Where Personal Potential & Reality Meet » Twitter

Quit Being One Of The Sheep. Build Something For Yourself

Steve — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:33:07 +0000

Today is sort of a rant. Sometimes I just can’t take it anymore and I have to let off some steam. Because I spend a stupid amount of time on the internet, combine that with some Adult A.D.D. (loss of focus) and I see things on the internet that I consider downright stupid. I’m no genius either, if I were, I’d have figured out how to blog from the beaches on the French Riviera. As it is, I’m sitting here in my office at home no where near as successful as those I’m getting ready to rant about.

I refuse to be one of the sheep.

As some of you may know, I’m not a very big fan of Twitter. I was pretty hot about it at first but my enthusiasm cools monthly. I just can’t make myself like it very much. I rarely follow anyone anymore. I have made a decision, right or wrong, that it will not be a large part of my social media unless the owners change the way it works. I’m tired of porn sites following me. I’m tired of anyone following me for purely a way to market their product or business that I don’t want. C’mon folks, I can find a porn site on my own if I wanted to. I can Google anything I want and find it. If you are in Nebraska and I’m in North Carolina, and you make homemade jewelry and I’m a hyperlocal blogger, I don’t see any connection. Do you? I am much more interested in finding people in my local area that I have a common interest with.

How eHarmony could kick Twitter’s ass

I wish Twitter would give me options of blocking people who are not in my geographical area. Twitter should allow me to set parameters that I control how people find me. If I could set controls in Twitter, much like a dating site like eHarmony, only people who had matches would find each other. If you wanted to find more people, expand your personal parameters inside your Twitter account. If eHarmony was smart, they would stop calling it a dating site and make it a social media site much like Facebook. Allow me to start an account and meet other people who have the same interests that I do. As it is, I can’t stop anyone from viewing my updates on Twitter without blocking them.

Stop re-tweeting guru’s of the internet, you look stupid doing it.

When someone who is firmly established on the internet, posts a stupid article, and you retweet this person, it makes you look like a freakin simpleton who will follow anyone. Join the herd of sheep my friend. Please, for the love of our Almighty, STOP IT! I’m not going to mention any names here because I’m nobody and I don’t want it to appear that I don’t appreciate the success of others. I do. Most of the books in my personal collection are about successful people and how they came to be. Why in the hell are you using the Twitter platform to promote other people all the time? I didn’t follow you just to watch you promote others. Do you think I’m so stupid that I don’t already know about the Guru you are promoting?

How does it make you feel when you are one of 375 retweets?

Did you just alert me to the breaking news story about the cure for cancer? No you didn’t. Guess what you did? You just retweeted an article from an internet fake who appears to have cut & pasted paragraphs from a Tony Robbins paperback. Do you realize what a sheep you are when you are one of 375 re-tweets? Do you really think anyone cares when you are comment number 117 at the bottom of a useless article about how to manage your personal brand? When you retweet, did you actually read the article and determine that it was important enough to divert my attention and click your link? If I’m following you, I probably have enough faith in you that you will alert me to thoughtful or funny articles that will enhance my knowledge or maybe give me a good chuckle or a cool video. Guess what, I just un-followed you for filling my Tweetdeck with pure crap. 99% of the time when you re-tweet you look re-tarded. I’ll probably catch hell for that remark. I hope I do, at least then I can interact with you directly and we can have some real Social Media.

So you want to be part of the herd and promote the Big Boys

Ok, I realize that some folks just need to be accepted. Promote this guy, David Risley, 6 Figure Blogger. He’s an internet success story who actually gives you great useful information. He’s not full of fluff like some of the others. Read and learn. Watch and learn. David is a great videoblogger and teaches you his methods. I also like him because he rants against Twitter at times also. Apparently, he makes a lot of money on the internet. Good for him I say. He gives value and deserves to be rewarded. He’s opinionated. He’s not going to tell you to be all fake and protect your brand. He doesn’t care, he’ll video tape himself riding in his car going to the post office to pick up his checks. To me, that is cool. Check out his video below. Guess what? No B.S. fluff here. This is great stuff that you and I can use. David’s videos don’t show him on a stage in front of a herd of sheep reading his own powerpoint presentations and causing audience narcolepsy. David doesn’t teach you to just think it and have good karma and read BS on a powerpoint and I will create success for your Fortune 500 business. No, he shows you the camera he uses, the microphone he uses. He show how his studio is setup. This is real, tangible not a nirvana I’m trying to create inside my brain.

Do me a favor, alert me to the obscure.

Have you found someone on the internet who is a great writer and is obscure and not quite so famous?

Is this person worthy of a re-tweet? Are you a regular reader of their blog?
Do they give some form of value?
Do they make you laugh?
Do they take photos and you know I like to take photos?
Do they shoot video and you happen to know I enjoy making videos?
Do they have the best yard in Southern Chicago and you happen to know I’m a yard freak?
Have you found a great site for motorheads and you know I own a 68 Camaro that I work on in my driveway?

Please tell me about sites like this one

Pacing The Panic Room is a great blog about a new family and their experiences during pregnancy and now they have had their baby. Ryan Marshall is a photographer who takes awesome photos and if you read him, you will be hooked. This is great stuff. It’s real life. Go look at his photos, they are awesome. I bet you have never heard of him have you? Why? It’s because you have been in the middle of the herd, stepping in all of the crap that the other sheep around you are crapping while all of you are eating the same grass on the same hillside.

Best bet, build something for yourself

I can’t add a lot to this. Build something for yourself. Let me follow you if we have common interests. Tell me about you. I’ll find the others on my own.

I have an email address. I have a blog. I have a comment section and you are not limited to 140 characters. Hell, write me a novel if you want to. Give me a link. Tell me about the obscure. I have a telephone. Click the link below and leave me a message. Re-tweet something deserving of a re-tweet, not the crap you’ve been doing. Tell me about yourself, your family, your dreams, your techniques. I can find the Guru’s on my own thankyou.

**Update** 8/14/09. I saw this on Seth Godin’s blog. He says things a lot better than I do and in much less words. I guess in a nutshell, this is what I was trying to say.

The Initiator

“I’m just here to learn.”

Learning is fine. Listening is good. Consensus is natural.

But initiating is rare and valuable and essential.

How often do you or your brand initiate rather than react? How often do you tweet instead of retweet? Invent rather than exploit?

If you would like to make a voice comment on this article and blast me, thank me, disagree with me or cuss me out, just click the link below and I’ll publish your comment in a player right here in this article. Whatever you do, do not re-tweet this article.

All comments are moderated. Spammers go somewhere else, you are wasting your time.

How To Determine Your Twitter Chances Of Hyperlocal Blogging Success In Your Town

Steve — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:00:44 +0000

There are so many Twitter statistics pages out there, that it’s hard to keep up with them. I should probably start a bookmark folder for all of them I stumble upon but I don’t. I guess that’s because I’m constantly switching back and forth between Safari browser & Firefox. I should get better organized. By the way, while I’m thinking about it, the new Safari browser sucks. I find bugs in it everyday. Firefox rules supremely. Ok, I got that out of my system.

Back to Twitter. I recently came across a new Twitter page called Twitterholic.com. Many of you may say, “Dude, where have you been?” Well, I’m sorry, I just found it. Twitterholic will rank you according to where you live, assuming you have it listed in your profile. The page tells me that I am ranked #1 for Monroe, NC. I use @stevesherron with my hyperlocal blog, Monroe NC. I thought that was pretty cool, but I already knew that I should rank near the top. I live in a small city on the outskirts of Charlotte, NC with a population of around 30,000. I’m constantly searching for people in my town or county to follow. My city has not yet jumped on the Social Media bandwagon. Slowly but surely, they are coming on board.

I see great power in Twitter in the future. No telling where Twitter will end up but I think it will be extremely valuable. I don’t have a billion, zillion followers but that’s ok. I have a little over 300 followers and honestly I don’t see how people obtain 15,000 followers when I check profile pages and websites. I see a lot of junk and it amazes me that they have so many followers. I wouldn’t follow most of these people if they were dropping $5 bills at the mall. Are these people on Twitter full time? Do they have a hired staff that spend all day following people in the hopes that people will follow back? When I come across one of these Twitterers with so many followers, I go check out their web site and peruse their tweets. I may go through a couple of pages to see what they are tweeting about to determine if I want to follow this individual. Rarely do I find such pearls of wisdom that makes me hit their follow button. Occasionally, but not often. I think most people are sheep that see such a massive following and through Twitter Hypnosis they are powerless as their twitter finger left clicks and they slowly exhale as if they just toked a joint. I don’t get it. Woo Hoo, I just became follower 31,973 to this person. I feel such a feeling of acceptance now. If I asked these sheep what the person’s name is, I doubt they could answer.

I thought I would do a little experiment here on bloggerlens. I’m assuming that most people who land here on this site has found me through some sort of search for hyperlocal blogs, hyperlocal blogging or citizen journalism. I would guess that at least some of the readers have their own hyperlocal websites or are considering starting one. Twitter must be in your game plan if you are going hyperlocal.

I thought I would take a random sample of my visitors from my stats and use ip addresses to determine who is the number one Twitter user in their area. I may actually follow some of these people if they are hyperlocal bloggers with my @hyperlocalblog Twitter name. What will this accomplish for me? I have no idea. I do think that one should work towards being the #1 Twitter user in their respected area. Let me make a disclaimer right now. I use my Twitter account for my Monroe Scoop website, @stevesherron, to socialize and gain friends. I use @hyperlocalblog to mostly post my articles from bloggerlens on Twitter.

All opinions that follow are exactly that, opinions. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything, just making a few observations along the way. If I offend anyone, well I’m sorry…grow up.

I’m using twellow.com to determine the top users in a particular city for my findings below.

Geographical visitors to bloggerlens determined by IP Adresses and the top Twitter users for that area.

Should these folks be going hyperlocal?

Greenville, S.C. Duncan C. Wierman is #1. @duncanwierman Over 41,000 followers. Not a hyperlocal blogger. It would be extremely hard to overtake this guy. Duncan actually followed me but I did not follow back. No way I could create a friendship online with Duncan. He’d never see me. He’s a real estate investor and I generally do not follow real estate people. His profile web site takes you to a landing page where he is trying to sell you his real estate course. He’s probably a very nice guy, but why would people follow him after they clicked his web page? He is using his Twitter power on a national level. Can you imagine his media power if he were to take it local?

*No user in top 10 for Greenville, SC appears to be a hyperlocal blogger. The #10 user in Greenville, SC has over 3000 followers. When I checked her blog, she mostly embeds YouTube videos from others and her feedreader shows 74 subscribers. Over 3000 followers and only 74 subscribers on her blog? WTH? This young lady appears to be some sort of designer and only has a paypal button on her blog. She should seriously consider re-directing her energy to hyperlocal blogging.

Moving on…

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mike Brenner is #1. @mikebrenner. Over 8000 followers. Mike is an artist and appears to own a gallery in Milwaukee. His web site listed in his Twitter profile. http://hotcakesgallery.com/. Mike’s website is weak for a gallery owner. I can’t buy anything from his web site. It doesn’t appear I could buy local advertising either. He should be directing all the locals in Milwaukee to his gallery from his Twitter page and become the cultural center of his town. He curses on his tweets. Bad move.

#10 in Milwaukee is a public radio station. @radiomilwaukee. Over 2500 followers and concentrates mostly on Milwaukee.

Moving on…

Platteville, Wisconsin. Andrew Brunner is #1 with 29 followers. @brunnerand. Website listed in his profile. http://www.uwpexponent.org/author/andrew-brunner/.

Population of Platteville listed around 10,000. Andrew, go hyperlocal brother. You could dominate after a while and probably take over the other communities close to you.

There are only 3 Twitterers listed for Platteville.

Moving on…

Port St. Lucie, Florida. Orrin Woodward is #1 with 47,000 followers. @orrin_woodward. Orrin is an author and a speaker. His web site listed on his profile page. Orrin Woodward. Orrin sells a book he authored on his blog through Amazon and embeds his and other YouTube videos. He doesn’t send out a ton of tweets. He puts out a lot of quotes from other famous people. I don’t really understand this. I think when people do this, it’s because they can’t really think of anything to tweet about. I’d rather see a twitpic of someone’s lunch than read a quote from an obscure author. He far overdoes the quotes. I would unfollow him. His best tweet after pages of searching? This twitpic of shark fishing. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Not sure how he inspired 43,000 followers. Who am I to say? I only have 300.

#10 is Port St. Lucie is a Pastor with 201 followers. @myministrybytes. As far as Twitter goes, hyperlocal is wide open in Port St. Lucie. Pastor Mike only follows 21 people. He will probably not be very successful at Twitter unless he increases the amount of people he follows. I rarely follow those with low follow counts and high follower counts. Pastor Mike does not list a web site. Pastor Mike could probably go hyperlocal religion in his community and build a tremendous following.

Moving on…still trying to find hyperlocal bloggers who are using Twitter effectively

Jacksonville, Fla. Robert Oliver is #1. @f4fanthom. 1482 followers with no web site listed on his profile. Robert is in home repairs and remodeling. Uses the standard Twitter avatar. Does not appear to use his Twitter account to do anything hyperlocal or build his own business. This totally does not make sense to me. No web site, no profile pic, nothing special about his tweets. I would never follow him but many sheep have. Robert should be driving hyperlocal customers to his own remodeling business instead of mindless tweets about affiliate marketing and contests.

#10 in Jacksonville, Fla is Jessica, @MsBoricua09 with 105 followers. No web site listed. Attention all people of Jacksonville, Fla…You could easily take over Jacksonville, Florida on Twitter and become a social media force in this city of over 1.3 million people. You are allowing a home remodeler with no web site and a standard Twitter avatar to school you. Someone in Jacksonville, please get off your ass and pick the fruit that awaits you.

Jeremy Cox is listed at #8, @Jeremy_Cox and should be dominating because he’s a local reporter. He’s got 158 followers and actually has hyperlocal tweets in his twitter stream. Jeremy, I’m screaming at you brother…take over Jacksonville, Florida for goodness sakes!

Moving on…

Jersey City, NJ. Maria Perez is listed as #1 with over 6700 followers. @profnet. Maria is a journalist and lists https://profnet.prnewswire.com/ as her web site in her profile. Maria appears to make a lot of hyperlocal tweets but not focused to her community necessarily. She has the experience and know how to dominate if she would focus strictly on her community but a lot of what she does appears to be on a national level also.

I’m going to jump to #12 in Jersey City. He is Zac Clark. @rockertycoon with 1150 followers. He runs a local rock music blog. He has local videos and photos. He’s got the right idea. He needs to get a wordpress blog and should cover even more of the local scenes. He should blog about the restaurant where the music is being played. He should blog about the drink specials and interview the owners. It wouldn’t take Zac long to be the #1 hyperlocal blogger in Jersey City with a niche like local rock music and restaurants.

Moving on…let’s do one more city that has previously visited bloggerlens.com.

Warwick, Rhode island. #1 is Practical Manifesta with over 1300 followers. @practicalmanife. Does not list his name on his Twitter page but has a picture of himself, I presume, on his Twitter background photo. This is stupid to not put your name. Whoever he is, he lists his web site on his profile as http://www.practicalmanifestations.com/. I visited his site and it’s a conglomeration of junk in my opinion. I saw nothing that would make me follow him if I were checking his web site listed on his profile. He’s into Universal Attraction. Must be working with 1300 followers and he doesn’t list his name. More sheep following I guess. His bio says follow me and I will follow you. No thanks dude. See if you can find his name anywhere. Pure snake oil it looks to me but he is #1 in Warwick.

#10 is RI Bridal Event with 324 followers. @specbridalevent. The website is listed as http://www.spectacularbridalevent.com/welcome.htm on their profile page. They specialize in bridal events in R.I. their web site looks nice and they are going hyperlocal in their niche. The tweets they put out are excellent in my opinion. They are mixed with a good focus on the bridal business. They understand what’s going on. If these folks decided to move to other niches in Warwick, they could dominate. I did a random sampling of their followers and they are for the most part very focused on their niche. This is probably the best example I have found today of hyperlocal examples and people using Twitter to their advantage.

I’m very surprised at my findings today. Once again, I’m not an expert at anything but the majority of the Twitter users I highlighted today are not using Twitter very effectively. Many are being followed by Twitter Sheep. Virtually every community in the USA is prime for a hyperlocal blogger of some sort. Restaurants, sports, news, charities, community videos…you name it. I’m a huge advocate of wasting time on the internet. I love to do that, but I also try to balance it with being constructive and building something useful for the future. Your community awaits you. No one in your local area can out-social media you unless you let them. Start a hyperlocal blog, even if it’s just in your neighborhood and join the revolution.

All comments are moderated. Spammers go somewhere else, you are wasting your time.

Using Twitter On Your Hyperlocal Blog

Steve — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:36:31 +0000

This article will be short and sweet, but very important to your hyperlocal blog.

Twitter. Plain and simple. Go to Twitter and sign up. Start using it. There are a zillion articles written about Twitter, so I will not go into the details here. It’s easy enough to find out, just Google it.

Twitter will send traffic to your site. Every time I post an article on the Monroe Scoop, I will tweet a link to the article maybe 2 or 3 times that day spaced out so as not to aggravate those following me. When I check my stats, I do get traffic. I don’t get a ton of traffic but that’s ok. For the most part, the majority of my followers are not from my hometown and I’m sure many of the links I post on Twitter would not be of interest to them. Those folks are not my target either. If you only have 10 people from your community following you on Twitter, those readers are your target audience.

In my case, I joined Twitter over a year ago and didn’t really understand the principal behind it. I use my own name as my Twitter handle. You can view my Twitter Page here. Now that I understand Twitter a bit more, I use it quite often. There is a bit of a learning curve. The premise question behind Twitter is “What are you doing?” Many people take it literally and all they ever post is what they are doing. Do not fall into that. People will “unfollow” you if you never add any value. I could care less if you are at Target buying some shampoo.

Here is my advice to you if you are just starting a new hyperlocal blog. Take out a Twitter name the same as your hyperlocal blog. You can have as many Twitter accounts as you like so I recommend that you take one in your personal name and also a Twitter name for your hyperlocal blogging efforts. For every new site that I start I will certainly take out a new Twitter account and use it with my site.

I have taken out a Twitter account for this blog. @Hyperlocalblog. I have not posted a single remark to it yet, but it’s there waiting on me when I do.

Right now, if you have not already done so, go get a Twitter Account in the name of your hyperlocal blog.

All comments are moderated. Spammers go somewhere else, you are wasting your time.