Filtering Twitter

 

 

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Filtering Twitter

via A VC : Venture Capital and Technology by Fred on 9/28/07

One of the complaints I hear about Twitter is there is no way to "filter" messages, specifically the ones that come via text to your phone (other than following and unfollowing people).

But what if you want to filter by the subject of the message instead of the person who is sending it?

Twitter quietly launched the first step in that process earlier this week. They call it tracking and it allows you to track the entire Twitter universe of users on your phone by keyword.

Over time I can see expanding this to include many other interesting ways to filter Twitter and I think that's a really good thing.

 

 

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Two kinds of 'don't know'

 

 

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Two kinds of 'don't know'

via Seth's Blog by Seth Godin on 9/25/07

I don't know French. I can't play the piano. I have no clue how to catch a bony spinefish. This is the first kind of don't know. Stuff you don't know because you haven't been taught it yet. Books are awfully good at solving this problem, so are good teachers.

The second kind of 'don't know' is often confused with the first type, but it's really quite different. This is the person who says they don't know how to cook, or that they can't balance a checkbook. This isn't about technique or a lack of knowledge. It's usually either fear or lack of interest. People with this type of deficit won't find the answer in a book or (usually) in a seminar either. You don't learn how to cook from a cookbook.

The answer lies in trial and error and motivation and in overcoming the fear that makes us avoid the topic in the first place.

And why should a marketer care?

You need to care because if you try to solve the second kind of ignorance with a manual or a PDF or a blog post or even a long infomercial, you're going to fail. If you discover that users are afraid or resistant to what you're trying to get them to do, more information is almost always the incorrect response. The effective technique involves peer pressure and support and in changing the design and inputs of what you're doing so that this group is more receptive to what's on offer. For example, internet penetration isn't up by a factor of 20 because people read a lot of copies of Internet for Dummies. It happened because of what peers said to each other over time, and because the act of getting online is a lot easier than it used to be. And you can help that happen.

 

 

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The Great Twitter Experiment

 

 

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The Great Twitter Experiment

via Influential Interactive Marketing by Rohit on 9/19/07

Ok, maybe not so great - but over the next week I am going to become an active Twitter user. I have not been a huge user of Twitter, though I have written before about seeing the potential for using it for marketing. Recently, there have been several other folks also speaking out about how it could be useful for marketing - some in response to Mark Simon's recent article in AdAge calling Twitter "asinine." For my own experiment, I am here at Intel's IDF helping to create content and to capture the vibe of the event and post more quickly than blogging would allow, I am going to be live twittering sessions.

One event wouldn't really amount to much of an experiment, but over the course of this week, I am going to be in San Francisco, Chicago, NY, Detroit and then back home in DC. In short, it's the perfect week to try something like Twitter because there are plenty of things happening for me - both client engagements like IDF, or the Promo event I will be speaking at this Wednesday.

So check out my feed at http://www.twitter.com/rohitbhargava - and add it to your list of feeds to follow if you are on Twitter. If you are among the many who believe that Twitter is just another Web2.0 enabled beta method to waste time ... check back next week as I will post a full recap of my experience and some highlights. It should yield some interesting conclusions over a concentrated period of time.

 

 

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Sabeer Bhatia Enters Social Networking With ApnaCircle.com

 

 

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Sabeer Bhatia Enters Social Networking With ApnaCircle.com

via VC Circle by Sahad P V on 9/23/07

Social networking sites continue to sprout in India although opinion is deeply divided on the viability of such a model in the country. The latest is that Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia has backed a social and professional networking site called ApnaCircle.com [no relation to VC Circle :-)].
A press release says: "ApnaCircle.com is an online social and professional networking site that is created to connect people with people, friends and even unknown acquaintances who live, work or stay around them." Yogesh Bansal is the founder and CEO of ApnaCircle.com. He is a Silicon Valley returnee.
ApnaCircle joins the existing bandwagon of SNS like MingleBox (funded by Sequoia Capital India), Yaari.com, Brijj (professional networking site founded by Naukri), BharatStudent.com (SN for students), IndyaRocks.com, DesiMartini et al. Of course, Orkut continues to lead the pack with a significant user base. Any idea about how many users these sites have?

Related:
A Guide To Social Networking?

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Introduction to Toll Free numbers

Heard about the Toll free numbers, Collect calls …the difference is that Collect calls are for the callers from any location to reach the person at his number where the receiver has to confirm on taking the call (pay for the bill) and then only the call gets processed. The receiver pays for the call bill. And the Toll-Free Numbers help businesses reinforce their brand name and recognition while offering their customers free and easy telephone access to their products and services. The toll-free services generally allows businesses across the country to share the same toll-free number, while offering exclusive rights to the toll-free number for calls originating in the same city, state or country.

 

There is no need to install and pay for another phone line. The toll-free number is set up to ring directly to any existing phone line that one chooses during the online setup process. If one moves in the future or get a new local phone number, one can definitely change to a new number at no additional charges (based on the service providers options).

 

Today, the combination of a Web site and a toll-free number provides businesses a truly global, electronic storefront.  As businesses harness the power of the Web with the ease of use and ubiquity of the telephone, toll-free will play a major role. From its humble beginning toll-free calling has become an indispensable part of everyone's life – for customers as well as businesses.

 

With little fanfare and meager expectations, in 1967 AT&T launched a new product called "interstate INWARD WATS."  Actually, "launch" is a strong word, because AT&T never envisioned the radical changes this product would bring to the world of business.  Their new "WATS" service had been developed as a solution to meet an anticipated shortage of telephone company operators.  The number of collect calls that were being accepted by businesses was overwhelming these operators.  AT&T believed that this new service, also known as "Automated Collect Calling", was a perfect solution, but otherwise had limited appeal.  Nobody at AT&T would have dreamed that by 1992, only 25 short years after initial introduction, 40% of the calls on AT&T's long distance network would be toll free calls. 

 

Customer is the King, and these days it becomes very important for the business to provide every ease to the customer to reach for services.

 

Link:

 

http://www.ciol.com/content/e_ent/km/

http://www.mytollfreenumber.com/mtf/howitworks.cfm

www.anywho.com/tf.html

www.ureach.com

http://www.accbusiness.com/services/svc_tollfree.html

 

 

Madhavi Chalamalasetti,

 

Content Team - BSNL Portal, Intelligroup Asia Pvt Ltd

content@bsnl.in

8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

 

 

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8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

via Influential Interactive Marketing by Rohit on 9/23/07

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity. Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long? As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point. Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used. This post is a compilation of the lessons I learned about Twitter and an inside look at the appeal of microblogging and why smart marketers should pay attention to this trend and some ideas for the possibilities it offers.

1. Broadcast Yourself For Real. This may be YouTube's tagline, but it really applies more to Twitter. As you start sending these messages to update what you are doing right now and gain "followers" - you start to feel like you are broadcasting yourself. When you're Twittering, you're on the grid and sharing your thoughts and actions real time.
2. Replace Invasive Instant Messaging. I don't use instant messaging at work, because it is interruptive. Even when you set your status, you'll often get instant messages that are hard to ignore. Twitter has the same qualities of instant messaging, without the interruptive qualities. As a result, it lets you send quick short instant messages to people that they can view and answer when they have a moment. I found myself quickly using direct tweets the way I might use instant messaging to ask a quick question to one of my contacts.
3. Build An Entourage Quickly. With the easy import feature from Gmail and the relatively low barrier for following someone, I was up to more than 70 contacts in my Twitter account within 5 minutes of starting to use the site. Not bad for a quick payoff, considering how long it would take to build a friends list of that many people for a new user of any other social network like Facebook or Linkedin. Even better, the vast majority of people who you follow will start following you right away.
4. Get Satisfaction by Venting. Throughout the week last week I found myself occasionally annoyed at a stupid ad or a flight delay. I would never "waste" a blog post on these topics most of the time, but found myself twittering them with great satisfaction. Somehow, just sharing the negative experience of having to walk all the way to the last gate in the B terminal at O'hare made me feel better about it.
5. Always Find Out What's New. With Twitter, I knew right away when Matt posted a photo of the guys from our panel at Promo Live, and when Gordon Moore finished his chat at IDF. The running commentary of the latest news from my contacts was actually really useful and somewhat addictive. Longer term, at the very least I'll be sending a Twitter update every time I publish a new blog post.
6. Fills A Gap Left By Blogging. Now that I have gained a few thousand consistent readers, I find myself considering more carefully what I write about. The people who subscribe to this blog invest their time and expect to find something of use ... and there are often times when I abandon a topic because I don't have a strong point of view about it. My blog has never been about pointing out things out there without some commentary. Yet sometimes there is something that is interesting which I would just like to share a link on, but not necessarily write about. Twitter is the perfect way to share those links and a quick thought without spending a whole blog post on it.
7. Highly Useful for Live Blogging. There are several events in the past few months that I have had the chance to attend and live blog. For most, my live blogging consisted of taking notes during sessions, coming up with a point of view and posting a blog post on it. This is what I did at the CCR event, and the Ogilvy Verge event. At Intel's IDF and Promo Live, I tried using Twitter for live blogging instead and found it to be really useful because you can get your thoughts out much more quickly, you can really do it real time, and it forces you to focus on capturing the really key points. I'll be Twittering many of my other upcoming events now as well.
8. Facilitate Meetups. When I was heading to a media event after the first day of IDF, I was looking for bloggers to invite to the event. Luckily Karl from ExperienceCurve spotted me on Twitter and suggested we meet up. This is one of the earliest benefits that I realized some time ago about Twitter, but it was really nice to see it in action. Imagine this blown out beyond cities to destinations and you can really visualize the potential power of Twitter.

So what does this all add up to? For me, Twitter is a compelling platform that can easily become addictive once you start to use it ... a quality that many great sites share. The marketing opportunity here is super simple:

1. Start following people that care about what you do
2. Respond to their messages where appropriate to start dialogue
3. Send consistent and substantial updates of your own
4. Use Twitter as a platform to inform your followers of news they might care about

Today the end of my week long experiment, I'll be continuing to use Twitter and I'd suggest you give it a go as well. Now I need to go and send an update to my group letting them know this post is live ...

 

 

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