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Posts tagged Twitter
Effective Social Media: Listen to Your Customers
Aug 27th
It seems obvious: if you want to be effective in your social media efforts, you should listen to your customers. Whether they’re tweeting about your services, or starting conversations on your Facebook fan page, customers do these things because they find value in the activity…and they want their voices and opinions to be heard.
Yet despite this no-brainer, it’s surprising how many companies and businesses pursue social media simply for the sake of saying that they do it, rather than truly committing to the complex and resource-intensive task of starting–and finishing–relationships that happen at the speed of the web.
The Importance of ListeningDon’t get me wrong. It is important to have a well developed (and executed!) strategy for your social media efforts. Everything from frequency, to platforms, to messaging should be CAREFULLY considered and implemented even more intentionally. Yet for all of this, remember that social media for a business is ultimately about giving. Sure, you want to increase visibility, drive sales, and develop better awareness of your brand (and if you’re doing things right, these will naturally follow). However, the bottom line of social media is ultimately about what your customers, fans, and followers get from you. Yes, it sucks More >
ColdFusion and Twitter
May 28th
Over the last several months, I've gotten into Twitter ALOT. I find it to not only be fun, but it is also an interesting social experiment. I've been surprised by how many great resources I've come across because of my followers quickly twittering something they think is cool/helpful.
Naturally, the next stage in my relationship with Twitter is to crack into its API to manipulate from my own applications. Turns out this is surprisingly easy to do. All of Twitter's functions are relatively simple and require very little to accomplish what you want to do.
So my case study was the most obvious: post an update to my "status." In ColdFusion, the entire process takes 6 lines. 6 LINES! Here they are, in all their simplistic glory:
<cfset update = "Hey, this is an update to my twitter status"><cfhttp url="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" method="POST" charset="utf-8" username="existdissolve" password="mypassword"> <cfhttpparam name="user" value="existdissolve" type="formfield"> <cfhttpparam name="password" value="mypassword" type="formfield"> <cfhttpparam name="status" value="#update#" type="formfield"></cfhttp>
For this function, you do have to create a basic authentication, which merely requires passing your username and password along with the status message. Very simple, but very cool!
So yeah, that's about it. There's a whole slew of functions in Twitter's API, but hopefully this shows More >
Cool Ways to Extend Twitter
May 5th
Okay, so I've been getting into Twitter quite a bit lately. I like being able to just post random stuff for people to read that does not require the length of a blog nor the time investment of an IM.
During my experience with Twitter, I've come across some pretty cool ways to extend it that make it easier and a lot more interesting to use.
The first, and most important, is Snitter. Snitter is a desktop client for Twitter that allows you to do pretty much everything you'd do in Twitter, but from the convenience of your desktop. Currently, it has a cap of a certain number of actions per day, but I think that will change as they upgrade their servers and web services. Definitely worth checking out.
The second is Twitty Tunes. This plugin for Firefox and FoxyTunes (you are using Firefox, right???) lets you post any song that is being played straight to Twitter. Additionally, you can use it to post web pages that you are browsing.
Finally, a new site has launched–twistori–which is a pretty interesting experiment with Twitter keywords. This application simply scrapes Twitter for all posts that contain certain keywords (like 'love, hate, believe, etc.') and displays More >
