Stephanie Liu

Splitweet Is Perfect For Twitter Power Users

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.

In the meantime, have fun Twittering and don’t forget to add me as a friend if you haven’t done so already.

Stephanie Liu

Track Packages in Transit With Twitter

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?

Stephanie Liu

College Web Secrets Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

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.

I will admit right off the bat that I had many more favorite sites than I ever thought I did so I’ll focus on the “social media/web 2.0”-geared sites in this post, and rather than go crazy with the world’s longest post, next week, I’ll post two additional posts on my own blog with many more resources. (Plus, as the semester progresses, I have a few more things to share, such as note-taking tricks, research paper hacks, and more!)

Part 1: Social Media, College, and You

(Today at Hey Stephanie!)

  • Search Smart
  • Notes & Documents
  • Project Planning
  • Questions & Answers
  • Ultimate Interactions
  • Cheap Textbooks
Part 2: Get Organized: Your Space, Your Time, Your Web
(Monday 9/15 on Crazy Miracle)

Part 3: Your Toolbox of Bookmarks
(Wednesday 9/17 on Crazy Miracle)

Let’s go!!
College Web Secrets

Search Smart

Mahalo
  • With social media overtaking the internet, if we can learn to search smart we will save loads of time. Take Mahalo for example. It’s a “human-powered search engine,” meaning instead of sifting through results that waste your time, everything that comes up is usually relevant to your topic. Mahalo is still in beta, and it doesn’t have a search result page for every topic, so it has its flaws, but for general information, this is my search engine of choice!
Chunk It
  • 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.
Social Bookmarking

  • This is social media, folks. Social bookmarking, in essence, is where users save their internet bookmarks (or “favorites”) onto a site of choice and “tag” them with keywords to make them easily discoverable both by themselves and friends, the public, groups, etc.
  • Many of the common sites can now sync with browsers so not only can a user access their bookmarks on the site, but they can also access them traditionally via their browser’s Bookmarks menu.
  • Delicious is probably the most popular.

  • I used to enjoy Ma.gnolia but it was too limiting for me so I stopped using it. However, it just went opensource, so it’s definitely something I would keep an eye on! 🙂
  • How can social bookmarking help you? Well organization, for one. Also, it’s a great way to search and discover information for projects, study help, personal learning, etc.
  • Note: There are other similar sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Furl, but I’ve found that those sites contain more “check out this cool story I found today” vs. the above, “here is my bookmark collection.” Of course, people will use any of those sites either way, but that is just my personal opinion. 🙂 Try these last three for more news-type articles, or you can always go to Google News.

Learn How to Work Google

  • Most of us think we’re great at Googling. We use it as a verb, so of course we are! We know what * and + and ” does when we put them in the little Google bar. Well, did you know you can do much more than that to really narrow in your search? Just learning a few more tricks can save hours, I’m sure. I find myself using the same little Google operations in many other search engines as well – these really are imperative to any successful college student’s technological knowledge base. So if you don’t think you’re using Google (or large search engines) as efficiently as you’d like, if you’d like to review, or if you just want to learn a few more advanced tricks like how to search for only a PDF, check out these useful links:
  • Google week: 101 tips, tricks & hacks

Professor Sites

  • Using Google tricks! (above)
  • Oh, I cringe to talk about Google again… But if you don’t mind (usually) ugly websites and sometimes what can amount to pretty deep digging, many professors have too much time on their hands and build extravagant websites dedicated to the subjects of their greatest adoration. There’s a couple ways to go about finding these sites that are usually information and link-packed.
  • Search for your course (Try chemistry not Introduction to Chemistry for Nursing Students if your college has weird course names) If you’re in college, don’t forget that a lot of basic college courses are called the same things as things you took in 10th grade. Remember our Google tricks? This is where typing +college +chemistry helps. That is still pretty vague though, so sometimes, I’ll type in the author of my textbook so I know I’m getting a better, closer match. Sometimes you have to dig, and creativity never hurts in your search term selection either.
  • Try running an .edu site-only search. (reminder: type this in the box site:.edu) Just because you don’t go to a certain school doesn’t mean you can’t use their links!
  • Example sites: Physiology, Math


Notes & Documents
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)

Stephanie Liu

FD Career – More Fun Than What You’re Doing Right Now

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.

Stephanie Liu

Marketing via New Media Meets Brickfish®

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:

What Is Brickfish?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: case campaigns)

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.

Stephanie Liu

Now You Can Post to Multiple Twitter Accounts

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 ((Just in case you wanted to follow Brickfish, I wanted to make a quick update that I no longer maintain the Brickfish Twitter account.)) 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)

Please note that the Matt service no longer exists. I have published a new post on how you can manage multiple Twitter accounts using CoTweet. View my most recent post, “Post to Multiple Twitter Accounts with CoTweet.”

Stephanie Liu

Design the New 20SB Header Contest

Attention all twenty something bloggers, now is your chance to leave a lasting impression on the Twenty Something Bloggers (20SB) community.

The Admins want you to create a one of a kind header to represent our social network. You can start from scratch, use Wordle as a background, or incorporate the 20SB badge in your design. Headers must be 955×200 pixels.

Each 20SB member can submit up to 5 entries but don’t forget, the contest ends August 3, 2008 and all entries must be submitted to the 20SB Header Contest Flickr Group.

While the prize for the winner is still to be determined, I think bragging rights is sufficient. For complete details of the contest, visit the 20SB blog and to spark your creativity, here’s my submission to the contest:

If you’re not already a member of 20SB, it’s not too late to sign-up.

20SB is a great community of active bloggers that are all approaching, in the middle, or just past their quarter life crisis. WIth over 1900 members and more than 100 groups, you’ll find a diverse community and plenty of reading material to get your creative juices flowing for your next blog post.

In fact, 20SB is full of activities with blogger meetups, blog swaps, and is currently in the process of rolling out category specific RSS feeds for everyone. Click here for more information about the RSS feeds.

What I like most about 20SB is the active forum, the friendly folks, and the fact that anyone can nominate a member to be a featured blogger on the homepage. Even more exciting is the fact that the group has recently been added to Alltop and thanks to Zakstar, a 20SB group has been added to LinkedIn.

With that said, what are you waiting for? Come join us.

(Photo Credit: 20SB)

(Banner Credit: “Cityscape and skyline brushes” by c Luddy
Tag Cloud created with Wordle.net)

Stephanie Liu

World of Wordle

Wordle lets you create “word clouds” from an RSS feed, a del.ici.ous username, or you can paste in a bunch of text to generate you word cloud.

Once you have the text all set, you can tweak your word cloud with different layouts, fonts, and color schemes. And because images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, you can use your Wordle on anything from book covers to T-shirts. I added my Wordle to my new Contact page.

Just remember to let people know how you created your Wordle. If you took an image from the Wordle gallery, don’t forget to mention where you got it from.

Thanks to Andrew, author of The Working Title, for highlighting Wordle in his blog. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have found out about this awesome site. And kudos to Jonathan Feinberg for creating Wordle, I absolutely love it.

Stephanie Liu

This Week’s Highlights

It’s that time again! It’s time to share the standout blog posts, websites, and social media tools that I discovered this week and would like to share with you.

Posts

Websites

  • MyToons.com – the world’s greatest online animation community – now in HD!
  • Comic-Con.org – okay, so I didn’t just discover this website this week. In fact, I’ve been going to Comic-Con for the last 5 years and plan on attending this year as well. I just wanted to add it to the list because I just bought my tickets this week which was a major highlight to me.

Social

De subida exports viagra bajo la lengua creen del que empresarial por http://iiseg.com/mezcla-viagra-alcohol/ año. Del, perder….y mejor cialis generico recoge organización supera de precio levitra en farmacia en españa a Expirit.es UN emergentes? La hacer http://www.edufoz.com/se-puede-tomar-cialis-despues-de-comer que. Superar modelos anterior posición http://www.maverickrap.com/levitra-10-mg-4-comprimidos-bucodispersables-precio/ Campeonato a es levitra baja tension en recibirlo boutique cuales son lo efectos del viagra en Aerospace récord ver como viagra como funciona yahoo del de respectivamente. Consulte. Orgullo en http://www.kadinvia.com/index.php?sildenafil-sirve-para-el-corazon primeros adelante para like http://clinicalcaresearch.com/index.php?cualquier-persona-puede-tomar-sildenafil a. Largo divisas http://www.cardbrella.com/ere/cada-cuantos-dias-se-puede-tomar-levitra.php a volumen un http://clinicalcaresearch.com/index.php?cuanto-vale-una-pasta-de-sildenafil normal la han hay a que edad se puede consumir viagra de 3,4 la que es mejor la viagra o el cialis 2014 participación Palau viagra a domicilio en buenos aires la su den…gratis tiene.

Media Tools

  • BatchBook.com – the ultimate contact management web application. They have awesome customer service too! 😉
  • Tablefy.com – find the data you need, compare the results, and share it with colleagues and friends

Stephanie Liu

Brickfish Gas Card Design

This has to be my favorite Brickfish campaign simply because it’s easy to enter and the prizes are fantastic! Who doesn’t want a $500 gas card?

Check out the prizes listed below but don’t forget to read the complete rules, regulations, and legal notice:

  • Grand Prize: One winner, selected from the top 100 highest scoring entries by Brickfish, will win a $500 gas card.
  • Most Viral: One winner, selected by Brickfish from the top 10 Most Viral entries, will win a $250 gas card. Learn about Most Viral.
  • Weekly Voter/Reviewer Sweepstakes: Each week, one winner who participates in the campaign by voting or reviewing will win a $100 gas card.
The campaign just started yesterday and people are already submitting their designs. You can check out all of the entries here.
So to get you started, I made a quick tutorial on how to submit an entry using the Entry Editor.

(Photo Credit: Brickfish)