Twitter Addiction

I’ve also been using Twitter a lot lately and that probably takes up the most time. Is it an addiction? Only if learning can be considered an addiction. If you follow the right people, it’s like hardwiring your brain to an Encyclopedia. The relevancy and timeliness of the knowledge is extremely valuable as social media becomes more mainstream. Also since Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters, the information will be summarized into a nice 1 second read.

I’ve been anticipating the social media global brain idea for a long time, and from my observations in Twitter, it seems to be much closer now. The value of creativity is brought back into the spotlight, where one person’s idea can be amplified a million fold through social media. I will continue to stay with Twitter, because it has become an essential tool to staying ahead of the game.

How I learned about the Interweb

I have a background in Advertising and Marketing. Worked in studios and Ad agencies but really hate having to deal with clients. They aren’t out to improve anything, and most just want a safe bet. I am someone who needs to learn constantly, who needs to create something new. I knew it would be pointless if I continued to be a salary slave, and so I began by learning about internet marketing.

I suppose my training would be similar to many people. Reading articles on SEO, online business, monetization, writing, forums, Videos, E-Books etc etc. Every new project that I start, I try to incorporate more and more into it as a test bed for a future big project.

I’ve been using the Internet for a long time but I haven’t really given much thought to how it actually worked behind the scenes. I don’t mean the software running the sites, but the interactions that naturally occur between groups of interests. Then I had an opportunity to change all that.

My first big web project

Earlier this year, I created a series of WordpressMU networks with a partner. For months I went through mountains of learning material and testing for User interface design, social media design, adwords, SEO, online communities, blogging, PHP, CSS, SQL etc etc. One moment I would be photoshopping a fantasy landscape, the next I would be sweating with a PHP help file.

There was a steep learning curve for working with a partner too. It taught me all the things that could go wrong in a business relationship and I’m thankful for it. Definitely better to learn all of that early on.

I’m a Pisces so I’m all about using the creative side of my brain. All of this was an uphill battle for me and made me lose a lot of sleep. I wanted to outsource everything but I’m glad I stayed the course and learned everything myself. Without all that knowledge, I would not have been able to create all the opportunities open to me today. I believe jack-of-all-trades  are going to thrive nicely on the internet.

Plans for this Blog

I’ve been experimenting with different types of design themes, blog post topics and plugins. While I’m getting closer to understanding the optimal goals of blog design, I fear that I’m going in the wrong direction with Creativeherb.com.

This blog was originally meant as a home base for me to write down my thoughts, and perhaps share a tidbit of wisdom or two. But like many things that I do, I tend to be a perfectionist. I started to become traffic greedy. Why share words with 50 people when you can potentially share it with tens of thousands?

I changed my blog topics twice in a month and site tagline 3 times in a week. I just couldn’t decide which subject I should focus on, I just have so much I wanted to say across many categories. Then I realized that the name “creativeherb” was just difficult to brand. Is it a creative site? Or is it a herbal site? I didn’t want to give up my personal site though.

Summary

My master plan for 2009, is to refocus Creativeherb around my business projects and design experience. I will talk about my projects and the business thinking processes I go through. It will not be a continuous stream of business tips or photoshop tutorials, but something more personable.

I will also showcase my professional design portfolio and talk about my design processes. I  hope this will increase exposure and authority for me as a Brand. I will also aim to increase reader participation because I would like to converse with like-minded people through my designs as well.

I will also start my new primary blog, involving case studies of brands and branding. I love branding, I can talk about it all day. And the domain name is much easier to remember than Creativeherb.

I have several other projects in the planning stages and one big project in the works. They are in completely different markets, so it will be interesting to see the success level of each.

That’s the bite sized summary of me, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about me and will come back to visit soon. Feel free to leave a comment to say hello!

Nowhere else can you get thousands of responses instantly. Polls on websites were a step in the right direction, but even then the participation level was low and slow. When you first join Twitter, don’t expect everyone to answer your questions right away. Your question should be phrased to provoke conversation or re-tweeting(forwarded on). A question asked by an influential person on Twitter however, will be much more likely to get a response. Companies such as Gregg Fraley’s setup creates an easy entrance into the world of Twitter research without having to do it yourself.

If you want to experiment yourself, it is very easy to add or remove a person in Twitter, users will follow others with like-minded conversations.

Starter Twitter Tips:

A good idea to name your account based on the topic you will focus on. Just like a website, the name of it will be the first impression that people receive.

Write your Twitter profile according to what you want to do with the account. Your first few words are the most important because it will determine whether they continue reading or not.

Another way for the right people to follow you on Twitter is creating a descriptive background. Design an appropriately attractive background with information such as your Logo, URL and critical keywords. Based on web eye-movement tests, the upper left side of the screen is what people look at first, so design the background with all the information on the left. A good example of using the background for informational purposes would be my Twitter page. Clarity and simplicity is important here so the message you are trying to convey isn’t distracted by complicated textures or graphics.

You can also leverage existing questions and answers through Twitter search engines. There’s the default one from Twitter, and also multiple live searches such as Monitter. You can get insightful information from the search results, or even take it further by directly contacting the people who wrote the original messages. And once you are connected to the right person, people of similar interest will gravitate to your tweets and follow you as well.

Twitter is an extremely timely and broad-reaching research tool. The interactions and the insights are invaluable to any industry. And with the right strategies, you will always be a step ahead of the competition. What do You use Twitter for?