Just Landed – In 61 Hours
Nerd Alert! This is AWESOME.
“This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta’s Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time….”
It might be weird but this fascinates me. Clearly, there’s something to be said with the growth of Twitter. I know. I’m a nerd sometimes.
Do You Follow?
There’s two theories out there when it comes to who you follow on Twitter and I think there’s value in both. Though I think it’s important to have a plan when implementing either, especially when it comes to artists.
Theory One. Follow everyone that follows you. This grows your followers list quick, gets your name out there faster, and ultimately increases your Twitter ‘popularity’ and maybe even your Twitter Grade. And if that’s what your going for, great. The downside? Everyone you are following now has the ability to ‘Direct Message’ you, which (for an artist) forces you to have your phone off to all updates. Relinquishing the point of having Twitter hooked to your phone in the first place. Mark Lee made a great case for this theory on this (now put to sleep) blog and dealt with some of these questions and issues and is one of the best artist, follow those that follow you, Twitter-er out there.
Now, here’s where I see this theory working in favor of the artist or band that is running it. If it’s a Twitter for a band as a whole, and it’s looked at as more of a news feed or for giving updates from the band, great. Follow everyone that’s following you and grow that followers list as fast and as big as you can. That will ultimately get the news out to more people looking for that sort of Tweet from you.
Theory Two. Follow the folks that you would if you were a normal person on Twitter. Most people on Twitter aren’t ‘marketing’ something. They don’t have an end goal of selling you a record, or getting you at their shows, or really anything. They see Twitter as a way to connect with their friends and some new people they find interesting. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Connect with people?
If the end goal is to be authentic and real on your Twitter does it then become a numbers game of following everyone that’s following you just to get the word out about something? Does that defeat the purpose of Twitter in the first place?
Me personally, I don’t follow everyone that follows me, but I do follow a lot of people. I like seeing what people have to say and if I start to lose interest, I don’t follow anymore. After all it’s called ‘Following’ for a reason. But, the SkörInc Twitter account does follow everyone that is following it and then some. It does that to gain followers and get the word out about things related to what we do.
So which is it? Which are you? Any other thoughts on following?
Six Hundred
Yesterday I mentioned that I was about to get 600 followers on my personal Twitter. Well, it barely happened. As it is now we are at 601. However, I did pay attention. Ladies and gentlemen, #600 is Mike. Now, Mike looks like he’s relatively new to Twitter, so make sure you head over and say hi to him, congratulate him on being number six-hundred, and follow him.
Oh yeah, and I told Mike that his prize was that everyone reading this would send him $100 so make sure to send that to him too. Sound good?
Congrats Mike. And if you aren’t following me on Twitter yet, what are you waiting for?
Starting A Company
A friend of mine sent me to the CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams Blog and this is what was written. It’s simple and brilliant and I decided to steal it…. giving him full credit of course, so he doesn’t sue the pants off of me.
“Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island.
You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life—or convince someone to send you more.
You don’t know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.
There’s always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.
Eventually, if you’re successful, you’ll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you’ll die—or, at least, have to go home.
Either way, it’s a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).”
I couldn’t agree more. I do have one question though. What’s the CEO of Twitter doing on a Blogger account though. I mean seriously. Hasn’t he heard of another small business out there?
Four Hundred Plus
So check this out. I noticed today that I have crossed the ‘four hundred followers’ mark on my Twitter. Now, I realize that several of these are companies following me in order to get me to follow them and buy Viagra or something, but four hundred is a pretty substantial number I think.
Now here’s the thing. I feel like I suck at Twitter, but I’m about to change that. I follow several folks that are really good at using Twitter and I aspire to be one of them. I think the thing that weirds me out about it is that I know that if I decide to Twitter something there is the chance that several people will be getting a text message from me…. saying something stupid… or pointless. That’s intimidating to me.
But no more. I’ve decided to try to get better at Twitter and not care about who might be sitting in a movie or in church or something like that. I’m going to type what I think and forget that I just might be interrupting your ‘alone time’ with your husband or wife with a stupid text message about something I saw on the way to Target. Sound good?
I imagine a lot of you are on Twitter already, but for those that aren’t, why not? What keeps you from it? And for those that are already on Twitter, are you following me?
I Am Jacks Social Network
Well, I did it. I signed up on several of the world wide web social networking systems against my better judgement. You might be asking, why. Why did Brody sign up on all of those world wide web social networking systems?
Well I can tell you why. I did it so I could use them to point people here. I did it so I could learn how to use them to point people here. And I did it because I need to know how to use that stuff. So there you have it folks. Yes, I have a MySpace. No, there is nothing on it. Yes, I have a Facebook. No, there is nothing on it. Yes I have a Virb. You guessed it… nothing on it. I also have a Twitter account, that I have used a couple times, but, no there’s not much there. Aren’t you impressed?
So now comes the fun part of digging through all the weird code and verifications to make sure I know how to work these things. After all, everyone has them right? Now I do to.
Seriously, what really spurred this on was the announcement of this, and my quest to know more about the different things concerning artists and online presence. Who knows maybe someday we can all work together as a big happy world wide web social networking family.
