Alert Blog Reviews

I’ve posted before about how certain features can improve your twitter experience. These required a lot of research. After reading hundreds of blog posts, I’ve gained a new appreciation of twitter applications.  One of them is The T wit Cleaner. I primarily use the web interface. I leave tweetdeck on when I’m busy but I’ll use the web to really dive into conversations. I follow over 1000 and,  despite being really picky with my return follows, started to find my friends where getting drowned out. I needed help but didn’t want to spend hours manually going through my list. This is where The Twit Cleaner literally saved my twitter stream. What is the twit cleaner? The Twit Cleaner i s an app by @sidawson that is designed to help clean out your twitter account. According to the FAQ , “it gets your following list, then analyses the profiles & tweets of every single one of those people, looking for certain patterns of behaviour (people not talking, being over repetitive, posting the same links repeatedly, etc).” I’ve run this a couple of times and, frankly, its awesome. Note: The account @twitcleaner isn’t associated with this – you have to make sure to @reply thetwitcleaner . How does it work? The whole process is really simple. First, you have to click the button to request your report. Note that there is a box which, if left checked, will send out a tweet telling your friends about The Twit Cleaner . You are under no obligation to tweet anything. You will then get shown a pop up asking if the application has your permission to access your account. This is safe. I have many friends that develop apps and they only need the information to give you the information you need. You will shortly get sent a DM linking to your report. There is an example report on the about page . Yours will look different and some of the names have changed. Thats cool. That picture was designed to help you understand it better. The report will contain a list of potentially dodgy accounts. Now – just because someone is on a list, doesn’t mean that they are dodgy. I will explain this further, but it just means that they fall into a certain category of behaviors. The main categories are: Dodgy – spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links etc Absent – No updates in a month, or fewer than 10 tweets. Repetitive – High numbers of duplicate tweets or links Flooding – So high volume you can’t see anyone else Non-Responsive – No interaction & those that follow back < 10% Everyone is free to use twitter in their own way. Not all of these behaviors are bad. Some people are travelling and thus aren’t on twitter for an extended period of time. Some people use the platform primarily to broadcast. The Twit Cleaner organizes people into subcategories so you can easily choose who you want to unfollow. In my summary, I have a section saything ‘These accounts ignore you.’ Within that, users fall into 3 subcategories. Hardly follow anyone Don’t interact with anyone Have fewer than 10 tweets. Each section is broken up like this. Based on the report, it is really easy to make a decision about who you want to unfollow. This process is really easy. There are two options. You can use the data to manually unfollow people or you can let The Twit Cleaner do it for you. You are given four options: Only unfollow those I don’t select Unfollow the spammy and absent, keep the rest Unfollow the spammy, keep the rest Unfollow the absent, keep the rest. I suggest you use whatever option feels right for you. I always choose to unfollow the users I don’t select. This is time consuming but ensures you don’t accidentally unfollow people. Selecting someone is easy. You just have to click their avatar. Their icon will show up as shaded and that person wont be unfollowed. How much does it cost? Surprisingly, the report itself is free. There is a small charge if your total follow count is over 2000. The prices are: Up to 25,000 – $5 USD Up to 50,000 – $10 USD Otherwise – $20 USD These are very reasonable prices considering what you get. Mini Interview with Si Dawson I was fascinated by this application and so, took the opportunity to ask Si a few questions about The Twit Cleaner . I hope this gives you an insight to what goes on behind the scenes of 1. This was super easy and really thorough. Why did you choose to offer it for free instead of charging? The report is always free. I do charge a small sum if you follow more than 2000 people & want to get us to auto-unfollow for you. 90% of twitter users follow fewer than 2000 people, so for the vast majority of people, the entire process is free. For larger lists, I figured once people saw how useful the report was & how much time it would save them, they’d be happy to pay. The charge is primarily to cover costs on larger reports. For people with massive lists (20k+) it can take literally hours on a quad processor box to do all that analysis. I did have one report that ran for three days. It’s a LOT of work. 2. How much work went into creating and maintaining the twit cleaner? I’d say I’ve spent somewhere in the order of 1500 hours to date. Eg, last night I worked until 5am, & was up again at 9 to deal with tech support issues, minor hiccups etc. That goes on seven days a week. It’s pretty full on. 3. How does using this application improve your twitter experience? I designed it because I tried some auto-follow tools (keyword following, that sort of thing) & quickly start to dread looking at Twitter. There was so much noise, so much junk. The Twit Cleaner categorises everyone you’re following into common groupings – people that just post links, people that never talk to anyone. Those that are just blasting noise out, & not authentically engaging with anyone, oh, & the pure out spammers, & so on. So, by seeing these groupings, it then becomes very easy to go “You know what? I’m actually not interested in following that kind of person.” In my case, I got rid of all the spammers, the link feeds & so on. When I got up the next morning I looked at Twitter, & suddenly it was -interesting- again. It went from 90% noise to 90% interesting stuff. Stuff I liked, information that was interesting to me. It was always there, but I just couldn’t see it because of all the crap. My follow list dropped by about 30% but my enjoyment went up 500%! 4. Do you plan to create more apps that will help the twitter community? I have a couple more apps in the imediate pipeline, yes. Obviously there are some bits of the site that are still a bit average. The functionality is good on the report, for example, but the UI needs to be slicked up quite a lot. So, there’s that. The other things is this – calling in The Twit Cleaner is kind of an emergency situation. Things have gone mad, & you need to get them back under control again. Wouldn’t it be better to not need it in the first place? So, one app (which I already have early beta versions of, but isn’t quite ready for public rollout), is a clean followback – which follows anyone that follows you, but filters them according to the algorithms (so you’ll never follow any spammers). Another is clean keyword searching. So, following people that use certain keywords – all very common already – but again, filtered by the algorithms. You’ll be able to choose which categories you’re interested in following or not. Using these two give you all the power to grow your list & respond to the community, but keep it clean & high value at the same time. I have some even more exciting stuff I’ve been testing out, but it’s too early to talk about that just yet. Suffice to say, it’ll completely revolutionise finding quality people on Twitter. I’m very excited about it. Over to you: Have you used any applications to clean up your twitter account? What was your experience like? Also, if you have any questions about The Twit Cleaner just leave them in the comments. Disclosure: The developer, Si Dawson , is a friend of mine. However I didn’t know that he created this, or that he was a coder, until after using the service. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Review of The Twit Cleaner

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Review of The Twit Cleaner

As marketing professionals, we usually have to justify ourselves to our bosses, our clients and everyone in between—especially in the less-tested, sometimes-hit-or-miss arena of social media. But now Ad Age wants accountability, too, as they ask “if you’re getting enough out of all the volunteer work you do for Biz & Ev and Mark,” or, more specifically, “Are we all just toiling mightily to make a bunch of rich nerds (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his employees and investors, Twitter’s Biz Stone and Evan Williams and their employees and investors) richer, while we impoverish ourselves?” That’s both a literal and a figurative question, since using those social networks is exactly what makes their founders and investors money (well, sort of), and, as the argument goes, we’re essentially a volunteer labor force creating content for these sites—an interesting point. Meanwhile, using social networks (at all, as the argument here seems to go) means sacrificing time (true), actual interactions (possibly true but not always)—and our very souls and identities. They mean this to be a discussion on a personal level, since a central thrust of the argument is that these social networks have sacrificed so much of our privacy that we’re allowing them to steal (don’t we call that “giving” in English?) “the sole ownership of our own thoughts, emotions, personal expressions, etc.” from us (yes, if I post “I’m sad” on a social network, that means that they also own my emotion…. right….). Of course, if you’re using Twitter and Facebook as a marketer, you’re there looking for business ROI from publicity—being public. Ad Age (you know, “Advertising” Age? About . . . could it be . . . advertising ?) does acknowledge that social networks might work for these purposes, if they’re worth the sacrifice: If you’re a brand marketer, chances are good that you’re extracting real value from investing time and energy in social media (and you’re happy to have consumers volunteering their time to be your “brand ambassadors” or whatever you want to call them); good for you. (And if you’re a consumer who gets off on connecting with big brands — or just wants to interface with customer service in a forum, like Twitter, where certain marketers seem to be hyper-responsive — well, good for you too.) In general, if you’re soft-selling something — like content or an idea — that can benefit from free publicity, Facebook and Twitter are your friends. Even if, well, they’re the two-faced sort who think nothing of riffling through your handbag or backpack when you get up to go the bathroom — you know, glad-handing “friends” (those are air quotes) who are obviously using you for something, only it’s not always entirely clear what. Um . . . I hate to bring this up, but aren’t we as marketers just using our social networks as those same kind of “friends” (and possibly even the friends and fans we acquire on those social networks)—we’re just using them as the means to an end? I do agree, of course, that on a personal level, excessive use of social media can rob us of time and valuable interaction with the people we care about most. It’s good to examine our relationship with the Internet and social media on a personal level and decide whether it’s really worth the time and effort we put into it, or if we might put that time to better use. While that’s the brief summary of the argument at the conclusion of the article, the main thrust is that using social networks is such a great sacrifice of ourselves (even without a time investment) that it’s not worth it. What do you think? Do you demand ROI from personal social network use? Or are you glad that most people don’t ?

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Are You Getting Enough out of Twitter & Facebook?

For many in the online space these days the words “Facebook privacy” would be called an oxymoron. Then of course there would be the usual calling others at Facebook morons and then it would get worse from there but I digress. Michael Arrington recently interviewed the poster child for the “Privacy? What privacy?” movement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore tells us : Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now, sharing with everybody would be the starting point, rather than with a small group of friends. Is this more about reflecting social norms or changing them to help Facebook compete with Twitter? The statement, made during a livestream of the Crunchies awards , hits on a hot button issue for Facebook: it recently notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification. While the message claimed that Facebook was displaying the message to give users more privacy controls, blindly clicking “next” was a way to make much of your data public. And in fact, some data like the Friends List has become more public without any settings changes by users. I honestly don’t know where I stand on all of this. I think my only real concern is just how little attention most people pay to these major shifts in social norms especially when they are moved along at rocket speed by something as pervasive and powerful as Facebook. I know that even with the new “everyone needs to see everyone else’s stuff” privacy policy at Facebook, I can go in and lock down my public profile to whatever degree I want. How many of the 350 million supposed users of the service actually know that or even care? I don’t know. I suspect not as many as should. An interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal today from Jaron Lanier , which is an excerpt from his new book. He is a pioneer in virtual reality technology and has some very real concerns about this new move to the “social collective” and I don’t disagree with him on much of it. Here’s a sample: Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation. There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth. I realize that I am mixing and matching the personal web and the business of the web. They are, however, intricately intertwined especially as we move into the future. When the generation of “open information and free stuff etc, etc” are in the business world (and a lot are already) this new “social norm” that Zuckerberg talks about so casually could very well mean the end to true innovation unless signed off by the collective. As a result that means watered down ideas in most cases. As if it’s not bad enough, the US government is showing socialist tendencies. What if the business world became that way too? Geesh, time to buy some land, make my own clothes and grow my own food. We will all be brought to the middle and the world could be very average. Of course these are just my own opinions on this but I am really no that interested in having to depend on everyone “signing off” on one my ideas before it can move forward. I am not thrilled about the idea of things like “search neutrality” that reared its ridiculous head in the recent weeks. I like privacy. I like some semblance of control. Maybe it is time to consider that plot of land and a tractor. That is of course, if it’s OK with everyone.

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Zuckerberg Sparks More Privacy Discussion

One of the problems that small businesses run into on a frequent basis is how to increase their monthly sales without stepping outside of their marketing budget.  This is due to the fact that most small businesses have either a very small marketing budget or no budget for marketing at all.  If you are in the situation where there is no money for advertising even though you desperately need to spread the word about your company you may want to consider using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a win-win marketing tool since it is a great way to spread the word about your business and help show your customers that you care about them and reward them for their efforts. The way that affiliate marketing works is simple and much less complicated than the term may appear to be.  At its core affiliate marketing is simply the task of getting your customers to advertise for your company in whatever way they fit and rewarding them for each sale they make as a result of their efforts. Most of the time affiliate marketing is used online by spreading a link for your website around the web along with recommendations.  It is your affiliate’s job to speak about your business and promote your products, and in return each time that someone makes a purchase from your website using their link you agree to pay them a commission on the sale or offer them a discount or reward certificate.  This is turn will increase your sales and offer you new business that in turn may decide to be affiliates bringing in more long term business. The best part of offering an affiliate service outside of gaining new customers, is that since it works based on the word of mouth principle is the customers that you gain tend to be long lasting.  Since customers trust their friends opinions they will not only make one small purchase, but may in fact purchase several items or services in one go which will make them even more valuable to your company.

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Affiliate marketing: How to earn a lot without spending a lot

Google’s Marissa Mayer talked with the Telegraph recently about her vision for Google’s future—and not surprisingly, she has an expansive vision for what information Google should index and provide to us. An “omnivorous” Google, she calls it. Somehow, I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that she sees a Google that eats everything (rather than, say, knows everything [omniscient], considering the interpretation is apparently “one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on”). One of the most important sources she wants to tap for better search results is social networks—and while they have already made deals with Twitter for up-to-the-minute results, she wants something a whole lot more “personalized.” Mayer thinks the key will be when Google can include people’s friends’ personal updates from social networks such as Facebook in search and serve these results personally to the correct people. Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’. According to Mayer – the ideal will be to get access to your friend’s updates in search: “Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public – will really empower us in terms of search.” That means digging behind (under?) the walls of privacy that social networks like Facebook have set up to mine your friends’ data (including status updates and events, most likely) and serve those up for what they think are your relevant searches. I don’t know about you, but when I google [a doll's house], I’m not looking for my friend’s status updates on the gift he’s building for his daughters. If Google wants to help us find and organize information, status updates probably aren’t a good way to do it. (The Ibsen play. I’m looking for the Ibsen play.) Interestingly, Facebook is pushing a new privacy system these days—and the default settings are set to “Everyone” for several options (easy to change, of course, but the push is still there). All right, all right, I know I’m apparently the only person on Earth who doesn’t want to see every single friends’ crazy dream status updates when googling [dream interpretation], but will you be giving Google access to your social networks?

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Google Wants Access to Your Private Social Networks

It is a common belief that Article Marketing strategy can be practiced only by those who are talented in writing. It is not so.  Anyone can do it. It is worthwhile to consider the following points to succeed in article marketing: 1. Give an appropriate, interesting title for the article. 2. Contents should be easy to read, but should carry depth. 3. There should be no grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes. Mistake will result in   losing the faith and the readers will underestimate your talent. 4. Give a little information about yourself, preferably at the end. Out of the millions of articles floating in the Net many of them are on article directories. Major Websites, small business owners, and those looking for free content to display on their website visit article directories regularly. With this there is so much competition for article marketers. This calls for efficient market strategy, so that your time and money are not wasted. You have to bear in mind the needs of the reader. The reader will try to know as to how useful is the article for him. How much he can gain out of the article? So your focus should with respect to the reader. Your writing should have the essence to win the heart of the readers. Obviously, you have to take some pains.  You are expected to make a good introduction, body and conclusion. You must have the writing style and skill to attract the readers. Good articles will get high search rankings. Try to write about something new. Take your time to write nicely such that your efforts bear fruit. Find out the keywords needed for the topic. These keywords are necessary for the search engines. Give an impressive title. If your article tops the list with respect to the topic, you will grow. Internet site owners will back you and your articles will establish a permanent place in the website. Try to gab what the audience is interested in. Base your topic on that. Type your ideas for every article. Make your writing style consistent so that the readers recognize you. Remember, though Article marketing is free, it will require your extreme effort to find a place in the net because of stiff competition. The proper strategy comes into play how. The following tips can be useful: Article marketers always meet at forums to discuss about latest developments in marketing. You can post a small piece of your article. Make it a point to post everyday.  • Make an e-book with your articles. Your readers should be permitted to distribute the e-book as well. • Write as many articles as possible. Then more and more people can read your article. • They will also try to get an idea on how to write, where to distribute, and so on. • Test it. How good is your article? Ask your friends to read it. Take their true opinion. • Follow their advice if any as your interest may not match with that of the readers. • Present in such a manner that readers enjoy reading it. Put bullets and numbers as required.

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Strategies of Article Marketing

Guy Kawasaki is a social marketing talent, he tweets every post of his blog three times a day, eight hours apart. Every time he gets hundreds of clicks. The tool Guy Kawasaki uses is Otweet , which is a paid web app that lets you schedule your tweets. Since Otweet is not free, you may be not interested, but luckily, there are some other similar and FREE web apps that let you schedule your tweets, among which, below 11 websites are the best for your reference: 1. CoTweet You need to register before you can use CoTweet, which lets you schedule the tweets and send them right now or in any specific time to one or multiple Twitter accounts. You can read, reply or retweet the tweets of the mention/direct messages, your friends’ updates and your twitter lists. If the URL is shortened by bit.ly, you can see how many times it has been clicked. 2. Dynamic Tweets You need to create a new account in Dynamic Tweets, then you can schedule the tweets and send them immediately, how many minutes/hours/days/weeks later, or in a specific time. You can add tracking code and spinnable text to every tweet. You can also send the tweet to multiple Twitter accounts at a time. 3. FutureTweets You can register a new account, or log in with your OpenID. Once your Twitter account is verified, select your timezone, input the tweets, and then schedule the publishing time. There are 3 funny things you can do with FutureTweets: add some funny images to the tweets, flip the tweets, and set the time by moving the clock needles. 4. HootSuite HootSuite lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook, your LinkedIn and your Ping.fm. You are able to attach pictures, videos and document to the tweets, to schedule and post the tweets to all the accounts at a time, to read, reply or retweet the tweets of twitter lists, and so on. 5. SocialOomph SocialOomph was called TweetLater before. You can register a free account or a paid account. For free account, you can schedule how many minutes, hours, days, or weeks from now on the tweet will be posted to one or multiple Twitter accounts, but you can only schedule 12 tweets per hour. 6. Taweet You need to sign in with Twitter OAuth and verify your email account, then you can schedule your tweets, post the tweet to multiple Twitter accounts one by one, read the tweets of your stream, replies, and direct messages, and so on. There will be a link added to every tweet you send from Taweet. 7. Twaitter You can sign in with Twitter OAuth or your username and password. Twaitter lets you schedule public tweets and publish them in any time. And you can reply, retweet, or favorite the tweets, see if the tweeple follow you, manage your multiple Twitter accounts, and so on. 8. Tweet-U-Later When you sign up, you will get an email address, to which you can schedule your tweets with Tweet-U-Later by sending emails. You are able to schedule public tweets as well as private massages, you are also able to schedule recurring tweets, but just don’t violate the Twitter rules. 9. TweetFunnel You need to create a new account in TweetFunnel before you can schedule your tweets, which also can be published right now or held in the draft. You can see the tweets of home stream, mentions, direct messages and reply, retweet, or favorite them. 10. Twittontime Sign in with Twitter OAuth, select your time zone, and then you can schedule your tweets. The Twittontime dashboard just looks like a calendar, you select a date, write down your tweets, and schedule the publishing time. 11. Twuffer Sign in Twuffer with your Twitter username and password, select your timezone, and then you can schedule the tweets by hours, which means you are not able to set a specific time like 8:30 am, but only 8:00 am or 9:00 am. Among the above 10 websites, HootSuite is my favourite, which one is yours? Or do you have any other nice similar web applications to schedule your tweets? © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . 11 Websites to Schedule Your Tweets Online for Free

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11 Websites to Schedule Your Tweets Online for Free