Twitip

Isn’t branding for companies or products? Why would anyone want a personal brand anyway?

Nowadays people prefer to connect with other people rather than with a corporate brand. Whether you are a company or individual, branding is a way to make yourself memorable.

Yes, personal branding is about making yourself memorable.

Examples of Personal Brand

Donald Trump is known as a dealmaker. That is his brand. As someone who knows Mr. Trump only from television — in The Apprentice TV series — I also tend to think of “Trump” as quality and luxury.

(more…)

Last year one of the interesting posts in TwiTip that really caught my attention was the post about how to turn a bedroom light on and off with Twitter.

In the comment, I hinted about how that hack works — after peeking at the source code. For most people, it appears like magic but really it is quite simple if you understand how different parts interact.

Once you are aware about how a typical system like this works, hopefully you can come up with more ideas to make use of the technology.

What Do You Need?

What appears to be magic actually is a set of tools and electronic devices working together. Each of them is able to communicate with the device next or before it.

There are a few components that work together in the light switch scenario:

1. A computer system with controlling software. Obviously the computer has to be on for it to accept messages and to send them to the right devices. Smart home devices also have programmable controller and remote so signals could also be sent from this remote instead of a computer.
2. A hardware controller. You need an electronic circuit that is able to receive signals from your computer (either via serial or USB port) and respond to it. It can be as simple as an on-off switch. If the device includes support for dimming lights, you will be able to extend the feature to dim instead of just turning on and off. As you see, the controller plays a critical role here.
3. The controlled object. In this case, it is a light. There is nothing special about the object. Just that the signal from the controlling device — most likely computer — instruct the controller to do something that in turn do whatever it is programmed to do to the object.
4. Communication mechanism. The last part of the system is a communication mechanism that lets you send signal to the computer system.

(more…)

How do you track what links are being clicked on on Twitter? Today Hendry Lee (follow him at @hendrylee) shares some tips on how to do it.

Much of Twitter is about communication with your peers and meeting new people. I’ve seen many social media marketers claim that in fact conversation is the only thing that matters in Twitter.

I won’t go into detail about it in this post, but no matter what people say, marketers can only track numbers. And without tracking, there is no way to measure how effective social media is to your business.

Based on the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter still continues to grow despite outages and other issues. Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.

Twitter’s growth and the ability to drive traffic via Twitter is two different things, but Jason Calacanis, for instance, blogged that Twitter was sending over 20,000 people a month to his web site Mahalo.com.

With that, I bet all marketers, webmasters and publishers will agree that they should take a very serious look at Twitter, especially if they want to tap into new source of audience and engage those users as part of their marketing activities.

The Problem with Tracking Traffic from Twitter

Before I start, let me elaborate a bit about the challenge for tracking Twitter. Feel free to skip this section if you already know it.
(more…)