As I get ready to leave the job that I’m currently at and embark on a new and incredibly exciting opportunity, I’ve decided to do a little bit of reflection at the suggestion of David, one of my social media mentors. When I took a position as an “intern” at the small NJ agency that I worked at during my senior year of college, I had no idea how much I would learn. Since it was my responsibility to teach the rest of the company about it, I had no choice but to throw myself head-first into the world of social media. Continue reading →
So we’ve all (hopefully) gotten over the importance of the Twitter follower count. Nonetheless you’ve got to have some core group of people you’re talking with or it’s just you shouting at the mountain. So the question remains what can you do, particularly when you’re new on Twitter to get followers (or more accurately, find your community). And so, a step by step guide from signing up to getting your first few followers. This post, of course, supplements TJ’s, on how the PRBC folks decide who they follow.
This might be particularly useful if you’ve got a friend that’s recently decided to join the SM world as part of a New Year’s Resolution (or your client’s CEO is just not getting ‘it.’)
As most of you know, I suffered from a Twitter virus, and just recently took the big step to abandon all my followers, and start a new account. Over a year of developing a name for myself on Twitter, and getting over 500 followers was a great achievement, so it was a huge step for me to start a new account. (If you thought you followed me @ctmichaels, check again, and follow @ctmichaels again) So when I started my new account, I just went into my old follower list and went through and started “re-following” people that I actually knew/enjoyed talking to. Figuring people would be like, “Oh CTMichaels is following me, I need to follow again…” I just started going down the list. To my dismay, instead of followers, I was bombarded with private DMs. Continue reading →
Choosing who to follow on Twitter is like the tagline of any action movie sequel: this time, it’s personal.
Talking to fellow PRBC-ers made me realize all the different barometers people use to decide with whom they interact on Twitter. There is no right and wrong way, I guess, except spam-following. Which is totally doing it wrong. But discussing what makes someone followable or not is, I think, valuable because lots of us still aren’t sure what our personal rules should be. Continue reading →
A lot of hardcore wordy people really hate internet-speak, but guys, I am not one of them! I’m all for language evolution mostly because there’s really no way to stop it, is there? Also, considering that Twitter only allows 140 characters, we now have an excuse besides laziness for our Internet acronyms. Chances are, you’ll run into someone online who’s moved beyond LOL or BRB and you’ll want to know what the heck they’re talking about. So here’s a handy guide for all y’all that weren’t rocking the BBS back in ’94 when all these things got carved in stone. Continue reading →
After recently talking with PRBC-ers Marie and Sherri about how Twitter can sometimes stress us out (and Marie’s own issue), I realized that everyone has their own personal Twitter dilemma. Mine? You might be able to guess it on your own, but I’m constantly grappling with whether or not I should change my username.
I joined Twitter when I was in college, while working at my internship. At the time I (and most other people) didn’t realize its full potential. I just knew that a lot of PR people were talking about it and that it was something I should check out. I also knew that I loved Juicy Couture and that I wanted my name to be in my handle- tada! Jessisjuicy was born. Continue reading →
There doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by that I don’t hear “Hey Marie, you really should get a personal Twitter account.” But, why is that?
If you don’t know by now, I tweet from my work account. When tweeting on behalf of a company, you have to be mindful of what you are putting out there for public consumption. Continue reading →
In a community characterized by comments and retweets, it is often difficult to notice when the SM becomes the news, rather than the news itself.
After reading some tweets the other week, I noticed the frequency of condolences directed towards @military_mom and felt compelled to dig a little deeper.
A short while back, Keith Trivitt wrote a thought-provoking post entitled Are Your Clients Ready for PR 2.0?We had an interesting conversation that started in the comments and worked its way offline to an agreement that whether a company liked it or not, they needed social media. I would love to be able to say that I am omniscient, but who am I kidding? So instead, I’ll simply speak from experience.
Now that that’s out of the way, we’ll start with how social media fell into my lap and turned me into an evangelist for keeping it clean and in the hands of the company’s communications team (PR, MarComm, agencies, etc.). About two years ago, our team was pulled into a meeting and told that the search team was going to use and manage Facebook and LinkedIn, and that it fell under Web 2.0 (remember that term), so we were to leave those sites alone. Continue reading →
It seems everyone hates Twitter lists. Among the top complaints are that they’re just another way to make cliques and make some feel less deserving than others. This is certainly a valid point, but there’s a gold mine of a benefit it seems no one has considered (or shouted loudly enough about) — one of the major upsides may have in fact have helped save Twitter (at least in how it applies to PR/Marketing). There are, of course, some downsides besides the clique factor… Continue reading →
