I’m a big fan of Twitter search. I have a cool plugin for Firefox that brings back the latests tweets for a search term and displays them above the same results for Google. It’s one of the reasons that Google is rumoured to be building similar functionality, to bring back real-time, real-people sentiments. But does [...]
I picked up a bunch of followers on Twitter yesterday thanks to a mention by Ryan Stephens on Lewis Howes’ Sports Networker Blog.
It’s hard to know what to expect when you follow someone. On the one hand, a reccommendation from someone whose opinion you trust is enough to sign up to the wisdom or otherwise of someone you otherwise might not have come across or followed.
For better or worse, Twitter, or at least the vast majority of the people I interact with on Twitter are in the USA. While I have spent a lot of time working with American sporting brands (some well known and some niche), I spend most of my time these days based in London, UK. It’s a shame that the core sports marketing and business conversation that thrives in the US is not visable here. It’s easy to forget that Twitter is NOT a mass market tool, though it may one day get there.
The point I am making is that if you have followed me and expect content around an ‘N’ sport (NBA, NHL, NFL…) then I’m not going to be able to provide a lot of insight. Hopefully though, the ‘mash-up’ element of Twitter that allows innovative and creative ideas to cross-pollenate across sports irrespective of size or geography will mean that the opinions from where I sit – an Australian living in London have value.
Yesterday, 150 people began to follow my musings. Normally I would get a few a day. A few a day allows you to look at who is along for the ride, look at their recent tweets, visit their blog or company page if available and make a decision about a reciprocal follow. With 150 in the space of several hours, that task is made harder.
Here then are a couple of tips based on how I decide to follow someone. It’s certainly not based on the number of followers someone has. This is not new, there are thousands of twitter tips sites out there – its just my opinion. It’s not a prescription either, just some stuff that came out of yesterday’s experience.
Welcome to those who have followed me over the last 12 hours or so. Hopefully underrated doesn’t become overrated to quickly.
For those of you who look at dmfreedom.com regularly, you will notice a recent relaunch. Just to keep my hand in and learn a couple of new things, I decided to use Word Press for the new site.
The functionality is quite rich and there are several hundred plugins to help with extra functionality. From a standing start I managed in 4 hours to create a site, choose and download a template, modify the template header to give my site a unique look, create several pages including a contact page with response form, blog feeds from other sites and a dynamic photo gallery with rollover effects and back end management functions.
Not bad for a someone new to it. I must say that the ‘simple scripts‘ service when offered with bluehost makes installation incredibly easy – just one click from the control panel.
The conclusion? For small simple sites of a couple of pages, this kind of system is the only way to go. Of course you have to be online, but you can still write copy offline and create imagery. No need for flat html, no need for clunky frontpage code. Nice clean sites that can be maintained.
