I rebranded my site

Do you think he rebranded or was he born this cool?

I’ve been thinking for maybe a month or so about rebranding my site to cover self-promotion, which I’m told is my specialty. Visiting the Eastside Entrepreneurs event Thursday and then the Bigfoot Blogging Conference today, I decided that it was finally time to follow through on that.

My original thought was that I should focus on Social Media, but honestly, I think that’s just a buzz phrase for the evolution of marketing and general, non-face-to-face communication. Plus, as a well-respected friend in SEO and web design said the other day, “Social Media is bullshit.”

I don’t think I would go that far, but to tell the truth, I do believe that a lot of people are looking to get ahead with the latest buzzworthy technology, but they don’t know the basics of using that technology for self-promotion. That’s where I come in.

Going forward, I will begin having guest posts on here every now and then, and I’ll be contributing in a more direct fashion to my blogs of interest. I would like this to become a much more focused discussion. If there’s anything y’all would like to hear about, please comment, email, etc.

Using Twitter – The Basics

If you already use Twitter, take a second to click here and follow me on Twitter, and if you are so inclined, follow the Twitter account for The Hotel Experience, a blog I manage at work.

Now onto business. . .

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to post updates of a maximum of 140 characters, similar to a Facebook update. It is extremely popular in marketing and sales channels and has actually proved quite effective in communicating about large group events, such as natural disasters, the presidential debates, conferences, etc.

Who should use Twitter?
If you are online more than once a day, creating content that you would like to share with others, an all around people person, or just into self-promotion, you should be on Twitter. Bloggers use it promote their latest blog posts. Political candidates use it to communicate with supporters. News reporters even show your tweets on their shows.

I was recently part of a panel on social networking for MBA students. In the short time we had, we focused mostly on LinkedIn, which I will talk about more in the future. However, we did not have a significant amount of time to discuss Twitter, which I thought was unfortunate, because students can use Twitter to network and build connections in their desired fields much faster than they can through blogging or normal networking events. I should qualify that though with the fact that building strong connections on Twitter can be quite difficult, so new users should take time to really interact with people they are following and make sure that they can maintain a long term, meaningful discussion with fellow twitterers. I have many weak connections on Twitter and only a few strong connections, but for the most, all of the people I follow on Twitter are of interest to me just as the people you follow should be of interest to you.

Twitter Strategy:
Initially, you should upload your address book to Twitter to see how many people you know that are using it. Follow them. If you like, you can invite people that are not using it, but many people find that to be annoying. I know because I’ve done it on accident before. Then, begin searching Twitter for keywords that are relevant and interesting to you. For example, I have searched previously for “Hilton,” “Hotels,” “Bellevue,” “Pratum,” etc.

You will probably start out following a ton of people and with very few following you. That’s ok. You’re new and likely have not built your reputation yet. It’ll come. Personally, I find it difficult to follow more than 100-200 people on Twitter, and you can often tell, who follows far to many people. Those are usually the ones that, when you ask a question to your followers, don’t respond. . . ever. Some people follows thousands. I don’t know how.

Twitter Resources I Use:
Twhirl is a desktop client that you can use for Twitter. It is probably the most popular Twitter client.
Digsby is a messaging client that supports Twitter and multiple other services. Some people really like it.
Twitterfox is a Firefox add-on and my personal favorite in a Windows environment.
Flock is a web browser focused on social networking and my personal favorite for using Twitter on macs.
There is a Facebook App you can use to update your Facebook status with your tweets.
Twitterfeed automatically tweets to let everyone know about your latest blog post.
Tweetlater can be used to schedule tweets and direct messages, as well as to send a form message to new followers.
MyTweeple.com shows the people you are following and whether or not they are following you. Want to get your ratio of following to followers more in balance? Use it.
Twitter badges can be added to your blog, myspace profile, etc to show what you have recently tweeted.
Twittercounter also has a badge (as seen on the right side of my page) that shows how many people are following you.

Wrap Up:
Use Twitter. To get started, sign up, follow me and other people relevant to you, and download a client to use Twitter with.

Twitter is fast. Through tweets, news spreads like wildfire. Make effective use of Twitter, and you can position yourself well in your field. . . or at least have some entertaining interaction.

Other Twitter Info:
Slate’s Write Up
Twitterholic – The most popular twitterers
Top 10 Twitter Hacks
Top 10 Uses of Twitter

Oversights?
For all those out there already using Twitter, I would be curious to know what your thoughts are. Please share them here so that people new to Twitter can get your insight as well as mine. Please also share links to your blog posts on the topic and to your Twitter account.

Give me cookies or the invisible dragon will kill us all

Found this on Wondermark this morning. Gee, I wonder what it refers to. . . could it be President Bush, Congress, the current economic crap heap on Wall Street? Who knows.

Courtesy of Watermark

Found on Facebook

(Online) Social Networking Tools – The Basics

I’m speaking at Western Washington University as part of a panel discussion with a former boss from Parker Remick and with a former MBA classmate, who also happens to work there now, so I thought that I would throw together a post on basic social networking for those not already deeply involved. This post is focused primarily at current business students, who may not already be using social networking to their advantage.

I have tried to group this in order of ease of use and amount of time needed. However, I have surely overlooked something and would appreciate comments at the bottom to let me and my readers know what has been left out.

Here at the outset, I will say that you should click here to follow me on Twitter and here to add me on LinkedIn.

The basics: Everyone should have LinkedIn and Plaxo accounts. LinkedIn is essentially an online resume coupled with social networking. On LinkedIn, as with many social networking sites, you have the option of connecting with as many people as possible and therefore having many, many weak connections, but a potential wide reach, or a smaller number of strong connections. My personal preference is on the weak connections side. For this reason, I am a member of groups like MyLink 500, TopLinked, and The LIONs MetaNetwork. Often groups like this offer email lists of people that you can easily add to your network on various social networking sites.

Plaxo is the other simple resource that I would suggest everyone take advantage of. The main reason for this is that Plaxo allows your contacts to update their contact information in your online address book. You can also sync Plaxo with Yahoo!, Gmail, LinkedIn, MobileMe, etc in order to get their updated information most easily to the places you are likely to use it. I would highly suggest that you use that aspect of Plaxo.

A little more advanced: There are very specific services out there that cater to things like photography (Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr), music (Myspace, Garageband), video (Youtube, Vimeo), and others. There are far too many to keep track of. As the blog pic suggests, you are most likely to find happiness or success if you pick the ones that are relevant to you. For example, I’m a musician, so I keep a Myspace page for myself, my new band, and my old band. My own Myspace page is not updated that often, but it does have new music when I post it, and it has links to other places I can be found. Since I am a musician and have pages with my music, I keep myself open to networking with other musicians online. How would they find me if I didn’t at least have the pages and check them now and then? The same can be said for those of you interested in photography or any other such things. If you don’t see your interest on a normal site, you might check out Ning, where you can basically create your own social network.

Facebook: Some people prefer to have their Facebook profiles completely open so that it is another way to network with as many people as possible. My personal preference is to keep it fairly closed up. It’s one of the few places that I can keep things somewhat private among my friends. How you use various networks is up to you, but keep in mind that there will occasionally be messages, pics, etc that you will not want shared with your entire network.

Blogging: I keep a blog here. It’s not professional, but it does have my resume and background, and it probably gives people a pretty good idea of my likes and dislikes. It also serves as an easy place to find info on me, should someone want to, say, interview me. Blogging is not for everyone. It takes a lot of time, but it is pretty much free. I think I pay about $15/year for my domain name, and how much easier could it be for someone to find me than to just type in my name and put .com behind it?

There are some major problems that people run into with blogging. Many of them can be found in Hubspot’s recent posts: here, here, and here. I’ll summarize them like this. . . If you start a blog, write about things that are important to you, have an opinion, add relevant useful commentary to others’ related blogs, and don’t give up if you’re not getting a lot of page views in the first month. I’ve had my blog up for close to a year now, and I’m lucky to get more than 500 visits/day, and most of those are for rant-type posts about parking, optical illusions, and misogynists, so not professional at all.

Most of my traffic is driven by tag/keyword searches and submissions to Digg and Reddit. If you take a look at my work blog, you’ll notice that I included Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz buttons in each post, as well and Feedburner links at the bottom of each post. All of these are minutia for those not currently blogging, but I would be more than happy to explain them and their use should you wish.

Let me say this before moving on. . . Blogging is probably the number 1 easiest way to get yourself found or noticed online. However, what is not easy is generating quality content that makes you seem like a valuable asset to someone. The end result of this is that there is a lot of junk out there created by people, who just want attention. I’ll admit, I’ve created plenty of it myself on my own blog. There is relatively little useful information in the majority of blog posts, but the dedicated can really carve out a niche for themselves and create very dynamic and successful career and life paths as a result. For that though, you need to start using blogging software from Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc and then couple that with info from Hubspot, SEODigger, Hubspot’s Website Grader, etc.

Messaging and Microblogging: If you are on the internet often, you should be using Twitter. Twitter is sort of like Facebook status updates, but it’s a service that is dedicated specifically to it and is used very frequently for business purposes. You can even follow political candidates, news reporters, and other well known people on there. If you like, you can even have Twitter update your status on Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Windows Live Messenger, AIM, etc are all popular, but are not often used for social networking. . . unless you are in an office or business that specifically encourages the use of one of those. I am on both of those and would be more than happy to chat should someone like.

Wrap Up: The correct use of some of these tools can have the effect of making you more visible and accessible, helping you to find a job, network, etc, and they might even earn you a name or some respect if you work hard, or even if you happen to unintentionally do something novel.

Since I was quite wordy, I will make sure to post soon in a more specific fashion about just one or two of these resources.

If I overlooked anything, please comment to let everyone know since this should be an educational post, and I am sure that I did not touch on everything that could be useful.

Why do you drink bottled water?

Courtesy of Malla_Mi

I have friends and family members, who refuse to drink from the tap. I used to use a Brita. . . have never been much of a fan of buying bottled water, but honestly, even after I explain how much waste product bottled water creates (it usually take 1.5 liters of water to create a 1 liter bottle) and that there are not near the quality restrictions on it that there are on tap water systems (more bacteria PPM in some bottled waters than in municipal water), people continue to buy bottled water. Seriously, you recycle paper at work because it’s environmentally friendly. Yet, you can’t take the time to fill up a reusable water bottle instead of grabbing one out of a Costco pack. On top of the waste, don’t you pay more for bottled water than you do for gas? I was happy to find this page this morning because it’s just another resource to show that you don’t need bottled water, and in fact, it is likely worse for you than tap. Please, stop buying bottled water. If you need any more of a push, just trust me that the French invented bottled water because they knew Americans would be stupid enough to buy it. Luckily, I’m not. Are you?

How long can a plant live without natural light?

As you might be able to tell from the pic, we don’t have particularly good lighting for growing plants in my office. There are no windows. I don’t think they’re ever given fertilizer. As far as I know, the only attention they get is a chick that comes once a week and waters them. We could do this ourselves I’m sure, and I assume we pay this lady, so I don’t know why we don’t just dump her and do it ourselves, but regardless, can these things survive? They’ve been here since before I started, so I have no idea how old they are.

Don’t park your SUV in a compact spot!

I took these pictures yesterday at about 7pm, while leaving the Bellevue Galleria parking garage. On the way in, I saw at least 6 cars parked like this. One, these SUVs shouldn’t be in compact spots. Two, if they’re going to take up two spots, they should have to pay twice as much as me. I have a small car, but even I can’t fit in a space that has 25% of it taken up by the careless parking of some douche in an F-150. Does the parking garage do anything about it? No. Why? No clue. Even if you say something, they just give you a blank stare. I swear, lazy people. . . or as XKCD would say, “adjective ass-noun.”

I’m thinking of printing a shirt

I realize that you pretty much can’t argue faith because faith in anything implies that, at some level, the individual is willing to make a leap from empiricism to belief, but still given my own beliefs, I do still like to point out the seemingly ludicrous nature of certain beliefs.

The guys that stand on the sidewalk with business signs

How much do these guys get paid? Before having a professional job, I just assumed that these people weren’t needed for the moment in their stores, restaurants, etc, so they’re managers sent them out to wave signs during slow afternoons. Now that I’ve been working for awhile and have actually talked to some of our city zoning people about signage, I know that sign laws are so strict in a lot of places that this is one of the few ways businesses can get signs out there; they have very limited options for placing signage on buildings, sidewalks, etc.

Is this a job people like doing? Is it satisfying? Do they get paid more than minimum wage? I mean, they have to stand out on the street, breathing car exhaust, having nothing to do, dealing with elements? Would it be condescending of me to walk up to one of these guys and just ask him? I really don’t want to be offensive. I’m curious.