Archive for February, 2009

Hey – some of those Facebook things are just downright annoying to me. I throw snowballs and return superpokes but mostly I just don’t. It really is okay if you do any or all of those things – seriously. In fact I get a little disgusted at “gurus” of social media who reguard those little things as a bane. I will say, as an employer and service provider, I look at what you have on your social media pages and take that into consideration. Even if it’s something you allowed to remain that someone else placed there. BUT that’s a little sidetrack – this is about the current Facebook Random Album Game and some very amazing results!

First the “what to do”:
1 – Go to wikipedia. Hit random
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Random quotations
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on explore the last seven days
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or for a really easy program use www.Picnik.com to put it all together.

5 – Post it with this text in the caption and TAG the friends you want to join in.

Let’s face it – it takes money to run Twitter. Not only that but we also know that there have been millions of dollars in venture capital put on the table for Twitter. Additionally there are many people using Twitter for nothing but business and spam. Not to mention the faked accounts of celebrities who never have even so much as heard of Twitter.

Answer this one question poll and let us know! We will discuss these results on Twitter Tuesday Radio this week with special guest @shelisrael

Charging a monthly account fee or even a fee per Tweet would definitely curb some, but not all, misuse and spamming. I don’t know anything you don’t know – I really haven’t heard the Ev and the folks have any intention of ever charging for access or use but if they did how much would you be willing to pay?

Coffee at Starbucks is overpriced, generally so bitter/cranked most Starbuckies load it with flavoring, sweeteners and/or creams and not one of them in my area is “easily accessible”. Yet there is always a small line. Why?

The answer is, “I don’t know. I have been to Starbucks 3 times and have never studied the social motivations of one’s desire to have a Starbucks.”

Why do you Tweet? The answer is, “I don’t know. You are the one person best positioned and motivated to answer this question. However you may not be the one most well equipped.”

In its simplest definition a Socratic investigation, or investigation using the Socratic Method, would be a series of questions and answer with a seemingly erratic directive with most questions being contrarian to the previous answer. In other words an interviewee and a devil’s advocate. The challenge is to play both parts and do so effectively. The goal is to tune your social presence and in turn reach your goals.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
Socrates

Being from the south we have a tendency to “get to the point”. Unfortunately we have to run too many gamuts and jump too many conclusions to discover a meaningful amount of truths in our journey to the answer. For the simple solution would go something like this: Q. Why do I blog? A. Because I enjoy it.

Realistically speaking that may actually be the full answer but which driving factors went undiscovered in the lack of a process of reaching that conclusion? Right about now you are thinking, “Is this really Ken writing this? Where’s the shallow humor and quick punches?” Don’t worry, you’ll get that on Twitter Tuesday and my next 20 Twitter Bits!

Now let’s try a short exercise with you being both the suspect and the county prosecutor. Perhaps the questioning would go thusly:

Q. Why do I blog?
A. Because I like to.
Q. You like to what?
A. Blog.
Q. Why would you like to do something so silly as blog?
A. Because it gives me a focus.
Q. A focus on what?
A. My friends and the things that happen in their life.
Q. Oh, so without blogging you have no friends or life?
A. No, I have friends. It’s just easier to write them all the same letter at the same time.
Q. Aha. So you are too lazy to develop one-on-one relationships?
A. Not lazy, just busy.
Q. But you’re not too busy to blog?
A. Blogging doesn’t take that long.
Q. Really? How much time did you spend blogging yesterday?
A. About 2 hours but that was Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
Q. What did you Twitter-book-space about?
A. My day at work. Some old photos a friend had on their myspace. Some baseball and politics.

Continuing on I could go for hours. If you simply look at that exchange you will start to see some answers the fictitious Q&A session did uncover. He blogs to focus on friends and share information. Further queries and responses would ultimately uncover many nuances and details of why the man has a social media network and what he hopes to achieve.

Examining just this short segment we could reasonably develop a plan for a successful media campaign. Obviously our fellow believes he is simply staying in touch with old friends and meeting new ones. Realistically he is conducting his own outreach program. His service is friendship and that is what he is marketing to his contacts. I am not saying everyone needs to develop a plan to stay in touch with old high school or work buddies but if you are social networking to build a fan base, client base or network of like-minded persons you probably need to evaluate your methods frequently.

I prefer a simple three step plan:
1. Identify my goal – what do I want to accomplish? Our fellow wants to stay in touch with old friends, discuss baseball and politics. This much we know.
2. Establish a plan – this could include how often I need/want to touch my network, who I may choose to follow or subscribe to, which topical discussions I wish to join, and how much interaction I will provide.
3. Measure my success – since I had a goal I simply need to place units of measure to it. How many baseball cards I swap online could be one. How many people un-follow me because I’m a pseudo-political anarchist who is a fiscal liberal and social conservative with a hot temper. You get the drift.

Spend about 30 minutes with yourself and go through the line of questioning. You can key the Q and A (recommended) into your favorite word processing/text app or you can write it on paper. Beat yourself up a little with the questions. Record the questions and the answers otherwise the exercise will be lost in the ether. Review your answers and identify the key points. The worst that can possibly happen is you can lie to yourself. From there up it gets rosy and rewarding!

It has been a big part of the buzz and one of the fastest tracking set of search terms on the social media network: Facebook’s “evil” service terms change. We even discussed it on Twitter Tuesday Radio on February 17th. Well, the monster within – partly created and grown by Facebook – has turned on the feeder.

The topic was so hot I kept one frame of TweetDeck on “Facebook new terms of service” and it moved so fast it was almost impossible to keep up with. It was mentioned on the local Fox news channel last night so no need to check if it got onto the news wires. The people spoke up and Facebook rescinded … at least temporarily.

From Facebook:

Terms of Use Update

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

We had 106 people live today which means 299,999,894 Americans (give or take a million) have not yest listened to today’s show. You know who you are

Our guest, Mike Mueller (http://twitter.com/MikeMueller) gave several links and was kind enough to provide them to you even after the show!

http://areweconnected.com/2009/02/links-for-today/

Here is Mike’s video teaser:

Please make sure to visit Mike and feel free to comment on his blog!

Twitter Tuesday Radio is co-hosted by Jason Crouch (http://twitter.com/jasoncrouch) and your’s truly Ken Cook (http://twitter.com/thekencook) and you can see our Facebook at http://budurl.com/twittertuesday or join the show live and listen to archives at http://budurl.com/jckc

Last week I used my meditation time to watch photos from around the world pop up on Twitpic. This Sunday morning my wife is not feeling well so I am using my church time to stay with her and do the same again! It’s like a quick “world tour” from right here on my laptop. Sometimes we forget to slow down and learn something from unusual places. If you haven’t tried Twitpic give it a shot. It will automatically cross-post to Twitter and of course Twitter can be tied to Facebook, FriendFeed and others.

We’ll soon know for sure! TweeterGetter all but promises “19,530 new twitter followers in 30 days”. Not too hard to track! I see @markres has it and I heard about it from @jackbastide. We’ll just check the stats in 30 days, eh?

Chances are Gary McCaffrey will be the only one to end up with 19,350 new twitter followers.

Okay, that’s a double entendre. What I am referring to here is an actual image for your blog, presentation, scrapbook, etc. Sure, you can join any number of image catalog companies like Dreamstime which I have used for years. But did you know there are literally thousands of images available through many repositories for as little as a link and a thank you? Now that’s the kind of open community I like to see!

BurningWell.org has been around for a few years and has a supply of completely public domain images. Every image uploaded to Burning Well has been released by the photographer into the public domain so you don’t even need to acknowledge the source unless you want. There is probably something pretty close to what you need in the few hundred thousand completely free images here.

flickr operates with millions of images under the Creative Commons license. Don’t worry if you don’t understand – the link goes to the page that also explains CC licensing and how to use it. flickr is a great place for new and aspiring artists to become quickly known as well as a nice forum for seasoned professionals.

FreeDigitalPhotos is a growing supply of thousands of images usable for personal or commercial purposes. Well laid out and “pretty” to use I hope they do well. You can purchase a higher resolution image and there is no need to link back to the site but the prices for the higher resolution are a bit higher than Dreamstime.

FreePhotosBank is a growing selection of thousands of images which can be used for business, blogging, print, web, or whatever. Take a little time and browse through and you will find plenty of images suitable for most blogging uses. It is also one of the few which gives you the choice of downloading as a jpeg or a zip file.

Public Domain Photos has 5000 photos all in the public domain. You can use these photos for any reason without worrying about giving credit or paying any royalties or even a download fee. My recommendation is you keep a link to where you found the image “just in case”.

FreeRangeStock has thousands of photos and images you can use for any purpose, no credits needed. You cannot resell or redistribute in packages but you can use them on your blog, website, reports, presentations, etc. You can quickly get lost browsing through these images!

Go places you’ve never been. See things you never get to see – leave comments! Never toured the public timeline at Twitpic? It’s pretty amazing. Here are a few samples from my Sunday morning meditation time while I travel the world:

And there you have it. Over a dozen cities around the world without leaving your chair.

The point is TwitPic is a great tool and a good diversion not only to share your photos but to see others from thousands of viewpoints around the globe. It’s easy enough to setup a TwitPic account and start sharing your own photos from your cellphone, PDA or computer. Just go to http://twitpic.com and follow the very simple directions.

We Twitterers are always trying new tools to control, monitor, enhance, augment, filter, or otherwise manage the scope of our outreach on Twitter. When you realize that you can touch millions of people in a matter of seconds – and likewise be touched by millions of people in a matter of seconds – it makes much more sense to control early and control often.

For the last short while I have used Friend or Follow to match and manage my followers and followees. Tonight I am trying another web based solution called My Tweeple.

My Tweeple does seem to have better functionality although it lacks in design appeal. This gets right back to the “would you rather have a good looking spouse or one that works”? Nothing worse than a broken spouse – but enough about me.

If you have a few thousand followers your first visit to My Tweeple may take a couple of minutes to assemble the data you will be needing. If you have a few hundred you will enjoy a little more speed. Once your list of followers and followees has loaded you will instantly see the value of My Tweeple when you are presented with the little icon that tells you what type of relationship you have with the other party. Best yet you can follow, unfollow, block, or hide from your list without leaving My Tweeple. This is a major improvement over Friend or Follow.

My Tweeple helps answer the ever burning question for most of us, “Should I follow?” Of course it will not answer the question for you but by being able to see how many they follow, how many follow them, how many times they have updated and if they follow you – and being able to do something about it from the same place – gives you a massive head start.

From the MT Master:

What is My Tweeple?

My name is Shannon Whitley, and I’m a Twitterholic, so much of one, in fact, that little things on Twitter that take extra time suddenly become a big annoyance.

Twitter’s Follower management tools lack a lot of essential features for me, so I decided to write my own application.

My Tweeple is a great way to manage all of my Twitter people in one place. I can easily see who I’m following and who’s following me.

With a simple click, I can follow, unfollow, or block people, and these changes instantly update Twitter.

I hope you enjoy using My Tweeple. This is your application as much as it is mine. Feel free to request changes or additions.

Shannon Whitley
@swhitley