Do Some Good, Have Some Fun, Attend a #Twestival

Last year around this time I attended a fantastic even known as #Twestival. This is a world-wide event that brings together the Twitter community in local parties for a global cause.

Parties are thrown in hundreds of cities around the globe to raise money for charity. Last year the charity of choice was Charity:Water and the global Twitter community helped to raise over $250,000 which assisted in the building of 55 water wells in Uganda, Ethiopia and India.

This year the #Twestival will be raising money for Concern Worldwide. A little bit about Concern Worldwide not in my own words:

"Concern is a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of poverty. Their mission is to help people living in extreme poverty achieve major improvements in their lives - improvements they can sustain without ongoing support."

Not only does #Twestival help to raise money for good causes, but it's also a really fun time. Last year I attended the local Toronto party, aptly dubbed #TwestivalTO. The party was at Circa Nightclub and featured great tunes, good times and lots of Twitter friends. In fact, it was at this party I met a lot of my online friends in real life for the first time.

If you don't believe me it's fun, just click here and check out the Flickr set of photo's from the past event for yourself.

Anyways. I hope that where ever in the world you're reading this from you can find a #Twestival near you to attend, and if not, you can always donate and watch and follow the parties online.

And if you're going to be at the Toronto party, make sure you come say hi to me.

For more info and to find a #Twestival near you check out the official #Twestival site. Through there you can usually get tickets to your local event.

So, do some good, have some fun, attend a #Twestival!

I'm Not Rude, I Just Don't See The Point

Just wanted to say this:

I don't understand why some people feel the need to thank everyone that retweets something they said or shared on twitter.

The other day someone said thank you for retweeting a link they posted. The thing was, it wasn't a link to something they had wrote, it was just something they had shared because it was interesting. This wasn't the first time this has happened either and I just don't see the point.

I post links on twitter because I thought something was interesting and I wanted others to see it. If someone retweets it than that's awesome, more people will see it and probably think it's interesting too. That's what I put it there for.

I'll thank someone if I put up a personal request like "I'm looking for info on ...." and someone on my list who may not know the answer will retweet it. They just did me a personal favour and I'll thank them for that. I just don't (usually) see retweeting a link I posted as a real favour.

Some people will say it helps to build relationships, but if you want to do that with me I'd rather we engaged and talked about whatever it was I just posted. That would help build a relationship with me.

But thank you to anyone who ever has or will retweet something I post.

That's just my personal thought on that.

They Don't Believe Me That I'm Me

If you follow any celebrities on Twitter you may have noticed that the site has started to verify some celeb's pages. For example, check out Quest Love of the Roots or Oprah's twitter page and notice right above their name the little checkmark and "verified account" badge. If you click the badge it takes you to a page that explains the how and why they're doing it (see here).

I have nothing against this idea. I actually think it's a good idea. Big businesses and well known celebrity names carry heavy influence over people, and an impostor can screw up their public image very quickly. If I owned a large company I wouldn't want people who have nothing to do with me saying things and claiming they've come from me. Doesn't even matter if it's positive or negative, it's still not really me. I'm sure you can all relate to the feeling.

However, since I'm not a big company or a big celebrity (yet) I was kind of weirded out to be asked to verify myself. I wasn't asked by Twitter either. I was asked by a regular everyday person whom I had added to my list earlier in the day.

I was adding some people in my industry for networking purposes while in my new home down under when I received a DM saying "[username] uses TrueTwit validation service. Please follow this link to validate your profile." Check out the service for yourself here.

Esentially, it's a service that asks anyone who follows the person using it to go to a website and enter a captcha to prove they're a real person. The service then sends the user an email that says I'm a real person, you can now check to see if you want to follow them back.

This is kind of crazy if you ask me. As I've mentioned in other posts, I don't believe in auto-follow-backs of people that add me. I like to check peoples profiles before I add them to my Twitter list. You can usually tell within 10 seconds if the page is a real person or a spam page. Heck, I don't follow everyone that follows me even if they are a real person.

Besides the laziness of the service, because we all know how much effort it takes to click a few links and look at a twitter page for 10 seconds, there was something else that got me about this service.

I could have signed myself up for the service which would have made me one of those auto-DMers that I hate, but it also would have automatically verified my "realness" to anyone else using the service that may have wanted to add me.

If I could create a spam page and then sign it up for the service so that my spam page is automatically verified... doesn't that defeat the whole point of the service??

Just a thought.

40deuce

Epic Publicity #WIN!

I've always been a fan of music artists doing cool new things. One of my favorites is DJ's who find new cool ways to mix, sample or change other artists music. That's why I was excited about a year and a bit ago when I heard that DJ AM was teaming up with Travis Barker (of Blink-182), whom I think is one of the best drummers around right now, to do an album.

The result was a great mix tape called "Fix Your Face" where DJ AM did the mixing and scratching and Travis played his awesome style of what I refer to as "ninja drumming" over the whole thing.

I got really excited the other day when I saw that the duo had released their set from Cochella 2009 as an album "Fix Your Face 2".

My friend gave me a link for the free download, which I'll give to you all shortly. The thing about this download was it was done in a manner I've never seen before, but I think was a genius idea for publicity on their part.

When you click on the link it will take to you to a website that says you can get a free download of this new album in exchange for one tweet (that's a twitter message for all of you not on the bandwagon yet). If you continue to click through, the site logs you onto twitter and then asks if you will allow it to tweet a message that says:

"Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape "Fix Your Face Vol. 2 - Coachella 09" in exchange for one tweet!"

GENIUS!!!

This message spread over a persons Twitter network allows everyone to see the name "TRVSDJAM", let's them know they have a new album and even makes a hashtag for the guys so that if enough people get the album through this method #trvsdjam will become a hot trending twitter topic.

I don't know about you, but I think this a great way for some free and great publicity. I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see other artists or even companies all trying things like this in the near future.

Now for those of you dying for the link to get the album in exchange for a tweet, here it is: http://twitter.trvsdjam.com

Now here's a track from their first album:

40deuce

#LOSTCHAT

Have you ever been on Twitter on a Monday night and seen the hashtag for #journchat go by a zillion times?? How about a Thursday and seen #smallbizchat?

What these are are large groups of people all talking about a single topic. #journchat is a bunch of journalists and people who interact with journalists (such as PR folk) talking. #smallbizchat is for... you guessed it, small business people.

I had an idea the other day to start a chat of my own. Perhaps it will be a one time thing, perhaps it will be ongoing. We'll have to wait and see how it goes.

So, here's my idea...

Because this Wednesday (May 20th) will be the first without a new LOST since the season is over, I thought it would be fun to have a #LOSTCHAT. This will be a forum on Twitter where everyone across the world can come together and discuss just WTF is going on. There's millions of theories out there about what's happening in LOST, and I'm sure your theories are different from mine, so let's discuss them together.

Please pass this on to all of your Twitter friends who also enjoy LOST.

We will start at @ 9pm EST on Wednesday May 20th (the time when LOST should be on for the east coast), and using the hashtag #LOSTCHAT.

This should be fun. See you there!

40deuce

Is Twitter the Next Great Search Engine??

I'm going to start this post off with a little story.

Today I was doing some research for ideas for an Online PR class that I'm helping my course director put together. While looking for some informative links to show him I came across a problem. I was looking for SMRs (Social Media Releases) to show my prof how different they are from old skool regular news releases. When I googled (do you capitalize that if it's being used as a verb?) "social media release" the top four hits were blogs and articles of peoples advice on how they think a social media release should look. Semi-helpful, but not what I was looking for.

I decided to try a different approach. Since I know that a lot of my Twitter friends work in and around marketing and PR, I decided to throw my query out to them. Within five minutes of me posting my question on Twitter I recieved six responses. Four of them were people on my list of friends with links and/or recommendations of people to talk to. The other two responses were from professionals who deal specifically with SMRs. One from Canadian News Wire (CNW) and the other from Marketwire, who each directed me to examples on their sites.

I don't know about you, but I find stuff like that incredible.

It also made me start thinking, is Twitter the next great search engine? Let's think about it for a minute...

- I was looking for useful information, and people I actually know were able to make recommendations on where to find this info. If you can't trust your friends, who can you trust?

- Professionals from all kinds of companies monitor sites like Twitter to see when people mention them. I'm sure that both the representatives from Marketwire and CNW had real time searches going for key words like "SMR" or "news release" so they could respond quickly. Other companies do the same thing. They search for mentions of their companies or products and respond to the people talking about them. I remember one time a friend had a problem with UPS, tweeted about it, and a few minutes later a UPS representative asked her via twitter how he could help make the problem right. Meaning, you can get any kind of info directly from companies themselves.

- You can see what everyone around the world has to say about a topic. There is now a plethora (I like that word) of Twitter search engines such as Twitter Search, TweetGrid, Twitscoop, and many more. On these search engines you can type in a key word or phrase and see what anyone in the "twitterverse" is saying or linking to about that topic. This is great for finding reviews and what people are saying about products and services, or even things like movies.

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head as to why Twitter is sometimes more useful than Google for finding things.

I'd love to hear what you all think about this, but I just added a new theme to my blog and the comments section doesn't seem to be working properly. I'm trying to fix that so please be patient. You can always tweet me your thoughts at @40deuce.

*UPDATE* comments seem to be working again, so please leave one.

40deuce

Random Thoughts on Twitter

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about how it's hard at times to get involved in social media when none of your "real life" friends are into it. Aside from facebook, most of my friends don't belong to other social mediums. I'm pretty sure, out of all the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter, only three of them are friends in real life. And one of them never uses Twitter, she just has an account.

I just wanted to say that not all of my experiences in discovering and learning and interacting in social mediums have been hard efforts. Specifically, Twitter.

When I first joined Twitter, which was late in the game already, I did an email search for my friends and only came up with two people. So what was I going to do?

I started using Twitter's search section and looking for people in Toronto and things I'm interested in, like; PR, marketing, social media, etc. I quickly built up a list of just under 100 people The problem was..., they were complete strangers. I didn't know where to start either, so I just started posting stupid shit that popped into my head. A few people would write the random comment back @ me, but mostly I would just read what other people were talking about. 

After a little while I started to get a feel for some of the people I was following, and would write something to them if I felt strongly about something they had said. The more comfortable I was becoming with this new online world, the easier it became for me to be myself and not just be some online guy. I was me, just online.

I was thinking about that the other day, and it reminded me of something I get told a lot in my PR classes: allow yourself to be fully visible and people will appreciate it. Sure, when my teachers say it they're mainly talking about companies and organizations, but it seems to work everywhere. People always tell you when you're going to meet new people "just be yourself." Apparently it also works online.

Once I started just being myself I've made a lot of friends via Twitter. I'm not just talking about how I've picked up more followers, but more that they're actual friend-type characters. People who know about things going on in my life. People whose lives I know about. People who just say "what up". But I consider them friends. I've learned about all sorts of new things from people on Twitter, and I'm also not afraid to ask people questions about anything. In fact, I've even been looking to get some experience in the PR and social media field and advertising it on Twitter. Some people who could, have been very helpful, and I've even had people who weren't on my list contact me about it.

So now I've totally lost where I was completely going with this post, but I feel better about saying what I did. So if anyone is reading this, I guess my message is if you can be a real person on social mediums people will see the genuineness (I'm pretty sure that's a real word) and you can make some real friends. Some of them may even come in handy to know one day.

Also, since Twitter's search has been down forever now, here's a good site for finding some people on Twitter with similar interests. Just Tweet It allows you to search for tweeters with similar interests, as well as post your Twitter profile under your interests for other people to find you. Check out Just Tweet It here.

40deuce

Who Brought the New Guy??

I've mentioned a few times before, but haven't written to much about, that I'm currently in school taking a post-grad program in PR and Corporate Communication. On top of this, I've recently taken it upon myself to also start learning about social media. I think that social media will continue to dominate technology for years to come, even more than it does now. I also think that being able to understand and adapt to social media will be an asset to anyone who deals with PR and/or Corporate Communications. Social media will become the way most people communicate both to and about companies and organizations. As well, companies will adapt to ways in which they can use forms of social media to promote community within.

I think that by learning as much as I can about social media I will be giving myself an edge next summer when my course is done and I begin the ever feared job hunt. The problem with my goal is that there is so much out there and I sometimes feel like I'm almost lost.

I read a lot of blogs to try and find out what's new and what's cool in the world of social media. One of my favorites is Mashable, as they are constantly looking for new social media products,services, sites, etc. and giving fairly good reviews of what they find (which sometimes include video's of the service they are showing). The problem with this method is that I never know which ones people will use and which ones are useless.

Now, I'm not completely new to the idea's of social media. I even consider myself to be the early adapter of such things with in my group of friends. I was one of the first people I knew to have a myspace (which I have since forgotten about). I had a facebook account before they opened it up to the general public and you needed a university email to sign up.  Aside from the big FB though, I kind of lose my group of friends and am forced to try these things out myself.

One of the best features of social media is creating your own little community, but my community is little over one. Not to say that I don't have friends who use some forms of social media, but in most cases I find myself exploring them on my own.

For instance; I finally got myself a twitter account a few months ago, but when I did the initial "search for your email contacts" I came up with a list of three people and one of them was a person I emailed once I think to send a resume to. I've slowly started to build my list of twitter friends though by searching for terms in twitter like "Toronto PR" and such. Some people have been nice and have become people I speak with via twitter, but I would still say the contact is very minimal.

It's very hard to try and build a social media community when your community truly doesn't know you, or about you. However, I'm going to continue to push myself into more online communities so I can use the social web for it's full potential and learn as much as I can. So, if you ever get a request on a social community from a member named 40deuce, chances are it's me.

Also, if you are interested in getting to know me more via a social network, here's a few places you can find me:

Twitter

Digg

Facebook

Last.fm

Hype Machine

Friend Feed

(On a side note before I post my outro music, I had an idea while writing this post. What do you think about the idea of me starting a new blog that just deals with introducing, reviewing and learning about social media? It would be a process where I would learn but as well help other people learn about and use social media. Maybe I'd even invest in a domain name and everything. If anyone is actually reading this, let me know what you think either in a comment or email or any other way you find to get a hold me.)