The whole world is using twitter so why aren’t you?

It’s fun!

There are so many reasons for you to be tweeting these days.  I don’t know the exact statistics but from what I have noticed, Twitter is on the rise and Facebook is on the way out!

Now, I’m not stating here that you should abandon Facebook. That platform has a very specific set of uses.

For my personal uses, Facebook is good for:

1. Browsing through a more manageable list of people to see what is going on in their lives. Most likely, you have added your friends and we can assume that you care what is happening in their lives. But just in case you don’t and you do not want to offend them…you should DEFINITELY unsubscribe from their feed.
2. Posting pictures…Facebook is a great place to have a repository (not suppository!) of your pictures and where your friends can go see what you’ve been up to lately.

Some things to hate about Facebook:

1. We all have that “friend” who thinks that their off-color, or sometimes even racist humor, is something that they should share with the world. Personally, I REALLY don’t like these posts. What do I do? I ALWAYS call them out! If someone posts an ignorant comment on their wall, I feel it is my duty to make them look as ignorant and bigoted as they really are and to point it out to others.
2. Posting can create drama. There are many times that you just want to say you are having a good day. But the whole world feels they have to tell you why their day sucks or ask why you are so damn chipper. My advice…tell them to GO AWAY! Or be super nice and piss them off even more.
3. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Sometimes I just want to send my little sister in college a message to see what is up. Now it is interesting that these young kids are more often of twitter. If I send her a tweet, she answers immediately. If I send her a text….not so much! And if you wanna follow a great person, she is @brookexkaitlyn and she has been tellin it like it is since 1991.

So what do you do now?

If you haven’t tried twitter yet, grab that bird by the neck and tweet its heart out. Next week, we will talk about finding what you want to know on Twitter!

Of course you are! Didn’t you mom always tell you that? 

But are you really special?

I think any of us in social media want to know that we have influence in our network. After all, what is the point of just tweeting randomly if no one is listening? Really…does your network need to know that you are blowing up the bathroom with the stomach flu?

Some tips…

1. First, if you are wanting to be a social media marvel, you need to push out content that your network will find not only interesting, but useful.
2. It is OK to be off-topic. Not everything needs to be the latest and greatest social media ideas. You are human, and your network likes to know that as well.
3. You are on Twitter to grow a network, not be a bot. Nothing bothers me more than reading articles from self-proclaimed social media experts that tweet 50 times a day and just push out old content that everyone read LAST YEAR!

So here is a great tool to help you measure your Twitter influence

TweetLevel is an awesome tool that allows you to quickly measure your influence. A lot of us have used, or heard of Klout, and a lot of people think it is a worthless tool.

This is what TweetLevel says about me.

Head on over and check out your influence score! Let me know in the comments how you do!

Social media consultants, or even enthusiasts, must be able to make the contact and seal the deal immediately! Time is always of the essence. 

How is a social media expert to keep up with everything?

One great tool for many types of entrepreneurs  is a fantastic service called Text Marks.

With Text Marks, businesses are able to create a group and allow others to join. Once your members or clients have joined, you are able to send unlimited texts to your group. And let’s face it. How do most of us still communicate? We text!

With Text Marks, it is easy to build your contact list and communicate to your group. You can add your group number to your blog, website, newsletter, email marketing, etc.

What could be easier?

Give it a try today and see how this simple, yet effective service, can grow your  subscriber base by leaps and bounds.

I’ll be the first to admit it here…I just don’t get the fascination with Pinterest.

Is it just another waste of time?

According to a recent USA Today story:

Pinterest is a visual bulletin board for the Web. It thrives on beautifully simple images of ideas for the home.

These images are grouped together on a user’s page, creating an inspiration board of ideas.

The website is a “virtual pinboard,” which lets users organize images, recipes and other things they find on the Web. When it called Pinterest one of the “50 Best Websites of 2011” in August, Time magazine wrote: “The basic idea behind Pinterest — which lets you create and share collections of stuff you like in any category you choose — has been tried before by startups that didn’t make much of a mark. This time it might take off.”

Pinterest has been around for almost two years, but has seen a meteoric rise in interest over the last couple of months. In December, Pinterest became one of the Web’s Top 10 social networks, according to tracking firm Hitwise.”

I believe that most social media enthusiasts do appreciate aesthetic beauty to a great degree. We like to look at beautiful things on the web, dream that one day these things could be ours when we hit it big, and like to organize our total lives on a platform which speaks to our need to share every minutia of our existence.

Although Pinterest has been around for a while, now all of the cool kids seem to be using it. Personally, I have had an account for a while but haven’t done much with it.

Just like other social media evangelists, I want to be the first to try everything…and let you know what I think about it of course.

But with Pinterest, I have failed. I would rather learn about developing social media from my favorite blogs or news articles.  I’d rather tweet you that I am having a delicious burrito from Chipotle. Or I’d rather spend some rare time with my loved ones.

My big question?

What am I missing? How are you using it?

Everyone likes to communicate, right? If you are planning an event for a group, a non-profit, or even something like a birthday party, there are several channels you can use to help get the people that you want at your event.

Social media to the rescue…

There are a ton of tools out there to help you reach your targeted audience and today I will discuss two.

Evite – Invitations sent via email to your event might sound a little old school, but truthfully, there is practically no other method to target a specific group of people then a personalized invitation that lands directly in their inbox.

The only thing you need to do ahead of time to make this work is have a robust email contact list that contains your loyal group of followers. There are many ways to develop this list through services such as Aweber, Constant Contact, Icontact, etc.

Check out evite.

Twitter – Face it…all the cook kids have finally migrated over to twitter. Young adults these days seem to be much more into twitter than facebook. To use twitter effectively, you need to have the information posted elsewhere on the web and include a link back to your page. You only have 140 characters…so use them wisely.

My takeaway

If you aren’t using various forms of social media to promote your events, you are working too hard and inefficiently. Remember with twitter to tweet often, and change the content of your tweets. You don’t want to bore your audience so use various messages, but always link back to your homepage.

I’d love to hear how you promote your events comments.

Are opt-in forms on a personal blog important? Or do you just find them annoying? I have to say that I answer yes to both questions. You probably have noticed that when you visit my blog, you are greeted with this cute lime green pop-up window that implores you to sign up for my email list. It’s cute, right?

Jay…those forms are sooo irritating!

I agree that they certainly can be annoying. The great thing is that if you don’t want to see it, there is a little X in the corner that will get rid of it.

I’m really not trying to bother my readers on this site. Really mom…I’m not!

Why then?

Personally, I have tried to research this topic a little online and have asked other bloggers that have higher readership levels that I do at this point. Most think that it is a good idea.

And I agree. If you like my blog, I hope that you wouldn’t mind receiving an email so that I can interact with you that way as well. Most of the time that email will contain a link to my newest posts that I think you are sure to find interesting.

Most of the time on this blog, I write posts that I hope are informative to you all and that you might glean useful information to use on your own blogs.

It makes me extremely happy to get a notification that someone has signed up to receive my posts and messages in their inbox. I appreciate all of you.

My final thoughts…

If you have a blog and you want to build your subscriber base, give these forms a try. After all, we write so that others may enjoy what we have to say or find something useful that they may implement in their own social media world. There are many services that you can use to get started. Below are a few of the top services:

I have personally tried these three. There are other great services for email marketing out there. I used mail chimp for a while and very much liked the easy user interface…and the monkey is cute. I ended up going with aweber though. Although it has a user interface that is a bit less friendly and there is perhaps a higher learning curve, I feel like in the long-run it will offer me the most opportunities.

So what do you think?

I’d love to hear what you think about these forms and your experiences with any of these services.

Believe it or not, I think about blogging everyday. You’d never know that from my lack of posts as of late. I think the problem f0r me is that I have way too many things going on in my brain. Rather than sitting down and actually writing, I’m constantly googling different topics and reading about new ideas.  In short, I’m constantly looking for my muse.

According to the dicionary a muse is:

the goddess or the powerregarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like.

So basically instead of sitting down writing, I scour the internet for inspiration and tell myself that I will get to that next great blog post “tomorrow.” I think it all relates back to the fact that I have lots of interests and have trouble narrowing myself down into one niche.

So what makes Jay run? Here is a short list of things that very much interest me:

1. Learning to become a better person, which includes professionally, as a friend, and as a son/brother/uncle/grandchild, etc.
2. My largest interest these days relates to animals. As you probably already know, I have two dogs and three cats. Do I live in an animal farm? Yes. Do I love vacuuming and cleaning up after them everyday? Of course not.  Do I wish that I could take off and leave for Mexico for a month at a time in the summer? Everyday.  But the love that my animals give me more than makes up for any headaches that they occasionally cause. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
3. Becoming a better divorcee. I think I am slowly accomplishing this. I don’t at all miss being married. It was a mistake. I learned a lot and I have changed my outlook on many things. I’d never say that I regret being married. Life is all about learning experiences.
4. My job is a big motivator. After having gone through a divorce recently, emotionally I was not in a good place last year. Although my students did extremely well on their advanced testing exams, better that they have every done, I always felt like I should have been doing more. Apparently it  worked out well and I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself.  They truly kicked ass on those tests and many will be receiving lots of college credit for Spanish courses as they begin their freshman year. Not just testing out, but earning actual college credits that will save a nice chunk of change for mom and dad this fall. I don’t take the credit for this.  It is definitely a two way street. I must teach and they must work hard to learn and progress through their language acquisition process.

My list of goals for the new academic school year are many but I want to list a few out here in public and develop a manner in which I am able to measure my progress.

1. Continue developing my craft so that more student not only do well in my Spanish courses, but also find that passion for the language and culture that made me fall in love with it all
2. Higher test scores…its inevitable. I want my students to kick ass on their exams and feel confident in their abilities.
3. Continue to to develop more interactive activities using various web 2.0 tools to reach students in ways and on platforms that they are familiar with and use on a regular basis.
4. Keep writing.  I really do love to blog and to write.  I get a great sense of satisfaction from finishing a post.  I’ve let my blog readership die to an extent and my goal is to definetely increase this yet again.

So my question to you is a simple one. Have you discovered your muse? What is it that keeps you motivated? I’d love to hear all about it.

Many of us in 2011 are using at least one, if not many more, various types of social media.  Be it twitter, facebook, or youtube, we seem to be learning the eccentricities of others.  Perhaps eccentricities is not even the appropriate word.  Maybe it is just the weirdness of our “friends.”

I posit that through the use of social media, we have come to the point where there is very little left to the imagination these days.  In our twitter feed we often see the great news of others like a new work promotion, the cries for help of parents that seem not to be able to properly carry out their roll, or the mundane like seeing that someone is going to take a shower.

In too many cases we read these status updates of our online friends and think….this person has some major issues.  And don’t tell me that you haven’t thought that very same thought.

Overall, I obviously believe that social media is a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with others, expressing yourself, and for networking, or I wouldn’t have my own twitter account, facebook page, or blog.

I also admit to the occasional post of something like going to take a shower now and then go have some lunch.

So my question is simple…Does social media leave anything up the imagination of those that “know us” and if not, is this a better state of affairs?  I’d love to hear some of your opinions.  As always, thanks for commenting!

As a part-time blogger at best, I like to visit others to see how they write, and what inspires them. It has been a really long day, I am not feeling well, and still have work to do but want to leave you with three writers that I really admire:
Being Cheryl
The Naked Redhead
Redhead Writing
You should definetely check them out…FANTASTIC!

Something popped into my head…these three are all women and all redheads. I never realized I had a thing for redheads.

Ok, maybe idiots is a bit harsh.  After all, I do have some colleagues that always put an inspirational quote at the end of each their communications.  It just DRIVES ME CRAZY!

There are websites galore where you can search for your perfect piece of inspiration to force the rest of us to read every time that you send out an email.

My question is this…why do you think that we are interested?  Sometimes it is bad enough to have to read a boring and pointless email, but then a quote by someone that you don’t even know?

I was wondering around websites looking for something funny to use for an example of an inspirational quote.  This is what I would probably use if I participated in this:

“Welcome to Hell. Here’s your copy of Windows.”

I’m a Mac guy.  What can I say?