Browsing Tag: twitter

    Music, Social Media

    #m2sod … Choosing a “Song of the Day” on Twitter every day

    November 14, 2017

    It’s been fun over the past couple months posting a “Song of the Day” (almost) every day on Twitter. I say “almost” because I know I missed a couple days here or there, always unintentionally. But I’m on a pretty good streak right now — knock on wood — and it’s become something I think about during the day while I’m driving, working, or doing whatever else that lets me listen to music.

    One of the rules I’ve put on myself is that the Song of the Day has to be a song that I actually heard that day. Each night when I go to post the tweet, sometimes I have a song in mind already that I want to post about. Other times, I rely on my iTunes playlist, Spotify playlist and/or my Last.fm account to remind me what songs I heard that day. (Goodness, I love Last.fm and hope it never goes away.)

    And as I scroll through the day’s songs, many times a lyric from a certain will come to mind — a lyric that somehow reflects what was going on in my world that day, or the world that day, so I include that lyric, too. This is much easier to do now that Twitter has expanded to 280 characters!

    There’s almost always a meaning behind the song I choose. I picked “I Won’t Back Down” on the day of Tom Petty’s death. I feel like I’ve picked a lot of songs about death, both before and after my mom died last month. Other songs have had meanings that only matter to me, and that’s okay.

    All of this began sometime around mid-September; I don’t recall the exact date. But I do remember that the first song of the day was REM’s “Man On The Moon.” My choices have ranged from the unsurprising (REM, U2, Adele, etc.) to the largely unknown (Gavin Friday, Lynn Miles, Reamonn, Kieran Goss).

    One thing I’ve enjoyed is the conversations that some of my choices have started. It’s cool to see how my friends and followers pick up on certain songs or artists or whatever. I’m glad I started doing this … and now that I think about, I better go get today’s song posted!

    BTW, you can use Twitter search to see at least some of the choices I’ve made by checking the #m2sod hashtag.

    Social Media

    The Secret to Twitter Engagement

    February 28, 2017

    Brands and marketers have been trying for years to crack the secret to Twitter success. What does it take to get a tweet noticed in such a fast-moving stream of messages? How do you get noticed in a world of information overload?

    Wonder no more!!! I’ve found the secret to uber-enormous Twitter engagement!!

    Have a look at this recent tweet of mine:

    Do you see those numbers at the bottom?? 77 retweets!! 712 likes!!! GTFO, right!!??!!

    I follow Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, on Twitter. He’s an interesting person to follow. Sometimes too conservative for me, and too quick to defend Republican politicians — like Trump in the tweet above — but usually pretty informative and a good balance to some of the overly liberal tweets in my stream.

    Here’s the simple secret:

    All you need to do is find a tweet from a popular or semi-popular account, reply to it, and cross your fingers that Twitter shows it as the first reply under his tweet.

    It’s that easy!!! šŸ˜‰

    In all seriousness, this is the second time Twitter has shown one of my tweets as the first reply under a popular user’s tweet, and both times my tweet has seen amazing engagement. (The first one didn’t come close to 700+ likes, that’s for sure. That’ll go down as my most popular tweet ever, no doubt in my mind.) I have no idea what the algorithm looks at when it decides to put a tweet first among all the replies — mine wasn’t the first reply; I tweeted that 10 minutes after Fleischer’s tweet.

    And by the way, in case it’s not obvious, all of the above about “the secret to Twitter engagement” is humor/sarcasm.

    Social Media

    Second thoughts on social media

    December 11, 2016
    (This guy would fit right in on Twitter these days.)

    Two weeks away from Twitter? Yep, I did that recently. It was two of the most enjoyable weeks of my life.

    Part of the hiatus was because I was out of the country on vacation with my wife, and even though we had plenty of internet access, family policy is that we don’t advertise when we’re traveling.

    But the hiatus was mainly because I’m growing tired of Twitter. When I get on Twitter, I see too much hate, hypocrisy and drama. I see too many people who think they’re funny, trying to crack snarky jokes at someone else’s expense. Too many people who claim to be tolerant, but have no respect for anyone who disagrees with them. Too many people who think they have all the answers and know what’s best for the rest of us. Too much smug self-righteousness.

    Yes, I know I’ve been guilty of some of those things in the past. And all of that is why, for now, I’ve had enough.

    I see a lot of the same things on Facebook, by the way, but at least there I can click “Hide This Post.” And to Facebook’s credit, it’s starting to understand what I want in my News Feed and what I don’t. I don’t see any of that on Instagram, thankfully, and that’s where I’ve been spending most of my social media time in the past few weeks. I’ve also been blogging more in this space — four posts in November! And one at the end of October!

    But as far as Twitter is concerned, I’m not reading as much, not tweeting as much, and when I do tweet, it’s mostly been for work-related content lately. I suspect that’ll continue.

    And based on what I described above about the stuff I see on Twitter, not to mention things like fake news, harassment, terrorist recruiting and so forth, I’m just not convinced social media is such a good idea.

    tweetbot
    Miscellany

    Oh Tweetbot, Sometimes You Make Twitter So Difficult

    December 12, 2012

    tweetbot

    I really do love Tweetbot. I love it enough to spend $20 on a Twitter client, even when so many other Twitter clients — including the official one — are free.

    But it’s missing a couple key features that I loved in Tweetdeck, my previously preferred Twitter client. Tuesday’s events reminded me of one of those features: the ability to formulate a single tweet by clicking “reply” on multiple tweets.

    What happened is this: I got a promotion on Tuesday, being named Editor-In-Chief of both Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. And when the news was published, a ton of super awesome people used Twitter to send me congratulations. (Thx again, everyone!)

    There were so many tweets that sending individual replies just wasn’t feasible. I wanted to reply to everyone, but in Tweetbot, you can only reply to one tweet at a time.

    tweetbot-1

    I started a reply to Drew Conrad, as you can see, and what I wanted to do was also click “reply” to Aaron Friedman’s tweet and have his username added to the tweet right after Drew’s name. And then click “reply” to Bryant Garvin and have his username added right after Drew and Aaron.

    You can do that in Tweetdeck, but not in Tweetbot. And that stinks.

    I had to go back to Tweetdeck so that I could easily reply to multiple people in a single tweet, like this:

    Another thing Tweetbot is missing (that Tweetdeck has) is the ability to schedule tweets in advance. It’s very basic in Tweetdeck, but it’s useful. Since that’s missing in Tweetbot, and with Buffer just launching some serious improvements, I might have to bite the bullet and upgrade to a paid Buffer account.

    But I still love Tweetbot, despite these two missing features.

    madden-twitter-1
    Miscellany

    Twitter Integration in Madden 13 is Interesting

    September 14, 2012

    twitter-bird-blue-on-whiteI’ve been playing Madden 13 occasionally since it came out a couple weeks ago, and one of the cool aspects of it has nothing to do with football. There’s a lot of social media integrated into the game — especially Twitter.

    For example, in the Career mode, when a game ends you can tweet the result — or send it to Facebook. First time they’ve ever offered something like that. (Now, to me, tweeting your game score from Madden 13 is even worse than tweeting one of those stupid paper.li recaps, so I’ll never use that feature … but still, interesting addition.)

    Beyond that, Twitter is very heavily featured in the News Center part of Career mode. This is where they recap all of the weekly news as you go along — what players were injured, what teams won big games, etc. And for each headline, they also show fake tweets from actual football commentators, like this:

    madden-twitter-1

    This is when I first started my Career mode. I assigned myself to be the coach of the Seahawks, so the big news that first week was about Pete Carroll getting fired. And you can see the (fake) Twitter commentary to the side there.

    And then the next story that week was about me becoming the new Seahawks coach, and that showed the same fake Twitter commentary.

    madden-twitter-2

    Those are actual Twitter accounts, by the way — see @MattMillerEA. But it spells out that it’s a virtual account associated with Madden, not the guy’s actual account.

    Anyway, pretty interesting Twitter exposure here, I thought. Not earth-shattering in terms of the game itself, but still interesting to see the integration.