For the past couple weeks I’ve been tweeting for the Reel-Time.com site under the Twitter handle “Reel_Time” and I’ve found some very interesting trends. Most disturbing is that Twitter doesn’t really appear to be an…
The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages. I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment. The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize. You can check out the full tweet stream here.
Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.
Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations. Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment. Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.
When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum.
Okay, maybe this isn’t the only flaw of Twitter, but it’s a good one, and I suspect, eminently fixable. The problem is that we’re forced to drink from the fire hose when we look at…
I missed this one last week and it’s the kind of post that I think most Social Media wonks will gloss over – “Social Media Scalability, the New ROI Question” from Shel Israel at Global Neighborhood.
Scalability is an issue for anyone who introduces something new online and wants to grow. It was true for the pioneers who predate social media like ICQ [LINK], for the Stanford start up team for a search engine called Google. It was true for the college project that is now Facebook and so on. The technology that you start with may not be right for large scale. The people that begin it may not be the right people to run it on a large scale. The costs you start with may not fill the petty cash box a year hence.
I was listening to This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte yesterday (Twit 171 – The Lemondrop Kid) which featured appearances by Jason Calicanis, Andrew Horowitz, and Geoff Smith. At some point Laporte asked Calacanis about his decision to stop blogging (he hasn’t really stopped, but he has drastically cut back) and Jason said he’d realized that being at the top of the blog food chain, the return on value wasn’t there for him. (I am paraphrasing here, and not directly quoting him.)
The problem is attributed to linkbaiting (from wikipedia):
Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[5] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.
For Calacanis, it became such a huge time waster, he had even posted “Linkbaiting Rules” in April of 2007. From his post:
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Regarding my post yesterday about the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers, two things happened over night that bear mentioning. Twitter again was down for a couple hours starting at 4pm EDT, or so. Users were…
Okay, I promise to go Twitter free next week, but for now, an interesting observation… Yesterday, Twitter went down for about 3 hours. The general experience provoked a few thoughts. Firstly, I thought of the…