Monthly Archives: June 2008

Will John Reese’s Marketing Tactics Break Twitter?

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There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.

And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.

So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?

Is he “gaming” twitter?

I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.

And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?

But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.

Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.

Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.

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On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.

Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.

At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.

I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.

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I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.

So You Want To Be A Video Blogger…

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My friend Rachel Rofe won a bunch of cool prizes including cash, a MacBook Air, Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme wordpress templates, shopping cart software and a Flip Ultra camera from Webmaster Talk recently and started posting videos on her blog at RachelRofe.

Video is a powerful branding medium, especially if you personalize the channel, rather than merely to fire out product launches or marketing announcements.

If pictures say a thousand words, I think video easily convey 10,000 words or more.

Some observations I’ve noticed about video:

  • Brevity is great: people have short attention spans. If you can convery you point in 1-2 minutes, just do it.
  • Content is still king: you need to include something useful in your entry. There’re too many “seinfeld” videos (about nothing) out there already.
  • X-Factor: Either you have it or you should go find it…But it has a lot to do with your personality.

Check out one of Rachel’s video’s below. I like the hair flipping and low-grade swearing at the end. Adds color!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttPDDqncmk[/youtube]

Rachel’s headed for Cancun and I’m sure there’ll be some interesting videos coming out of the trip.

Friday Podcast: Email Marketing With Jason Henderson

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jason henderson

I had email marketing and Miva cart SEO optimization specialist Jason Henderson AKA Big Jason from BigMarketingOnline on the line this week.

Despite the intrusion of a couple of phone calls, we discussed issues like:

  • Text-based vs HTML emails
  • How to increase list responsiveness
  • Resources for building up your foundation in direct marketing

As well as Jason’s previous career as a pro basketball player (he’s only 6’11″…) and position as one of the Ask.com guides.

Jason is in the running for Thor Schrock’s Top Affiliate Challenge and you can check out his vote page.

He’s also giving out bonuses at his vote page.

If you’re keen to increase your sales and profits by adding or enhancing your email marketing efforts, be sure to check out Jason’s Better Email Deliverability product.

The Friday Podcast can be accessed below:

[display_podcast]

Will Your Social Marketing Efforts Ripen And Product Fruit?

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Social marketing has quite an organic flavor to it and the garden analogy applies well.

If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate – everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.

spring flowers

But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden – whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds – spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.

The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection – these same principles apply to Continue reading →

Kung Fu Panda’s Secret To Internet Marketing

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It’s a covert message and if you didn’t know that DreamWorks Animation’s recent hit Kung Fu Panda which raked in more than $60 million in the box office, pushing out Adam Sandler vehicle You Don’t Miss with the Zohan, also contains the internet marketing million dollar formula, you should rush out and watch it now.

kung fu panda

Protagonist Po the Panda sets out to follow his passion for Kung Fu and inadvertently is chosen by the master tortoise Oogway to become the Dragon Warrior and master the secrets of the Dragon Scroll to become the ultimate KungFu master.

The analogy is that new internet marketers also set out to become masters themselves and are looking for their own “Dragon Scroll” to become the ultimate (fill in your preferred internet marketing specialty – affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, etc).

The same secret contained in the Dragon Scroll applies Continue reading →

The Broken Twitter Web

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The Twitter team has been working overtime with fixes intended to resolve the growing pains associated with the microblogging service, with regular updates at the Twitter blog and the Twitter status blog.

I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.

The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?

Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:

blackinkproject

The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.

If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.

[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]

So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.

I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?

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Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.

Take a look at the left Continue reading →