Monday, November 24th, 2008
Twitter
If you’re still using Twitter, Louis Gray has 15 Tools For Your Twitter Toolbox which you might want to check out.
Social Media
How To Be The Social Media Champion At Your Office by Jason Falls. Many of us are graduating this year if not next, it might be time to think seriously about bringing such a change to our offices.
Collaboration
And speaking of offices, EtherPad is a tool that allows you to collaborate on text documents in real time. I was pretty blown away by the screencast, you should give it a view. I’m looking forward to using this on future projects!
Recessionary Marketing
Do Not Kill Off Marketing During A Recession is the call by Hutch Carpenter. Most of us in marketing (unlike the CEOs) know this, and I’ve read that there is statistical data to show that it’s a bad idea. Try Hutch’s little cartoon for a more intuitive feel.
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives
New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development - I’m a little out of the “teen” demographic, but I think this study hits the right notes and more importantly, should give employers an idea of what to expect when we hit the workforce. I haven’t had time to read the full white paper, but the two page executive summary is pretty exciting.
As always, share your links with me on delicious/uniquefrequency or post them in the comments!
Tags: championing social media, collaborate on text documents, collaboration, delicious, digital natives, do not kill off marketing during a recession, etherpad, generation y, how much to spend on marketing in a recession, hutch carpenter, jason falls, louis gray, millennials, recessionary marketing, screencast, social media, social media champion, social media in the office, teen development, twitter, twitter tools, uniquefrequency
Posted in Links | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Twitter’s downtime over the last couple of months has really pissed off a lot of people, most of all me. And I’m a #1 Twitter advocate. I mentioned it as a conference, been interviewed in the papers on Twitter, I wrote how to guides, encouraged an SMU Twitter challenge, the works.
I tried to be tolerant, but waking up every morning and finding out that Twitter isn’t working just disappoints.
First I turned to FriendFeed, with the new Room function, I was hopeful that it would be a nice replacement, but that has yet to gain any traction, at least in the Singaporeans Room. It just lacks the personal element that Twitter has. (Had?)
Enter Plurk. It has the same personal element that Twitter did, an innovative timeline system (takes some time to get used to) and a personality that I’d call… quirky. There are some elements I don’t like, let informing me about comments on posts I don’t care about, and the timeline interface is a little chunky and takes some time getting used to (I can’t imagine my 300 followers on it), but the introduction of cliques has officially won me over.
Cliques
Basically these are groups or segments that you can form within your followers. I blogged once about using Twitter like IRC and spamming the rest of your contact. No worries about that on Plurk. I’ve separated my chatter from my proper Plurking, and am very happy with the results. I can have fun, personal conversations without disturbing the rest of my followers.
Since Twitter seems to be spending all its time just putting out fires, I don’t think I can look forward to similar improvements from them anytime soon.
In the last 24 hours that I’ve joined Plurk, I’ve seen plenty of Twitter folk move over. chrisbrogan, colinwalker, daphnemaia, derrickkwa, foxtwo, hendri, howiec, jljohansen, kevinlim, kevyn, litford, marinamartin, mhisham, mintea, moby74, nicole85, ridz84, rinaz, scabr, sentosagirl, shahw, sonnygill, waynesutton and yuhui. Add them by typing http://plurk.com/user/[username].
That’s almost 10% of my network on Twitter. The value for Twitter now is the 300 or so contacts I painfully built up over five months. But unfortunately at this point in time, I’d rather move than stick with a network that doesn’t work. Do connect with me on Plurk at http://plurk.com/user/uniquefrequency
Tags: bye twitter, hello plurk, move from twitter to plurk, Plurk, plurk cliques, plurk rocks, twitter downtime, twitter sucks, uniquefrequency
Posted in Plurk | 9 Comments »
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Yesterday was SMB:Singapore 2, which was great because we had the unveiling of the first version of the logo (which was printed out on all the name tags), just under 60 people appearing, pretty good food and what I thought was a nice cozy venue at Cafe Domus.
For me, it was really good meeting people like Siok Siok and Krisandro, Rony Thomas in person, and finally getting to meet Preetam, as well as interesting conversations with Su Min, Jayden, Hun Boon and many more. I also had a kick ass time being interviewed for Geek Goddess TV together with Sheylara and Derrick. (Mic, please make me look good in post!)
As always, great meeting the (by now) usual crew of Nadia, Tech 65 guys, Yuhui, Ridz, Hisham, Supriya, Brian, Daphne, Nicole, Coleman, Claudia, Peter, Miccheng, Bernard and Shannon. I’m sure I’ve missed out people and I apologise! This crazy linking is hard work, but I like generating linklove.
If you came for SMB and we didn’t manage to connect, do drop me a comment or look for me on Twitter (@uniquefrequency) or on Facebook, and we can start a whole new conversation there! Just drop me a note so I know you’re not some random person looking to add me.
You might notice this post says “The Success Part”, more on “The Failure” part later today. Also, I’ll be putting up a post consolidating all the media coverage of SMB2, so if you have a blog post, pictures, video, audio, anything, drop me a comment so I can link you!.
And now, on to the pictures (mouseover for captions):
Tags: cafe domus, geek goddess, podfire network, sherms, singapore social media scene, singpore bloggers, smb singapore, social media breakfast logo, social media breakfast singapore, tv, twitter, uniquefrequency
Posted in Blogs, Fun, Singapore, collaboration, social media, social media breakfast | 15 Comments »
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Got a link in the mail today pointing to Rainier PR and their hiring of staff via Twitter.
That’s pretty amazing, but before you jump in and get yourself a Twitter account, it’s not really about that one tool. It’s about building an online presence, getting people familiar with you, and building your personal brand. More from the article:
PR students listen-up. If you want a fast track career in digital PR use your holiday time to get work placements and like Matt immerse yourself in the tools of your trade such as Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Google Tools, Twitter and Wordpress. Chances are that if you do you’ll have a head start on many of those that have been in the industry for several years.
I’m always gobsmacked by candidates, both graduates and those that have been in the industry for some time, that come for an interview (almost always via recruiters) at Rainier PR that don’t make an effort to look at the agency web site or our blog. They typically don’t use an RSS Reader and haven’t had “time to look at Twitter”. Bollocks. Don’t waste your time – or ours.
How true is that? I think it extends to any communications effort and I don’t think you even need to be in PR. Let’s not even talk about the real world. If I had to form a team to do a communications/marketing plan for a student club in school, I wouldn’t want someone who doesn’t know how to use Google Alerts or Wordpress (at the very least).
Congrats to Matt Watson (who I am now following on Twitter @mpwatson) and I think this is only the start of things to come, and we’ll definitely be hearing more of such instances in the future.
You can find me on Twitter (@uniquefrequency). Feel free to follow!
Tags: @mpwatson, building online presence, building presonal brand, communications effort, communications plan, google alerts, hiring through twitter, hiring via twitter, matt watson, rainier pr, recruitment, social media hiring, twitter, uniquefrequency, wordpress
Posted in social media, twitter | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
The article’s out today! I thought it’s pretty good. Hopefully more people will read it and get onto Twitter.
That said, I’m going to be a little cautious about Twitter. Steven Hodson blogged about some of Twitter’s troubles, financially, bringing us back to harsh reality that you can have the best product in the world in the Web2.0 space, but you better have a monetisation plan. Frederic from The Last Podcast updated us a couple of days ago about how Twitter has rolled out ads in Japan (which makes sense since they are so big in Japan)
All the financial worries plus the recent downtime over the weekend and Twitter’s lead architect leaving makes for a slightly worrying future for Twitter. Here’s hoping they can pull their act together soon.
Follow me on Twitter: @uniquefrequency
Tags: microblogging, monetization plan, the last podcast, today twitter article, twitter, twitter ads in japan, twitter caution, twitter downtime, twitter monetisation, twitter monetization, twitter worries, uniquefrequency, winextra
Posted in social media, twitter | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
It hit me in the shower last night why exactly Twitter is so powerful. It’s like IRC.
No, I’m not kidding and don’t run away yet.
Today @stripedshirt and @valene were talking about why MSN (aka IM) isn’t used by them anymore, simply because it’s too distracting. On top of that, MSN mostly allows for one-to-one conversations (yes I know you can add more people to conversations), but Twitter is cool in that you can have many people adding to a conversation at different times of the day and it’ll continue on.
And that’s what I like most about Twitter and that’s why it’s so powerful. It requires a short amount of attention, but it allows you to feel connected and part of a community more than IM does (at least for me). A real example is when a few of us just got started on Twitter. Me (@uniquefrequency), Andre (@stripedshirt) and Valene (@valene). So 3 of us kinda were messaging here and there but with only 3 people, there wasn’t much benefits to reap in terms of network externalities.
Fastforward 4-6 weeks, add in Andre’s group’s great presentation on microblogging, and now we have Nabilah (@allquirknoplay), Jacqueline (@jacquelinechang), Amelia (@amsie), Lionel (@gaothebao), Peiling (@gniliep), Alaska (@alaskie), Xiao Hui (@thehsuperficies), Mark (@beatmastermark), Gladys (@gladyschock) and Christina (@tinana).
The best part is I have less than half of these people on my MSN list, and yet I talk more to most of them than to other people on my MSN list.
It’s like IRC in that we all drop in the same “room” at different times of the day and maybe I’ll know that some of them are in the library, some are awake at 5am finishing a project, who’s in a Starbucks, and the list goes on. It’s come to a stage where we even have @SMUtweets to tweet school-related stuff to all of us. How cool is that?
To me, Twitter has truly become the new social water cooler.
You might argue that 13 of us out of a school population of 4,500 is insignificant. But is it really? If you were a company and you had 13 passionate advocates following your brand on Twitter, Tweeting things to each other and spreading your brand and/or message, wouldn’t you be happy? (Wouldn’t it be great if Frujch could tell us when the queue is short? Or if portobello melts are running out so we can ZOOM down to get the last few?)
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and here’s an experiment I want to run: All of us SMU students currently on Twitter should aim to get one, just one, other friend on Twitter by Week 14 (just lean over to the person next to you in the library and do some convincing!). We’re going to try to double the SMU-Twitter population and see just how far we can go with this in really forming a community and network, and see what comes out of it.
Post your success stories and/or great Twitter stories in the comments section so we’ll know who to follow and we’ll review this experiment in 2 weeks! Let’s keep in mind that getting new people to sign up on Twitter is just the first step, we need to make them feel welcome to get them to stick around and enjoy it as much as we do!
Tags: alaska, alaskie, allquirknoplay, amelia, amsie, beatmastermark, christina, curiousfoodie, frujch, gaothebao, gniliep, im, instant messaging, irc, jacqueline, jacquelinechang, lionel, mark, microblogging, microsoft messenger, msn, nabilah, online conversations, peiling, smu twitter, smutweets, social media experiment, social water cooler, stripedshirt, thehsuperficies, tinana, twitter, twitter community, twitter experiment, twitter network, twitter population, twitter stories, uniquefrequency, valene, water cooler effect, xiaohui
Posted in SMU, Singapore, twitter | 17 Comments »
