Last week, I was checking my bacn account on Yahoo! Mail and noticed that Twitter’s new follower email looked different. The newly-redesigned email (pictured below) sent out by the ever-growing social network is a winner – both from a design and a functionality standpoint.
For starters, the new email that left Twitter labs has Twitter’s logo on it (something the old email was missing – pictured below) as well as the familiar “cloud” background – which makes the message instantly identifiable. On top of that, the email now includes a lot more useful information about your new follower: the amount of followers the user has, how many updates the user has posted, as well as the number of other Twitter users your new follower is following, are all displayed to the right of the user’s Twitter avatar. Rounding out the newly-redesigned email is a link to the user’s profile, a link to block the user, and a link to turn off email notifications altogether. All around, this is a much-needed update to Twitter’s new follower email notification. Read more »
Posted in
Cloud Computing,
Decisions,
Social Networking,
Success,
Twitter
Courtesy of atrier.com
Being new to professional blogging, I’ve faced my first share of decision-making. And while I’m sure there are many more decisions to be made, this series is dedicated to exploring the myriad of decisions that I either have already made or am thinking of making. How many parts will this series contain? I have no idea, but I promise to document as many decisions and the details behind them.
For the first part of the TNR blogging series, I would like to address the age-old question of quality vs. quantity. More specifically, do readers of (insert your blog’s name here) want to see a lot of stories throughout the day, or do they want less stories that go more in-depth (and are perhaps longer than than an average tech-blog post)? This is the first question I had to face when starting TechNest Report, and one I am constantly thinking about. In my experience, four major factors have an influence on answering this question.
- Your audience
Your market, your readership, your fanboys and girls – whatever you want to call the people who visit your site and read the blog posts – that should be the first thing that determines whether you should focus on quality or quantity. Do your readers want fewer posts that are more detailed or do they want a greater amount of posts that are shorter and to the point. In the case of TechNest Report, I didn’t have a clue: it was a brand new website that nobody knew about. How was I supposed to know what people wanted to see? Sometimes, you just have to trust your gut feeling on this, but at the same time – be smart. Before launching TNR, I noticed that the majority of technology-related blogs in the blogosphere focused on the quantity factor – they had many posts throughout the day that tended to be short in nature, often not exceeding two paragraphs. Seeing an opportunity in this, I decided that it was a great idea to do the complete opposite – to write in depth posts that go into greater detail and explain as much as possible. This proved to be a little problematic, because of Read more »
Posted in
Featured,
Solution,
Success,
TNR Blogging Series
Left to right: Lizette Gagné, Gary Vaynerchuk, Alex Luft
Yesterday, regular TNWR podcast contributor and geekanista Lizette Gagne posted an audio recording of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at FOWA Miami on Tuesday Feb. 24. As she was recording the presentation, I was burning through the keyboard on my MacBook – typing notes of Gary’s tips and advice. Why would I do that? Well, as with so many other speeches, I have a problem of long-term memory: I think I know what the speaker talked about, but after I wake up a week after the speech, it seems like I forgot more than half of the talk and only remember that the presentation was awesome, but can’t seem to remember why.
So here is some advice that you can walk away with and store in your “advice notebook” (you have one, don’t you?): here are my notes on Gary’s presentation (expletives included for full effect):
Posted in
Events,
FOWA Miami 2009,
Inspiration,
Marketing,
Success
