Stephanie Liu

Instagram Disables Twitter Cards And How It Impacts You

As of Sunday, Instagram photos no longer display on Twitter as cards but as links to a photo’s Instagram URL. Viewing Instagram photos now involve an extra click and images that were previously shared on Twitter via Instagram no longer appear on a user’s profile.

In response to Instagram’s actions, Twitter has released an updated app that allows users to edit and refine photos with a filter. Images shared via the Twitter app will now appear as cards in tweet streams and Instagram photos will continue to appear as links.

If you were a hardcore Instagram user that also shared images on Twitter, you’ll also notice that those images no longer appear on your Twitter profile.

Overall, the impact of these updates mean:

  • The best way to share photos on Twitter is to use Twitter’s app
  • Content publishers now need extra time to jump from one app to the other to share a single photo
  • If a publisher continues to share Instagram photos on Twitter, he/she should include a clear description of the photo to entice followers to click

[Image Source: Flickr, WebRankings Pictures]

 

Stephanie Liu

Social Media Club San Diego presents The Social Hour

You’re invited to “The Social Hour”! Social Media Club San Diego is launching The Social Hour every third Wednesday of the month at Co-Merge at 6pm. It’s the perfect opportunity to stay on top of trends and changes in the social media landscape in under 60 minutes.

This month Social Media Club San Diego will be hosting, “The Social Hour – The Twitter Rules,” an informal discussion to talk about Twitter’s new policies.

Haven’t heard about Twitter’s new policy changes? No surprise, not that many folks are aware of the changes and how these policies may affect their content in order to adhere to Twitter’s guidelines. Below are details of the event.

The Twitter Rules

When: July 18, 2012 6pm
Location: Co-Merge
Moderator: Kari Embree

Twitter Trademark and Content Display Policy: Are You Already in Violation?

Twitter recently—and somewhat quietly—updated their brand usage guidelines to be much stricter in order to protect their trademark and content, and these guidelines could affect your business.

For instance, did you know that you:

  • Should always use one of the approved Twitter logos and/or buttons?
  • Should capitalize the ‘T’ in Twitter and Tweet?
  • Should not use Twitter in the name of your website, application, or product?
  • Should not use the Twitter bird on your book/publication cover or title?

Before you dismiss these and the rest of the updated brand usage guidelines too quickly, note this warning from Twitter’s page at https://twitter.com/logo: “This policy is designed to help you use our brand and assets, including our logo, content and trademarks without having to worry about negotiating a separate agreement with us or talking to our lawyers.”

To RSVP for the event, head on to http://thesocialhour.eventbrite.com. See you there!

 

Stephanie Liu

Memecube: Get a Taste of the Super Optimized Conference Experience

This year I’ve been fortunate to attend a number of marketing and industry related conferences. And while the content tracks differ, the underlying struggle as an attendee has been fundamentally the same across the board: What do I do when there are two equally mind-blowing sessions going on at the same time? 

Normally, I ask myself two key questions. Which session will I walk away feeling 10x smarter? And, what’s the likelihood that I’ll be able to apply what was presented when I come back to the office?

If I’m still struggling, I’ll quickly glance around to see which session is drawing in the biggest crowd — that’s usually a sign that the presenter is a definite must-see. At that point, I know I’m taking a chance and leaving it to Twitter and putting faith in the hashtag gods that someone in the other session will be tweeting every highlight. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

Fortunately, when I attended Gamification Summit (GSummit) 2012 last month, I didn’t have to worry. The reason is because GSummit had partnered with Memecube, a robust Twitter client, to deliver a super optimized conference experience. Now, I’ve seen Tweets projected on a wall and have seen images get pulled into a feed but I have never seen anything like Memecube. And although Memecube went down a couple of times because of conference attendees and Fora.tv subscribers rushing to log on, I still thought the platform was impressive.

Memecube Features

  1. It auto-populates speaker Twitter @handles and the conference hashtag. This makes it easy to tweet the event’s most memorable ideas, quotes and memes.
  2. Enable attendees to tweet and retweet others from same platform.
  3. View the conference schedule  easily and check-in to let other attendees know where you are.
  4. It can tie in gaming aspects where attendees can earn badges when one of their tweets is retweeted.
  5. Since attendees had to tweet via the platform, I didn’t come across any hashtag spammers.
  6. And lastly, ALL of the updates tweeted during a session are organized in one place!
In fact, if you want to check out how GSummit and Memecube turned out, you can still visit m.gsummit.com. While you’re there, check out my favorite session at the conference with CEO, Chamillionaire, “Direct to Fan Engagement” with CEO, Chamillionaire. I love what he and Big Door are doing at Chamillionaire.com. My only regret during his session was sitting in the back. I wish I was up close so I could be visible in the photo he took of the crowd and posted to Facebook.

Source: Facebook.com/Chamillionaire, June 2012

Taking Memecube to the Next Level

Overall, I think Memecube is cool and would recommend all event organizers to check it out. In the future what I’d like to see Memecube do is feature photos in tweets. I’ve seen it in other Twitter clients such as Minglestream and thought it was great having the ability to view photos of sessions taking place. I’d also love it if Memecube linked to the actual tweet so I can copy the embed code and paste a tweet in a future recap.

Stephanie Liu

How to Archive Twitter Response Threads

  • By Stephanie Liu
  • February 26, 2009
  • Twitter

twickie_hpIf you’re trying to do market research online with Twitter or simply want to copy and paste Twitter response threads to your blog, you’ll find Chris Pirillo’s Twickie tool to be very helpful.

Twickie is a free service that aggregates Twitter replies based on a specific tweet’s ID which is found at the end of the tweet’s permalink. This makes it easier for the original poster to follow the conversation thread.

When you go to Twickie, you’ll be prompted to enter your Twitter username and password. Once you log in, you’ll be able to see your 50 most recent tweets. Click the “Get @s ?” button to see tweet replies in descending order and the “Get @s ?” to see tweet replies in ascending order.

If the thread you’re looking for is not on your Twickie homepage, click on “Search”. This page will let you search for threads by replies, hashtags, conversations, and person-to-person.

Here is a breakdown of each search function:

You can then export the conversation thread three ways:

  1. Copy Full (default option)
  2. Copy CSS (advanced)
  3. Copy HTML (advanced)

Select which option best suits your needs then paste into your blog. It’s that easy and it’s free.

Just recently, my husband and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary in San Francisco, CA. Before we headed out, I asked my followers if they had any suggestions for restaurants or places we should visit. By aggregating all of the responses into one single thread, it was easier to distinguish which replies were related to my San Francisco trip and those that were not.

For updated, news, and more information about Twickie, follow them on Twitter @twickie.

Stephanie Liu

Promote Your Top 100 Tweeps

Twitter MosaicLooking for a great way to promote your fans on Twitter or a unique gift for your Top 100 Tweeps? Then you should check out Twitter Mosaic.

Walter Higgins, founder and CEO of Sxoop Technologies, created the Twitter Mosaic tool which lets you create a mosaic of all your followers or friends on Twitter.

Simply enter your Twitter user name and choose what type of mosaic you’d like to create (followers or friends) and in seconds, you’ll receive an HTML code that you can add to your site or blog post to promote your tweeps. The Twitter Mosaic also gives you the ability to remove default Twitter avatars from your mosaic.

twitter_mosaic

Now the fun part…

After you’ve created your Twitter mosaic, you can pimp your Top 100 Tweeps at Zazzle.com with Walter’s two products:

1. On a T-Shirt.

Choose a shirt design for men, women, kids and even babies (prices vary by color and shirt design). You can keep a T-shirt for yourself or if you have room in your marketing budget, you can take advantage of the bulk discounts and send a T-Shirt to all of your tweeps.

2. On a Coffee Mug.

Not in the mood to deal with shirt sizes? Not a problem. Choose a Twitter coffee mug, stein, or commuter mug for tweeps on the go.

And that’s it — pretty easy huh? 🙂 Got any other idea on how to promote your tweeps?

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

Personalize Your Posts on Twitter

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.

Stephanie Liu

12 Seconds: the Twitter for video

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

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.”