Personal and Professional Thoughts on Social Media

Earlier this year, I wrote about Matt, a web application built by the Carsonified team, to solve the problem of posting to multiple Twitter accounts. Matt was useful in that I didn’t have to log into each of my accounts separately. However, if I wanted to view tweets from individuals I was following via both accounts, I would still have to log into each account individually. The same rule applies if I wanted to see who replied to my tweets.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could view all of your friend’s tweets and replies on multiple accounts on just one application?

Will was thinking the same thing as well and asked me earlier this year…

“Out of all the twitter clients I’ve been browsing through, a lot of the same features of being able to post to multiple places at once for example. Nothing that I’ve seen so far does this in combination with being able to see the tweets from multiple accounts; have you come across anything like this yet?”

At the time, I didn’t know of any application that did just that until now. Thanks to Problogger’s tweet this afternoon, I found out about Splitweet. It’s the perfect multi-account Twitter management and brand monitor for Twitter power users.

All your accounts, one place.

All you have to do is create an account then add your Twitter accounts. In a matter of seconds you’ll start to see tweets from the people that you’re following.

Follow your contacts’ tweets easily.

Each tweet is color coded to reflect which account you’re following them under.

Monitorize your brand & reply.

You can even monitor your brand with Splitweet. Simply enter the brand name on your profile settings and hit save, and you’ll start to see mentions of your brand pop up and you can reply directly from the UI.

Overall, it’s a great application for individuals that manage multiple accounts and want more features. It’d be even better if it tracked how many people clicked on a link you twittered like Tweetburner. I wonder how long that will take to develop.

The holidays are just around the corner and soon the malls will be packed with eager shoppers and hopefully a lot of deals. Unfortunately, during this time of year, parking gets rough at the malls and the lines are ridiculous. If you’re not a big fan of the long lines like me, you’ll most likely be shopping online and taking advantage of free shipping from multiple online retailers.

For online shoppers, you can take advantage of TrackThis to receive updates on the location of your package(s) via Twitter, SMS, or email. In the event that your orders are being delivered by multiple delivery services, you can still count on TrackThis to have you covered—TrackThis supports tracking codes for DHL, UPS, USPS, and FedEx.

To start tracking your packages on Twitter follow these simple steps:

1. Go to twitter.com/trackthis and click on the follow button. TrackThis will follow you automatically which will enable you to send direct messages.

2. Send a direct message to TrackThis with your package’s tracking code (must be a tracking code from FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL) first then a short description or title of your package.

For example: 123456789987 Flip Ultra Video

3. Finally, an update on your package will be sent to you as a direct message within twenty minutes. Afterwards, you’ll continue to receive updates each time the location of your package changes.

Now wasn’t that easy?

What holiday shopping tips do you have?

Last week I met up with my old colleagues at a Happy Hour 2.0 in La Jolla. It was the perfect opportunity to catch up with them since I recently started a new job and to mingle with other marketers, developers, and other web people. The only drawback was that I didn’t have my new business cards or any moo cards to hand out. Fortunately, HeyStephanie.com was easy for my new friends to remember and I was able to get by with giving my email address.

Meanwhile, I still don’t have any new business cards so in the interim, I had to find a solution to my business card dilemma. Luckily, I stumbled across MyDropcard.com which lets you easily share your contact info with your phone—for free!

Once you’ve registered and entered all of your contact information at the site, you’re good to go. As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can create two separate profiles; one for business and the other for personal contacts.

When you meet someone new, simply text “drop” and their email address to “41411″ and Dropcard will deliver your contact info directly to their email. You can even add your social network profiles on your dropcard (i.e. LinkedIn) or your blog.

Dropcard also has convenient text messaging shortcuts so you don’t have to waste so much time texting. For example, you can replace the “@” symbol when typing your friend’s email address with a space and Dropcard will know what you mean. And if your friend’s email is on Gmail, even better! Text “drop” and their email address without “@gmail.com” and you’re done. For more ways to cut your text time, check out more Dropcard shortcuts here.

Not only is this handy, it sure beats carrying 100+ business cards to hand out at a conference. On top of that, soon they’ll be offering users more features (i.e. personal logo, attachments, statistics, etc.) for $4.99 a month. That might be helpful for the hardcore networkers.

So what about you? Is there a different service that you use to send contact info to colleagues through your phone? What would you do in this type of situation?

My Google reader was flooded with great articles and blog posts this week and there were a few that I knew had to be highlighted and shared with the rest of you. Want more great blogs to read? You can view all of my shared items on Google Reader here.

Also note that I want to try something new and promote upcoming Web 2.0 and marketing events. Feel free to contact me about any upcoming events or social media tools that you’re aware of or find useful.

Posts

• 10 Prolific Bloggers Share Tips on Generating Conversation on Blogs by Darren Rowse
  
• Five Lessons Learned About Live Blogging by Aliza Sherman
• Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make It Worthwhile by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Social Media Tools

• Add Your Social Network Signature Almost Anywhere with WiseStamp by Doriano “Paisano” Carta
  • Also check out WiseStamp on Twitter @wisestamp
• Backtype.com —BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web.
• CraigsPal.com —manage your Craiglist searches with this easy to use desktop application.

Special thanks to Ashley Futak for her post on Brickfish at the Web 2.0 Expo that was held in New York City last month. To get more information on where Brickfish will be next, contact Ashley at AshleyFutak@brickfish.com.

The Web 2.0 Expo in New York was filled with firsts for Brickfish. It was the first time, as a company, that we were an exhibitor for an event of this scale. It was my first time attending an Expo, let alone orchestrating the whole thing (you would be surprised how much work goes into putting an exhibit together!). It was also the first time we were able to explain Brickfish to a crowd of people who were intimately familiar with Social Media and all that Brickfish has to offer.

We were surrounded by companies that live and breathe Web 2.0, and engaged with people that truly welcome this “new media” and speak in those terms. We were overwhelmed by the number of companies and people anxious to learn something new, and to apply their learning’s to their business models or to their everyday life.

That said…our booth was packed! From the moment the Expo opened until the moment it closed, we were busy sharing the Brickfish experience with anxious listeners! If we weren’t giving demonstrations, we were walking visitors through the Brickfish site, or handing out our new marketing materials.

It was so exciting to watch this start-up company from San Diego emerge onto the playing field with some of the biggest names on the Web today, and to establish ourselves as the leader in Social Media Advertising.

Thanks to the Twitter Photoshop template available at Boinblog, personalizing your Twitter profile to promote your personal brand just got easier. Most tweeps upload a background for their Twitter profile while others take it a step further, like Problogger, and include links to their other social media profiles.

Inspired by Problogger, Boinblog’s easy to use template, and armed with a copy of Adobe Photoshop, I took the leap and updated my Twitter profile. You can follow me at @HeyStephanie.

After getting the hang of editing layers, I offered to help customize backgrounds for my colleagues at Brickfish®—in exchange for Starbucks of course.

Rachel Kay is the founder of RKPR and is an award-winning public relations expert. Check our her new site when you get a chance.

Ashley Futak who is a part of the Brickfish public relations team and just recently came back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York (stay tuned for her guest post on Wednesday, October 1, 2008), also let me update her Twitter background. For her avatar I went to PosePrints then used my digital scrapbooking elements from Keri Schueller’s Organica collection.

To view other Twitter backgrounds that I helped co-workers with, check out @mphillips4ku and @ssultar.

Have fun with your backgrounds and feel free to leave your Twitter link here so we can check them out.

Today’s Guest Blogger is Amanda from This Crazy Miracle Called Life where she blogs about all aspects of life and whatever “random fabulosity” that comes to mind. Amanda is currently in college earning her nursing degree, and in her spare time, she enjoys traveling, creating, spending time with family and friends, and planning her upcoming wedding.

Since it’s Back to School time and a lot of us are getting back into college, I figured what better topic for Stephanie’s monthly Social Media Guest Blog than helpful scholarly resources. Now sure, some of you are done with college or chose other plans, but these things can work for many different things as well.

Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

(Today at Hey Stephanie!)

• Search Smart
• Notes & Documents
• Project Planning
• Questions & Answers
• Ultimate Interactions
• Cheap Textbooks
  

Let’s go!!

Search Smart

Mahalo

• Chunk It is brand new, in beta, and it’s totally rocking my world!
• If you’re just writing a simple essay where a few Google sources are fine, here’s what it can do:

• Are you up against a deadline with an 8-page research paper due in the morning? Working with huge databases and journal articles? Check this out…

• Their site has many more examples, but what this can do in PubMed, EBSCOhost, [insert your major's preferred database here] will just amaze you.

Note Sharing Sites

• Two pretty similar sites, Scribd and DocStoc both serve the same purpose - hosting documents (many filetypes supported) that you can share (or make private) with friends or the entire world (via the sites or neat tools like embedding). The sites even look similar, so you can browse both. You can find all kinds of things like course notes, articles and papers on huge ranges of topics, scanned copyrighted documents (SparkCharts, scanned textbooks and study guides), and so much more. I’ll kind of leave this one at that, but I do want to warn you to use your own personal moral/legal judgment with the scans, and use extreme care as far as plagiarism goes. Just because someone posts a paper on Scribd doesn’t mean you can download it, turn it in, and your professor will be sure you wrote it.
• FYI, SearchDocs.net has the ability to search both sites as well as others, but that’s all it does.
• I’m keeping an eye on sites like ShareNotes and Incredicampus. They have a lot of growing to do, but you might be able to find something, and ShareNotes especially seems to have a lot of potential.

Project Planning

Notefish

• Notefish is a lot of fun. In Internet Explorer or Firefox, you just a need a little browser addon, and while you research your project or paper or whatever it is you’re working on, you can clip bits and pieces to add to the page. You can move things around, organize them, and basically, make your own little scrapbook of plans. You can share it, too! Check out this public page for a good example: Trip to NYC Notefish
  

Questions & Answers

Yahoo Answers

• Clueless on that last trig problem? Confused on a topic and you’d like to talk to a few professionals (or self-proclaimed “professionals”…. hey, we’re talking free here, people!)? Or feeling wise with your new scholarly knowledge and want to help others out? Yahoo Answers is the place. You can’t show up and post your entire chemistry worksheet and hope for someone to do it for you. You can, however, jump right in and search past questions, ask questions of your own, and use this site to explore, get help with specific things, ask for clarification perhaps on a math concept you don’t understand (maybe with an example problem), etc. Make sure you help back though - you lose “points” for asking questions and gain points for answering questions. Note that this is not a homework-help site - it’s a site for asking any question about anything, and a lot of the people there are really great about helping with educational/career/project questions.
• Fluther - another fun, similar site!
  

Ultimate Interaction

Ning

• Ning is the site where anyone can start their own social network for any topic! This has several applications for us:
• Start a course Ning for all the members in your class to share notes, discuss, etc. Many professors are starting to do this as well.
• Search for non-private course Nings already open. There are several professor-headed networks for people who need help in certain subjects or for students passionate about specialized majors. Also, there are several major-specific networks to join where you can make friends, share tips, blog, have discussions, post pictures, videos, etc. (Nursing major? We have almost 1200 nurses on Ning at NursesConnect) The bigger the groups, the more fun they are! (And Ning is definitely not just for school - run a few searches and you’ll find a group for just about anything!)

Cheap Textbooks

Textbook Revolt

• Sick of paying too much for books? Well we all know there’s power in numbers and our generation kind of rocks. So, why not boycott the textbook companies and start using sites like Textbook Revolt? I have yet to complete a successful “transaction” on this site, but I’ve heard many success stories, they just got a new owner, and the more students that join, the more the site will help us all!

Price Comparison Sites

• Two of my favorites are Campusi and BigWords. I never buy from campus bookstores anymore and I lost track of how many hundreds of dollars I’ve saved. Seriously.
  

That’s all for Part 1!

I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget to check my blog next week (Monday and Wednesday) for the rest. I have more links and surprises that you will not want to miss!

Thanks to Stephanie for letting me share my expertise, and thanks, readers, for listening! Feel free to comment with your favorite sites, and if you are struggling with anything college-related that you think the internet may be able to solve, go ahead and post and I’ll see what I can do to address it next week.

(Images from free stock photo site, http://www.sxc.hu)

Companies encourage their hard working employees to reap the benefits of work-life balance, to go on vacation, and take a break from the office every now and then to recharge.

For some of us, getting out of the office isn’t difficult but for the 15% of workers that forfeited their vacation days last year— it is. What makes leaving the office so difficult? One answer that comes to mind is the avalanche of emails that you receive when you get back to the office. Opening your Outlook to find 50+ or even 100+ unread emails waiting for your response can be overwhelming.

Fortunately there’s HitMeLater.com, a cool website created by Philip Kaplan, that lets you hit the snooze button on your emails. Simply forward an email from your inbox to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll resend the email to you 24 hours later.

Even more helpful, you can swap out the number 24 to any other number or day. For example, if I want an email to be sent back to me two hours later, I just forward the email to 2@hitmelater.com. How easy is that?

So the next time you feel like your drowning in a sea of emails, try HitMeLater to see if it lightens up your workload. I know I will.

(Photo Credit: Philip Kaplan)

Special thanks to Jun Loayza, author of Living the Startup Life, for his guest post on the launch of FD Career.

As an undergrad, I played video games during the day, partied hard all night, and just barely had enough time for my classes. My future career was the last thing on my mind. I figured that if I got straight A’s, I’ll eventually find a job that I like and that pays well. If this is you, boy are you mistaken.

The time to think about your career is now. Monster.com and your career center help you apply for jobs. Vault.com helps you research companies. But there’s nothing out there that helps you find out what you want to do career-wise or that helps you get there. Furthermore, most career sites are so boring that you would rather go back to work or homework than to spend time on the site. That’s why we created FD Career.

Our career approach is simple, yet unique - live your life as if it were a video game. Think about the last video game you played. Did you just sit around idly waiting for things to come to you, or did you explore the map, slay demons, and gain new abilities and features? There is a direct relation to real life. Think about what you did last week? Did you sit around, watch TV, and play video games, or are you a go-getter who constantly meets new people, reads articles and books, and looks for every way to develop yourself personally and professionally?

In FD Career, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up. As you increase in level, you gain prestige, get new abilities and features, get access to new areas of the site, and are able to recruit with more prestigious firms. This is what we call the FD RPG.

What do you want to do with your career? If you want to be a Consultant, you can go on FD Career and choose the Path of Business. From there, you can take Quests to level-up in 5 different personal qualities:

• Education - Knowledge in your field
• Experience - Your ability to execute your knowledge
• Leadership - Leading teams
• Social - Your overall social influence
• Initiative - Your motivation and drive to develop yourself

For example, an Experience Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis quest. The user would have to solve a profitability problem that a company is having and submit their solutions online on our website. Our panel will judge your recommendations and give you experience points accordingly. A Social Quest could be to increase your social status and influence using Twitter. The quest could be to increase your number of followers to 100.

We plan on launching our first nation-wide competition this October. The competition will be to create a market penetration and product development strategy for a real life company. The winning team will be featured on our website and could be funded the money to execute their business plan.

The next time you’re watching TV or playing video games, ask yourself, “Isn’t there something more fun than this?” There is, and we have it at FD Career.

I have officially dumped YouTube. He was old, played out, and everyone got a piece of him. I moved on to a player that’s shiny and new. His name is Viddler.

I discovered Viddler from Demo Girl’s screencast on ididwork and didn’t think much of the player until I saw Viddler’s president, Rob Sandie, showcasing how you can customize your player.

We’re talking about customizing the shade and color of your player, a custom logo, and yes—you can even decide where your videos link to!

I’m all for customization and Viddler just took it to the next level. Here’s my custom logo in a recent video did for my company called “Sharing is Easy“. It’s not as cool as Rob’s. You won’t see a guy dancing in the background but it’s a start.

For an awesome step by step tutorial on how to customize your Viddler player, check out Alex Carpenter’s blog. He even has screenshots of other custom logos by Viddler creators.

Earlier this month, our company was invited to be guest speakers at Becky Carroll’s Marketing via New Media class at UCSD Extension. Carroll’s class focuses on how social media can leverage customer loyalty and engagement. In fact, the book that she uses in her course is Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff—a definite must read for any company looking to gain insight and engagement from their consumers.

With that said, we were definitely excited to meet her class (especially me since I’m a big fan of public speaking). We presented what Brickfish® was and how companies can use our platform to launch a social media advertising campaign. Below is the presentation that we shared with her class that night:

Again, special thanks to Becky Carroll and her students for letting us speak. You can learn more about how her students are embracing social media by reading her blog at Teaching Social Media.

By the way, if you’re attending the 2008 BlogWorld Conference, be sure to check out the Creating Customer Loyalty with Social Media panel as Carroll will be one of the moderators.

Every morning our team meets to discuss items we’ve been focusing on, what’s been completed, and projects we need extra time on. This week I wanted to try something different so I rallied a couple of my co-workers to try out ididwork.com. It’s a simple and easy-to-use web app that lets you keep a log of the work that you and your teammates have completed. With ididwork, we were able to view status updates from each member on our team which kept us in the loop during the day.

Fig. 1 Work categorized by tags.

In addition to microblogging our status updates, team members were able to analyze how much of their work was dedicated to a specific tag (see Fig. 1) and how much time was spent on a task. Employees can even send their work logs to managers for feedback and review. These reports can be exported into Excel or a PDF and you can edit your settings to automatically send a report to your manager as often as you like (i.e. weekly, every 2 weeks, etcetera). ididwork also has a graph that illustrates the number of entries your posted in a day or in a week (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Number of Entries per Day.

The web app isn’t going to replace our morning meetings, but it helps us analyze how we can be more productive at work. For example, if ad hoc reports for clients make up 70% of my day, it would be a good idea to work with engineering on how to automate those reports.

For an awesome demo of ididwork.com, check out Demo Girl’s video tutorial below:

Would you use ididwork? If so, what would your tags be?

(Video Credit: Demo Girl)

Special thanks to our friends at BatchBlue for creating BatchBook, an easy-to-use CRM software, that has literally saved us hours organizing our contacts and managing our communications with partners. Not only do they have a remarkable product, excellent customer service, but they have cool t-shirts too!

Your happy customers,

Ashley, Stephanie, and Rachel (aka R3K2)

Special thanks to Jun Loayza, Chief Marketing Officer at Future Delivery, for this post on 12seconds. Don’t forget to check out his blog on Living the Startup Life.

12 seconds is not a lot of time for a lot. You can’t really watch a Youtube video, read a blog post, or even microwave a hot pocket (the entrepreneur’s food of choice). However, in today’s society where attention spans are short and the barriers to meet new people have significantly decreased, short busts of information and messaging are exactly what fill the gaps between the work we do at the office or when we’re stuck with writer’s block.

Enter 12seconds.tv. Think of it as the Twitter for YouTube. If you use Twitter, you know that this is a breeding ground for bloggers and startups to keep in touch, share ideas and information, and promote their products or brand. So it follows that 12seconds could potentially be used in the same way.

While browsing through my friend’s short impromptu videos I think to myself, “This is going to be the next Twitter!”… and I’ll tell you why:

1. 12 seconds is perfect for bloggers who want to convey a simple burst of information
2. It easily syncs with your Twitter so that you automatically post your video link on your Twitter as soon as you record your vid
3. It doesn’t suffer from decision paralysis. On Youtube, you can create a video about ANYTHING. On 12Seconds, it greatly limits your decision making and makes you focus on one core theme for the vid.

For a while I wanted to be a “Youtube star.” We’ve all seen them, those people who have the weekly wrap-up show or some funny little sitcom that they post up every other day. However, I just don’t have the time, let alone the creativity and resources to become a star. Plus, it’s so saturated that even if I had good content, I just wouldn’t be discovered. This is why I’m so excited about 12Seconds! I have the opportunity to apply all that I’ve learned about what sticks with YouTube, Twitter, and blogging and apply it to 12Seconds. It’s brand new so there is no competition, I can stand out immediately, and I can be a pioneer in the types of 12Second vids that I have.

So how can you stand out at 12Seconds? Still a little early to tell, but here are my predictions:

1. Pick a topic and stick to it. Your friends read your blog or twitter because they’re your friends and are interested in you. People outside your network could care less about what you do on your own time. If you want a steady stream of subscribers, you need to become a thought leader on a topic. I predict something similar on 12Seconds. What kind of entertainment value you’re able to present to your viewer is up to your creativity and personality.
2. Start conversations. You’re not able to video reply someone on 12Seconds yet, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do that eventually. But, you are able to do it if you have the person’s Twitter. Just add the “@username” to your video’s title and you’ll reply to them via your Twitter account.
3. Use the blog widget. There are twitter, meebo, and flickr widgets, so why not use the 12Second widget? This is such a great way for you to personally interact with your readership.

I feel that anything right now that is targeting bloggers and providing them with a vehicle to get their message and personal brand out there is hitting at gold. Look at Twitter and Plurk. You can even take Tradevibes as a great example: if you provide a group of people with a tool to distribute their brand or product, the group of people will use it and run with it.

I predict that 12Seconds will be successful, so hurry up and get your username before someone takes it! See you on the channels…

* If you would like an invite to 12Seconds, feel free to reach out to me at jun (dot) Loayza (at) gmail.com

Today’s Guest Blogger is Erin from The State That I Am In. Erin currently teaches preschool special education and shares her thoughts on how she’s managed to incorporate social media with her students and their parents.

I became a blogger shortly after I got married, when I was finishing up graduate school. I’m not really sure why I started a blog then. I didn’t even read blogs at the time. An acquaintance had a blog, and it looked like fun to me. I’d always tried to keep a journal growing up, but I really hate my handwriting and have no patience for writing things out by hand. Plus, I think my thoughts are really important and people should want to read them!

I signed up for a blogger account and spent hours stressing over posting and changing colors and whatnot. I posted randomness about my life (I still do) and gradually began reading and commenting on other blogs. Eventually, I moved from blogger to typepad, from typepad to wordpress.com, and from wordpress.com to my very own self-hosted wordpress blog. I love writing on my blog and have gotten to know so many great people through it! Blogging has become my main hobby, but up until last year, I had never really thought that blogging could be more than a hobby.

At the beginning of the last school year, I became my building’s instructional technology facilitator. In addition to teaching my wee ones, it was my job to teach other teachers how to use the technology we had available to us. Funny how my blogging hobby had actually given me the skills to be qualified to do this. If you’ve ever worked with preschool teachers, you’ll find that they are generally afraid of technology. I actually had to show 10 teachers in my building how to set up and turn on their computers last year!

I knew it was going to be a tricky year. I was going to have to prove to the other teachers that using technology would be worth their time. While talking to another district teacher, I found out that she was starting a blog for her kindergarten students. The idea intrigued me, but I was hesitant at first. What were my preschool special education students – most of whom function at the level of a two-year-old – going to do with a blog? I decided to just go ahead and give it a try. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work.

I spent quite a bit of time on my home visits at the beginning of the year explaining to parents what a blog was. Some parents were naturally hesitant to have their child’s picture appear on the blog, but most agreed to try it. My first couple of posts were just summaries of our days at school with random pictures. As I played around more with the blog, I started adding slideshows, which were a huge, hit with the parents and my students! I also then got permission from every single parent to have his or her child appear on the blog. I loved having the blog as a way to bring families into the classroom, and my kids loved seeing themselves and their accomplishments. I was even able to record myself reading some of our favorite books so that the kids could listen to the story at home!

Overall, my classroom blog has been a huge success and I plan to do even more with it this coming school year. I now have other teachers in my building who are interested in blogging, and I get frequent e-mails from teachers across the country about how to get started. Blogging may have started out as just a hobby for me, but I now have a personal blog, a classroom blog, and a business website that includes a blog. Social networking tools, like blogging, are a great way to get to know people online, but they are also a great way to enhance your work life and build your business.

I work very hard to keep my personal and professional Internet lives separate. If you are interested in seeing my classroom blog or business site, please e-mail me at stateiamin1 [at] gmail [dot] com for the links!

One of the most memorable booths at Comic-Con was the Sony Online Entertainment booth where they unveiled DC Universe Online. There were multiple demo stations available and it created a huge buzz among the crowd of hardcore comic fans. Fortunately, my husband and I were able to get a first look of the game and I have to admit - I’m not much of an online gamer and we don’t even own a PS3 but after getting our hands on the game and experiencing it, all of that just might change.

What had to be the most exciting part of the game was that I could could defy gravity and run up and over buildings and choose whether or not I wanted to be a super hero or a villain. On top of that, I could create my own legion or league of super heroes or villains. What type of character would you create? Would you be good or evil?

Check out the DC Universe video from Mahalo Daily below:

(Video Credit: Mahalodotcom)

If I had to award one costume from Comic-Con as the most entertaining, it would go to Dexter and his tribute to MySpace. I literally laughed out loud when I saw Dexter coming around the corner in his costume because it was so original and well thought out.

In fact, when I asked if I could take a picture of him he insisted that I be in the photo with him. I honestly didn’t know what he meant until he unhooked the back of his contraption and he swung out the “Who I’d Like to Meet” window - how creative is that?!?

Even more entertaining, I read at Rama’s Screen that a guy that actually works at MySpace took a picture of Dexter to share with Tom. I can only imagine what Dexter has planned for next year’s Comic-Con!

Since 2001, we’ve been going to the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) and this year we didn’t miss a beat. This week’s theme will feature highlights from SDCC including plenty of photos, updates on must-have games, ridiculously talented artists, and websites that you’ll definitely want to check out. Stay tuned for Stephanie and Storm Troopers - you don’t want to miss it.

If you went to SDCC, let me know what you thought or share links to photos and videos that you captured.

There are several reasons why people have multiple Twitter accounts. Some people use one account to keep their friends up to date on events privately and automate their other account as an RSS feed.

I have two Twitter accounts that I maintain. @HeyStephanie is for personal use and @Brickfish is geared towards highlighting new and exciting Brickfish campaigns.

Thanks to the Carsonified team, I no longer have to sign in to each account individually to make updates and neither do you! In four days, the Carsonified team built a web application called Matt to simplify ‘multiple account Twitter tweeting’ (say that five time fast!). And boy does it make managing multiple Twitter accounts easy.

Step 1: Simply login at Matt with your Twitter username and password and this will generate your first Twitter account.

Step 2: Next you’ll need to click on the “Click here to add a new account” link and enter the username and password of your second account.

Step 3: If you have more than two Twitter accounts and would like to add more, repeat Step 2.

Step 4: Once you’re done setting up your accounts, you’re good to go! Type in your 140 character tweet and check off the accounts that you want Matt to update for you and click on “go go go” - it’s that easy!

Have fun Twittering and don’t forget to add me as a friend if you haven’t already.

(Photo Credit: TheMattinator.com)