Websitetology

Found this really simple, 7 step process on how to get started with Twitter. Forget following just the people you know, expand your reach, and find people who are interested in the same things you are:

1. Pick a topic the person is passionate about.

2. Go to http://search.twitter.com and run a search on the term.

3. Find an interesting tweet or post about the topic, and click through to the profile of the person who posted it. If the profile looks interesting, follow that person. Follow a few folks like this.

4. Start a conversation, reply to one of the posts as if you had started a conversation in line at the supermarket.

5. Look for someone sharing a useful website or blog post related to the topic, click through to the blog and consider subscribing to it. Maybe reply to the author via comment or back on Twitter to let them know what you thought.

6. Spend a few minutes in the conversation and see what happens. Try again the next day.

7. Repeat.

via How to Show The Value of Twitter In 2 Minutes or Less | :: a thousand cuts :: adam cohen’s blog.

The real value comes in networking at geek oriented events. A whole other conversation is going on at most conferences among those on Twitter. Find out if there is a hashtag, signified with a # instead of an @ address- and watch the conversation there. Guaranteed you’ll meet more people through twitter than by trying to make small talk at the breaks over soda.

At geek tech conferences, there is almost always a “backchannel” going on these days over twitter. Audiences are sharing their thoughts in 140 characters or less, in real time about the speaker using a #hashtag.

In fact, almost every sporting event, television show, mass audience, now has a mass conversation tool. But, typically- its only for people “in the know.”

Now, we have teachers utilizing the hashtag to engage a classroom- with the conversation projected on screen in the classroom:

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

via How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom.

I’ve started using twitter to take notes when at events, coming back to a tweet stream that captured in realtime not just what I was thinking- but feedback from my followers.

Watch as social media and  social networking in realtime and in real space becomes normalized behavior in more places over time.

Sharing this link to 100 twitter applications and tools and a few links to Twitterers to follow:

Here, we’ll take a look at 100 tools that can help twittering teachers make the most out of this helpful microblogging tool.

via Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher | Best Colleges Online.

Twitter is fast becoming one of the more useful tools in the social media toolbox. Take some time to look and explore the tools, and then go sign up for a twitter account. We’re www.twitter.com/TheNextWave

Websitetology  is a seminar about using the web for successfully making new business connections. We teach how the web works, how search works, and how to use open source content management systems like WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal to help you make a successful home on the web.

Conventional advertising and branding is suffering from the effects of over-exposure and fragmentation. The key is to find a community and build relationships. This story of how a small winery employed social media to grow their business is a perfect example of what we teach:

Stormhoek was a tiny South African winery when the company began working with UK blogger Hugh MacLeod to develop a social media strategy. MacLeod started working with Stormhoek in May of 2005, and by the end of the year, the winery’s sales had doubled. Besides dipping its toes in the blogging waters, in 2005, Stormhoek also launched an interesting campaign where it gave away 100 free bottles of wine to 100 bloggers in the UK, Ireland, and France. The bloggers were under no obligation to write about the wine or Stormhoek, but many did both, and the company’s awareness among bloggers skyrocketed.

In 2006, Stormhoek expanded on the ‘give wine away to bloggers’ idea, by setting up ‘Geek Dinners’, where bloggers around the United States throw their own parties, with Stormhoek providing the wine for free. This idea just further raised Stormhoek’s presence in the blogosphere.

So what’s the end result from all this for Stormhoek? Hugh MacLeod, speaking at last year’s South by Southwest festival, stated that before Stormhoek started blogging and involving bloggers in its marketing efforts, that the winery sold around 40,000 cases of wine a year. When MacLeod spoke at SXSW in March of 2007, he stated that the company was at that point selling 40,000 cases of wine a WEEK.

via So Does Blogging Really Work? Here’s the Proof. – Search Engine Guide Blog.

Although we still believe in empowering clients to do their own blogging (who knows your business better than you) we can help get you started.

To all the Tweetheads: Twitter about the seminar on Tuesday Jan 6, 2009, and you can come for the client rate of $99- just include the link to your tweet.

To everyone who has been- send your friends- and tweet that they are coming- and they can sign up for the $99 rate this seminar only- and I’ll pay you $10 per registration that they credit you for.

http://www.websitetology.com/?page_id=247&category=2&product_id=14

This is a special for the Jan 6 session only.

This isn’t exactly a Wordpress tip, but it’s a handy tool for coordinating multiple people for an event- or choosing what to do. Instead of endless e-mails, pick some dates and times, send it out to everyone to see their availability and preference- and get a response in one quick move:

Doodle
Schedule an event…

… such as a board meeting, business lunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other group event.
View example, create poll
Make a choice…

… among movies, menus, travel destinations, or among any other selection.
View example, create poll
How does Doodle work?

1. Create a poll.
2. Forward the link to the poll to the participants.
3. Follow online what the participants vote for.

It’s just another cool web 2.0 tool to stash in your toolbox.

plasq.com – Skitch – Snap, Draw, ShareYour friends are global… you can send them links… but what if the action is on your screen? … Point out a quick suggestion to a colleague or pass on that funny moment from an IM chat, post images to MySpace, eBay, forums or via email..Skitch is the Internet age’s Camera and it Rocks!There are many ways to take screen shots of your desktop, from a quick series of keystrokes, to 3rd party tools of varying levels of ability and complexity. But even with advanced tools, any editing beyond cropping and resizing will require another program, and then another will be needed to share it.The developers at Plasq saw the need for a better tool, and the result is Skitch, a veritable Swiss Army knife of functionality – from capturing, to editing, and finally, uploading or embedding. Take a screen shot, crop the picture, resize it by dragging the corners of the window, draw on the picture, add some text, drag and drop it to your desktop, upload it to Flickr, insert it in your LiveJournal/MySpace/WordPress post, share it through the Skitch website, drag and drop it into an email, share it through almost any social networking site, save it as a PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, TIF, or the native Skitch format, then view all your other screen captures in the History window – all from Skitch. Skitch can also upload to an FTP server, or share via WebDav. It’s freakin’ sweet!Like many sweet things, it’s only available for the Mac. Try out Skitch, and let us know what you think.