If it were not for QQ’s presentation, I would not have known Skype has changed tremendously since my last use two years ago. The interface and texture look more professional and the new functions like the ‘Share Screen’ are very interesting. I still have the exclusive video of her laughable parody to Skype’s call-in music. I’m sorry – I can’t post it up here – NSFW.

Great moves she had there but let’s not perish her image especially when internship commences next week. And we all know most likely, employers get curious sometimes. (:

Pat Law’s lecture let us in on a lot of exclusive websites. I have taken note of them – feel free to browse through:

Tweetica: http://tweetica.com

Twitalyzer: http://twitalyzer.com

Twitter Grader: http://twitter.grader.com

Alexa: http://www.alexa.com

URLfan: http://urlfan.com

Compete: http://compete.com

Popuri: http://www.popuri.us/

Wefollow: http://wefollow.com/

Tweetizen: http://tweetizen.com

MrTweet: http://mrtweet.net/

Twellow: http://www.twellow.com/

Muck Rack: http://muckrack.com/

Media on Twitter:  http://www.mediaontwitter.com/

Twitterfall: http://twitterfall.com/

Monitter: http://monitter.com/

Hashtag: http://search.twitter.com/

Daymix: http://daymix.com/

Whostalkin: http://whostalkin.com

SocialMention: http://socialmention.com/

MonitorThis: http://monitorthis.info/

BoardTracker: http://v2.boardtracker.com/

Omgili: http://omgili.com/

Technorati: http://technorati.com/

Google Blogsearch: http://blogsearch.google.com

Icerocket: http://icerocket.com/

Ping.sg: http://ping.sg

Blogarama: http://www.blogarama.com

PBWIKI: http://pbworks.com

Netivities: http://www.thedailyinfluence.com/

Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader

Google Alexis: http://www.google.com/alerts

Alltop: http://www.alltop.com

Delicious: http://www.delicious.com

–

Now, that’s A LOT of links. Credits to Pat Law (and to me for painstakingly stressing my eyes over the two-megapixels pictures to figure out them).

Support Asian-American blogs and news outlets by submitting them for inclusion into Alltop's search engine results.

As a relatively new user to Alltop, the brainchild of entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, I’ve been spending a lot of time building up my own Alltop account. (For some background information on what Alltop is, click here.) While doing so, I noticed there were no Asian-American outlets adequately represented in any of my Alltop searches for blogs or news sources on related topics. In fact, when putting in the search query, the following results showed up:

A screen shot of Alltop search results for the query "Asian American."

I’m not blaming Alltop for the interesting but inaccurate results generated — not when Alltop users are encouraged to submit blogs and media outlets on their own for inclusion.

So here’s a little call-out to blog readers, encouraging you all to submit to Alltop worthy blogs or news sites related to Asian-American issues so we can improve our representation in one of the newest online news tools. If you aren’t using Alltop (and you should be), you can still pitch your suggestions by following the link above. You can trust I’ll be pitching my own favorite Asian-American blogs and sites — and maybe even those I’m not a fan of just so there is a choice for people when they come looking for related content.

Asian-American issues are a niche topic, so it’s unlikely related blogs or publications are going to be picked up right away by Alltop or other related online news services. But by being proactive, we can at least work toward establishing a presence for future Alltop users who, like me, will want to know about other great Asian-American bloggers and online resources.

Photo by: teamstickergiant // Creative Commons License

Here’s the first of three posts based on the presentation I gave at WordCamp Victoria. You can  view my slides on SlideShare here.

This visual by Mark Smiciklas depicts the challenge we have in making sense of what is going on within the social media space. It points to the need for research strategies that enable us to listen and act on relevant signals in the sea of social media noise.

How to find material that will interest your readers, and organize it so you can access it when you need it:

Read, read, and read. Read posts by other writers who are interested in the same subject as you – whether that be urbanism, productivity, photography  or social media – whatever it is you’re blogging about. Read comments people have submitted. And also seek out different points of view.

You can find other blogs in your subject area through sites such as Alltop, Technorati, Google Blog Search and Loaded Web. (Tip: Some of these sites, such as Alltop and Loaded Web, will list your blog. Not automatic with Alltop, but make them a pitch.)

Subscribe to those blogs you like through a service such as Google Reader. The folks at Google make it super easy to add a subscription, find others you might like, star items, and share items you like with others. Other items such as Google Alerts and Flickr updates can come through your Google Reader account as well, so it’s all in one handy place.

Now that you’re reading your feeds each day, you’ll soon start accumulating some fabulous ideas for future posts. How to store them in a way that’s easy to access later? Set up an account with a social booking site such as Delicious.

Want to dig a bit deeper in the area of research? Check out KD Paine, Charlene Li and Angela Sinickas.  They are all tremendous reseachers and thought leaders.

And for fun, check out CEO Merrill Dubrow’s blog. Dubrow is president and CEO of MARC Research, a 100-person market research firm in Irving, Texas. In addition to standard web metrics, his staff measure the average length of comments (106 words), the total number of comments (1,700 in 18 months), and the number of people who have contributed more than four (115).

This morning at 2a.m., when my home alarm screeched, “PATIO DOOR OPEN” and my adrenaline kicked in, I simultaneously reached for the panic button and the heavy flashlight-slash-weapon by my bed. Thankfully, it was just my husband, who’d forgotten the alarm was on when he decided to step outside to view the Leonid meteor showers. Sadly, the skies were too cloudy for him to see any stars but for scaring me half to death, I briefly considered obliging him with some – cartoon-style – by means of a frying pan to the head.

Stars of another kind are on my mind today as Brandchannel speculated about whether fans of celebrities on Twitter will un-follow them once they start shilling products via Ad.ly. Um, no, I don’t think so. Why do tweeple follow celebrities in the first place? To hear what they’re doing, where, and with whom; possibly even to garner an @reply from them. For some, that would elevate an ordinary, merely mortal day into something to, well, tweet about. We want to know “who” celebrities are wearing and we wear celebrities too, in the form of their eponymously named fragrances and clothing lines. Some celebrities are so popular on Twitter that they merit their own Alltop page.

Why shouldn’t celebrities use Twitter to hawk their wares or someone else’s? How will it differ from any other selling venue, i.e. a movie junket or book tour? The Oprah Effect is well-known; her mere mention of a product or book can send sales through the roof. Variety reports that Michael Buble’s appearance on Oprah in October helped launch his new CD into the stratosphere – #1 on Amazon. But not every celebrity has a talk show, although I admit that of late, it seems like they do.

The celebrities I tend to follow are of the non-celluloid variety – authors; chefs; pundits. They tweet about their books, stockpots, and speeches and I’ve yet to un-follow them. In fact, many people on Twitter are pretty much selling something even if it’s just their own random thoughts. During the course of my decidedly non-celebrity day, I receive all manner of pitches via phone, email, blog, work, school, community. But I’m a grown-up; I know how to say “no, thank you”. I don’t unfriend my neighbor because her kid is selling Girl Scout cookies. I admire Ad.ly for their business model. Celebrities are tweeting and often, they mention products, places, or services that they like. For Ad.ly, they can choose the products, like Ashton Kutcher has with Nikon. Celebrity endorsements can make all the difference between a so-so product and a successful one. The reflective glow from a celebrity’s star can make a product shine. In nature, as in Twitter, the key of course will be to strike a balance between too few and too many tweets. A gentle, starry night is always better than a storm.

Think about what it means.

At AAPA we don’t do .org accounts on Twitter. There is no @AAPA.org or whatever, individual employees have accounts & that is it. Some may think I’m crazy, but take a look at the pictures to the left…

Now compare the followers…

@GuyKawasaki – 188,517 followers

@alltop – 8,851

I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one thing is clear, the individual account has many more followers. I know that Guy has started to operate his personal account as a brand account in some ways (always linking, ghost tweeters, tracking campaigns, etc.), but followers still connect with the fact that it is Guy Kawasaki and not Alltop. (Side Note: I do find it funny that the @Alltop account tweets our primarily the postings of Guy’s blog though)

I understand the ease of having an .org account for associations. It’s a great channel to push out the information that you’re wanting to reach your members, there is brand recognition with in the profession or trade, if there is any staff turnover there isn’t the risk of losing those connections (more on this topic later). But there is one major downside to me that negates the benefits… People do not connect with brands, they connect with the people behind the brands. Whether that be your CEO, your President of the Board, etc.  your members want to connect with someone they can recognize and go to.

Twitter to me is NOT a broadcast channel, it is an opportunity to converse with & engage your members.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

~Lynn

Guy Kawasaki es considerado uno de los grandes gurús del mundillo de la innovación en internet y las startups.

Además, entre los fans de la web social, Guy es muy conocido por el uso que hace de Twitter para promocionar Alltop, su actual proyecto. Alltop ofrece una selección de las mejores fuentes de contenidos de Internet organizadas en función de su temática. Para promocionar el servicio en Twitter, Guy y su equipo comenzaron a compartir enlaces a contenidos muy llamativos, incluyendo además un segundo enlace a la correspondiente sección de Alltop. Un ejemplo:

Promocionando Alltop en Twitter

Recientemente, Kawasaki ha dado una última vuelta de tuerca a la estrategia: muchos de los enlaces que promociona en Twitter ya no llevan directamente a ese sitio tan interesante del que hablan, sino a una página de resumen creada en Holy Kaw, el blog de AllTop. Y, por supuesto, quien explota la publicidad y suma a sus cifras de tráfico con esas páginas intermedias es el propio Kawasaki: todo queda en casa. Aquí podéis ver un ejemplo.

LOL kidding about the title. Its not stalking, its research! Teehee.

Yesterday, we had another guest lecturer for our NCT lecture! (Sorry no awesumzz photozzz. The only photo I took using my webcam turned out to be too blurry )

Photo taken from Flickr >.<

Pat Law from Ogilvy PR Worldwide and 360 Digital Influence came to share with us about some tricks about social media. Within the short one-hour lecture, she briefly explained about and taught us how to use Google reader, Google alerts and Alltop. She also shared blog directories (like Technorati, Ping.sg, etc) and what she calls a one-stop-shop (Daymix, Omgili, etc).

Maybe its just me but I couldn’t help but LOL at the Omgili name. Sounds cute but how do you even pronounce it?

Anyway, she told us that these online tools are pretty useful to track opinions of brands online. Turning to the online medium to find ‘free feedback’ seems quite ingenious eh?

Hahah ok tbh its kind of scary too. Because everything you do on the internet is recorded and can be seen by anyone (or everyone). I don’t want to be all paranoid and everything but its still better to be careful about whatever you type, even in personal messages to your friends. You never know who might be able to use whatever you typed against you. (Park Jaebeom learnt that the hard way. )

She shared loads of websites that we could make use of to evaluate a website’s popularity (Popuri, URL Fan) and do tracking on Twitter (Twitalyzer). Then she showed us a real-life example of “Bad ways to approach a blogger” and what to do before approaching one. Those small minute details are really important, otherwise one would end up shaming their company/organisation. >.<

Though it was a really short lecture, we managed to gain an interesting insight on how people in PR like Pat Law make use of these online tools to manage an organisation’s online rep.

Oh, and thank you Pat! ^^

PS: In her tweet, Pat said she was nervous during the lecture. LOL if that was considered nervousness, I think my presentations would be panic attacks. ROFL.

- Update -

I forgot to post my list here the last time I blogged. =.=

Just gonna share a few:

Mr Tweet: www.mrtweet.net – Sends you tweets everyday on who you should follow

Twellow: www.twellow.com – Like a yellow pages directory for followers

Media on Twitter:www.mediaontwitter.com – Archives and shows all journalists worldwide on twitter

TwitterFall: www.twitterfall.com – Especially good for events, can see a particular trend being discussed through a list of tweets with that particular hashtag

Oh, and if you want to find out about your Twitter “health”, check out Twitalyzer: www.twitalyzer.com
It analyses your tweet history, making it easier to define how you want to improve on your tweets.

Check Nizam’s blog for the longer list.

Guy Kawasaki (Alltop)
Nov 02, 2009 -

Way back in July of 2009, I explained how I used Twitter. Lots has changed since then, so this is an update to explain how I tweet. As a small business owner, you can adopt my techniques to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

General

Question: How can you follow more than 180,000 people?

Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, direct messages, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki,” “alltop,” or “guysreplies.” I answer almost every @ and direct.

Question: Then why do you follow everyone who follows you?

Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that people can send direct messages to me. I like direct messages because they are more efficient than email.

Question: Why do you use both @guykawasaki and @guysreplies?

Answer: Originally, I created @guysreplies to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. Subsequently, Twitter changed the way @s work so that only people who follow both parties will see them. However, there are ways that people can still see all the tweets from @guykawasaki, and I don’t want to waste their time.

Also, I like a high signal/noise ratio from @guykawasaki, so I don’t want a bunch of “Thanks for reading my book” in it. The downside of what I do is that people might think that @guykawasaki is not responsive and “engaged,” but I’m willing to take this risk.

Work Flow

Question: What Twitter applications do you use?

Answer: For reading, I use TweetDeck on my Macintosh and Tweetie on my iPhone. For posting, I use Objective Marketer and Posterous.

Objective enables me to create marketing campaigns and then schedule, frame, repeat, and track tweets. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to Objective.) It is the foundation of my Twitter efforts.

Posterous powers a part of Alltop called Holy Kaw; this sub-domain is a collection of summaries of the third-party sites that I am tweeting about. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Posterous.)

Finally, I use SocialToo to automatically follow people who follow me and to kill spam direct messages. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Posterous.)

Question: How do you find so many links to tweet?

Answer: I use three principal sources: Alltop, StumbleUpon, and SmartBrief. These sites curate and aggregate information to make the hunt for quality links much, much easier.

Question: What is your workflow?

Answer: I find interesting links and write-up a short summary using BBEdit that I post to Holy Kaw, and then Objective checks the Holy Kaw RSS feed once per hour and tweets new articles.

Question: Isn’t that a long, complex process just to tweet something?

Answer: Twitter is a marketing tool for me. It’s not a “social” activity or a game. This process is what it takes to make Alltop successful.

Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?

Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much he plays golf. “It’s what I do.” If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on a computer eight hours per day.

Question: If a company wants an active, aggressive presence on Twitter, how many people does it take?

Answer: One person working really hard, unencumbered by a clueless boss and a Luddite legal department, can do it. Certainly one person can get things going enough to prove that Twitter makes sense for a company to add more people to do it even better.

Repeat Tweets

Question: Why do you repeat your tweets from @guykawasaki?

Answer: I repeat my tweets because no one’s followers are on Twitter 24 x 7 x 365 nor do they scroll back to see what was tweeted already. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat news stories throughout the day—can you imagine a news network assuming that everyone has seen a report after running it once or that everyone has recorded the news and will look back?

I have tracked repeated tweets, and the amount of click throughs on the second and third instances of a tweet is almost as high as the first one.

Question: Do you recommmend that companies repeat their tweets?

Answer: Yes, if they want to ensure that as many followers see their tweets as possible. There will be tiny number of people who will complain, but you cannot make all your followers happy.

In fact, if you’re not pissing someone off on Twitter, you’re not using it to its fullest potential. Companies should not let a few angry people dictate their marketing practices.

Question: What if I don’t want to see the repeats?

Answer: The easiest thing to do is unfollow @guykawasaki and follow @alltop because it contains only one instance of my tweets. You can think of @alltop as @guykawasaki on Tivo.

Ghostwriters
Question: Do you use ghostwriters?

Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Catherine Faas. I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people (assuming you think I’m intelligent) looking for interesting stuff will find more than one intelligent person. At the end of every Holy Kaw post, you can see who created it if you’re curious.

Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and direct messages for you?

Answer: Never. They only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.

Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?

Answer: I didn’t hide this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it. My attitude is: “As long as the tweets are good, why does it matter who wrote them?” Do you think Ralph Lauren himself designed every article in his store?

Question: Why do some people attack you for using ghostwriters?

Answer: Because they are angry, little people who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy to get attention. They also assume that I have to cheat and use ghostwriters to respond to people because they are incapable of dealing with the volume of @s and direct messages that I get.

Question: Do you recommend that companies use ghostwriters?

Answer: Most companies are “brands,” so this isn’t an issue unless people are so dumb as to think that Richard Branson is @VirginAmerica. Issues arise when the Twitter account is a person’s name.

For example, should @Lancearmstrong use a ghost? For some tweets, I’d say it’s perfectly okay—tweets about cycling news and information, for example. However, if @Lancearmstrong says his bike was stolen, he pulled a hamstring, or he can’t stand the color yellow, it has to be him.

Let’s say the Twitter account is for the CEO of a company. I’d rather read the interesting tweets of a good ghost than a clueless CEO. It’s the same reason politicians have speechwriters. As my mother used to say, “Behind every successful politician is an amazed speechwriter.”

Alltop Promotion

Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?

Answer: Twitter is a means to an end: Alltop’s success. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don’t work for free) into it. The Alltop promotion justifies and pays for the efforts all five of us. You can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.

Question: OK, but what if I don’t want to see Alltop promotions?

Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me) just like you can change the channel from PBS.

Question: How much promotion can a company get away with?

Answer: It depends on several factors: How much do your followers love the company? How good are the deals that you offer? How much “real” content and “interaction” do the company’s tweets contain? For sure, the answer is not “None.”

Twitter is far beyond Trixie telling Biff and Carly that her cat rolled over. It’s now a “platform.” As such, there is no wrong or right just as there is no wrong or right way to maintain a website or blog—Is Zappos “wrong” for using the Internet to sell shoes? Forty years ago, some Arpanet scientists might have said so.

The bottom line is that there’s only what works and what doesn’t, and you won’t know which is which until you try.

If you have questions about how I tweet, you can reach me at @guykawasaki

via openforum.com

I ran across something new (to me) this week while doing my blog reading “homework.”  As part of keeping up with the latest in information for small and home-based business – and just business in general – I “surf” blogs of interest.  I did an interesting journey-of-sorts while surfing last evening.  Kind of like the however-many-points-of-separation game…start here, which leads to there and you find this.  This is how it worked:

• I began with an initial reading through ProBlogger’s “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” by Darren Rowse.  I’m going through this workbook as an exercise to be a better blogger…makes sense – part of my business plan is continual improvement.
• Chapter 6/Day 6 is about learning from successful bloggers of the likes of Seth Godin, Liz Strauss and Chris Brogan - as well as others.  I’m a diligent student so I looked up every one of them.  Some I’m already familiar with as you can see by the blogroll to the right.  Well, in one of those articles I was directed somewhere that looked interesting and found myself at the Forbes.com site with an article review of “Small Business Blogs.”
• In looking through the short list in the Forbes article, I visited the allbusiness.com site – it is rich with articles and blogs of interest to small and home-based business.  While there I noticed an article written by Denise O’Berry, whose tag line was “Just for Small Business.” Some great articles written by Denise here.
• My next step was one of curiosity. I decided to do a search for small business blogs on Google.  Guess what came up? First was Small Business Blog Directory and second is the Forbes.com site mentioned above.  I went to the Small Business Blog Directory site and was astounded to find that the founder of this directory is Denise O’Berry.  And what a good idea she has in developing a directory whose emphasis is small and home-based business and those who write about these issues.

This was very cool.  I looked over the SBB Directory and decided Linda’s Business Blog just might find a home there, too, so I filled out the info.  I got the email just a bit ago that says my blog is now officially a member of the SBB Directory.  Today you can find me listed on the “What’s New” page.

What is instructive about this exercise is the idea that the internet has now become a valuable repository of information.  You do have to search and categorize and sift and sort to find just what you’re looking for; but you’d have to do that in a public library also.  There is criticism that “just anyone” can put up a blog or website and call themselves experts...but the same is true in hardcover print.  I think the proof comes in the pudding…or so the saying goes.  Either the source and information stands up over time or it doesn’t.

The internet is a rich ground for any small or home-based business owner seeking information, guidance and advice – doesn’t matter what their market niche might be.  The experts are out there.  Experts?  I have 2 definitions:

• An Expert is someone with grounded experience in “whatever” – having won, lost and generally learned along the way and who comes out with positive gains…these are the business owners themselves
• An Expert is someone who has studied the efforts of those who experience the “whatever” in all the fields in which the experienced players play…these are the academics

It’s like the art thing:  if you can’t make a living as a working artist, teach.  In both cases, the person has the expertise of the subject.

My advice?  If you are a small or home-based business person seeking information go to the obvious sites first such as:

• Business.gov – “…Business.gov helps small businesses understand their legal requirements, and locate government services supporting the nation’s small business community….Business.gov is an official site of the U.S. Government….”

Then do some research on blogs that give good help and tips – find them through such blog directories as:

• Small Business Blog Directory
• Alltop – choose “s” then choose “small business“
• Technorati - on menu bar choose “Business” on drop down choose “small business“

And, of course, do internet searches on your own.  The information is out there and, just as at a public library, you have to go in and sort and look.

So I happened upon this great blog the other day, Fuel Lines – Fueling Ad Agency New Business Through Social Media, which is written by Michael Gass @michaelgass. Now I’m a sucker for a good blog about social media, and I’m a bigger sucker for smart ideas that capitalize on social media’s strength.

According to StatBrain, Fuel Lines get about 4,800 visits per day. Michael also has over 10,000 followers on Twitter so he’s doing something right.

Looks like Michael has a “Blog of the Month” thing going, where you can submit a blog to be voted on for November honors.

Did I also mention I’m a sucker for shameless promotion? So I submit our blog and three days later, sure enough, there are the AdMavericks listed with 44 other blogs that have been submitted. The vote is based on the following question:

“Which of these 45 ad agency blogs best understands social media?”

The reason this is so brilliant is that Michael probably knows that posts like the one you are reading now are bound to happen. People will tweet about it, Facebook statuses will be updated, you get the picture. If you get 45 blogs to vote for, and all of the blogs are about social media, what do you think will happen?  My guess it that traffic to Fuel Lines is going to spike big and bad. I wish I had thought of it.

I’m officially launching our Vote AdMavericks campaign. Here are several campaign promises and reasons why we think you should vote for us. If one of these makes sense to you, I encourage you to go here and vote for the AdMavericks.

We are the only Iowa blog on there and Iowan’s love their own. The east coast and west coast don’t expect the winner to be from the “No-Coast” – put them in an Iowa state of mind.

You compete with Lessing-Flynn. That’s right, you might even be an ad agency in Des Moines. But, given the fact that we talk about other ad agencies and link to their blogs and twitter pages, additional traffic coming to your site wouldn’t be bad, even if it’s from the AdMavericks.

This isn’t your first rodeo with the AdMavericks. You like the content, you come back and read us from time to time. If you really like it, tell others by voting for us.

We spoke at Highlight Midwest last week and essentially told the AdMavericks story. You can see the PowerPoint on SlideShare but here are the highlights. Since this blog started in January 2009 we’ve received:

20,000 blog views (2000 views per month)
Syndication on CNN.com and The Chicago Sun Times
Been ranked in the top 1% of all blogs by Technorati
Featured as one of WordPress’s fastest growing blogs on multiple occassions.
Selected by AllTop as one of the top marketing blogs.

Now we may be tooting our own horn here but this is a campaign and we won’t lower ourselves to bash the other candidates. Plus, the AdMavericks are registered Independents as well. I made that up.

So, if you can do anything to help rock the Vote for Ad Mavericks campaign we’d appreciate it. We’d appreciate it more if you told us what you did as well. Something like tweeting: “I voted for @AdMavericks on Fueling New Business (with the link)” would be stellar! We’ll be sure to provide our thanks back in droves!

Come on Iowa, lets show them that Iowa, yes Iowa, has social media game! Again, please vote here!

Author: Josh Fleming
www.lessingflynn.com
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The new Technorati still has some bugs to work out, but it looks promising.  I’m excited to announce that I’ve been accepted as one of their writers…people who write articles on their favorite topics either just for Technorati or to be seen there first – before it appears anywhere else.  My first exclusive-to-Technorati article was published over the weekend and can be found here.  As I do on this blog, I will be writing articles about business, small business and home-based business.

Don’t know what Technorati is?  According to the Technorati Blog, dated October 14, the new T is a “…re-launch of a wholly new Technorati.com. Technorati was founded to help people find great blog content….” When I first discovered it about two years ago, I understood it to be a blog directory – a place to use much like an internet search engine, to find blogs to read in categories of my choosing.  And so it was.  Then I also discovered Alltop, which also is a terrific directory: “…The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, ‘What’s happening?’ in ‘all the topics’ that interest you….” It has a cool feature where you can have a page that lists blogs and sites that you like to read.  My Alltop page is here.

As I’ve said on my “About” page on this blog, I believe information is key and it is very helpful to have sites such as Technorati [the new] and Alltop and other blog directories that help you sift and sort the millions of blogs and words to find what you need.  Everything new has bugs and fits and starts…so I’m hoping that blog readers and writers everywhere will join me in having patience with the New Technorati as it gets its beta version off the ground.

George of my jungle

Speaking of having patience…George, my 5-year old Amazon parrot insists upon “helping” me this morning!  He likes to “shop” on my desktop to see what he can snatch…today it ended up being some green sticky notes.

The foundation of any online marketing strategy is content. It is necessary to create new and relevant content consistently. It is also just as important to share other’s new and relevant content. One of my favorite sources for this content is Alltop. Alltop answers “what is happening?” in all topics. They do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs on the web. To learn more check out my video:

Back in August, I attended the 2009 Toronto Information Overload Awareness Day event.  During that event, I was introduced to the Pecha Kucha presentation technique.  The Pecha Kucha format, in a nutshell, consists of 20 slides lasting 20 seconds each.

Recently, I came across Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 presentation rule, which I found to be very complimentary to both Pecha Kucha and the Ignite presentation formats.  Guy Kawasaki is currently a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures,   However, Guy is best known for his role in evangelizing the Macintosh brand for Apple.  He is also co-founder of Alltop, an emerging online magazine rack recently announcing their third version.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

10-20-30 Presentation Rule

Per Guy Kawasaki, there should be only ten (10) slides in your presentation.  As a venture capitalist himself, Guy is fully aware of their initial short attention span during a pitch.  As such, the presentation should only last (20) minutes.  Additionally, you need to ensure enough brevity in your presentation to offset any technical setup issues, schedule conflicts, and Murphy’s Law.  Finally, your smallest font should be thirty (30) point.  He formulates that you should take the age of the oldest member of your audience and divide by two to equate your minimum font size (e.g. 60/2 = 30).

Having recently turned forty (the 10-20-30-40 rule?), I can relate to the fact that your target audience is no longer capable of reading 12 point at a distance.  Knowing your target audience and catering to their pain points is a tenet of Business 101.  This should apply in your presentation layout as it would in your actual business plan.

These rules force you to know your presentation before actually presenting it.  Only the core of your text should be on your slides.  If you are simply reading the presented material verbatim, your audience is capable of reading faster than you speak and will be reading ahead as opposed to actually listening.

The 10-20-30 Presentation Rule in summation:

• 10 Slides
• 20 Minutes
• 30 Point Minimum Font Size

Textual Transcript

Guy Kawasaki’s textual transcript of his 10-20-30 Presentation Rule can be found here with the main points quoted below.

Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

Creating An Effective Scientific Poster Presentation

The University of Minnesota posted a nice tutorial on effective scientific poster presentation.   Specifically they have a section on creating legible text.  I believe these guidelines go well with Guy’s 30 point text rule.  They recommend limiting the fonts to either Times New Roman or Arial.  The use of black text of a light background is still ideal for reading purposes.   The use of colour should be used for highlighting text and not competing with it.  White space is still highly recommended and sticking to larger font sizes achieves this goal.  Paragraphs should only be used for outlining logic.  Whereas, short lists (4 items) should be commonly used for outlining content.

Image: University of Minnesota

C’mon in!  Grab a cuppa Joe, find a comfy seat on one of the large overstuffed chairs and browse through the endless options of digital magazines.  You can flip through the pages of this one, take a few off the rack and curl up and devour them completely or you can wander aimlessly from topic to topic and title to title. 

This is the genius behind my new favorite site (well, okay, one of them, but it has all my other favorite sites there so it has to by my most favorite): Alltop.com.  It is like a giant magazine rack of all my favorite places on the web.  Alltop aggregates all my favorite sites about my favorite topics all in one convenient place on the web.  No more going from link to link on my blog roll.  No more crowding my favorites tab on my browser.  Yeah, and I’m still trying to figure out how RSS feeds work so Alltop solved that one for me too.  I just go to Alltop.   It not only does this for me personally, Alltop provides this service for millions of other people all over the web.  Alltop would be glad to be your online magazine rack as well. 

Think of it this way.  If you are a magazine lover or a newspaper nut you understand how these treasures can accumulate over time.  In my living room and around my house I used to have a pile of newspapers here, a stack of magazines there and when I had a coffee table the thing was continuously piled with magazines, newspapers and books about the things I was interested in and the author’s I was currently reading.  Then, I got rid of the coffee table, piled the papers in a neat wicker basket and the magazines in a cool container or two, by topic and genre, so they could be displayed facing forward for easy access.  Alltop does (exponentially, I might add)  in digital world what I just did in my living room.

I suggest you go check it out and see for yourself.  You can see the badge in my side bar and the link is first on my blog roll…or it should be soon.

While you’re there if you like my blog, suggest Welcome to Cabs Place! to Alltop.  I’d really love to show up there, because, well, then it would just mean I was hanging out with all the other cool kids!  

Enjoy!

Other Twitter Topics:      The Graying of Facebook      Multiple Account Layering Strategy      Social Media: Not Just for Kids      Email The Scoopdog Team

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(Read time = 2-3 minutes) Information overload on steroids.  That’s a common theme the Scoopdog team hears  from marketers, agency leads and social media advocates.  How best to keep up… filter the noise… find the hidden gems?  Here’s three ”insider” resources useful to help scrape away the clutter.

1.  Alltop: Your Personal Magazine Rack

For those struggling w/news overload, a solution worth the look is Alltop – a news aggragation web site worth discovery.  With self-loaded pages like “Twitter News“…  Facebook News… and Social Media News… quick snapshots are possible.  The site also enables a “build-it-yourself ” feature for constructing targeted magazine racks.

For the B2B pro, the advantages are:  aggragation and time savings.  The Scoopdog team uses Alltop as a means to quickly scan information sources for topics and trends that are perhaps worth further investigation and a blog post. The site is fed by tens of thousands of information sources and blog resources.  To say it another way, Alltop strives to be the  filter to find information nuggets, as the user specifies.  (Disclosure:  I have no assotiation – just like the site and service. Same for the others below) 

 A helpful tutorial steps through the process with point/click simplicity.  The Alltop blog provides tips/gricks… the Goodie page has all manner of widgets, badges, feed connections, groups and even the obligatory T-shirt.

2.  Twitter Accounts to Follow: Social Media Analytics

waworld  The official Twittter account of Manoj Jasra’s web analytics world blog. Insights into search marketing, social media ROI, and social media strategies.

analytics_  If you can’t analyze it, you can’t measure it;  if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Here you’ll find tweets and links to various aspects of social media measurement.

WebAnalyticsGuy  Canadian RyanDinelle and is ~500 followers mashup the metric scene.  Google Analytics, media tracking, comparisons/distinctions between audience communities, SEO.  The breadth is impressive and the conversation intelligent.

3.  comScore Research and Digital Intelligence

comStore – the self-proclaimed global source of digital market intelligence.  While in the business of selling research, the site contains a plethora of library produts accessable free, sponsors webinars on 2.0 topics, and hosts digital audience measurement events.  Often sited resource for usage statistics.  Excellent blog here.

The company was founded in 1999 to focus on e-commerce trends measurement.  Acquisition of Media Metrix in 2002 expanded the media intelligence services.  Today, comScore has as its mission to shed light on the beharior of digital consumers using data collected from 2 million+.  One of the most valuable destinations on the site is the “Presentations and Whitepapers Library” here.

All: We love collecting little known resources/sites/references sources.  If you have favorites, please share.

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Frecuentemente se confunden a los INTEPRENEUR con los emprendedores (entrepeneur). Ambos comparten su capacidad de innovación, pero el primero actúa al amparo de una gran empresa

 
22/09/2009 ENTRINNOVA – Los ‘interpreneur’ son personas emprendedoras que actúan bajo el amparo de una gran compañía. Según la definición de Guy Kawasaki, cofundador de Alltop, un portal web de noticias, la labor del ‘interpreneur’ es “desarrollar los productos o iniciativas que podrían idear dos chavales en un garaje para tratar de destruir tu empresa”.

Los ‘interpreneur’ desarrollan un nuevo proceso, producto o servicio en el contexto de una organización más grande para facilitar su crecimiento, anticipándose a la competencia.

La buena noticia es que la figura de los ‘interpreneur’ se está estableciendo en el seno de las grandes compañías.

Google siempre ha sido un gran defensor de esta idea en su línea estratégica de crecimiento. Productos como Gmail, Google News y Adsense son el resultado más visible de su programa de Innovación Time Off, en el cual los empleados pueden dedicar el 20% de su jornada de trabajo a realizar esfuerzos independientes.

Otras organizaciones, incluida las del sector de la comercialización y empresas de ingeniería, están dispuestas a seguir el ejemplo de Google.

Fuentes:

• http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123889352826089995.html
• http://www.guykawasaki.com/

Interview with Guy Kawasaki: The State of Social Media from ritchie pettauer on Vimeo.

Lately, I found this interesting interview on datadirt.net: Indulging a nice chat in Vienna’s traditional coffeehouse “Sperl”, Guy Kawasaki administers valuable inside into his new project Alltop, offers advice in preventing an email account from overload, gives his opinion on Twitter and Facebook and many more. Enjoy:)

Making a career change presents all kinds of challenges, among them being a need to learn the best practices and the trends for a field you may be new to. I would know. I’m making the classic transition from reporter to marketer, with an emphasis on the web and social media. Fortunately, just about every industry has its leading group of bloggers or online news sources. The trick, however, is finding them, and even when you do find an seemingly relevant blog, it may be difficult to gauge how much you can trust the author.

Fortunately, I have found a resource to help me in this endeavor. Alltop is a web site started in 2008 by marketing guru and entrepeneur Guy Kawasaki, in which blogs are hand-picked and collected by a staff and placed on the web site. Of course, there are probably other sites to simply get links to collections of blogs, but Alltop provides several great features to help you find relevant content with minimal hassle. And as a bonus, it’s fun to use.

In addition to selecting links,  Alltop’s staff organizes them into dozens (if not hundreds) of topics, which can be explored from the main page. You can find everything from Event Planning to Nursing. You can look under a set of 10 broad categories or by entries from A to Z (plus #, whose entries are 3D and 4G.).

Then, within the topic pages, Alltop brilliantly includes not only a list of relevant blogs and media outlets, but also lists the five most recent entries from each site. I feel I can trust the authority of these sources, because they’re hand-picked, and furthermore, Alltop’s format allows me to cherry-pick individual stories to read. And this is all done using a very elegant layout, which displays an enormous amount of information without seeming cluttered. And as a bonus, hovering your mouse cursor over any story link will display the first paragraph or so from the story itself, offering a handy preview of its content.

http://pr.alltop.com

In my case, I’ve been making extensive use of the PR, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and of course, Blogging pages, among others, to help me learn new skill sets.

So if you’re looking into a new career field or if you want to find out what people are saying about the one you already work in, Alltop provides a great resource. Of course, there is an important caveat, and that’s whether Alltop has included your field in its listings. I’ll admit I’m fortunate in that I’m looking into some technology-based fields that are pretty hip right now, so it’s natural they’ll be included on Alltop. You may not be so lucky, however. (Note: I was going to use plumbing as an example of a field without an entry, thinking of the idea off the top of my head, but it turns out there is one.) However, the site provides good contact info, so you can always request that your interest be included. And if you have a blog or know of a great one that’s not already on Alltop, you can submit it, as well.

Guy Kawasaki and me

My world has just been shattered. Ok, perhaps that’s a little too dramatic, but today I experienced what it feels like to have my carpet pulled from under me (during the first-half that is). One of my long-time Twitter follows @GuyKawasaki had defied my laws of Twitter use without remorse, but made up for it later with useful tips for business use.

This morning I attended an event at Imperial College London, organised by MIT Enterprise Forum of the UK, Twitter – weapons of mass construction with Guy Kawasaki – Alltop, Nick Halstead – founder of Tweetmeme, Mario Menti – Twitterfeed) to discuss Twitter and offer some tips and tricks. Whilst I was getting over Guy’s devastating and cold disregard for my Twitter beliefs, he surprised me with loads of extremely useful tips that can be applied at work – using Twitter purely as a Marketing tool.

Guy opened the conference with an assertion that nowadays there are no excuses for not being able to run affective Twitter campaigns. He argued that all elements (people, Twitter, Marketing) needed are FREE:

• free tools (Twitter) – to publish the message
• people are free – to consume and spread the message
• marketing (Objective Marketer) is free – to reach people

… all to drive traffic to alltop.com.

Also, at the event was tweetmeme.com which allows you, as a publisher, to chose one of four buttons (via a plugin) on an article. The button allows visitors to tweet the story directly from the article page. Planned for release soon is Tweetmeme’s report and tracking suite. The suite of apps will allow the account holder to track clicks and RT’s and better manage activity.

The tools Guy suggested using to run an effective marketing campaign to drive traffic to alltop.com include:

• Twitter
• Stumbleupon
• ObjectiveMarketer (in beta).

With ~150,000 followers Guy strongly advocates automation. Automation of as many services as possible – especially useful when he travels. Part of the automation process includes auto sending of tweets and ghost tweeting – tweeting using a false name.

Using Objective Marketer, Guy is able to schedule tweets, track clicks and RT’s and RT effectiveness. Guy claims:

“There is no better way to create, test, and modify Twitter-based marketing than ObjectiveMarketer. If you’re going to take heat for using Twitter as tool, you might as well do it well.”

Finally, when Guy constructs a tweet manually (yes, he still tweets manually when at his desk) he includes two link portions to a tweet – one directly to the story and one to alltop.com’s channel/section page. When users click on the links from his tweet the target url is framed with an Alltop.com leader to help promote Alltop.com more. Guy assured us that website owners should not feel cheated, but rather pleased that a tweet of his has directed users to their website.

As the event drew to a close I couldn’t help but wonder how I might apply his useful steps to a work situation. Perhaps I might see if it works with some of our product teams.

[I have not mentioned Twitterfeed.com in this post as I lost track of what was being said other than it's a tool to auto send tweets out of your RSS fed blog posts]

If you’re a poet/fan of poetry, CNN is not your best option for news.

What is?

This.

- C.J.

When I first started this thing called social media, I had no idea where to begin.  As dumb luck would have it, I stumbled across a Mashable post referring to a blog aggregator called Alltop by Guy Kawasaki. This fantastic tool allows you to find blog information about all types of subjects. You can also customize your own page so you can see what interests you. Some of my favorite social media blogs are listed below.

Chris Brogan Community and Social Media

CC Chapman Managing the Gray Podcast-Learn to use Social Media and Emerging  Technologies

Mashable Social Media Guide

ReadWrite Web

Building43

Smart Briefs on Social Media

Social Media Today

Liz Strauss Successful Blogs

123 Social Media

The Harte of Marketing

FeverBee

I hope this helps you as much as it did me. What are your favorite social media blogs? I am always looking to learn.