance on abuse by Twitter admins:
So hopefully this issue will be resolved soon.
In the meantime, we always have the spammers present to keep the town well full of piss.
New Business Card: “New Twitter inspired Zappos business card”
The new Twitter-styled business card with twitter id and ‘Powered by Twittering’ verbiage.”
Still don’t think that Twitter matters for your business?
