I have woken up this morning and am fundamentally convinced that somehow the machinations of the Universe are working against me today. Now I don’t believe in any higher power or organisation, and yet sometimes we just have days when nothing seems to go right. So far today I am convinced this is occuring to me. Lets pick through the evidence… you can come too if you want to read on, or, deciding this is truly a fluffy ‘nothing’ post you might choose to move along.

The past couple of weeks I’ve had a really trouble sleeping. I just can’t seem to switch off. It’s a nightmare. Well, not really, it isn’t any kind of dream at all; good or bad. However, last night I slept like a baby. I mean that in our perception that a baby sleeps deeply and peacefully. As every parent knows this is rarely true, but rest assured that I didn’t wake every 4 hours screaming, demand to be fed after soiling myself. So, last night I slept really well, and yet was abruptly awoken by two 4 years olds, at stupid-o’clock, excitedly telling me it was raining outside. Just what I needed. Then they begain fighting, which is normal, yet requires UN level diplomacy to sort out. However I just cannot quite imagine Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sitting the USA on a kitchen work-top and telling it to stop smacking Afganistan, before encouraging them both to sit down quietly while he fetches thier duvets, makes them Coco-Pops and puts on a Barbie DVD.

The second piece of evidence was when I went to make myself a much needed cup of tea- just to tease the sluggish brain cells into employment. I discovered that our massive box of tea-bags (PG Tips) had run out, and instead I had to opt for some cheap ones we had spare… WHY WHY WHY??? I just can’t recall why we have these cheapy t-bags… but I guess I’m begrudgingly thankful we do. The fact remains however that I really could of done with a ‘good’ cup of tea this morning, but the Universe has continued to deny me the ‘basics’.

The final item of evidence is the lack of paracetemol in the house. Waking up, early, hot, grumpy and with a pounding headache the best thing for me is a cup of (nice) tea and a couple of tablets, but no, not today. Pah!

Oh I have so little patience sometimes. The girls are now watching the Barbie Princess DVD with flying horses in it, hence my headache is being compounded by their jumping hither and tither ‘neighing’. At least they have stopped fighting eash other, Ban Ki-moon would be proud.

I’m a little annoyed. I had meticulously written notes on each application I tested. Then my children borrowed my note pad to do some drawing, then one of them left the pad in the garden. THEN the clouds dared to rain upon my notebook rendering it sodden and dripping when returned to me. Blast and curses! I am sorry I haven’t been able to deliver. However I have whittled (I think whittled has a ‘h’) my personal selection down to just 3. 1) bDule 2) DestroyTwitter and 3) Orsiso.

These are in order of how I would use them. Orsiso though, even 3rd, has a massive amount of potential as it develops.

Sorry again for letting everyone down in not being able to provide a full report. I appreciate this is the equivailent of saying the dog ate my homework, but my apologies are sincere as those of the child that left the pad in the rain. Distinct and grovelling.

I have been meaning to this for a while now, but today I start my testing/reviewing of Twitter applications.

I have become a little addicted to finding ‘the ultimate’. This isn’t a new behavior from me though. When I was about 13 I decided to find the ultimate Chicken nugget- (Birdseye, I didn’t have to look far) and at 18 I sought the best bacon butty (a now defunct sandwich shop near where I lived). I did all this and still manage to avoid teen obesity.

I’m not quite as into chicken nuggets now, and while bacon butties are a nice treat my metabolism no longer allows me to quest for the ‘ultimate’. So here I am looking at Twitter applications.

I love Twitter. I think its great and I find myself spending more time on there now than Facebook or, prior to that, Myspace. I love it for a number of reasons, but I would say the humour and honesty people display on there is really refreshing. Tweets are very disposable and do not stick around on your ‘profile’ for very long, it’s very ‘in the moment’ and that in itself is a good thing.

I like the web interaction on twitter.com, but it always seemed a bit basic to me- especially after the overwhelming influx of applications on Facebook. While I wanted the simplicity of simply following what interesting people will tweet about, I just wanted a little bit more.

I’m looking at this purely from a non-commercial perspective. From what I can see there a quite a few applications for businesses and marketing purposes (sigh) the real explosion has been with applications for individual users.

I have trawled through about 20-25 in total, and have settled on 9 to trial properly. These will be bDule, DestroyTwitter, Orsiso. Mixero, Skimmer, Tweetdeck, Spaz, feedalizr and Seesmic.

A number of factors will be considered, but principally; looks, features, funtionality and speed. I have to stress at this point I’m not especially techie, so please do not expect in-depth focus on code, or whether an app is open-source or not. This is just the approach of someone who is a little bit geeky about these things, but not a developer.

I hope to publish the blog next week, so I’d love it if you came back to read it.

I have to break from my normal kind of blog to transcribalise (I’m just trying this made-up word out) about something I feel strongly about. Marketing on Twitter. Marketing on Twitter is lazy, unprofessional and what I call “throw enough shit and hope some of it sticks” marketing methodology.

Essentially these Marketer’s either use a kind of program that will automatically follow you if you use a particular keyword, or click to follow you themselves if you tweet said keyword, regardless of the context. So you might tweet “I love marketers. I’m actually excited about the opportunity of throwing my money at any of their affiliates”. If you do so, you will undoubtedly get a number of new marketer followers. However you might also tweet “I hate marketers. In fact if so much as one more starts to follow me I’m likely to go postal and start killing people”, with exactly the same result. What I’m saying is whether you are genuinely open to marketing opportunities or not you will get the ‘bots’ of these grinning fools following you regardless. Oh joy.

Personally I plainly state on my bio “ABSOLUTELY NO MARKETING”, yet clearly these people/bots have no genuine interest in their potential customers. They see no reason to get to know their customers or market, they simply click (or have a program click it for them) “Follow”. This is fantastically lazy, highly unprofessional and goes against all the marketing training I have ever received, which, believe me, is damn substantial.

I worked in marketing and sales for a number of years. It was my job to build relationships with business professionals over the phone or over email. From day one I recognised that unless you know what you customer likes/wants/needs you will not get anywhere. In fact, whenever I spoke to a ICT Director or Financial Director whose company I realised were not in the market I was focussing on, I’d simply laugh and say “I guess we may as well be chimney sweeps then!” as a light hearted way of ending the call (actually that sounds quite naff as I read it back, but I always had a positive response using it). A relationship must be had with the customer on some level before they will buy from you. This is the very basic premise of sales and marketing. So why is this completely forgotten? Why do internet marketers lazily get a program to do this for them?

The answers to these questions are thus; percentages. If you add thousands of followers, a small percentage will follow you back. Of that small percentage, a smaller percentage will follow your links and buy from you or your affiliates. So, apparently, the more people you follow the more you will ultimately sell, and Marketers therefore think using a program to randomly follow people is a viable and inexpensive means of ‘getting your word out there’. This is false. It is more likely to irritate people and reflect your company as ignorant, lazy and unprofessional.

The majority of Twitter then users who perhaps are not interested in being sold to in this way have to accept it as a necessary evil of using the Twitter service. I find this unacceptable.

An example of this is when I started to be followed by a real-estate company in the US. I’m a mature student in the United Kingdom studying English Literature. I have no ambition to live in the US, buy property in the US or even consider doing so in the future. What made me a ‘target market’? The answer is ignorance and laziness on the part of the company, and that is all.

Marketers take numerous forms. ‘Internet Marketers’, ‘Marketing Guru’s’, ‘SEO Guru’s’ so on and so forth. The most common image seems to be the following; teeth white enough to suspiciously look like low level radiation, a corny profile shot which shows a flashy suit and a fake ‘mouth-only’ smile- (in other words their eyes are just aren’t interested). It is sometimes accompanied by a profile that displays a pile of cash or some kind of capitalist display of wealth. they usually have thousands of people that they follow, yet a much lower figure are following them. Their tweets will themselves be a number of sales links to whatever they want you to buy accompanied by a ‘too good to be true’ slogan ‘Win ‘x” ‘Earn $$$ thousands from home’ etc. All of which is cloying, tacky and has clearly been given no thought.

The answer?

I’d like to call for Twitter to either ban or regulate these people. Alternatively, maybe the Marketing community on Twitter should begin to follow a few simple yet effective techniques to get followers.

1. Get to know your market. You want their money, the least you can do is see whether they even fit your target market. Have a look at their profile and try and ascertain their interests. If they look like they might be interested, then and only then follow them.

2. Make yourself followable. Nobody wants to be sold to. Be yourself. Talk about your own interests and what you did at the weekend. People are more likely to follow you if you are not always selling to them.

3. Build relationships. Be a good follower, comment on what people tweet about. Marketing can be soul destroying at the best of times, at least try and enjoy yourself. This way you will come across as a genuine person and attractive to customers.

4. Be consistent. Tweet regularly, do not just ram links and ads down people’s throats.

5. Invest time on Twitter. Get to know trends and the things people talk about. There is no quick-fix to marketing, organic relationship-based selling/marketing will always be more fruitful than hammering people with ads.

6. Message your followers. Thank them for following you, ask their opinions. People love answering questions about themselves, its human nature. Ask them for feedback.

7. Ask questions in your ads. When you sell to them, try using their own curiosity; ask a question or pose a scenario. External links or follow-up tweets can be used to provide the answer (your product). It’s gentle yet effective.

8. Know when to walk away. If they are not interested, then thank them for their time and walk away. If you leave them with a least a memorable positive response, they might remember you in the future if your product does become relevant to them, or even recommend you to a friend.

9. Organically build a list of followers yourself. By doing so you will at the very least have a number of people who respect you and your company, and therefore their minds are open to what you have to say. This kind of ‘database’ is clean, targeted, relevant and open to you.

10. Be original. Marketers on Twitter seem to be doing very few of the above, you can be the first!

11. Stop smiling like a deranged fool . It looks creepy. If you looked at a child with that face you’d be placed on a register.

Sorry to my usual readers for going on about this. I just had to get it off my chest because it’s so frustrating to get hammered by internet marketers on a daily basis when they clearly haven’t taken the time to know who they are following. Especially when this is really basic stuff. I’m going to tag this to death to ensure that as many people searching for this kind of advice will read this. Who knows, it could start a debate about an internet marketing code of practice that helps companies target the right people, as well as allowing non commercial Tweeters the freedom to enjoy the service without a barrage of adverts. I live in hope.

I invite anyone in the industry to tell me where I’m wrong. This is all based purely on my own experience, both as a Twitter and 12 years working in selling and marketing IT/Recruitment/Financial Services.

I have been followed by 7 marketers while typing this blog. None of whom appear to be able to read.

As ever, thank you for reading.

Hello and sorry it’s been a few weeks. Truth be told (would you expect anything less?) I’ve been on holiday…. in Antigua. In the Caribbean. Needless to mention it was absolutely stunning. I have some incredible pictures and, although I began to upload a snap I took, I find WordPress isn’t particularly user friendly in this regard and the picture came out looking completely stupid. I will attempt to upload them again when I have more patience… if you want me to. I say that because I know what its like to be on the receiving end of a barrage of holiday pictures/video’s/anecdotes and never before has the phrase “You just had to be there” been more fitting. So, I’m flexible, let me know- I’ll understand your polite silence as “Don’t bother” and I’ll refrain from throwing myself into a technological struggle with WordPress to post them (as you can see I won’t particularly be offended either way).

Anyway, on with the blog. There are a couple of things I wanted to write about. One actually was my holiday, in a manner of speaking, although it might not be what you expect. Instead of droning on about the beach, the sand, the pool, the food, the people, the cocktails (which were all lovely) I simply wanted to share a few of the funny little things that I experienced while I was there. I ultimately decided to keep a little log of what happened on the holiday, purely via writing little notes on my mobile phone, so it was just a couple of funny things I noted during the two weeks we were there. I hope you find these amusing/interesting otherwise it’ll definitely fall into the aforementioned “You just had to be there” category and I’ll want to kick myself, which is anatomically awkward at the best of times. I really want to avoid that if I can.

First of all I have to tell you that they have wild dogs in Antigua. Wild. Dogs. As a child I’d think that was incredibly cool and endeavour to lead a gang of wild dogs and have adventures, but when you have children yourself the notion of wild dogs is a little alarming to say the least. Thankfully we only saw one wild dog and from her large black teats (for more detail imagine half-chewed liquorice), I guess she had puppies somewhere. I did find this quite sad though, but probably from a restrained English sense of not wanting to interfere I didn’t do anything. What could I do anyway?

Next odd little occurrence was the first time we went onto the (ridiculously pristine) beach. On entering the water for the first time (warm, clear, refreshing, beautiful) we were warned by a large, topless American man (imagine the colour of Cuprinol woodstain) that there was a huge jellyfish about, but he was going to get a stick and fish it out. He never did fetch a stick or fish out a giant jellyfish and in the end he just wandered off. What I thought was strange was that he waited until we were all in waist deep before he told us about it. The only suitable way to reply to that has to be “Yes, it’s wrapped around my leg right now” before screaming loudly at him.

My next experience is a little conversation I had with my 4 year old step-daughter. We were all in the pool and she decided she needed the toilet. It was my turn to take her which meant going to the Gents toilets, rather than the Ladies. “The boys one is rubbish” she said “The girls one is much nicer”, but regardless she went into a cubicle and slammed the door accidentally. After a few seconds I asked he if she needed some tissue (it’s hard to reach from the seat when you are 4) but wonderfully she replied “No, I’m wet already”. I love the ruthless logic of children, and the occasional ignorance of hygiene is really sweet… but in all honesty, it’s hard to argue against.

A further story I want to tell is about the night we saw ‘Mr Moves’, the fire-eater. Like a shop that mends shoes as well as cutting keys, this fellow could also limbo dance. We were sat in complete awe actually as he ate fire, then limbo danced, then ate some more fire, then limbo danced (even lower than before) and so on and so forth, for quite a while. He then began limbo dancing very close to some fire, to the point I feared his MC Hammer pantaloons would catch light and end the show. This fortunately didn’t happen (though I hear the hospital on the island of Antigua is the best in the Caribbean, so he would have been in good hands), and everyone was thoroughly entertained. I asked my step-daughter (the 4 year old one, I have a 10 year old one as well and I’m sure she will feature at some point in my blogs so please be patient), what she thought of ‘Mr Moves’ fire-eating as she had sat in stunned silence for the whole show. “It’s dangerous” she replied (to my relief actually, Mr Moves act could have undone a great deal of household safety advice pertaining to the danger of fire to young children) and “and its rubbish” (I was almost proud, Mr Moves foiled) but then she immediately followed this with “I will do that when I am bigger”. Shit.

Thanks for reading, that’ll do for now. I promise that the next blog will sooner rather than later.

Listening to:

Jamiroquai – Corner of The Earth

Reading:

2666 by Roberto Bolano

Webstuff:

https://destroytwitter.com/ Fantastic Twitter client that looks cool.

http://www.befunky.com/photoApps.php# Great online application for editing pictures with effects. Really simple and easy to use.

http://bumptop.com/ Make your desktop 3D, its brilliant, original and you’ll never want to go back to your usual desktop.

Hello.

Thanks for looking at my blog. I’m new, can you tell?

I’m writing a blog to keep writing during the summer when I’m off from Uni (BA English and History dontchaknow) and because I’ve been thinking about writing a blog for such a long time it’s no longer amusing. I know that once I get into the habit I’ll continue

What will I write about? Lots of things really, things that amuse me, things that annoy me, things that make me happy and things that I think need to be said. At times it will be pathetically infantile, I might use the odd ’swear’ and I might make you laugh. I might even make you think, and if I do, please tell me and I’ll try not to do it again.

I’m also going to nudge forward some of the things that I like such as music, books and websites. At some point I want to interview my children about some ‘big’ topics and blog what they say. ‘Thats sweet’ you might think, others among you might think ‘ah-ha getting the perspective of young minds on cultural topics will be interesting and, you never know, maybe  insightful’. Erm.. yep, but its also easy material and they amuse the crap out of me and I want to exploit share their genius. It won’t be all the time though, just when they say something good…

I’m soon to post a proper blog, I just wanted to say hello.

Thanks again if you are reading this, you must be extremely cool.