With the rumor that Twitter is going to create their own photo sharing/hosting platform within their own walls, it’s time for businesses to start getting serious about using photos if they’re using Twitter. The following are best practices on how to do just that. Know your audience. Before you even look at taking photos and posting them to Twitter, you have to ask yourself the most basic of questions: Is your audience on Twitter? According to eMarketer, only 20 million Americans visited/used Twitter last month. While that’s a decent number, that leaves a few hundred million potential customers choosing to get their information in other ways. If you’re not finding them where they are, all the best practices in the [...]

Done anything to help your offline brand lately? We’re all talking about ways to improve our online brand. Here are five ways to improve your offline brand, as well. Remember – the two are connected. 5) Meet three new people a day, offline. Learn how to talk to people. Introduce yourself to people in your office, at a party, at a reception Make the connection. When we meet people, the majority of us listen just long enough to find an entry point for us to talk about ourselves. (I’m guilty of this, as well.) A better thing to do, however, is to listen – actually listen – to the other person, and make neural connections in your brain. They’re huge [...]

“These orders are 12 bloody hours old!“ -Said by Captain Tupolev (Stellan Skarsgård) of the Russian sub that was sent to capture Captain Rameus (Sean Connery) in “The Hunt For Red October.” Kind of how I feel right now, as I write this in hour-one of my 13 hour flight to Tokyo, (around 11:45am EST Thursday,) and I know I won’t be in a place to post it until Friday around 4:30am EST.) Come on, Continental! In-flight Internet! Argh! But anyhow… As some of you know, I’m throwing a holiday party next week in New York City, in conjunction with the Venetian and Palazzo Hotels in Las Vegas, Haworth in Michigan, Vocus in Maryland, Klout in San Francisco, Jet Blue [...]

Full disclosure: I don’t have a Tumblr account, I wasn’t affected by yesterday’s almost full-day outage in any capacity – but it seemed that one out of every four tweets in my stream was at first, about how the world was ending because Tumblr was down – Then, all about defining what “be right back” meant, then finally all about “this is ridiculous, where the hell is Tumblr, it’s no longer funny, now we’re pissed, we can’t get to our content!” And to be honest, I knew 100% that the comments/tweets/blogs would happen exactly like I wrote them above in exactly that same order, from the second I realized (along with the rest of the Internet) that Tumblr’s problem wasn’t [...]

While in San Francisco last week, I had a spectacular opportunity to have lunch with Philip Hotchkiss, Joe Fernandez,, and Ash Rust, the three heads of one of the hottest social media companies currently out there, Klout. For those living under a half-mile of earth for the past 69 days, Klout is making quite a stir lately, as the company that’s assigning each user of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and the like) a “score” to determine their influence in the online world. The more you engage, the more people find you interesting enough to respond, repost, or retweet your information, the higher your Klout score will go. Essentially, Klout is using various algorithms to determine your relevant worth in the [...]