I pulled together a quick primer for twitter over the weekend. It all came from a few tweets that I saw @TheRab make for some new comers that were following him. I figured that a Twitter Howto was due.
Check out HowTo Twitter
Please feel free to drop me a comment with anything that you think it missing. This is meant to to be a primer, not a complete walk through of everything twitter.
A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.
I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.
It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.
Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) over at DigitalCapitalism.com, links to a very inspiring and frank talk from Gary Vaynerchuck in a recent blog post. Let’s watch it here, it’s worth the 15 minutes…
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4[/video]
Kipp calls out what I also feel is the most important part of that talk: Be Yourself. Well Kipp actually goes a bit beyond that, his point is that if you are yourself and are not hyper-concerned with pleasing everyone then you will piss a few people off – and that’s good.
I’m not sure you have to piss people off, but I agree that you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Part of being yourself is being passionate about something. Being passionate lends to having very strong opinions and being able to stand up to others with differing strong opinions. And that’s where you provide value.
So where are you providing value? Who are you arguing with?
I’d ask you to forgive the lack of gusto exhibited here lately, but that’s something that blogs just can’t ask you to do. But I can at least explain why I haven’t been posting lately. There’s a simple explanation for this, Bronto has it’s Fall 2008 Release this weekend.
Is it a product manager’s job to test furiously? to write help docs? to give webcasts? to do a little coding? Well, it all depends on your level of dedication, and maybe a bit on your company too. But that’s one things I really like about Bronto, our dev team gets everyone involved in the process. We all work very hard to get a release out the door.
Being a product manager is about dedication and devotion to your product. You have to be excited about it, and you have to not just want, but ensure, that it is as good as it can be. Of course this isn’t just for PMs, it’s for anyone who can really get into their company. It’s for anyone that has passion for their work.
So for probably another week, I’ll still be hard at work, because I know this release will be a huge step forward for Bronto.
I’ve been somewhat meandering around with this blog. I had aspirations of taking SEO head-on. Really stepping it up and laying out for everyone. But I realized that I don’t have time for that. I think SEO is very interesting, but I don’t have the spare cycles to dig into it.
So I figured to focus on what I do well and have the most passion for: Product Management. But what does that mean on a daily basis, well, I think it means I can get back to reviewing websites and products from a useability, functionality, and strategic point of view. Do they have a purpose and goal that is clear to everyone? Are they just plane cool?
I’ve done this a bit here before, and I had a lot of fun doing it. My new Flip Video camera will definitely help out as well. So let’s make this one stick.
Building on my last post, Chris Brogan just put up a guest post on mashable about building and managing your brand on the web – whether it’s personal or business. Definitely more comprehensive than mine. Definitely worth the read.
Remember, your brand is your responsibility, and it’s not going to happen on its own.
Let me start by saying that I probably visit too many social sites. I’ve cut back, but it’s still quite a bit. However, one thing that I do is always try to get the same name at each one (covati) and always use the same picture.
I know it’s fun and cute to use a new picture of your child, cat, boat, favorite martian, etc. But when it comes down to it, you are creating a personal brand, and that brand needs to be identifiable.
So I would recommend the same for you, if you have a presence in multiple locations, try to keep it the same. Even though they are different services you want your audience to be able to immediately identify you no matter where you are.
Before you start posting on your site you should set it up to have the right types of permalinks for your posts. Permalinks are links that go directly to an individual blog post. They are important because the text that comprises the link actually has an impact on it’s search engine ranking.
In order to get this first step right we are going to have to do two things, create quality post titles and get your blog to leverage them in your permalinks, so let’s get to it!
In this post I’ll be talking about how to change settings in wordpress, but most blogging tools will have similar functionality, and these optimization tips definitely apply no matter what blogging tool you are using.
Learn more about optimizing your permalinks
I just got adamcovati.com up an running today. I’ve seeded it with a number of posts (comments, links, and all) from my previous site that are relevant to the focus that I have here. As I move forward this will be a good resource for all my ruminations and rumblings with respect to email marketing, social media and marketing, as well as other aspects of marketing (SEO/SEM) and branding.
Since I just started this blog, I figured it would be good idea for me to track everything I do to optimize my search placement. Wordpress is setup to help you get there without too much effort from a technical point of view. The hard part of course is continuing to create and involve yourself in quality content.
Look for blog posts coming with information about how I am optimizing this site for search engines, and how you can get your site performing it’s best.
Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at Capstrat, a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:
Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
