Tweet you very much.

logs are a bit narcissistic, I mean by publishing a post you are assuming someone cares about what you have to say.Getting attention may not be the obvious goal of your blog, but it is part of its MO. So here is a post (and statement) that is go a bit narcissistic… I follow the best people on Twitter. My IRL friends and Twitter friends are simply funnier than yours.

So here are some of my favorite tweets pulled from my feed over the past month or so…

My question exactly.

Tyler Hilton, you just won yourself a new fan.

Inappropriate, yes. Funny, hell yes.

Tweets and quakes.

Some people have called this “bad taste” but I think they are being a bit sensitive. Twitter is faster than an earthquake…

Twitter was how I learned about the occurrence of the earthquake, how I got both news and “eyewitness” reports from the quake zone and how I checked-in with my friends on the East coast to make sure they were okay. If I ever doubted twitter was my go-to source for breaking news, I will doubt no more.

Mobile journalism in Greektown.

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Tonight (or last night since it is now 1am?) I got my first true taste of being a mobile journalist. As soon as my “regularly scheduled programming” was interrupted by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, my quiet evening watching Brothers and Sisters was brought to a sudden halt.

I live in a house in the middle of the University of Missouri’s Greektown. “Noise” is a nightly routine. But tonight’s noise was unmistakable – it was the sound of celebration (and as I type it is still going on thanks to caffeine and a great sound system). An estimated 2,000-plus students took to Greektown’s streets to celebrate and show their patriotism. Between loud/out-of-tune renditions of the National Anthem, repetitive “U-S-A” chants, and contraband fireworks, the scene was pretty show-stopping. 

The Kardashian effect.

he Kardashian Klan has power. They are on television. They are in magazines. They are at your local department store. The three (sometimes 11) Armenian beauties are everywhere all the time.

And, unsurprisingly, this overexposure has led to some pretty serious power. But what did it take to prove the extent of this power? Three things: Piers Morgan, Twitter and a close-up.

On Thursday night, Piers Morgan made a direct plea from the host-seat of his new show on CNN for new Twitter followers with the help of his guests Kim and Kourtney Kardashian.

While the show had been promoting Piers’s Twitter account all night and his followers had slowly been accumulating, after a one-sentence request from the girls, Piers’s account saw a landslide.

This graphic shows this dramatic increase chronologically.

The highest spikes occurred just after the Kardashian plea. (via Twitter Media)

The long and short of it.

I tweet. I blog. I write. The constant in all of these actions is “I.”

What is not constant is the way in which I do all of these things. An article I read this month in Wired recently brought this to my full attention.

The article explains the news value of tweets perfectly. It explains…

“These are just short takes, and the’re often half-baked, or gossipy and may not even be entirely true. But that’s OK; they’re not intended to be carefully constructed.”

And the effects of these “half-baked” tweets? The article suggests they drive people to crave reports and analysis (full-baked style). The article backs up this theory by reporting the most popular blog posts are ones reaching at least 1,600 words.

“Whereas a tweet becomes outdated within minutes, a really smart long take holds value for years.”

The way we report news has obviously evolved, but so too has how we write news. In high school journalism we were always told to put the most important information for a story in the lead (because of some historical significance about telegraph lines and the Civil War, hmm…) but today the most important information is put even before the lead. It is put in the tweet giving you the link or the info box under the website headline. Think of CNN articles, there is a bullet point list of story highlights at the top of the story with the most important facts pulled out – you don’t even need to read the first paragraph to understand the beginning, midle, and end of the article. Sure, you may not comprehend the detailed full story, but at least you are educated on it.

The greatest intersection on the blogosphere.

 

ome companies get social media and some do not. Those who do have one thing in common – they establish a brand. Their brands are authentic, personable and brutally obvious. Some of the the companies who I have found doing the best job with this are in fashion. I have conversations with @katespadeNY daily and feel like @bergdorfs is one of my best friends (who happens to have an amazing fabulous incredible e n o r m o u s closet). I think I have fallen for these brands because of the voice they use to promote themselves. You know there is a real woman behind that twitter/facebook/blog account. She literally lets you into her wardrobe and life.

So here are two social media spots in fashion that can teach any company out there how to create a brand and become more than a storefront.

1. Things We Love: The “behind the curtains” website connected to katespade.com

What’s really on Twitter?

via I Love Charts

Watering Coach’s poppies.

oppy flowers may be part of the Wicked Witch’s evil plans in The Wizard of Oz, but they don’t scare away Coach. The popular high-end accessory and apparel brand is making poppy flowers the center of a new marketing project, one with an entirely social media focus. Poppies will be popping up all over twitter, facebook, and blogs – here’s how they will grow…

The Poppy Project is an innovative art project by Coach that celebrates bloggers and blog readers in the spirit of the new Poppy collection. To participate, blog administrators embed a small piece of code in the header tag of their site and a pattern appears on the sidebar which bloggers and readers will be able to interact with through tweets, facebook “Likes” and site visits. The more interaction, the more the poppy pattern grows. Each pattern even has a chance to grow a Coach Poppy purse – if someone finds the purse and clicks on it, Coach awards them a gift.

The entire project is innovative. It combines the strengths of various social media tools and puts them all to use in one major project. Poppy itself is already a fun brand – channeling a design which brings in a young “PINK-esque” Victoria Secret market with a higher-end, designer savvy cliental.  Now, by reaching out through the online community, Poppy will bring in more views for it’s line and more publicity for its entire campaign. It is exciting to see a company not just reach out through social media with a simple contest, but to reach out through social media with an entire line of tools for anyone to use.

Well… almost anyone. I wish I could add a poppy pattern to my blog, but unfortunately you can only place code in WordPress headers if you purchase a domain and WordPress upgrade (both things I will do as soon as I have a real income). In other words, using the WordPress.com free version doesn’t make the cut. I am restricted from fully participating, but I still want to see the Poppy campign take off… so get ready for some #growpoppy grow tweets from me.

Even though the poppies in The Wizard of Oz put her to sleep, don’t be surprised if you see Dorothy embracing the Coach Poppy and maybe even skipping down the yellow brick road with a new clutch or accessory for Todo sometime soon.

Drop cap art from dailydropcap.com

Legal larceny.

Look at them Apples - my very first class in college. Enough Apples and journalism nerds in the room to scare anyone away.

I figured out why companies want interns. They want to steal our ideas.

That may sound mean, but it’s true – it’s legal larceny.

This week I participated in a discussion group about SI.com. A group of interns and I sat around and took questions from SI.com staff. We talked about online use, twitter accounts, video content, page design, mobile applications, and social media identity – pretty much everything any journalism nerd skips class to sit around RJI to debate.

And the discussion was a perfect setting for me – I like to talk, I like having opinions, and I really like talking about my opinions on online/social media. Plus they threw in sports. Screw volunteering for this, I would have PAID to be part of the group.

The beauty of it all was that everyone in the room was exactly like me. Nerd haven. They gave us one question to start the discussion – what do you think of our facebook page – and off we went. The simple lunch discussion turned into two hours of complete brand evaluation. The best part was that our group was the perfect mix. Interns have a facilitating combination of journalism knowledge, millennial generation ideology, understanding of a company’s capabilities, and ambitious attitudes willing to suggest ideas outside the box.

Before you knew it we had redeveloped SI.com (okay, not really – but we did have some worthwhile comments).

SI.com got a lot out of our discussion. I think we confirmed and contradicted some of their decisions – giving them ideas to grow and recreate. But, how about us interns? We had our ideas willingly stolen. Besides that, what did we get out of it?

More than you may think.

We realized that, yes, sometimes we do know more than the bosses. We can see from an outsider’s perspective, but with an insider’s understanding. Yes, we are valuable. They listened to our opinions and genuinely wanted to understand our thoughts. What we said can create change. Yes, we can contribute. Interns can be more than fact checkers, sometimes those little ideas you come up with sitting in your cubicle can actually be put in effect. So, overall, yes – we are earning our pay (at least for today).

If there is another intern discussion in the next few weeks, count me in. I like to talk, but, more importantly, I like what I get out of it.

The inevitable MTV TJ post.

I remember asking my friend Danielle what she “really wanted to do” when she graduated from journalism school.

Her (way too quick) response: “Umm be paid to blog about t.v.” (like she does here).

I remember thinking A) oh that would be perfect for her and B) she is going to be unemployed forever. Oh how wrong I was. Fast forward a year later and has an amazing job with Atomic Dust as their social media guru (aka she blogs, she tweets, she gets paid). But that is not all she has… she has a chance to do exactly (scarily so) what she told me her dream job was.

MTV has finally figured out this “twitter thing” and they want to actually do something with it. The days of the MTV VJ are behind us and the time of the MTV TJ is here. Who is going to be the next La La or Carson Daly? If I have my way, Danielle is (and not just because I want invites to VIP events – she is actually qualified, interesting, and the best tweet-er I know).

MTV has selected 18 candidates, and two more, nominated through Twitter by fans and friends, to compete in an online, Twitter-based challenge to prove their savvy social media skills. Weekly competitions will culminate in a live finale show in New York City where the final five candidates will go head-to-head in a series of elimination rounds.

What convinces me beyond a doubt Danielle should be at that finale… check out her twitter bio (made a long time prior to her knowledge of the MTV TJ competition): “a lover of tv, tall heels, and tweets.” I think that sums up what I want in a MTV TJ.