Showing posts with label social media tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media tips. Show all posts

Friday, May 17, 2024

Mayday Call in May and Third Time is The Charm

In the next episode of Tea Party Media podcast, I will make a mental Mayday distress call and tell about my situation as I am open to work and being ”unemployable” at the same time. I have failed forward a couple of times, and now it is time to get ”lucky”… ;)

With that said, I am getting convinced that I am at the right place at the right time. Please, stay tuned for more content on new media, business philosophy, and the good life (including tea). Next Saturday, on my birthday, I will learn how to add stuff to my tea.


Check out:

As an ending note, have you planned for ”Beach ’24”? :) I will test LiveGood’s new product, Lean (Body Composition Improvement Formula), during the upcoming summer season…

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Tangram Life Puzzle

Here is an excerpt from my latest photo post on Instagram:

Maybe I can't see the forest for the trees? I have to come to the conclusion that I have to add additional pieces to the Tangram life puzzle. I miss Fizzle’s palapa online community. I have to check out Zen Business. Do you have a favorite digital town hall? I will join a new business network in the near future. It is called Booster Friends. Where do you go for business mixers? 


I am starting my well-being journey on March 20, the Persian New Year, Nowruz. These are my phrases for the year:


๐Ÿง ๐Ÿค๐Ÿงก Value Each Other (VEO advisor)

๐ŸŽง⚡️๐ŸŽ™ Value 4 Value (Podcasting 2.0 certified)

๐Ÿ“ฆ๐Ÿ’ช๐Ÿป๐Ÿ’ฐ Purchasing Power w/ a Membership Club (LiveGood affiliate)


I will also come up with my three words for the year in the near future...


Today I am celebrating 1 year as an affiliate (”independent distributor”) with LiveGood. I have a team of about 40 individuals (affiliates and members). My goal is to reach the next rank, gold, during this year. I strive to introduce 100 individuals (affiliate members, regular members, and retails customers) to this new type of e-commerce.


I will continue to purchase products from other direct selling companies, e.g., microsilver products from LR Health & Beauty Systems, and I am open to become a retail customer to other companies.


I have been involved in several network marketing during the years, and I have learned plenty from the MLM (multi-level marketing) industry. The good, the bad, and the ugly… For example my activities in a chocolate company, had some bittersweet memories. I did a search on the net now, and found this piece of document


I am taking into account my experiences from a cashback company and a travel company, as I am looking into this new company.


Check out Ben Glinsky’s commentary on ”golden handcuffs” in the business world. (LiveGood Firestarter-Friday Training Zoom, March 8. CEO, Ben Glinsky starts his positive rant, around the 20 min. mark). 


As an ending note, please listen to:



Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Pieces of the Puzzle

The pieces of the content creation process are starting to get together. Maybe as a tangram?

  1. My three words for the new (Persian) year: Coin(age), Trade, Victory (sign).
  2. B.N.P. toolbox: Blogging, Newsletter(ing), Podcasting
  3. L.I.F.T. framework: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
  4. Live streaming and digital town halls.

  • Monday Open thread on Instagram. Post on digital town hall.
  • Tuesday Tech live streaming (for the time being on EasyLive, in the future on TeaParty.Media) and blog post.
  • Wednesday Wrap on LinkedIn and post on digital town hall.
  • Thursday Throwback on Facebook, and Storm in a Teacup live streaming with Boomcaster for future episode of EGO NetCast podcast.
  • Friday Follow on Twitter and post on digital town hall.
  • Saturday Siesta live streaming on Tea Party Media digital town hall, powered by Haaartland, and podcasting.
  • Sunday note to self, weekly review, and issue of Lyceum Bulletin newsletter.

Talking about puzzles, listen to Maria Rubia's tune, Pieces Of My Life, and my conversation with her.


Sunday, February 5, 2017

Creating a Newsletter with a Twist

Do you have your own newsletter? How many newsletters do you read on a regular basis? Maybe I am a "cool kid" according to Veselina Gerova's definition! I have figured out the why of starting a newsletter... The challenge now is to stick with it. Here is an excerpt from issue number 2 of Lyceum Bulletin:

On 2/2, with 22 subscribers to my newsletter, I thought it was time to publish another issue of Lyceum Bulletin! ;)

My goal is to send out a new issue once a week with new media tidbits, business philosophy related topics, and the good life stuff (including tea and chile peppers). Elsie Escobar’s announcement on The Feed podcast, sparked the idea to start a weekly newsletter. 

I will add a twist to the bulletin by including a short audio clip in English and Swedish, as a mini podcast episode. It could be a “behind the scene” moment, a shout out to a new subscriber, feedback on the content, etc. I will start with this feature in the next issue of Lyceum Bulletin. I am feeling a bit under the weather with a sore throat at the moment, so I will spare you to hear a soundbite of my wheezy voice this time.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

POWER FRIENDING IRL AND CYBERSPACE

During my birthday on May 25 I got 99 mentions on Facebook.


Is this an example of the power of new media? If you are interested in this topic, I recommend you to read Amber Mac's book, Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business. [Nota Bene: Amazon affiliate link. If you want to support my blogging and read a great book at the same time, please click the link and purchase Amber Mac's book.]

How many friends do you have on Facebook? I am getting close to 1,000 (power) friends... What's your take on the Dunbar's number and the social media tool called, Path?

In the evening, I got social and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant together with three of my friends that I am doing business (according to the trader principle) with:




After the dinner I went to Cafรฉ Hammock, listening to Elecro Swing (jazz) music.

Electro swing jazz Music party.
Electro swing jazz Music party.

Here is my birthday thank-you note:

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

HITTING THE FOLLOW LIMIT ON TWITTER



How many tweeps could you handle? Is the magic number 150 (Dunbar's number)? Could it be a good idea to try to increase the amount of people you are following on Twitter, or am I on the "wrong" path...
From Ev Williams's post, Making Progress on Spam:

There Is No Magic Number  
So, our challenge is to curb this type of behavior without interfering with non-spammy users—some of whom may just be very enthusiastic followers. What is a reasonable number of people to follow, anyway? Most users may have a hard time finding 500 accounts they are interested in—while others would think a limit of 10,000 is too low. 
Also, people approach Twitter in different ways. Some think you should follow everyone who follows you. Personally, I don't because that would render Twitter unusable for me. I "only" follow about 700 accounts—less than 5% of the 16,000 who follow me. (Mr. Obama may have time to keep up with 50,000 people, but I'm a busy guy!) 
The point is, there is no right or wrong. And there is no perfect formula. We do our best by taking a multi-dimensional approach. We look at a number of factors—including how many people are following you back—before applying limits. We don't reveal exact limits, because it's somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google's PageRank, they'd just engineer their way around them much more easily.

(blog.twitter.com, August 7, 2008.)


Here is my comment (BizSugar) on Valentine Belonwu's post, How to Promote Your Business on Twitter? Here are 7 Awesome Tips:

Twitter is one of my favorite social media channel. I have participated in this kind of cocktail party, listening to several radio stations of lifestreams, since 2007. Right now I am looking for a tool to help me clean up some of Twitter users I am following, so I can follow new tweeps. I have reached the "follow limit". Twitter has put a cap at 2000 users that you are following. I am following over 4000 users at the moment, but have "only" 3800 followers, so I can't follow new tweeps at the moment. Do you have tips on a tool that take care of this situation?

Valentine suggested that I should test out JustUnfollow. Don't you think that Codigami Technologies Pvt. Ltd's video demo is inspired by CommonCraft?! ;)

JustUnfollow - find who unfollowed you on twitter

Do you know about the different Twitter follow limits? I don't hate the limit as Isla McKetta, but I agree with much of her statements. Here is an excerpt from her post, Why I Hate the Twitter Follower Limit:

I follow back. Not indiscriminately, but if you want to take time to get to know me, I’d like to get to know you too. We can do that on Facebook, but unfortunately you’ll have to make the first move on Twitter (and wait until I hit some magical unpublished ratio—PR and the Social Web says the magic formula is number of followers plus 10%—that means I can follow you back). 
(Portent.com, September 17, 2012.)

It is up to the folks at Twitter to set their own rules, but personally I don't understand their reasoning with the limit:

When you reach a daily or total limit and we show you an error message, you've hit a technical limit imposed to limit egregious behavior by spam accounts and to prevent strain on the site.  
(support.twitter.com)

Kathy Colaiacovo: I promise you, I am not a spammer! ;)

Twitter does have limits set in place with regards to ratios of following (who you follow) and followers (who follows you) and their preference is to have more followers than following. They do this for one main reason – to keep spammers at bay. If you follow 1500 people and only 150 follow you back – the first question people ask is ‘why is no one following this person?’ and assumptions are made that you are trying to ‘talk’ to more people than want to talk back to you which = SPAM ALERT!

(social4business.com, January 30, 2011.)

Before I test JustUnfollow, I want to hear your thoughts on this issue and tools you have used in order to keep your Twitter feed nice and tidy.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

READING TWEETS WITH BRIZZLY

SAN FRANCISCO - MARCH 10:  Twitter co-founder ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I haven't published any new posts for some time, but I have been microblogging during this time. You could follow me on Twitter, FriendFeed, Posterous and Tumblr.

I will start to use Brizzly when I am reading and writing tweets. It is a new, web-based Twitter client. I have been using Twitter's standard dashboard, Seesmic's desktop and in-browser. Read Jennifer Leggio's post, Brizzly takes the guesswork out of using Twitter.



If you want to have an invitation to Brizzly, go to my tweet message:

@Brizzly says: "All the cool kids are using Brizzly! Don't miss out - use this invitation link, good for 10 people." http://bit.ly/SVyO7




Related post: How Small Business Owners Get More Done with 101 Twitter Tools by TJ McCue.


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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

POKEN SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESS CARD

[Editor's note to Stephen Smith: I am still working on the draft of my "Evolution of EGO workspace" post.]

Oprichter van poken / Founder of Poken DoYouPokenImage by Erwin Boogert via Flickr


After I watched Robert Scoble's interview with Stรฉphane Doutriaux, founder & CEO of Poken, I got a strong desire to get this kind of new digital business card that you could use to share your social media online profiles with people you meet.



I want to order a 12 pack of Pokens so I could start sharing them to my friends and business contacts. It would be a perfect give away gadget to members of your social & business networks. I am also interested in joining Poken's "viral distribution network." I want to spread the good word about this new type of business card. I have some ideas on organizations, businesses and individuals that could be interested in this gadget. I think that their vision is described in a nice way (How Does It Work):

We’re not another social network. You’ve already got that.
We've thought bigger to let you instantly bridge the gap between the people you meet in the real world and those you stay connected to online.
So, do you poken ?


Here is another excerpt from the site (FAQ):

Why do I have to carry around an extra gadget? Isn't there some way to do this in my phone?

Sort of but not really. Since the beginning of mobile phones and PDAs there have been myriad proposed solutions to easy sharing of contact information or "replacing the business card." To show our age, several members of Poken's staff fondly remember beaming vCards in infrared between our Palm Pilots back in the day. However, nothing has ever emerged as a standard for a couple of reasons. The first inhibitor has been hardware/OS/application fragmentation--basically different phones often can't talk well with others. Recently there have been more and more hardware/OS/application-independent phone solutions for contact exchange via BlueTooth or visual codes. However, these also have not really caught on. We believe that it is because the user interfaces too unwieldy, requiring the user to type in codes, launch applications, etc.

Our solution is meant to address these issues by providing an extremely simply mechanism for contact exchange: the high-four. It is natural and it mimics the way we interact with other humans every day. The security is built into the hardware so there are no codes to enter and no risk of someone stealing your information. It requires a small, extra hardware device to carry around so we've designed that device to be cool and fun--something we hope you would like to carry around with you anyway. Perhaps we're tilting at windmills by trying to create a social replacement for the business card, but we really think we're on to something!

Attorney business card 1895Image via Wikipedia


I think that this device could the answer to my question on how I should store contact information in the future. I still have to come up with a solution for the regular business card, as I say in my comment on the post, Poken: It’s Silly, And It’s Meant to Replace Your Business Card by Robert Scoble. Are you using CardScan, CloudContacts or Evernote in order to capture data of business cards?

It is interesting to read about their product plans for the future. Here is an excerpt from Josh Bernoff's post, What we can learn from Poken.

The Poken has two parts. One is a plastic shell which you choose to reflect the some side of your identity -- mine is a little tiger. The other is the little hand part, which has a USB connector. You plug the Poken into your computer, it connects to the Poken site, and you enter as many of your social network IDs (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as you're willing to share. Then you carry it around with you. If you meet somebody else you want to befriend, you "high-four" them, your Pokens exchange ID information when they come in close proximity, and the little light glows to tell you it worked.When you get home you can connect to your computer and see the information from your new friends. It's like exchanging a business card, only quicker and with more info. (Forrester, July 19, 2009.)


Do you want to keep in touch in new cool way? Here is my proposal to my friends, business contacts and supporters. I want to buy a 12-pack of Pokens, but I can't afford to pay all of them by myself at once at the moment. If you want to get one piece of Poken and help me get going with this project, please contact me by email and we could discuss the details. I was thinking of collecting circa $ USD 20 per person / Poken and then order the kit of 12 Pokens when I have got about $ 180 in total. The total price, including the shipping cost, is stated to be $ 201. I will give away one Poken to a special person of the pool of buyers.

Do You PokenImage by YO |X| YNTL via Flickr


[Editor's note: Talking about cute gadgets, my brother showed me a new pet robot by Takara Tomy.]

Sunday, July 19, 2009

The Law of Seed in Social Media Marketing

The Law of Seed is a reality which has long been forgotten. This is a life lesson ought to be learned yet taken for granted.

Now, how the Law of Seed does relates to Social Media Marketing?

Well, we couldn’t answer that question unless we clearly identified to ourselves what the Law of Seeds really wants us to learn. The lesson of the seed is simple – we should reap our harvest after we have done our work.

Say for example, literally, we dig the soil, plant the seed, then water it. This initial process indeed requires a lot effort. Of course, a seed doesn’t naturally grow in a snap of a finger so we have to wait for a while before we can actually pick fruits from what we planted.

From the example above, it gives us a very simple and true equation of -- Effort + Patience = Results. It’s a law applicable to all walks of life thus is also true in social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing according to wiki’s definition is also known as social influence marketing which is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools today includes Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and a whole lot more.

Understanding the definition alone, we can already grasp how much effort you should expect to invest in. True that social media marketing is one of the most innovative ways to market and build your business’ brand online but that does not mean everything will be easy when you get your feet wet in social media marketing. It requires small business owners a lot of effort and patience before to see the results.

I’ve thought of a very simple example which would relate to reaping what you sow in social media marketing. Take Twitter for example. Twittering about your business has indeed become one of the most lovable social media techniques. In fact a lot has already written their reasons why they love Twitter. I even have written my list of Twitter tips which I am actually inspired to continue sharing about what I learned from Twitter when smallbiztrends.com invited the readers to share their Twitter tips.

But I’m telling you that Twitter won’t be friendly to your business if you don’t have tons of relevant followers reading your updates. Unless you build your followers effectively and you build relationships with other Twitter tweeps, you will surely say, Twitter is just a waste of time for me and for my business.

You see what I mean? It requires a lot of effort and patience before you will see the results. Still from beginning to end, the Law of Seed applies.


Mary Grace Ignacio is an aspiring ITpreneur and a hobbyist traveler. She is the Editor of her own business blog which you can find @ InternetBizNez.Blogspot.Com. Connect with her on Twitter @girlopinion.