Why I Love Twitter and Became ProBlogger/YouTube Famous
By Jacob | May 7, 2008
Last month, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asked his Twitter followers — that includes me – why they loved Twitter. He took those responses and turned them into a video slideshow on YouTube enhanced with a rocking instrumental track.
Check me out around 4:03 AND AGAIN at 4:17. Yeah, that’s right — twice. Don’t worry. I’ll sign autographs at the end of this post. I just couldn’t capture my thoughts in 140 characters.
While most people highlighted Twitter’s ability to create a virtual water cooler or bring a bit of social to the desktop of those who work solo at home, my response was simply this:
I love twitter b/c it keeps me up to date on the latest happenings and makes it easy to share interesting finds.
Before going a little deeper to say…
Most people I talk to are outside of the contacts I have in real life, so I get exposed to things I may not have seen otherwise.
To expand on what I twittered — see, I told you I couldn’t keep it to 140 characters — Twitter has thus far been my forum for geeking out and releasing my blogosphere-hugging link monkey. It satisfies my fear of missing something by allowing me to listen in and respond to the conversations of hundreds of individuals that I admire/watch/read but never meet for coffee.
The real value in Twitter for me is being able to listen in on the thoughts of like-minded Internet junkies. It’s like being a talking fly on the wall in a Web 2.0 startup or a major blog. I find things on Twitter that I wouldn’t catch anywhere else, and I follow others who have interesting things to say even if I can’t keep their blog in my RSS reader due to the overload.
Twitter is also my release for early-adopter-itis. Despite what the walking-two-miles-in-the-snow, non-Internet types might believe, friends from my own generation have not completely jumped aboard the twit-train or the Internet. While Facebook has gone mainstream, I am, for the most part, alone among my off-line friends in my Twitter usage and social network-aholism. I often explain Internet memes to friends and co-workers, but in Twitter, I get to join a cloud of people that know what’s up online. Is Twitter the Cheers bar of the Internet future?
I haven’t gotten the return value of a Scoble just yet due to the “friend divide” that Scoble defined. My growing army of followers don’t yield the huge number of responses that a ProBlogger can amount, but regardless, I have found value in Twitter because the people I follow keep me in the loop and make me, as Scoble said, “smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier” — and better looking.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Web Culture | No Comments »
Anatomy of an Internet meme: Dear Sister from The O.C.
By Jacob | April 24, 2008
First, it was just a silly scene at the end of The O.C. episode “Dear Sister” — I know, of all TV shows to create a meme, THE O.C.
Then Saturday Night Live (SNL) made it into a “digital short” (Sidenote — I’m guessing “LorneMichaelsSNL” isn’t the real Lorne Michaels, but this video is the only copy I found online.)
After seeing it spoofed on SNL, YouTube users made remixes of popular Internet videos based on the “Dear Sister” spoofs like this “Charlie Bit My Finger” remix
From there, it esploded — yes, I meant to say that — all over the Internet. Just look at how many search results you can find for “Dear Sister” now — many of them completely recreated by users.
Has it now come full circle with a remix of scenes from The Office into a series of “Dear Sister” spoofs?
That’s a sample anatomy of an Internet meme — or in this case, a viral video — that I discovered today.
*sigh* The things I do with my evenings.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Web Culture | 2 Comments »
Time to work: Public Relations pitching in a social media world
By Jacob | April 21, 2008
Pitching bloggers, just like traditional media outlets, takes research and significant effort. To be effective, you really have to know your audience and what will interest them.
Off-topic pitches are a bad first impression, and they can stick with you if you are unlucky enough.
With the growing number of social media communication tools and the rampant abuse of journalists’ email addresses, more and more journalists opt to require that public relations practitioners reach out to them through their social network of choice. Bloggers and the stars of online media are leading this movement.
Brian Solis highlighted several preferred contact methods of the big names of the blogosphere today.
Some like Facebook while others are incredibly turned off when you bring business to their wall.
Several ask that all pitches be twittered to them and add a little bonus pressure to PR reps to cram their message into just 140 characters — if the message is really that good, you should not need all 140.
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick prompted Brian Solis’ post after he shared that his favorite method of receiving pitches was through RSS feeds. Bloggers have started to post this sort of information online to help us all out.
Brian highlighted Kirkpatrick’s opinion on getting something outside of the (in)box:
He summarizes what you should do this way, “PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients’ blogs and news release. The full fire-hose of company news and updates for us to pick out what’s interesting, someplace outside of our email inboxes, free of dreadful press release rhetoric (skip to the second paragraph where details usually are, then skip past any executive quotes and hope there are readable details somewhere) - that sounds like a dream come true. I know that’s where I get most of the stories I write about, not from email pitches. Send both, but company feeds are likely to be looked at more closely.”
RSS feed pitching encourages the growing trend of corporate blogging, and in the process of demanding just a feed, Kirkpatrick is also taking away the control, the choice, that PR reps have in what they choose to send out about their clients. Is that such a bad thing? Giving the journalists more info about you on a regular basis and letting them highlight what they will?
Kirkpatrick’s post points out one particular tech-savvy PR practitioner who used Yahoo Pipes to create one massive feed of all his clients. Very clever. I’m jealous.
Read Brian’s complete post for several detailed looks at what prominent bloggers and journalists desire from their PR friends.
As each journalist better defines their pitch acceptance process, it’s on all public relations professionals to do the research.
Almost every blogger that has made up their mind has a contact page or post detailing how they like for PR people to reach them, and off-line journalists are speaking out to inform PR people what they like to see as well.
Find it and follow it or reach out to journalists and ask them what they like before you shoot off an email.
As Brian put it: “Yes, it’s time consuming. But this is about relationships and not about broadcasting spam.” Well said, Brian. Well said.
photo credit: Stabilo Boss
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Public Relations | No Comments »
How to Game YouTube and Go Viral
By Jacob | April 6, 2008
Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s guest post on TechCrunch sparked heated discussion about the ethics of gaming YouTube to get more views.
I am not a fan of gaming the system with fake comments and trickery like changing titles, tags and thumbnails, but there is no doubt that many “viral video specialists” use these tactics to get their videos viewed.
If you really want to generate a following and positive karma for your brand, I think it’s best to let the good videos rise to the top and go viral. Call me a dreamer. Natural selection FTW!
Here’s a little tongue-in-cheek video that shows you how it’s done by the people that brought us Ooh Girl!:
I personally miss the “Wild West days,” as Greenberg termed them, when a great video on YouTube would rise to the top with no tampering. I think the best videos still do, but the space will certainly be cluttered by those who will try to manipulate it in the coming years just like the blogosphere.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Public Relations, Web Culture | No Comments »
Web Culture 101 via South Park
By Jacob | April 3, 2008
If I am going to open a conversation on social media and community building on this blog, we are going to have to discuss Web culture from time to time. Hence, a new category!
Want to know what makes a video go viral? Just look at the history. Here’s a quick Web culture test to start off your education–or continue it. South Park recently tackled the life of an Internet superstar in the “Canada on Strike” episode.
Can you name every meme/viral sensation featured in this clip?
WARNING: This clips is not entirely “family friendly.” It IS South Park after all.
Bonus points if you knew what a meme was before reading this post. Maybe we can all learn something from South Park after all.
via Veronica Belmont’s Pownce sharing 
(You do know Pownce, don’t you?)
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Web Culture | No Comments »
AJAXed with