code is poetry | uber.la

Aug 28 2010

Going short (are you what you can communicate in 140c?)

Category: code is poetry,lifestreaming,social media,tech opinion,twitter way — jmacofearth @ 1:32 pm

Blogging is dead, the short form and short attention span RULE the web. Umm… Really? So let's think about that for a minute.

If you've only got 140c to express your dying words… what would they be?

There's nothing magic about 140c, it's not like haiku or anything. It's just the number they hit upon when inventing Twitter. Now the idea is… If you spent the time you normally use doing statusphere updates (Twitter, TXT, Facebook) and did something else (blog posts, book chapters, poetry) would you have anything more valuable at the end of a week. Or how about at the end of 10 years?

The short form acid test: Have you collected your BEST TWEETS anywhere? Do you have an idea of your best tweets? If you had a best tweet what would it be? Are you adding value in your tweets, or just twittering away?

I come and go with Twitter. It's more a matter of the mood I'm in rather than best "status" format to use. There are times when Twitter is alive with intelligent conversation. And mostly people don't "get" Twitter or tweeting, because they are trying to use Twitter.com to tweet. (See TweetDeck, Hootesuite or some other Twitter-Management tool to get your stream under control.)

So here it is, my BEST EVER tweet. And I'm typing this in from memory, though you can find it captured on this site under Ah ha.

NOW, I am here.

That's it. It's sort of a zen koan. Now being the present moment, IN THIS MOMENT. And "I am here" both being an affirmation of being in the moment, and a compact summary of my philosophy that you need to be LIVE on Twitter and not use timered or automatic tweeting tools. AND the biggest connect is a swipe at my least favorite stream generators, geo-location beasts Foursquare and Gowalla, that often flood peoples twitter streams with an endless line of "I am at…" tweets that make no sense unless you are stalking the person. (Please, if you use one of these tools, TURN OFF your "I AM AT" updates to Twitter. If I want to follow you on Gowalla or Foursquare, I will follow/track you on those websites.)

So is there beauty in your tweets? Is there harmony and language manipulations? Do you make yourself laugh sometimes by what you tweet?

I hope that you can begin to gather some of your best tweets and put them on a page somewhere. Even just to amuse yourself. (Often that's what Twitter does best of all.) And if you don't have any good tweets, ir all your chirps are about going for a Diet Coke or what you had for lunch, well… most of us simply don't care. Your chatter goes right into the same bucket with the folks telling me they can get me 10,000 followers in one week. (Yeah, let's talk about that one later.)

Be real, be realtime, and tweet something of value. That's the extended version of my best tweet.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/going_short

The seven immutable "blogging" rules to keep in mind and then crush!

Category: code is poetry,executive learnings,social media — jmacofearth @ 10:40 am

The short form is here. Twitter, Facebook status updates, TXT, mobile, shorter attention spans. All of these things contribute to the death of the long form, or POST. BUT… if you are coming to blogathonATX you might have different ideas. I certainly do. While I love Twitter and the other channels of the "statusphere" I think I sometimes do my best work up in the 500 WORD range. Your opinions may vary.

Here are a few rules of the trade that I find breakable and I often make efforts to subvert them actively. I thought you might like to consider them today, as we will be sharing some air and bandwidth tomorrow.

Make your posts short.
Always put up your posts mid-morning to maximize exposure.
Write about what you know.
Never, ever go "negative."
Don't do too much self-promotion of your blog.
The blog is a dying publishing form.
Always keep your goal in mind.

That said, please do keep the above rules in mind as you sally forth and blog your hearts out. And here are the short versions of my corollary ideas.

1. Short posts often lead nowhere. One or two paragraphs of summary information with a "What do you think?" at the end… Well, I consider that post spam. Or post baiting. You can do it. But don't be surprised if nobody forwards, tweets, or "best of" links you. Dig in. Be articulate and verbose. Know how to edit, yes, but don't be afraid to WRITE.

2. Post'm when you finish'm. And then promote them a couple ways and a couple of times during the day. If you have some followers who are not in your timezone, they missed your tweet anyway. So tweet again. Sure you might lose some "followers" but that's not always a bad thing. Be afraid to be invisible. Be terrified of being bland.

3. How do you know what you know if all you ever write about is what you think you know? Write about anything that makes you passionate. If you later come back to it and think, "what the heck was I talking about" unpublish it. Or better yet, UPDATE it with your own self-revealing comment. "I have no idea where I was going with this post."

4. Nobody cross promotes boring prose or posts. Don't necessarily pick a fight, but when someone is trolling (being a virtual ass online) or speaking out in defense of something you find indefensible (Hummer love, for example) well pull out the guns and go for it. Don't be an ass or troll yourself. Stick to the facts. Back up your conjectures. And if you are wrong, or change you mind, share that too. But to only write positive posts, would make for some pretty bland reading most of the time.

5. Promote yourself. If you're really good maybe one other person will care about what you write. And remember that Europe and Asia are waking up as you are burning the midnight oil. You might as well tweet to them if you have'm. You can tell if it's working by looking at the stats in the 1 – 2 minutes following a tweet promo.

6. Blogs are the free self-publishing of this century. And there are plenty of blogs that run their course in about 10 posts. But don't give up when you run out of ideas. Good blogs, blogs with WRITERS and POETS are hard to find. But when you do, BOOM, you will understand why blogging exploded in the first place. (6.a Never pay for themes, never pay for hosting, use WordPress and FREE WordPress plugins.)

7. Go beyond the goal. Look further into the future. You might keep your goal in mind within a single post. But expand your goals always. By reaching or stretching beyond what you think you know, what you think you understand, you may find a new voice that you didn't plan on.

Bonus rule: Forget everything I just wrote.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/seven_laws

Some additional lies about blogging:

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Aug 18 2010

The Un-Agency Of the Future: Doing More with Less

Category: code is poetry,community building,connections,teaming & leadership,tools — jmacofearth @ 1:56 pm

In a lunch meeting today I found myself drawing the un-agency chart again. My friend said, "I think your exactly right." I had just given him my speel on off shoring some of the creative and technical services as a competitive advantage for all agency and creative shops going forward.

The off shoring route has some inherent problems.

1. The timezone exchange with Russia and India may cause significant delays if there are misses.

2. Creatively the off shored resources are less than stellar. Some of this is language, but most of it is creative thinking. (Something the US is ahead of according to The Flat Earth model.)

3. Execution may be significantly hampered by language barriers. You ask for something from your team in India, you will get EXACTLY what you ask for. If you are missing a period on your job request you will be missing a period on the returned creative files. And don't even think about spell check. IF they can't read the content they sure as heck can't spellcheck it. Even with great tools, they simply cannot make the necessary human computation to error correct for your mistakes.

4. Process is king. If you don't have a platform to communicate jobs and change requests, get one. (See SocialText or Jira. If you are flush with cash the workflow models in Jive and Sharepoint are good.)

5. Accountability will be difficult. Most of the time it's cheaper to do it again. But the off shore partner has to begin assuming some of the leadership.

6. Pay cycles can be problematic. Now mostly this is problem for the off shoring company, but be aware that net-30 and net-60 contracts from some of the larger clients can turn into net-180 at the blink of an eye. And guess who's left holding the financing responsibilities between work and payment?

I'd love to hear of some successful models that people have used. I have had mixed success thus far. But I'm optimistic about helping a local agency become less local. (No offense.)

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/the_unagency

Tags: account services, advertising agency, advertising and marketing, creative services, creative services agency, creative thinking, marketing agency, offshoring, offshoring creative, online agency, the flat earth, the new agency model, the un-agency model

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Mar 08 2010

Rockin the Tweets: Twitter Tools, Twitter Lists, Stats, Discovery #Twitter

Category: code is poetry,community building,connections,how do i?,lifestreaming,social media,tools — jmacofearth @ 8:13 am

So all the BUZZ around Google Buzz seems to be around simplicity and not having too many followers or having too much noise due to those followers. Here's something I want to let you know. It's not the tool (twitter vs buzz vs facebook) it's how you manage it. So here's a few ideas I'd like to share around managing your social media status-sphere. It really doesn't matter if you are trending towards Buzz over Twitter. What matters is how you use it.

First up: Twitter Lists.

What are they? Why you need 'm. And why your Tweetdeck or Hootsuite lists are different.

Here is my page of Twitter list links: http://uber.la/tools/twitter-lists

So what I would like to ask you, as you are starting to re-frame your social media accounts is this, "If I can't add you to one of my Twitter lists I probably shouldn't be following you in the first place."

There is a 500 tweep limit for Twitter lists. So beyond that you will have to create 2nd and 3rd lists to keep your "austin friends" together in your lists. You will notice I have an "austin friends" and an "austin friends 2" lists. This is not an indication of favoratism, but merely a reaching of the Twitter List 500 tweep maximum. I suspect I will be giving up my "tennis" list or my "cats and dogs" list in the future to build an "austin friends 3" list. But not today. (grin)

RULE of TWITTER ADDITION: before you click "follow" figure out what list you are going to add someone to and then do both. 1. Follow; 2. Add To List.

RULE of TWITTER SUBTRACTION: if you are following someone and you can't put them on a list, perhaps you should consider unfollowing them. 1. Examine who you follow; 2. Add all "friends" to a list; 3. UF, unfollow everyone you cannot place on one of your lists. (Why were you following them in the first place?)

Next: Twitter Tools

Fact: You can't manage Twitter on Twitter.com. You need tools. Aside from the Twitter Tools Matrix, here is the shortlist for Twitter clients I recomend.

1. Tweetdeck; 2. Seesmic; 3. Hootsuite. And more recently, a Mac-only favorite is Nambu.

Next: Twitter Stats and Analytics

While following and being followed in Twitterville is interesting, almost as interesting and potentially more valuable is the tools that allow you to see what people are tweeting about. Example: during the SuperBowl 2010 the hashtags #nfl and #superbowl and #superbowlads were quite popular with tweeters who were rating the advertisements that were paying over a million dollars per 30 sec. slot. So if your ad didn't "trend" within these hashtags you can bet the audience mostly ignored it, or forgot about it. And there were a number of unremarkable ads.

TERM: "Trending." When something is trending on Twitter it means the Tweet volume is so large that it is showing up as one of the top twenty most frequent words being tweeted.

So what tools are my most used when looking at Twitter trends? Here are my top Twitter stats and analytics tools.

1. TwitterVenn (making Venn diagrams out of trends is fun and easy); 2. TwitterFall (a visual browser for seeing hashtags and searches) ; 3. Twitter Trends Map (see the topics that are trending worldwide);

Finally: Twitter Discovery Tools

Finding new people to follow, new trends to track and new hashtags to search for is all part of the beauty of Twitter.

1. Mr. Tweet (who you follow and who they recommend); 2. FriendorFollow (are they following you back?); 3. NearbyTweets (how's close to you and tweeting?); 4. Twittoria (information about your flock)

Take the time to add value to your Tweets. Don't just follow to gain followers. If you can't put them on a Twitter List, don't follow them. Lists will become the new marker of Twitter Authority.

No, you can't ask me to add you to a list. I must discover you and add you manually. Yes, you can ask me, but I'm likely to… consider it first.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/rule-twitter

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The Un-Agency Of the Future: Doing More with Less

∴ A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
∴ Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
∴ The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

Contact John McElhenney - All content ©2006-2010 - Theme by Tommaso Baldovino - Mod by Rick B | my flavors connector

uber.la

Going short (are you what you can communicate in 140c?)

The seven immutable "blogging" rules to keep in mind and then crush!

The Un-Agency Of the Future: Doing More with Less

Rockin the Tweets: Twitter Tools, Twitter Lists, Stats, Discovery #Twitter

∴ A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools) ∴ Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them? ∴ The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

Contact John McElhenney - All content ©2006-2010 - Theme by Tommaso Baldovino - Mod by Rick B | my flavors connector

∴ A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
∴ Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
∴ The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility