Why your little music festival isn’t trending in Twitter

As SXSW rolled through Austin this year, a number of people have been baffled by the fact that it wasn’t a trending topic—despite the fact that Twitter first became popular at SXSW a few years ago. The fact that it didn’t become a trending topic really shouldn’t be surprising. Lets do some basic math to figure out why…

Trimming Your Passions to Find Your Online Audience

In trying to grow the amount of people “following” me, I’ve often struggled with trying not to narrow what I post online into one specific niche; while at the same time recognizing that targeting a very specific audience is exactly what builds followers. It’s my blogging paradox, if you will.

Delusional Online Reputation Management for Social Media

Let me describe the swirl of thoughts that run through my head whenever I mention a brand name…

The second before I type the company name, I start to consider whether that company is doing any ORM (Online Reputation Managment) and if they’ll ever see my mention of their name.

It’s always my hope that the company I’m mentioning is savvy enough to be actively measuring their brand in social media. After all, I’m making the effort to mention them, so whether they’re listening or not it’s possible my comment will have some affect on their business. (Yes I recognize that this blog is brand new and gets very little attention; but if a tree falls in the forest… it can still be heard.)

Twitter’s Appeal is the Signal : Noise Ratio

As more big names keep showing up on Twitter (Southwest, Comcast, MSNBC) people are get more excited about using Twitter as a means for connecting with real people inside these companies. Obviously everyone wants to be heard and right now Twitter is a great spot for the little guy to actually be heard by the corporate giants.

Avinash Kaushik’s Book Update

Sometimes I don’t follow my RSS feeds for a month or more. Mostly because it’s hard to try and digest all the worlds information every day and if it’s really important I’m sure I’ll catch wind of the news somehow.

Today I opened my RSS reader (Vienna for osX) and clicked on a post in Occam’s Razor (Avinash Kaushik’s blog).

The Paradox of Choice (of books)

Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book by Barry Scwhartz (Paradox of Choice). yet.

The real purpose of this post is to understand how others are making choices out there regarding all the books on marketing, business life / management, ’self-help’; how do you sift through the books and choose what’s worth reading? And most importantly, what’s worth implementing?

Understanding Visitor Intent and Web Conventions

As this blog develops I’m surely going to be tweaking and adjusting various aspects concerning layout / typography / naming schemes / visual hierarchy etc …

Over the last few years I’ve proven my ability to look at a website and recognize “user experience pitfalls” quite easily. On almost any website I visit I’m always thinking of link placement and colors, type spacing, navigation consistency etc… How easy is the site to use? Am I struggling to find what I’m looking for or is it totally thoughtless?

The Forecast is in the Tweet Clouds

I ran across Twitter Grader the other day and noticed a lot of people bragging about their overall scores as compared to others. After looking at a few Grade Reports for various high profile tweeters, I came to a simple conclusion: a Tweeter’s high score doesn’t mean that their tweets actually contain ‘quality’ information.