Millenium Marketer

Many people are clueless about how to use Twitter. While there are many blogposts out there on how to use Twitter, here’s my version of why anyone would join the micro-conversation.

At the risk of being wickedly evangelical, I decided I needed to figure out what kinds of mobile apps are out there for my Palm Centro to stay social. Most apps seem developed for Blackberry or Windows Mobile platforms, although there are easy workarounds.

My tolerance for a 4 lb Dell form factor has been reduced to a spoiled few ounces in a Palm Centro, a small sacrifice to a tinier screen just so that I can be more impulsive and share “of-the-moment” thoughts and keep on top of the latest news where ever I am. Like, yeah, I need to be more ADD.

The best will be during huge events where I can Flickr with the camera, Tweet, e-mail blog while on a train or other moving vehicle, and remember stuff without searching frantically for wireless networks or pray for battery power.

My posts may be much shorter and more frequent after this one, and here’s how:
Flickr
The Centro’s specs say that the camera phone has 1.3 pixels

When I go to Flickr Mobile, it tells me I can email my photos to a designated address.

Your subject line will be the title of the photo, and the email body becomes the photo description

Tweet
Yeah, I know. I can easily receive text messages on my device and I don’t have to worry about downloading program clients. But what is the fun in that?!
So, MoTwit is the application for Palm users.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?

E-mail Blog
Wordpress has a workaround to blog posts from your mobile device. The FAQs can be found here. As usual, WordPress claims that the process is easy: set up a dedicated e-mail address for blogposts and then configure your settings.

The disappointment for the average user sinks in when I see things like:

When you are done creating the new e-mail account , return to the Writing Options panel and fill in the name of the mail server and port number your web hosting provider uses.

Oh damn, I don’t know what that means. WP, can you give me an example?

7/10/08 Update: Setting up a new e-mail address is easy, but I wasn’t too clear how to get WordPress to synch with the new e-mail address.

Remember Stuff, or I mean, the Milk…
Oh and most important, here’s another use for Twitter that is rarely mentioned. Productivity. So, now I can send Tweets to my calendar and tasks to Remember the Milk. That’s uber-social and fun, too. Makes me want to put tons of stuff on my tasks list, although it would be nice to SEE what is on RTM. When RTM gets around to developing a Palm mobile app, then I will be in heaven–Girl Geek heaven.

07/04/08 Update: Tweeting to Google Calendar turns out to be a really nice way to make quick reminders on-the-go since the Google Cal Mobile doesn’t have an update function.

Since this is just the start and I am only learning about all these apps, I’ll say it’s about time to have some discussion on this from more advanced users. What apps have you found really useful for mobile?

There have been some ongoing conversations this week where people are saying, “Should I join Plurk?” or “I joined Plurk…am figuring this out.”

I say, who cares? We’re so caught up in how many people are following us or how many people we are following. I’m bemused at my current follower to following ratio of 73% because I know it’s the high school instinct of “wanna be popular” kicking in every time I take a look at those numbers. Then again, there are a few “spammy” followers who want to say, “Hey I’m a company you should know about” or “I have a blog you should read.”

Followers like “CashGiftingPays”…I’ve now caught up to your games and I’m saying, dude that does not work. I’m getting over the excitement of having followers, so there!

Here is my personal policy on “following.” I think marketers have to pay attention to this because I’m not talking about simply advertising things. I am talking about engaging your consumers.

Let’s not forget that the value in any one of these tools is in the conversations that we have with one another. At least that is true for me. I look at the links that people attach to their brief 140 word bios to see if they are worth following. If you are a business trying to say, “Hey, I’m here, and I’m following you,” that doesn’t create any relevance.

I follow people I admire and also my due diligence in following others back as a thank you. These make up my group of peers and mentors. Then, there is a third group of people who are the most serendipitous: the ones I start having conversations with elsewhere. They make up mainly two groups of people
1) Co-workers, meaning people I work with on projects of interest
2) Fellow bloggers

The value in this is having conversations that lead to events, the discovery of new tools and new insights, and most importantly having a supporter or two in my daily life in a space that is still very elusive to most.

So, before you join Plurk and get all overexcited because you now have a new opportunity to be popular somewhere or follow social media gurus like a sheep following the herd, think it through. (I am guilty of both) but I think in the case of Twitter and sometimes FriendFeed, it was a good move. I am learning so much from everyone.

Do you really need a new app to manage and are you having solid authentic conversations right now? Make sure you have friends, fans or followers that you can trust and give them the quality time that they need. Find quality conversations instead of quality apps.

Also, if you are someone with a ton of followers, does it creep you out when you get a few more? For example, I follow people I respect and/or admire, but would you find this weird?

This in vague response to: Human3rror.com, What the Plurk?

I’ve always been good with foreigners, and was very well known in my college years to be the welcome wagon, give you a tour of campus and the best places in downtown San Jose, and whatnot.

But this is kinda silly, because I see a HUGE opportunity to now welcome digital immigrants.
I owned my first Mac when I was 9 years old (Thanks Dad!) so I guess that qualifies me as a Digital Native. As for Digital Immigrants, that is all you who are wondering “what is social media and what do I with it?”

The first rule of learning about social media is to be open minded. You can’t learn anything if your thought is “Well, that’s not how they did it years ago.”

OK, I agree social media is a HUGE buzz word, and maybe you really don’t have time to get involved. I admit, it is also a very addictive medium because it’s interactive.

But we all have to learn to innovate, and that also means playing nice with the late adopters. There’s apparently this entire market of people who are now familiar with the web when it first emerged in the 90s, and are curious about social media, but are absolutely confused about where to start. Ironically, I write a blog, so I’m not exactly sure how Digital Immigrants will find this post, but if you are curious about what is a:
“blog”
“Twitter”
“Cloud Computing”
… read on. Let’s see if we can make this a good jumping off point for you.
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