Les Jones

Wash. TV anchor lands job in Knoxville thanks to Twitter

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | Blogging | Permalink | No Comments |

Westfield Patch - Drohan Tweets Her Wpay From Westfield to Knoxville:

Drohan had ifor a job with an NBC affiliate in Washington State, which she was offered. While she ended up declining the job, she chose to place it on her Twitter feed, where a sudden new opportunity came along.

“I had put that on my Twitter and the news director in Knoxville, Tenn., is a follower of mine on Twitter,” she said.

Suddenly, Drohan found herself with a direct Tweet from the news director of WATE, the ABC affiliate in Knoxville. He offered her a shot at the morning anchor position, saying he had looked at her demo reel on YouTube and was impressed by what he saw. (It is common for many up-and-coming television journalists to place their demo reels on YouTube.)

Very cool. I used this in a meeting today to illustrate the surprising ways people are connecting via social media in the business world.

Via Michael Silence.

P.S. The consultants we spoke to today recommend changing your Twitter design at least once a quarter. I like that idea. Corporate Web re-designs can be long, drawn-out, and political. Twitter is so simple there’s no reason not to change frequently and keep things fresh.

Tags: twitter

Social media madness

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | Blogging, Funny Ha-Ha | Permalink | No Comments |

Hat tip to Cloud Ave.

Bonus!

Tags: twitter

Jakob Nielsen’s advice on writing Twitter posts for a business

Monday, August 24th, 2009 | Blogging | Permalink | No Comments |

Good stuff.

When to Tweet
My last design decision was when to post the message to the Twitter timeline. My preferred tweeting time is 9:01 a.m. because it encompasses working hours from California to the U.K. and thus reaches a majority of our customers. (It’s best to post a minute after the hour so you’ll be listed on top of anybody who naively sets their software to release postings at exactly 9:00.)

In this case, however, German readers and others in continental Europe were particularly important, because we’re going to Berlin for the first time. Thus, I pulled the posting time forward to 7:51 a.m. Pacific time, which is 4:51 p.m. in Germany and will still reach Californians who check Twitter during breakfast.

One of the big downsides of stream-based communication compared to email newsletters is the highly ephemeral nature of the postings: Once they scroll off the first screen, they’re essentially 6 feet under.

A look at clickthrough statistics for links posted to Twitter vs. those circulated in email newsletters shows a drastically steeper decay function: lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none. In contrast, email continues to generate clicks for days as people work their way through their inboxes.

Clickthrough decay: Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time.

This makes it hard to reach an international customer base on Twitter, and makes it important to tweak the posting time relative to each topic’s main target. (It’s also one of the many reasons I continue to believe that email is a more powerful medium.)

Tags: twitter

I now understand the genius that is Tad Kochschwinger

Friday, July 17th, 2009 | Blogging, Funny Ha-Ha | Permalink | No Comments |

After posting this I actually read Tad Kochschwinger’s Twitter feed. Now I think he’s a genius of Twittery obnoxiousness:

• Bad start to the day. The Segway caught a flat on the way to Starbucks.
• People don’t just love me because I’m a social media rock star. They love me because I inspire them to be more like me.
• Does anyone know how to get Maximuscle protein shake out of the upholstery of a Tesla Roadster?
• I bought myself a World’s Best Dad T-shirt. The twins are too young to understand what it means but I’m sure they’d want me to have it.
• The people who say I’m arrogant and shallow don’t see me when I’m at home with my wife. Did I mention that she’s a former swimsuit model?

Tags: twitter

Are you on The Twitter? Are you TweetingTooHard.com?

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Blogging | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Teh funny. Behold the  “twisdom” on The Twitter.

Kochschwinger’s mother-in-law died and his audience was moved. It was win-win for everyone except the dead lady!

Tags: fish barrel gun some assembly required, twitter

How do I get Kim Kardashian’s picture off of my Twitter profile?

Friday, June 5th, 2009 | Dear Lazyweb | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Dear Lazyweb,

So I created a Twitter account for work. During account setup Twitter asks if you’d like to follow some of their top Twitterers. Thinking I should see how other people Twitter I picked five people.

Now I have pictures of Kim Kardashian, Tim O’Reilly and some other folks on my Twitter profile and I can’t rid of them. I unfollowed them, but their pictures are still on my profile.

UPDATE: The pictures went away after a few days.

Tags: twitter

Twitter FAIL

Sunday, March 15th, 2009 | Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Patterico has the backstory on this Twitter: “‘So, Johnathan, what did you do today?’ Oh, nothing really. I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money!”

Tags: twitter