Day Five: Twitter & tequila!

Pee Wee Herman Demonstrates How to Get Ones Message Across

Did you know that the average person spends a superficial 3 mins and 4 secs digesting news on their favorite news sites? (source:The Pew Foundation "State of the News 2010")

Not only are we spending next to no time gathering news info...we're not interested in hearing the full story; apparently, these days, we only read headlines. Perhaps this goes some way to explain the success of twitter.com, which we must confess we've been using pretty passively - up to now - as a sophisticated news feed service and event planner.

Twitter is neat because it doubly pre-qualifies stories; not only can you select by interest area i.e. Art, or Design, but info can be further pre-qualified because you choose the info sources you trust (venerable institutions, legacy media or simply fave places to hang out). In twitter dialect you "follow" these people and/or places. And the best news of all is that these tweets are economical, headlines only, max-ing out at 140 characters inc URL links (conveniently twitter abbreviates URLs, so as not to squander your character allowance.)

Another smart feature on twitter is the DM facility (sorry to say we've lapsed into twitter lingo). DM-ing is to tweeting, as chatting 1-to-1 on Facebook is to posting on a person's wall.

Pretentious?

Nous..?

We've decided to take the bull by the horns and add that innocuous blue twitter button to our blog. We're not convinced that anyone else is out there in cyberspace listening to us, but if any of you are twitter novices and fancy tweeting (under the radar), then let's give it a go...this is not highbrow stuff.

So here's our link to Twitter. Be gentle with us peeps.



(If you want to join the twittering classes, it's easy to do this yourself. After you've registered at Twitter.com and you're on your home page, scroll down to the bottom of that page, select "goodies", then select "buttons". It's really that straightforward.)

Racing ahead
We wanted to end with a cute animation from Wacky Races. Found a wonderful website run by a couple of Hanna Barbara acolytes who sat down (separately), watched all 34 episodes of the cartoon and counted who won most frequently. They then compared notes and published a table. So who would you put your money on? Peter Perfect, Dastardly & Mutley, or good ol' Penelope Pitstop driving the Pussycat Wagon? And the winner is...

Having (almost) mastered embedding animations (a.k.a. gifs), we now feel quietly confident that audio and home video will be a breeze. But that's a story for another day...and a second shot of Tequila.

Posted by: Claire

Day Four: The Good The Bad and the Ugly of Facebook

Depending on who you ask, Facebook has somewhere between 100,000,000 and 400,000,000 users. That's an awful lot of people and a true cross section of the world. This means a wide variety of usage styles and a panoply of posts. We have broken them down in to three basic categories:

The Good



Thanks to our friends at Headhouse Books for sharing their experience using Facebook as a marketing tool. Here is what we learned from them:

FB is an amazing way to communicate with existing customers. It is the utmost in targeted marketing, since all of the "Fans" want information about your business and are interested in your products and services. Considering the costs of direct mail, billboards, and other traditional methods of advertising which are expensive and diffuse, Facebook is far and away the most effective and cost effective mode of customer outreach. It is also instant; if an event is cancelled or a hot new product has arrived customers know immediately. And the potential for overnight exponential growth is absolute. Fans are often willing to pass on your page to others, and this creates tremendous opportunity for expansion and exposure.



The Bad





Bad Posts are Boring Posts. I'm not the least bit interested in my own laundry; why would I want to read about yours? Ditto what you had for breakfast, where your dog peed, and whether you are feeling energetic or lethargic at a given moment. Finally, unlike cheese, pasta, and good company, Facebook and wine do not mix. (at least not in excess.) Beware of indiscreet posts; they are admissible in a court of law, not to mention the water cooler corner at work tomorrow.

The Ugly


These are the people who post material about their colon surgery, their marital woes, or their ferret's folliculitis. If you have the misfortune to have "Friended" such a person, we highly recommend a break-up.

And finally, we liked the following, a rather amusing and sardonic assessment of Facebook comments and their translations. Thank you, trueslant.com.


PS We've had a couple of questions about how to follow our blog. See that FOLLOW icon in the upper right margin of the blog next to the video clip? Click it, and proceed as directed. And here's a blogger resource with further details on following.

Posted by: Keri

Day Three: From I'm a dodo to have a go-go

In Disney's universe, friendly bluebirds are ubiquitous; they accompany Brer Rabbit on his woodland walks, dress Cinderella in couture and tidy up after the slatternly Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in their respective cottages. Hardly surprising then that twitter.com uses this iconic bird to give form to its version of instant messaging. Twitter seems to be all the rage. You're either in the know, or you're not. Devotees even seem to have their own cozy lingo, but it's not as scary as all that...




Twitter is sometimes called a "micro-blog". It provides a forum for you to air your views and share your opinions. The difference is that you have a scant 140 words in which to get your point across. We've all heard the PR stories surrounding Ashton Kutcher and his cult band of twitter "followers" - an understandable phenomenon for celebrity gossip is addictive (People magazine has some 3.75m readers). But what of business users? Is it just twenty-somethings tracking celebs or are grown-ups tweeting too?

Twitter.com does a great job explaining how to test your wings. Check out their kindly tutorial on Twitter101. Here you'll find the insider's guide to the jargon, best practice and a rocking case study on the Geek Squad at BestBuy and how they are using twitter to get closer to their customers Twelp (Twitter Help) case study

Blogging On The Fly.....

One intrepid reader, shortly departing for South Africa, asked us about blogging from afar using a PDA. So we asked our tech support guy (and babysitter's boyfriend) who responded thus:

"Quick answer is yes, but I would need to know more information on a few things.

What kind of device?
Is there a stable connection to the Internet?
What blogging software (e.g., Blogger) is being used?

A modern PDA (which have mostly been replaced by Blackberries, iPhones, etc.) would be able to blog if it has an internet connection and the software being used can be accessed from any kind of device."

We also found you a resource for mobile blogging. Hope this helps you live happily ever after......

We did not, however, live happily ever after with our attempt to post audio today. We tried and failed, with Hypster, Last.fm and ITunes. (We won't trouble you with the links as they were singularly un-useful.)

Any suggestions for future success are welcome.

Posted by: Claire

Day Two: Blogging for Beginners

Do you ever feel like you are climbing Mt. Everest? We do.






Well, we built the thing. We are posting on it. But what exactly is a blog? In short, what fine mess have we gotten ourselves into? Can we expect nothing but trouble?

Not big on reinventing the wheel, we came across a great description of a blog that addresses the subject from several angles. Thank you, Parm Farm. We also found a great how to create a blog video. Thank you, YouTube.

Having been advised by some cyber marketing gurus that blogger was the best host in terms of generating traffic because of its connection to Google's ubiquitous search engines, here we are.

The blogger site is pretty user friendly if you know the jargon:

--"Templates" are the ready made layouts; just pick one and name your blog. No messing about with margins, spacing or any of those headaches.

--"Gadgets" are anything you add to the blog besides the textual material; title--which they call a 'header', photos and illustrations, video clips. We just discovered that there is a feature on blogger that enables you to post video, which might have saved us a lot of time on Day One fiddling with the Zoolander clip although now that we are in the know on YouTube's 'share', it couldn't be simpler.


--When in compose mode (aka "posting"), the little icons at the top of your text box are quite handy. Bold and italic are self explanatory. Just highlight the text you want to emphasize and click on the appropriate icon. Spell check works the same way it does in Word or any other program we have used in the past. The green thing that looks like an overweight inchworm wearing glasses is for hyperlinks--just cut and paste the link as directed and you get one of those cool blue underlined or highlighted phrases that enables you to jump right to another place. The mini postcard adds a picture--click it, then click 'browse'. Select the picture you wish to post from your desktop, then click "upload", then "done". When you return to your posting/edit screen, there should be a bunch of gibberish there. (This is html--the language spoken by your computer--don't mess with anything inside the pointed brackets--the things that resemble the 'greater than/less than' symbols in elementary math--your computer will translate the html into a picture, boldface type, or whatever you have told it to do. But not if you change so much as a period.) Next, hit "Save Now" then "preview". If all went according to plan, you should be looking at the picture you wanted to post. If not, try, try again. That's what we do.

Or, put another way, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." --Lao-Tzu

Posted by: Keri

Day One, Uomo vs Mac

Remember that scene from Zoolander?




This is how we feel a lot of the time. Having taken a short break from the work force amidst the tech explosion, we missed a bit. Now that our kids can change their own clothes, not to mention passwords, screen names, filters and the like, we need to play catch up.

Today we set up a YouTube Account, uploaded video, and built this blog all in 1 hour and 41 minutes, give or take a croissant, brioche and two cups of loose leaf Chrysanthemum tea.

We'd like to say it's easier said than done, but it wasn't. The good news is, it wasn't entirely due to our limitations. Despite our fragile self confidence and immediate presumption that we are to blame for the glitch, we learned that this is not always the case. Amid our attempt to sign on, Google experienced a server error and sidelined us for a bit. We persevered, however, and this is what we learned:

1. When signing up for YouTube, it is hard to find a user name. Many are taken and we tried thrice before succeeding. We linked several uncommon words together and finally hit. We will tape the name and password to computer til they are firmly committed to memory.

2. Help page was surprisingly helpful.

3. We spent 15 minutes struggling to copy our video clip. The penny dropped; we were doing things back to front. We wanted to retrieve video from YouTube and post to the blog--so we asked it to "upload". To our way of thinking, this meant that they would send their clip to us. To their way of thinking, "upload" meant we wanted to post our video to YouTube. Duh. Finally, we happened upon a "Share" button, lovely little thing. That gave us the ability to post the clip on blogger, twitter, facebook, and possibly the Vatican website if we liked. Hence, we learned the difference between upload and share. Any scoop on what download means? (What goes up must come down, right?)

Thus ends our inaugural experience with YouGle and GooTube.

Thank God it's Friday.

Posted by: Claire and Keri