One of the most coveted Android features is Swype. Even dedicated iPhone users see me swype typing and marvel at “how did you do that?!”
Lifehacker reported that a Swype upgrade is in beta release and available for download. Register to download and install the beta here: https://beta.swype.com.
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Obtaining a decent twitter username is becoming harder and harder as twitter grows in popularity. All the good names are gone right? As a result you may find that your brand being represented by less than stellar Twitter handle. Don’t despair.
I’ve identified 7 elements that impact your twitter brand. These in concert can help make up for a somewhat craptastic twitter username.
This is your twitter handle, the part next to the @. Other than killer, consistent, contextually relevant content, getting a good twitter handle is the best thing you can do for your twitter brand. Here are two tools I use to social check a username:
Someone brand jacking you? Here’s what you can do about it.
Pretty self explanatory right? But presenting your business name in your Twitter profile is invaluable brand touch point if you get stuck with a crappy twitter username. Using your proper name fills in the gaps where your username might have left off. For some reason, and I’m a bit baffled, twitter only provides you 20 characters for your full name. A 20 character limit for a business (and many individuals) is entirely unacceptable. But hey, twitter is a free service, what can you do? Credit to Svein-Magnus Sorensen for finding a hack – too bad it didn’t stick.
Tell your brand story here. But you only have 160 characters so tell it quickly! You can decide to describe your company, your value proposition or maybe something else. Remember that this is social networking – it’s not just about your brand. As you craft the bio consider what your customer will connect to. What’s relevant to them?
Feel free to think out of the box on this. You can be precise or a bit flighty. Consider this a chance to really support your brand. Here are some examples provided for illustration.
Pretty simple really. You want to send customers to one of the following:
Just be brand consistent.
If you want to play is safe use a brand logo. Simple. Clean. However, visual expressions are the best way to capture emotion and therefore brand affinity. The big question for brand managers is what to use. There are arguments for the humanity of using a face and consistency of using a logo.
My current favorite brand logo is Schroders. They are an investment firm, but they’re not afraid to add a bit of punch by putting headphones on their statue guy.
Although not a brand, I personally love Jamie Punshill’s previous picture. It made me want to down tequila shots and it provided a window into his personality.
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So you good? Not quite yet. Run your twitter account through Hubspot’s twitter grader to make sure you didn’t miss anything.
Feature image from Sarah Korf
Bottom line up front: Rob Brosnaro and I would love it if you would vote on our South by Southwest panel submission. Comment and vote here: http://reff2.me/sxswipanel
Our panel is going after the friction between corporate Marketing and IT teams. We will answer the following questions:
A quick apology, not as much content recently, I’m working on developing a related side project. More to come if we can get our act together.
Before I rant, you can find me here on Google+: http://gplus.to/iamreff
Okay, 3 quick reasons why Google+ is driving me nuts.
It’s great that I can create context circles, but for the most part it’s the SoMe rockstar show. Now, I love the rockstars, but I already have multiple outlets to benefit from their wisdom. As people have written before, the real-time nature of Google+ makes it a better platform for engagement (as opposed to Twitter), but the lack of large network of users really limits the conversation. The conversation on Google+ seems very natural and organic, but there’s too little of it. Perhaps 10% of my Facebook friends are on Google+ and for the most part those are my SoMe friends who I see everyday on Twitter. Until more people join Google+, it’s not much of a draw for me, just another thing to weed and feed. How can Google get more users on Google+? More and better features.
So although this is a rant post I want to be particularly careful not to blame Google+ users. It’s a new platform and people are poking and prodding it, trying to see how to best use it. HOWEVER, right now it feels like it’s missing the conversation starter. As a user, you create the groups based on the topic, but you’re the only one that knows the context of the circle. For example, I created a Babson circle where I put all my friends from our MBA program. However, I can’t use the circle as a group to share context related stories. I want to create groups within the circles and have discussions there on specific topics, but it just doesn’t work that way.
Google+ users are left to start their own conversations. As a result many post questions. Since we are lacking the context of a group, it seems most are left asking very broad questions that may come across as a bit silly and not as interesting as the author might desire. I wish there better integration with Sparks providing the needed conversation starters. Or perhaps a Quora like capability to do Q&A.
Out of the box the pictures you take are automatically uploaded to your Google+ profile (at least it does with my DroidX). Perhaps it’s nice functionality, but for a number of reasons, I want creative control. I frequently take multiple pictures and only post the best. I take pictures of my kids and friends kids and I want to decide what to share. Of course Google gives you a couple ways out of this. You can disable the upload feature in your Google+ app and remove photos from your profile.
/rant
I haven’t spent a ton of time in Google+ and it’s totally possible that I’m missing some critical piece of the puzzle. If so, let me know in the comments.
Last month’s rather silly poll garnered some definite interest, but then again, anytime you bring Star Wars to a fight you know the nerd crew is going to bring it. This month we’re a bit more serious and looking at advertising on social media
A recent study by The Pivot Conference and Brian Solis determined that two-thirds of markers surveyed were already conducting social media advertising activities.
How about you?So-
[poll id=”10″]