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What’s Up Tweeples! Twitter is for Losers! Or is it?

16 Apr

E.Mendoza

Twitter the social media fad has a lot of people talking about it and tweeting on it.  There are some that use it to send updates like, “I just farted!” and then there are others that use it to get updates on weather or news.  This technology is great to many but there are those that feel it is the stupidest thing.  These anti-twitter people often make comments about how they don’t care what you just ate , what TV show you are watching or what you are going to do tonight!  These people believe that there lives are boring already. They don’t want people reading every boring minute of their mundane lives.  However, I believe that Twitter is something that can help businesses and people in many different ways.

How Twitter Can Help Your Business’ Marketing Efforts

1.  Use it as a sound board. Twitter has a live search feature that enables users to search for things other people are writing about.  For example, if you are a pizza restaurant you can search the word,”pizza”, anyone that has written “pizza” in their feed will show up on your search.  You can then get creative and try to contact these people by sending them a reply or following them.  You might want to refine your search to your area by searching something like Houston Pizza.  You will get interesting results but that might spark some creativity from your part.

2. Give Discounts. Your sales are lagging but you have 100 followers on Twitter.  Give them something for free or give them a discount.  You sell pizza!? Write a tweet like this,” Order a large pizza from “Best Pizza” in the next hour and mention this post to get a free box of bread stick!”  I would also recommend to push people to follow you as the more followers you have the bigger potential clientele base.

3. Be Yourself. Don’t try to pose as some type of corporate yuppie if you are not one.  If you are then, well, you have no choice.  Just tweet about what you are doing or any other thing that comes to your mind.  With the continued example of a pizza parlor, if you are the owner, maybe write about the things you deal with on a daily basis.  Try to stay positive though don’t throw any of your young workers under the bus, chances are they are on Twitter as well.

How Twitter Can Help People

1. Networking! So the economy sucks and you have no job, how in the world can this idiotic twitter thing help you? Easy! Try finding other individuals that are on twitter that might have connections in your field of expertise.  If you are a professional beer drinker you might be able to find people that enjoy drinking beer just as much as you do.  Through Twitter you can coordinate a “meeting” to discuss beer drinking expertise in more detail. All of this in hopes that through your new connection you can land a job sometime in the near future.

2. Re-Tweeting for Good Causes. If you are involved with a certain organization and you are in dire need of raising funds for your cause, Twitter is a great place to spread the word.  Through Twitter you can spread your message and hopefully grow the donation exponentially by having other people “Re-tweet.” A perfect example of how this has been used was when the horrible earthquake hit Haiti.  People were re-tweeting the text HAITI to 90999 like crazy right after that became available.  You can view some of these re-tweets live here.

3.  Entertainment and Education. If you like to be entertained or educated get on twitter when something major is happening on network television or the world.  People from all over the world are able to post messages to Twitter from a variety of gadgets (i.e. phone, computer, etc.) which in turn enables them to post their immediate thoughts after they experience something or see something.  A simple example to help illustrate this would be the NCAA tournament.  People were posting at a very rapid pace when games were super close. You could literally read their emotions on your screen. Another example of this would be the shootings at Fort Hood. People that were at the base were tweeting what they were experiencing from inside of the military base. The things they were posting were more informative than the things the media was reporting.

In the spirit of this post I guess you can “follow” me on twitter here.  I promise I won’t tweet about me passing gas anytime soon. However, I will tweet when I hear and smell someone else passing gas around me. :)

 
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What History and Technology Taught Me About Convenience

10 Aug
E.Mendoza

E.Mendoza

This weekend I read an article that was written by Richard Corliss titled,”Why Netflix Stinks: A Critic’s Complaint“, in which he complains about the Netflix service.  I subscribed to Netflix about a month ago and I really enjoy the ease of use and the price of the service.  For a few bucks I can watch a lot of movies off my computer or stream them directly to my XBOX 360.  I also get two dvd’s shipped to me as I return the ones that I rent.  In his piece Corliss complaints deal with not being able to pick-up a movie like at your local movie rental store.  I have had a few headaches of my own on certain movies that I would like to watch right away but are not available through online streaming.  I tried watching “Cool Runnings” the other day but I had to add it to my dvd shipping list.  That was very inconvenient but I lived with it.

This weekend I also went to my wife’s grandmothers house and heard a couple of stories over some delicious watermelon.  One of the stories that was told brought up my curiosity of an old Singer sewing machine that they bought in 1947.  This machine still works and they still use it as much as they can.  My wife’s grandpa explained to me that around that time you had to put in your name into a raffle like system at stores that sold goods you were seeking.  For example, if you wanted a sewing machine you would put your name on a list and you had to be picked to have the right to buy a machine.  He went on to explain that they put their name on three different lists at different stores.  They were lucky because they got called back at all three but other friends of theirs didn’t get called.  What ended up happening was they gave those extra two machines away to their friends.

Can you imagine the chaos that would happen today if you had to put your name on a list to buy a television or computer?  People would go nuts!  Technology has made all of us a lot more dependent on it than we would like to admit.  We want something we go online and buy it because of the convenience.  We have a variety of outlets to get the goods we want as fast as we need them.  Want to buy a television but you don’t want to spend much time at the store?  All you have to do is go online and pay for it with your credit card then pick it up at the store right down the road because it’s convenient.  I know there is still some of this “waiting list buying type thing” going on today.  A lot of people camp out to get the latest gadgets like the Apple iPhone but those people are a few in comparison with the people who wait. The people that wait only wait until the device is available at more stores or somewhere online to buy it.

I guess we all have to be thankful for the way the world works today.  I know I live on the web and can’t remember what it was like before the internet.  I, however, still have nightmares about slow internet a.k.a. dial-up internet.  Oh, that annoying sound of the phoneline connecting to the ISP but that is a post for another time!

 
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A Crazy Concept: Using Technology to Connect with My Elementary Teachers

20 Jul
E.Mendoza

E.Mendoza

My brain and my heart work together to become my body’s Digital Video Recorder (DVR).  If you own one of these apparatus you can program it to record your favorite show or sports event so that you can watch it at a later time.  Although I can’t really program my brain or my heart to record my favorite or hated life memories most of these get stored.  I, like many of you, attended elementary school a few years back.  It seems like a very long time but for some reason I seem to think about those years a lot.  A couple of months ago I started thinking of some of my old elementary teachers and wondering what their lives are like today.  In my mind there are little video sequences that place them in a moment in time.  These images of them are stuck on replay infinitely.  For instance, I can still see the big circled rainbow colored apron that we used in Mr. Vowell’s P.E. class.  I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.  I also remember playing a lot of fun duck-duck-goose games.  I usually lost but I had fun chasing after my classmates.

These memories are like a book that I started reading with all these characters and then for one reason or another I lost track of the book.  I still think about the stories in the book but can’t find it to piece the rest of the chapters together.  This is similar to when you connect with a long lost friend from college or high school on facebook.  It has happened to me a lot.  I remember classmates of mine from my freshman year in college that left at semester.  The next thing you know we are “friends” on facebook and I am speed reading through the last four years of their lives.  I am doing this by viewing all the pictures they have posted, their info they made available and by sending messages back and forth.  It is crazy how life moves for some people.

With that in mind I realized that maybe I could do some investigating and see if I could find some of these former teachers of mine.  I want to hopefully just e-mail with them and see how they are doing.  I also want to let them know how much they influenced my life and helped shape who I am today.  I started jotting down a few of the names that I remembered on a piece of paper.  I remember their physical features better than their first names, mostly faces.  However, I do remember their last names which helped get me started.

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Why are Parents, their Friends and my Professors on Facebook?

23 Jun
E.Mendoza

E.Mendoza

I remember the buzz about this facebook thing back when I was in college.  Southwestern College is a small private college in the middle of a small rural city.  At the time facebook was a social media network for students in colleges in the east coast.  It was hard to get them to allow your school to join.  One of my classmates e-mailed back and forth with someone from there and Southwestern College was finally set-up.  What I mean by set-up is that you had to use a school issued e-mail to join.  In our case we had to have an SCKANS.EDU domain at the end of our e-mail account.  The first time I logged in I wasn’t very impressed because I didn’t know much about what I was suppose to do on this platform.

Southwestern College issued each of their students a Dell laptop to use through the year.  This was a big selling point (and it still is) of the college because who doesn’t want a “free” laptop?  I know I was pretty excited to get my hands on a brand new machine.  With these laptops you had standard software that came with them.  The obvious ones were Microsoft suite, messenger and the great Explorer browser.  If you were or are currently attending Southwestern College you know how easy it is to get addicted to using messenger all day.  I remember I was logged on 24/7.  This was awesome because I could read messages from anyone who left them when I got around to it.  This was also great because you could get help with homework from someone in your class. And if you are a professor at the college I am sure you know we chatted in your class all the time.  (Except for Tracy Frederick’s class because she made us shut our laptops off!)

The facebook revolution began in 2004 when I was a sophomore in college.  By the time I was a senior everyone was on facebook.  People posted pictures of parties, family, friends and other hilarious things.  I also remember after this social network took off how taboo it was with our elders.  I remember watching television and seeing how parents of some students didn’t think this facebook thing was such a good idea.  Their reasons differed but one of the main ones was that these types of application excuse young people from being held responsible for their actions.  They were especially upset about their little girl’s picture half naked on top of a bar drunk out of her mind.  I am sure most parents believe their children are good mature adults if they are in college.  However, what these parents don’t see or hear is probably best.

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How Important is a Web Site? Really!?

22 Jun
E.Mendoza

E.Mendoza

The world of the inter-web is a beautiful tangled mess, is it not?  Blogs, social media, search engines, pay-per-click campaigns and many other buzz words you have heard in the past make life for a business owner a bit more complicated.  Where do you start promoting your site? What, if anything, can any of these things bring to a business?  It all depends on the type of business you have and the goals you have for your business.  These Web 2.0 technologies are not suitable for all business models.  However, I am a true believer that the more you do on the web the more exposure your business will get.  You are probably thinking, well duh!? This seems like a logical thought process but people waste a lot of money and effort doing things the wrong way on their web promotion efforts.

A lot of business owners think that because they have a web site this will automatically bring them more business or exposure.  In my opinion, you have to work at developing and maintaining a web site that will produce something that you are looking for your business.  This can be an online sale if you have e-commerce capabilities, a new lead and brand recognition among other things.  I have been “doing the internet” as one of my bosses put it since I was 18 years old and a lot has changed.  With that said I have encountered clients with web sites that have not been touched since the 90’s.  There have been exponential improvements to internet technology in the last couple of years alone.  A client like this is in desperate need of improvements but they don’t want to “mess anything up” because they might get a comment or two from someone that visited the site.

If you are a business owner and have a web site please ask whoever works on your web site to tell you what kind of technology your web site runs on.  If you are wondering what to ask see if they are using a Content Management System, Cascading Style Sheets instead of tables and have them give you a report of online visitors to your site for the last month.  Unless you are a tech savvy business person and kept an eye on all of this technology over the last few years chances are you won’t get some of that information.

Your business web site is like a front door to your office where individuals can walk-in, take a peek and learn about your business without you ever knowing they were there.

The last point I will make is that while these business owners with old web sites have been satisfied with what they have, their competitors probably have pulled way ahead.  Should you be worried if your competition has a great site?  Yes!  However, the beauty of technology is that if you get the right people on it you can catch up.

The question now becomes, ” What would you do if you had a million people walking past your business office everyday because of the run-down-broken-window-grunge-look it has?” Would you let these potential customers pass you by? Or would you invest a little and make improvements?

If you have a comment please feel free to respond in the comments area.  Questions? E-mail Eloy at eloymedia [at] gmail.com

 
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Posted in Web Site Tips