Results tagged “social media” from David Kamerer's Spoonful

The elections in Iran have yielded fierce protests worldwide over the validity of the outcome, electing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over popular rival Mir Hussein Moussavi. While the results certainly look fishy, I'm not qualified to assess them. However, protests in Iran and worldwide continue to put pressure on Ahmadinejad's regime.

While Iranian citizens are protesting and fighting in the streets, they are also communicating with the world on popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The New York Times reports that one virtue of Twitter is that it's harder to block than other networks because members can access it from mobile devices, cell phones and computers.

Outside of Iran, people are aiding the protest, too. They're:

• setting up proxy servers and making them available in Iran, helping citizens escape government censorship of the web;

• launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against the Iranian government's web infrastructure;

• instructing people outside of Iran on how to help, not hurt, the opposition. See this list of instructions from Boing Boing.

• talking, blogging and tweeting the news, putting pressure on mainstream news outlets to continue or increase coverage. Tweeters are turning their avatars green in a show of support of the resistance.

Reporters have been banned from sharing news from Iran with the outside world. If you would like to read news from participants and citizen journalists, try these resources, as suggested by PC World and others:

The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan's blog, contains videos and commentary

On Twitter: Twazzup has created a mashup of relevant Twitter resources; check it out. Or search for the hashtags #iranelection or #gr88

Images on Flickr: mousavi1388, parsaoffline, sharif

Conversation is a powerful tool to fight fascism. And social networks give conversations about Iran a media-rich megaphone. The whole world's watching - and talking.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009

Also worth a look, the Junta 42 bloggers have made a list.

Here are some more fun virals:

Naughty or Nice? Courtesy of the Greteman Group, a branding agency in Wichita, Kansas.

Simon Sez Santa does your bidding from keyboard commands.

Celebrity Gingerbread, Law and Order edition, from last season, at chow.com. Instructions for making ginger cookie versions of some of Hollywood's fallen heroes (Phil Spector pictured, without gun). Delicious!

Sephora's Mistletoe Makeover. Upload a photo of yourself and play with cosmetics. What favors you most? Is it "Smoky Sugar Plum," "Merry Berry," "Santa's Little Temptress," or "O, Tannen-Babe?"

Ace your Face, from Ace Hardware.

Holiday Party Excuse Generator, from Enlighten, an ad agency in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Don't tell the kids! For a modest fee, Capture the Magic will photoshop Santa into your living room for evidence of his visit. Ho, ho, ho!

BannerBlog has archived 123 agency e-greetings from 2008. No trees were killed, just lots of hours of Flash development.

If you've found a good holiday viral, let me know. And happy holidays!

Niall Cook writes about good Twitter practice for corporations at The Customer Collective.

A very useful study on Twitter from H-P Labs, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the Microscope, with useful annotations from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

Ogilvy PR 360 slide deck on Twitter, from SlideShare.

follow me @DavidKamerer

Follow me @DavidKamerer

Remember when you were young and full of innocence? You know, about a thousand tweets ago?

If you'd like to recapture that special first time, check out MyTweet16, which will show the first 16 tweets of any person you care to stalk investigate learn about. You know, how they tweeted "back in the day." Sometime in September or October, most likely (Twitter has grown that fast).

The open API that Twitter runs on is sparking lots of innovation and reinvention, always a good thing with new media. Everyone can get their hands on a piece of the Twitter experience. Here are some more Twitter tweaks:

FriendorFollow - Who are you following? Who is following you? This service helps you manage the reciprocity of your Twitter follows/followers from three easy-to-understand windows. Worth a look every so often to keep your Twitterverse in balance.

Mr. Tweet - your Twitter valet service. Follow Mr. Tweet (for some reason I can't stop thinking about Homer Simpson as "Mr. Plow") and Mr. Tweet will suggest people who should be in your network.

Twitbacks - free custom Twitter background themes. (or you could go old school and wrangle the pixels yourself; I suggest creating an image 2048 pixels wide by 1707 pixels high at 72 ppi; save out the finished art as a .jpg. And please, make it pretty).

Also, very much worth a read: Why I love Twitter, by Tim O'Reilly (yes, THAT O'Reilly).

If you've been contemplating joining the Twitter community, here's some excellent advice on getting started from David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. This book, by the way, is an excellent introduction to using social media.

One way to get going is to generate a feed of Twitter users in your community. You can do this at twitterlocal, or by using the advanced search function at Twitter.

Another approach? Figure out who the power Twitter users are, and follow them. Or, you could follow the top Tweeters at TwitterGrader, which purports to analyze the influence of Twitter users.

But don't look for me on the list. I'm taking Twitter pass/fail.

Follow me @davidkamerer

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That's the biggest limitation for a lot of bloggers. You can manage the technical hurdles and you can create the content. But in the end, there may not be a lot of eyeballs at David Kamerer's Spoonful. Or at my public relations blog, PRNeededHere.com. I'm building traffic, but it's not like perezhilton.com over here. Perez is on a superhighway; I'm a two-lane blacktop.

But I'm learning to go where the eyeballs are. In the past week I've cloned my blogs twice. LinkedIn's new applications create new opportunities to host content on your LinkedIn page. I installed Six Apart's Blog Link, and my blog instantly flowed on to my LinkedIn page. Blog Link also found my contacts' blogs, which are also viewable from my page. Simple and brilliant.

I also participate in a public relations social media site, PR Open Mic. I cross-posted some blog entries there, and instantly got a lot of comments. The process is pretty simple; from my blog dashboard, copy the blog entry HTML, and then paste it into a window. Preview it, touch up the code, and publish. 

Every time I clone my blogs, I reach a new audience. It's a few more breadcrumbs to make it easier for interested readers to find my work. I'm glad to have you as a reader, whether here or there.

An online portfolio tacitly shows that you're comfortable working in an online, digital environment. So start scanning, digitizing, photographing and writing, and get that work online. 

Using the SaaS approach (Software as a Service), you don't have to write a bunch of code to create an online portfolio. Host it from a click 'n build website or a blogging platform. Then link, link, link! Photos? Link to Flickr. Video? Link to Vimeo. Powerpoints? Try Slideshare.

Here are some of the other tools I talked about:

Behance.net, currently open by invitation, offers a well-designed online portfolio space. Currently in beta.

Etsy.com, online marketplace for selling handmade things.

Issuu.com, tool for presenting and sharing formatted printed documents online.

VisualCV.com, currently in beta, allows you to create an interactive, online CV and post it in a searchable database.

DeviantArt.com, suggested by a student. International art community that allows you to upload your art, view art by category and participate in social activities.

Here's a video that's sure to go viral, from MoveOn.org:

Build your own video at http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html

He's right. Most readers first see your blog through an RSS reader. If they do click through, they're likely to see a familiar template from a popular blogging platform like WordPress, Blogspot or Movable Type. Templates are the great democratizers of online design. They make enough design available to all. If you're not a designer, that's a good thing.

And the other reason blog design isn't that important: it's the content, stupid. But you already knew that.

What do you think? Does blog design matter to you?

Here, you can watch "Be Here to Love Me," a documentary about the wonderful songwriter Townes Van Zandt ("Pancho and Lefty"). There's a catch: wildly inappropriate commercials may intrude on your viewing (in my case, eye lash makeup ads, not exactly great targeting). Oh well, small price to pay. Enjoy the film, click through, and share the love. 

If you're an indie filmmaker, this may be a worthwhile distribution channel. 

Learn more from Walt Mossberg's column, originally published in the Wall St. Journal. One more warning: the service is still in beta, so you might find some bugs. But it worked fine for me.

Of course, smart businesses build relationships and make money. I was reminded of this the other day, when I attempted to return something to The Bicycle X-Change, a store in Wichita, Kansas. I had purchased a cable for a vintage three-speed English bicycle that I'm restoring. It turned out my existing cable was OK, so I returned to the store to claim my $8.49. I had with me the cable in its unopened package and my receipt.

The kid behind the counter told me he could not give me a refund, only store credit. I protested, so he got another employee to tell the same story. He pointed out that the receipt says "no cash refunds."

I told him that I understood that the business made that choice, but that it was unacceptable to me, and that I could also make a choice. I walked out of the store.

So who cares? What's one little customer?

Maybe nothing. But I do own six bicycles, one of which always seems to need some sort of attention. I am a former president of a bicycling club. I have organized 100k bicycle touring events. In college I worked in a bicycle shop. I once built a recumbent bicycle from scratch. When my friends are thinking about buying a bicycle, they ask me what to buy, and I go along with them to the store. In a very local way, I am a bicycle opinion leader. 

I gotta think that somewhere there's a bicycle shop that wants me to go home happy. 

Here's another way to think about my failed attempt to get my $8.49 back. The shop wins. They get to keep my $8.49. And every month, they'll turn around and spend crazy money on marketing to try to get people to walk into the shop. Yellow pages. Newspaper ads. I've even seen television ads for this modest shop. 

And they could've had me for free.

This is the lesson of the world-is-flat-social-media environment in which we live. In the old days, businesses sent a stream of messages to their customers, who listened. Today, many of the messages about a business come from its customers, who tweet their experiences. Blog about them. Write reviews on social media sites and message boards. Search engines organize this stream of information and make it easy to find for other customers. Research validates this concept: these messages are more credible than traditional ads. An entire industry has sprung up to manage these new online relationships. Social media marketers and public relations professionals help businesses understand this interactive environment and optimize their performance so the messages work for them, not against them.

I've started riding my bicycle to work, and am saving up for an Electra Amsterdam Royal 8. Know any good dealers near Wichita, Kansas?

The book I'm looking forward to reading will detail how the Barack Obama campaign was built in large part with expert use of social media. I attended an Obama event last winter, and have been impressed with the almost daily updates on how I can participate in his campaign for President.

Now the campaign has created an Obama-specific application for the iPhone. It allows you to participate from one easy portal. For example, it organizes your contacts by state, so you can first call your friends who live in so-called "battleground states."

Of course, iPhone users are likely to be social media-savvy and Democrat-friendly, so it's the right message for the right medium.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there is a "Donate" button.

McCain's response: "iPhone? What's an iPhone?"

Sticky, sticky, sticky. Well done!