Category Archives: twitter

Retirement Information at Retire USA

Posted on by
4

Retire USA is growing as a helpful source of retirement information for the USA.    As always the challenges of creating and maintaining a large website were underestimated, but I think the final product is starting to come together nicely thanks to excellent city profiles on over 200 US cities, some great bloggers at our excellent Retirement Blog, and many thousands of individual retirement records in city by city categories of Health Care, Financial Services, Retirement Communities, and Real Estate.

As always any criticism or comments are very welcome.    One of the challenges is the sheer size of this topic – there are thousands of cities of interest and tens of thousands of potentially relevant listings so we are struggling a bit to decide whether to filter all that content or try to be very comprehensive and find ways to include everything we can find.    Thankfully, our Google “retirement search” (see top of page) allows folks to search both our site and the greater Google universe of content for more information.      We also have one of the most followed Twitter Account for Retirement information:   Twitter Retirement

We’ve got some good city by city coverage of all states now, so check it out and let me know what you think!

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Retirement
Colorado Retirement  Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Retirement Information
Florida Retirement Georgia Hawaii Idaho Indiana Illinois Iowa Retirement
Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Mississippi Retirement
Missouri  Minnesota  Montana Nebraska New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico Retirement
New York Retirement Nevada North Carolina
North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Retirement

Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota
Tennessee TexasUtah Vermont Virginia Retirement
 Washington  West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Retirement

President Obama on Youtube answering questions

Posted on by
Reply

The US Presidential elections are much more about marketing more governance, and it’s been interesting as an internet marketeer to watch the brilliancy of the Obama campaign with respect to online media and especially social media.

For example, right about NOW he’s on YouTube answering questions from voters: http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse?feature=inp-gh-SOU

Republican Mitt Romney’s pathetic twitter following is probably an indication of who will win in the coming online media battle for the White House.   Clue – it’s not Mitt Romney.

How to Use Twitter

Posted on by
6

Yes, of COURSE you’ll be doing Twitter soon, so might as well jump on the bandwagon now.  Below are the instructions to the extent you need any – Twitter is, if nothing else, very easy to use.

The normal phases of Twitter adoption are

1. “Wow, Twitter is  stupid!”  2. Hmm, lots of people LIKE Twitter. 3.  I wonder how you do Twitter?   4. I’m tweeting, I’m tweeting!  WooooHooooo!”

I’m assuming you are here in stage 3 of the process and that you realize it’s best to just jump in and do this and there really aren’t any formal “rules” so here you go with general ideas:

HOW TO USE TWITTER: 

1.  Sign up at www.Twitter.com    Easy, takes 2 minutes.

2.   By clicking the follow tag on a person, you should follow a LOT of people (hundreds at first, eventually thousands) who share your interests plus any friends you know who are doing Twitter.   If you are like me, also follow people who don’t agree with you.   I think the best approach is to find interesting people for a topic and follow their followers – this is MUCH FASTER than following people one by one (UNDERSTAND THIS POINT or you’ll spend too much time waiting to follow and click!)

Don’t worry about being picky, just click up to 500 per day until you hit the 2000 limit.   This will only take you about 10 minutes per day.  Don’t worry, you’ll be surprised how LITTLE activity there is on Twitter even with lots of followers.   I, for example, spend only about 10 min a day with it unless I’m bulking up followers – then I’ll spend 30 minutes following and unfollowing those who do not reciprocate.     Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not much of a time sink unless you get obsessed with it.   It’s partly for this reason it’s such a great business tool.

One of the neat things is that you can pretty much post what you like, there really aren’t many protocols.  Until you have a lot of followers (and even then), you’ll be surprised at the low feedback.  I use and see Twitter as more of a public soapbox for shouting than as a serious communications tool, though I love it when it becomes serious as when I’m complimenting a business or reporting a problem, or when I’m an insider to international twitter activity as during the ongoing “Arab Spring” where heroic folks are keeping the flame of freedom alive using Twitter and other social media.

Arab spring is only one example of people using Twitter very seriously.    YOU can take your cause and post links to your pictures (if they are public), make a comment, and then use a tag like this:  #PutAnyTopicHere         .
Using tags allows people searching for that topic in the tag to see your tweets.    Otherwise and in general only your followers will see what you write.
Retweet tweets you like that others make by simply clicking “retweet”.   This is nice for them and also helps you get “noticed”.
Summary of “How to Use Twitter”:
Join,  TWEET,  change the world.

Southern Oregon Tweetup at the Craterian Theater … rocked!

Posted on by
Reply

Here in lovely Southern Oregon we enjoy a very high standard of living but – at least in my experience – really cool parties are few and far between.    However last night at the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford a distinguished group of news, tech, and twitter folks and twitter-friendly sponsors came together to enjoy fine wine, great food, great coffee, sparkling conversation and music, and more.    I kept thinking I was at one of the neat tech blogger parties they throw at the Computer Electronics Show “CES” in Las Vegas every January.

In my opinion it’s very important to the social media environment to create online thanks to both the promoters and the sponsors of great events and I’m sure I’ll miss some of them, but here’s a shot:

Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater – home to fabulous performances all year long.

Brad Nelson is the Craterian’s Production Manager and most excellent social media mad man.

Jerilyn Hassell Pool is an amazing Twitter evangelist, webmaster, and has a knack for organizing parties, especially when they involve twitter.  Tweet Aunt Marvel

Fresco Food put out a fine spread of healthy finger foods.    Owner Alyssa Warner doesn’t just use mobile twitter technology, she’s created mobile edibles served all over the region from the Fresco Food Mobile.     Ricotta Gnochi delivered to your door?    Call Fresco!, or better yet, Tweet them.

Bad Ass Coffee of Medford was serving up several of their fine brews.    Follow them on Twitter for specials.

DJGemineye was picking and spinning some great songs.    Tweet him to make your party much cooler than it would otherwise be.

Wine Tasting was a highlight of the party, and here in Southern Oregon we’ve got some of the best appelations found in the USA.   If you’ve seen the movies “Bottle Shock” and “Sideways” you know how California Wines lept from relative obscurity in the 1960’s to become a dominant force in the global wine scene.   In my opinion Southern Oregon, with rich soil and excellent grape growing weather – is poised to become recognized very soon as one of the world’s great wine regions.

Valley View Winery  | Valley View on Twitter

Abacela Winery      |    Abacela on Twitter

Windridge Winery

Serra Vinyard       |      Serra Vineyard on Twitter

Del Rio Vineyards   |    Del Rio on Twitter

Twitter as Emergency Broadcasting Network?

Posted on by
6

When the Tsunami struck  SE Asia, killing huge numbers of people, I was struck by how poorly information flowed in that region.   Scientists viewing pacific ocean irregularities seemed to be alarmed, but I understand it generally takes up to “hours” for word to spread from those scientists to those affected by the bad news.

This delay seems totally unnecessary in all but the remotest locations on earth – certainly not including the beaches of Thailand or even most islands of Indonesia where at least a handful of people have internet access.

My proposal is that Twitter create an “Emergency Broadcast Network” to spread news of pending trouble both regionally and around the globe.    The system could be as simple as a simple informal network, but I think stronger would be a formal Twitter verification of thousands of credible people who are allowed to broadcast a tweet to everybody in an affected area.     This in turn will be retweeted rapidly, effectively creating a huge swell of targeted “emergency tweets”.

Obviously everybody affected is not on Twitter, but enough people will see this that those folks can then contact authorities and media to spread the word.    This is likely to work *faster* than the outmoded legacy systems such as radio and fax that plague even many “modern” police and media agencies.

Perhaps to enhance the credibility of the network Twitter could very formally assign several thousand volunteers – who collectively can easily be on call 24/7,   the ability to review  “Emergency Tweets” for authenticity, though this could create delays so I think the first experiments would be to assume those authorized would use the power responsibly.

Why not?

Update – addressing some of the concerns expressed:

Reach (number of people you can instantly inform).   This is generally very high in most areas where Twitter use is exploding, though I’m not up on global stats.   Still, all you really need are a few volunteers per region to monitor the emergency tweets and spread the word to police, etc.

Cost: Zero.  Not an issue.  Volunteer base is millions, so the benefits include abundant free help vs high costs of staffing at communications centers.

No Computers / No Wifi  in some areas:   Twitter is a mobile application and works with phones as well as computers.    Mobile access is exploding and fairly ubiquitous.    Obviously this won’t work in areas with no connectivity whatsoever, but this factor diminishes daily.

Medical Traveling and other sites back up and on better server

Posted on by
10

Drama here at the mini web empire over the past few days.   I was critical of Godaddy for taking down several of my sites after an advertising traffic surge of about 9800 unique visits to the new medical tourism blog MedicalTraveling.net put a strain on the shared server.    After the blog post / tweet and intervention by CEO Bob Parsons my issues were very quickly resolved and now I’m on a much better server setup that should be able to better handle the high traffic I expect at that blog.

Still trying to figure out why it took Dr. Bob’s clout to resolve this.  The tech folks I talk with at Godaddy are usually very capable and attentive, yet two of them had insisted to me there was no way to expedite things after what they seemed to believe was a  “network violation” caused by the traffic surge to the new blog.   Uptime was particularly important to me on my new Medical Tourism blog because it’s being reviewed by Thai tourism as my entry in their Medical Tourism blogging contest where finalists will be flown to Thailand for an introduction to the country and to their very advanced medical tourism infrastructure.

So … we’ll see if there is a happy ending to another installment in the great lifetime blogging adventure, and I do want to thank Godaddy for coming through with a fast fix after the initial frustrations of having sites taken down.

FourSquare, Twitter, and Facebook

Posted on by
2

As a self-proclaimed social media expert  (hey, cuz I have a MASTERS DEGREE in Social Science!), I like to think I understand what is driving the latest wave of online enthusiasm.    But I’m increasingly convinced nobody understands it.  Rather, like evolution, we work away from failure and wind up with applications and websites that have *survived* and adapted far more than were “brilliantly planned and executed” according to some online success formula.

Of course predicting Google’s success was easy – they’d cracked the nut of “really good search” and even as others caught up to their quality they’d established our habit of “googling” when we needed good info fast and have reaped the enormous advertising revenue rewards from that early success.     I had more trouble understanding why Facebook was so appealing yet it has thrived as the key friend and family connector in an increasingly social media world.

I remain skeptical that Facebook can drive advertising revenue to the extent needed to ever compete against Google for online dominance, but we’re still *very* early in the big online game and clearly Facebook is rocking in terms of online influence.

As for many, Twitter didn’t impress me initially but after following a lot of people and capturing a lot of followers I started to understand how important Twitter would be to the online social experience.     This was borne out very strongly at CES Las Vegas watching how quickly businesses – even including non-tech businesses like the hotels and attractions in Las Vegas – were using Twitter as a key news, customer contact, and customer relations tool.    As mom and pop businesses and “regular folks” begin to understand how active engagement with Twitter can revolutionize the way we do business communication I think we’ll see a second explosion in use and Twitter will rival Facebook in terms of importance.

The latest in the pantheon of  very popular “social media” applications is called “FourSquare”.     The idea is to know the location of your friends and share your location as well as offer tips about everything from dining to attractions.    The basic idea is appealing and intuitive and the service appears to be exploding in popularity, though I’m finding it hard to use I think in part because I’m a rural dweller and things like this are more useful in urban centers where there are a lot more participants.   Still, it seems to me this only enhances Twitter somewhat, and is not really a major improvement over what we’d expect from more active use of Twitter, which I see as playing (eventually) the a role as an application that manages how people are relating to other people on an hour by hour basis.     Although it’s mostly early adopters who use Twitter in this way now, the fact that tweets are easier than a phone call means to me that eventually we’ll shift from calling to some form of text messaging, the most powerful of which is …. tweeting!

In summary I’m thinking that Google search will continue to thrive and dominate with Facebook and Twitter becoming the key tools for social interaction – Facebook more between friends and family and Twitter between businesses and celebrities and customers / fans.       That doesn’t leave much room for Foursquare to become huge, but the online social space has become so large that even a supporting role can be an auspicious one.

Twitter Outage ? Twitter down? Twitter Problems? ” Something is Technically Wrong ” message ?

Posted on by
Reply

Is it just me or has Twitter been down for several minutes now?   OMG Twitter is down, twitter is down!     In the early days Twitter’s uptime challenges seemed more commonplace.

Part of this post is just an SEO experiment to see if these common Twitter queries fetch some traffic, so to make this a *helpful* experiment I’m soon going to add a bunch of good resources for Twitter in general and for Twitter Troubleshooting:

Twitter Status (appears to be independent of the current Twitter.com problem as this is working for me while Twitter.com remains with an error message “something is technically wrong”)

Twitter.com

Anonymity is so … 1999

Posted on by
5

Hoping to start some discussion here about the role (if any!) for anonymity in online environments, especially when people are pitching sales or services.     I’m starting to think I’m pretty much opposed to anonymous stuff in almost all circumstances because it fosters so many of the bad things in the online world, and helps in so few cases.

At Twitter on prominent guy was pitching for $50,000 in startup funding, then appeared to be retweeting his pitch via … at least one fake profile though I can’t be certain it was fake.    However there’s enough deception now at Twitter that it requires almost as much skepticism as we have for bogus email scams.    Skepticism is healthy and good but we need to *reduce it whenever possible* to create more effecient and safe business environments online.     There is *FAR, FAR* too much tolerance of scammers in their various and sundry forms even as search engines work very hard to eliminate those who seek to manipulate their search rankings.

Tangential point here:  Google – I’d argue very evil-y and non-Googley – worries far more about certain SEO tweaks that have little impact  on users than they do about lying and cheating scammers who deceptively advertise using adwords.     In fact we could not even resolve an issue a few years ago where our India Travel website was hacked and payments made to somebody else for adsense advertising.   Google is a lot more interested in protecting their advertisers [cough Cash Cow cough]  than protecting their publishers or their users.    This point is so rock solid I’d like to debate it sometime with a Google person, for although I have a lot of respect for them in some areas I’m pretty much tired to death of the idea they don’t value advertising dollars above pretty much all else.  There are now *thousands* of example of this.    That kind of hubris very deservedly hurt Microsoft’s reputation and it’s starting to hurt Google’s too, though in fairness they are unlikely to *ever* reach the level of opportunism we saw with Microsoft products and services.   In my book Google remains on balance “good guys” and are likely to stay that way – perhaps even as the competition from Bing.com and search upstarts heats up.

More on this Anonymity topic  after the feedback here I’m hoping for…