A couple of weeks ago, Ingrid and I had the privilege of being invited to HBO Asia’s blogger event for their new show, True Blood, with the promise of a bloody good time.
One thing that was obvious about this event, was that we certainly weren’t invited just to hear about True Blood and be treated to an exclusive screening of the first episode (though that certainly happened too), but there was really a nice mix of activities the first of which was to mimic the pose of the True Blood poster pictured above.
After some food, Karen from HBO told us a little bit more about True Blood as well as Max, the channel on which it will be airing:
After that and a preview of the show, an interesting segment came up, where a bartender took the stage to show us how to “make” Tru Blood, a drink that the vampires in the show drink. Incidentally, Tru Blood was a true *ahem* viral campaign that ran in the US prior to the airing of True Blood there.
Tru Blood
Following this, three volunteers were asked to replicate the drink, and Claudia, Ben and Nadia gamely stepped up to the plate, with Claudia winning.
Overall this was a pretty fun event and I really liked the fact that the HBO team brought a mixed bag of activities to the event, rather than the normal “thanks for coming, here’s our product” drill that we seem to get all the time.
True Blood airs tonight (April 9th) here in Asia at 9pm on Max, so don’t forget to fight for the remote!
We have a pretty lively SMUcommunity on Twitter with @studio_bug and @iammyy joining us just this week. In a way it’s this awesome community that led me to the revelation of why Twitter is so powerful. In short: It’s like mIRC in that you can talk to anyone and leave messages for anyone and usually do these with multiple people at once.
It really plays up on the “social” effect of web2.0 where you and your group of friends can come home from being separated from each other all day, and catch up on what happened in their lives.
However, outside of the 20-30 of us, I’m quite acutely aware that there are another 130ish people following me on Twitter (a healthy amount not even from Singapore) who may find all this inter-tweeting a little…. frivolous. Or maybe even bordering on annoying.
I realised this awhile back and struggled internally whether to start a new, personal account to do all the chatting guilt-free, or to exercise more self-control and not tweet excessively, or use direct messages more often. I chose the latter option (and it’s a slow process, I assure you), but I just wanted to take this opportunity to add on a ninth mistake that bloggers make while using Twitter, inspired from Twitter-Themed Social Media Wednesdays from @stripedshirt who picked up the original post of eight mistakes bloggers make.
#9: Twitter gives you great mIRC-like benefits, but it doesn’t mean you should use it like IRC.
If you say something great on Twitter, chances are you might share the news with friends in real life, pass it on on Twitter or even blog about it. I think this is the new water cooler effect (and you can feel free to disagree with me). But if we as Twitter users abuse this new found “power” and choose to blast anything and everything via Twitter, sooner or later there will be people who find that you aren’t adding value and ignore you. Similar to how we don’t use IRC anymore.
In short, let’s all try to be watchful of what we tweet, and keep in mind that although it may be relevant to those 10-20 people in a specific community, it may come across as spammy or annoying to the rest of the majority who are following you.
If all else fails, try Mibbit. It’s an online IRC client that doesn’t need installation or anything. A couple of us tried it yesterday and it works pretty well! I do think we’re going to end up full circle in terms of chat and instant messaging, so I’m up for a test drive anytime.
Are you feeling like Twitter is getting more and more congested? Or do you think that there’s not even enough being posted on Twitter? Let’s hear your views in the comments below.
