A Certain Presence of Mine

Who should you follow on Twitter? Just ask Mr Tweet.

November 29th, 2008

Twitter is pretty boring until you start to follow people. And it’s also pretty boring if the people you follow don’t update more than one a week, don’t follow you back, or only tweet about themselves. So how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter?

Enter Mr Tweet, a new service from @mingyeow and @ambivalence. Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network on Twitter to help you build relationships, and answers two very simple, and very important questions: —

* Who are the influential people I should be following?
* Which are the followers I should be following in return?

How it works is incredibly simple. You follow @mrtweet on Twitter. And that’s it. Mr Tweet will then send you a direct tweet pointing you to your personal report at the Mr Tweet web site. When I followed Mr Tweet, my report came through in about 6 hours - but due to rising popularity (Robert Scoble found it), you may have to wait up to 48 hours, especially if you have a lot of followers and / or follow a lot of people - but it’s well worth waiting for.

The report you receive (see my example report for @clarocada here) is produced online at Mr Tweet’s site, and allows you to either find influencers beyond your network or show which of your followers you should be following back.

The beauty of Mr Tweet’s reports is that you can assess whether to follow twitter users suggested to you on the basis of a great deal of information: -

Examples of who, among those you follow, follows them.
See how many of the people that you follow, follow them.
How many followers they have.
How many people they follow.
A quick ‘following/followers’ ratio.
A reciprocity statement - such as ‘frequently replies to non-follows’, ‘usually follows back’.
How often they update - you may want to limit the number of ‘57 tweets a day’ people you follow!
Link to their web site or blog as noted on their twitter profile.
Brief biography from their twitter profile.
View their last 5 tweets (A really useful touch).

The Mr Tweet Blog has just had its first entry, and they encourage feedback at Get Satisfaction. All in all, Mr Tweet is an extremely useful, very well-designed and beautifully easy to access service.

Follow @mrtweet and see who you’re missing…

Tags: Twitter
Posted in Twitter | No Comments »

What is Twitter? Why use twitter for business? All is explained here, beautifully…

November 2nd, 2008

I just came across this beautiful online publication which explains what twittering is all about. (Thanks to The Next Web)

Are you still wondering why you should use Twitter? This might give you some answers - it’s called the “Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter“, although it’s actually written in Plain English that anyone can understand - it’s worth a look in any event because you can flip through it online using a lovely interface, and you might find a few tools you’ve not heard of, even if you’re a twitter user already.

Are you on Twitter? Why not follow Certain Host?

Tags: business, plain english, Twitter, visibility
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Yellow Pages for Twitter: New features help people find you online

October 13th, 2008

Twellow, the ‘yellow pages for Twitter‘, has improved its utility with the ability to create your own biography entry.

As well as being able to claim your twitter profile, and classify yourself in up to 10 categories (although I’m in 14 for some reason), you can also add your own social media links to your profiles on Pownce, LinkedIn, Flickr, FriendFeed, etcetera - as well as creating a brief summary and what’s termed a ‘bio’ or biography entry.

The search facility in Twellow includes the data in your summary and pick ups keywords and links used there, and your biography information can also include basic HTML, so links and visual formatting can be added. The summary is indexed in search - the biography does not appear to be indexed yet.

Apart from being a great way to find people using Twitter with similar interests, and pinpointing interesting people to follow, categorized Twellow profiles are also becoming visible in Google and Yahoo searches. So I’d recommend making sure you claim your profile at Twellow and add your details and social links to ensure your online visibility and credibility stay high. It’s free, and there are over half a million people listed there, so it’s worth spending a few minutes to make sure you’re visible, coherent, and linked up here.

Tags: Twellow, yellow pages
Posted in Twitter, visibility, web tools | 1 Comment »

Use twitter in your email signature to engage your customers…

September 10th, 2008

As well as making your email messages more interesting (and always up to date with your latest twitter announcements) many forums, blogs, and other social media web services let you include images as part of your signature.

twitsig.com allows you to display your current twitter status as an image. Free, and easy!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I don’t have meetings. I have tweetings.

September 9th, 2008

[ This article was originally published at Digital Biographer and The Next Web ] © Copyright 2008 Clarocada Ltd. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” - Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting - where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content - has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so - but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

IN GOOGLE TIME
I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things - I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.
HOLA FONEROS
I have a laptop computer and a mobile phone, I can work from a cafe terrace in Banyalbufar just as easily as anywhere else. As a result, I don’t have the need to restrict myself to doing business with those who are within easy reach of where I live or work most of the time.
HOME OFFICE DRESS CODE
I don’t need to have an office in the city centre to get my work done - I can do it from my home office. As a result, I don’t need to spend time travelling, and so I use that saved time productively. I also find wearing a suit in my own kitchen a bit pointless, so feel there has to be a very good reason to dress up to go somewhere. I like the fact that my carbon footprint’s lower with less travel.
MY ONLINE VISIBILITY
Whereas I used to have to push information out to people in brochures, newspaper interviews, in meetings, at trade shows, I now have online profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, Friendfeed, MyBloglog etc, and I have blogs and web sites that I can update easily in seconds. As a result, I don’t have to spend so much time introducing myself, and explaining what it is that I, or any of my enterprises provide - people find out about me before they meet me, or get to know me through following my activities online. People can meet me at airports because my photo is online. They can also decide whether they need to waste their time meeting me.
I HATE COFFEE
I don’t really like coffee any more. And I especially never liked paying €5 for a cup of it unless it was refilled all day and came with free wi-fi. As a result, when someone says - let’s have a chat over a coffee, I say “No. Let’s save the time and money, and spend five minutes now working out if we need to meet - and if so, what items on the agenda we can dispense with before we need to have a meeting”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: meetings, microblogging, time management, Twitter
Posted in Twitter, visibility, web tools | 1 Comment »

Free competition to win a domain name with Certain Host!

September 8th, 2008

This month, Certain Host are giving you the chance to win a free domain name!

All you need to do to have a chance of winning your very own .com or .co.uk domain name is to give the correct answer to the simple question below, and send us your name and email address (which will be only be used to notify you of the winner). Good luck!

If you can’t see the entry form here, please visit the competition entry page.

Now, it should be well known to you that Certain Host offer a free domain name with three of their most popular hosting packages, but, we’re just making sure, and spreading the world a little.

Remember - this competition closes on 30th September at 6pm Eastern Standard Time.

PS: If you need a clue with the answer to this question, try looking at the web site of a certain reliable small business web host.

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Ten good reasons why Google Chrome’s getting popular.

September 8th, 2008

As we reported here last week, Google Chrome - the first ‘beta’ edition of their revolutionary web browser, was released to the public last week, and so far, the reception has been very good — with most reviewers very happy with this new web browser, welcoming the healthy competition it will engender, and looking forward to future releases and new features.

We’ve rounded up a few reviews and commentary below for you, and can report from our own use of the browser that it’s —

Fast to load into memory
Fast and smooth loading web pages
Great at handling complex pages with a lot of Ajax and Javascript
Has a great, intuitive history feature
Is great for searching, especially the ‘type-ahead’ feature
Has the best ‘home page’ we’ve seen - a collection of screenshots of the pages you visit most
Handles badly behaved pages easily - you simply close the tab, rather than having your browser crash entirely
Has very easy to understand options and settings
Allows you to see more web page, and less browser
Has extremely robust security built-in to protect you

All in all, we found the browser a delight to use, and cant wait for the next versions (and hope the Mac version will be along soon). We think that it will become a serious, and worthy competitior to Internet Explorer, even in environments where nobody every thinks to use an alternative browser to that which comes bundled with their operating system.

Tags: browser, Chrome, Google, Google Chrome, search, Web browser
Posted in web tools | 1 Comment »

Meet Google Chrome: A new kind of web browser

September 2nd, 2008

Later today at 11am PDT (and here is the download link ) Google will release its new web browser, called Chrome. If you want to join a live online news conference (and get a reminder of its start) then visit CNet’s site here.

Google Chrome screenshot
The browser announcement has taken everyone by surprise, although the timing, with September 1st being the holiday of ‘Labor Day’ in the USA, does not surprise me - what better than a new browser to liven up your Tuesday after the break?

It’s also interesting to note that the browser will be Open Source, which means you can expect a lot of third-party developers to be adding extra features to the browser, working in the same way that Firefox has done to become more and more useful as a ‘webtop’ tool.

The announcement was made on Google’s Blog yesterday when they revealed that they had sent out an interesting graphic novel or comic book to explain the new browsers’ features a little early. A nice way to explain software, I think - very refreshing.

We’ll be posting reviews of this important piece of software here as soon as we can - stay tuned.

Tags: Browsers, Chrome, Comic book, Google, Labor Day, Searching, Web browser
Posted in web tools | 1 Comment »

How to find out everything about any website with Quarkbase…

August 31st, 2008

Well, finding out everything is probably an exaggeration, but you can certainly find out a great deal of useful information about any web site, and see it in a well-presented format, using Quarkbase.

Quarkbase data is best for the most popular sites, and comes complete with summary, popularity, ownership, traffic information, and even recent blog posts and tweets about a site. A useful tool to find out more about a particular site, and to see what the ’social footprint’ is for smaller sites.

Tags: Google, Quarkbase, Technorati, Twitter, Web Design and Development, Web search engine, Website, World Wide Web
Posted in site data, web tools | 1 Comment »

Where is your business in the Twitter Yellow Pages?

August 10th, 2008

As someone involved in what I reluctantly term ‘online reputation management‘, I carry out a regular search for my own name, thos eof my companies, and those used by my customers, and I was interested recently to come across my name in relation to twitter, but with the accompanying description of ‘Chef’. *

Now, I use the phrase ‘word chef’ to describe what I do rewriting online profiles, and include the phrase in my Twitter Profile’s brief description, so this was not a huge surprise, but I was surprised to find myself in a ‘Directory of Twitter Chefs‘ when I first came across Twellow.com in July.

Internet Marketing - using Twellow Twitter Directory for Online Visibility

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I claimed my entry by just entering my twitter password, and then could add various social media profiles, add myself to directory categories that fit my activities, and was also able to find other people in twitter with activities and interests like mine (or, importantly, quite unlike mine).

If you’ve not come across Twitter yet, then here’s a great explanation of how you might be using twitter to promote your business and find opportunities from Chris Brogan, and here’s a simple explanation of how Twitter works.

I was placed into the ‘chef’ category because the word appeared in my twitter description and matched the taxonomy of the search categories. I’d advise you to check that you’re in the most appropriate categories - and have a browse for other twitter members in various categories.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

There is also a powerful search facility, which can either be directory-wide, or can focus on a specific ‘vertical’ - so you can find all of the Dentists with Tokyo in their profile, for example. It’s one thing to be able to search for what people are tweeting about, but it’s also very useful to know who the people on twitter are.

Simple and powerful idea

The site is a property of IEntry, known mainly for its advertising sites, but for now, there are few ads appearing on Twellow. I’m sure it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how they might monetize a Twitter Directory, although at present, those with the most followers, default to top of the page, with a filter to swap to showing those with the most recent twitter updates.

So - are you categorised correctly? Go to Twellow now and check your entry! I was amazed to see that in the Geeks Category, Robert Scoble hadn’t yet claimed his profile! (Update August 30th - He’s claimed it now.)

* I will be looking at some tools for monitoring online conversations in a few weeks time over at Digital Biographer - make sure you are subscribed to the Digital Biographer RSS feed, or follow David Petherick on Twitter.

Tags: Advertising, Robert Scoble, RSS, Social media, Twellow, Twellow.com, Twitter
Posted in Twitter, visibility, web tools | No Comments »