AriWriter

10 Twitter Users Share Why They Use Twitter

Ari Herzog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:32:08 +0000

As a follow-up to my December 2008 blog post describing Twitter in 14 ways, and countless articles since, I feel there is no better time than the present to revisit the question why people use the social media tool.

Why do you have a Twitter account? I realize this may be self-serving, but consider me curious. Your replies will become a blog post, I scribbled on Twitter this week.

Here are their — your — responses.

Each tweet is a separate image and may be clicked.

Tweet from @fredchannel

Tweet from @jrick

Tweet from @abbiemf

Tweet from @dan_munz

Tweet from @cluelessek

Tweet from @scotthorvath

Tweet from @sarahebourne

Tweet from @dmullen

Tweet from @kwooleyy

Tweet from @marciamarcia

Marcia’s link points to April 2009 story she wrote for Fast Company, explaining how she joined Twitter out of spite and progressively used the tool to merge her business interests with her personal thoughts:

Before Twitter (and her enterprise-strength counterparts) we didn’t share our layered thoughts casually so we appeared always on task. Via Twitter, you now see my mind periodically follows tangents, that sometimes circle back, and other times leads to wholly new roads. Engaging with a wide circle of people — celebrating our focuses and interests along the edge — deepens and widens everything we do.

Looking at the above extracts from real people such as you, in comparison to what people said last year this time, not much has changed, has it?

-- Thanks for reading 10 Twitter Users Share Why They Use Twitter at AriWriter

Social Change, Me, and My Mustache

Ari Herzog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:01:37 +0000

What started as a few days last week opting not to shave led me to remember Gradon Tripp’s desire to fight prostate and testicular cancer and Mike Schneider’s video of shaving as part of a 10-year-old global movement every November “to change the face of men’s health” called Movember.

Purposefully choosing not to grow a mustache because I can never ever grow any hair in that hollow area under my nostril called the philtrum, and because I wanted to wait until after Election Day came and went–I decided to give men’s health a chance for the second half of the month.

Me and My Mustache

Movember is not just about growing hair on upper lips, but also raising money. This 30-second video provides a good description:

Wikipedia provides information on the origins and controversies about the charity, which social media has enabled people to share their ’staches, such as these other guys and gals in the Boston area:

I see the 40+ Team Boston members already raised over $11,000 in the name of men’s health. Down in Austin, David Armano raised over $5,000 alone in corporate sponsorships.

If you like my closeup and can appreciate that my great-grandfather lived with prostate cancer and I have aunts and uncles with stages of breast cancer that this is much more than merely growing out some hair, please click here to donate if you are moved.

-- Thanks for reading Social Change, Me, and My Mustache at AriWriter

How to Write Blog Content For Your Readers (or Why Metrics are So Important)

Ari Herzog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:05:32 +0000

Note: This blog post is graphic-intensive. If you can not see images below, you may want to visit the blog directly.

The most important aspect to consider when writing blog posts is you.

I’d be lying if I wrote anything different.

You.

When I write blog content, I keep of a mental log of who you are, what keeps you busy, where you live, what kind of computer you own, how fast your internet connection is, how many children you have, and other technical and demographic aspects you’ve already shared with me.

Enter cookies.

No, not the chocolate chip kind but the cookies that run behind the scene and identify who you are every time you visit this site, whether for the first time or the hundredth. Data is written from these visits into applications, shared below, that help me provide you a fuller experience because you would be reading something you enjoy reading.

For purposes of data collection, you are an aggregate of many people.

Looking at the data in piecemeal, I first turn to Google Analytics — a subject I introduced 12 months ago, and again when I explained how one post quintupled my blog visitors. If you’re a long-term reader, you may remember that one.

Visitors to ariwriter.com over the past 6 months

Over the past six months — between May 21, 2009 and November 16, 2009 — I can see much textual and visual data about you…

What you use to get here…

Your browsers and operating systems

How long you stay here…

Your length of stay

How loyal you are to return here…

Your loyalty

Whether you have a fast or slow connection to ascertain whether graphics like this blog post are OK or detrimental to your browsing experience. Add a comment below if you’re using a dial-up connection?…

Your connection speeds

How you got here (out of 1,144 traffic sources)…

What brought you here

Your top 10 (out of 19) favorite search engines…

Your search engines

…and so forth.

Once I’ve exhausted the data perspectives on Google Analytics, I then turn to Quantcast for a different set of benchmarks.

While GA is predominantly about your computer, your browser, search engines, and referring sites, Quantcast follows you around the web to see where else you go and what you do to guesstimate your age, ethnicity, age of your children, and more. Everything is an aggregate; no personal information is tracked and I, for one, don’t have access to anything other than what you, too, can see from this link.

Quantcast tells me the average version of you is a college-educated, middle-aged Caucasian male with teenage kids living in the house and earning an annual salary under $60,000.

Does that sound about right?

Here’s a demographic snapshot:

Quantcast demographics of ariwriter.com

…and here’s a snapshot of your geography:

Quantcast geography at ariwriter.com

Third, comparative sites like Compete.com enable to me to gauge who’s visiting my blog in relation to other blogs to ascertain what I might want to write about to “steal” their readers to come here, whether via intelligent comments on their blog posts or flat-out writing about topics that search engines will eventually index.

For instance, comparing unique visitors at AriWriter against Marc Meyer’s at directmarketingobservations.com and Josh Peters’ at shuaism.com over the same six month period yields this graph:

Collective intelligence from compete.com

If you head over to compete.com yourself, you can cut and paste different domains. The free version allows up to three domains to be compared together.

Sometimes, I like to plug in random websites to see where I stack, such as this graph showing me against a bigger blogger/author, and GovLoop.com with its 20,000+ government accounts:

Different intelligence

Fourth and definitely not least, I browse through my blog archive and draw upon categories and past months to see what I feel like writing about again that you may have liked.

I also use Wordpress plugins like Popularity Contest to gauge which posts saw the most amount of comments, an indicator a similar topic again may prove useful to you and your colleagues.

You.

That’s the beginning of how to write blog content for your readers, anyway. Can you think of a better metric to gauge content creation than who reads your content in the first place? Do you understand why I focused this on me and my readers to give you an idea how to focus it on you and your readers?

There are other ways to learn who your readers are and why they may return and what to write to bring them back, but those are subjects for other articles. Thoughts? What am I missing? What would you like to learn in more detail?

-- Thanks for reading How to Write Blog Content For Your Readers (or Why Metrics are So Important) at AriWriter

Why Unfriending is Important This Year

Ari Herzog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:25:05 +0000

You may not appreciate when someone unfriends you on a social networking site, but the action verb has a lexicographical importance to the New Oxford American Dictionary which announced unfriend as its 2009 Word of the Year.

From the press release:

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Searching my blog archives, I find two references to the word of the year. One is from last week on unfriending Facebook friends and the other is from five months ago when I referenced Twitter as lacking unfriendliness as a hurdle to make money.

Christian Science Monitor scribe Marjorie Kehe notes the last three annual words had an environmental bent — “hypermiling” in 2008, “locavore” in 2007, and “carbon neutral” in 2006 — and questions the bigger picture why a similar word, such as “ecotown” wasn’t picked this year. Maybe the web’s caught up with us?

Hat tip to Sarah Evans for the find.

-- Thanks for reading Why Unfriending is Important This Year at AriWriter

Social Media: Banning vs Blocking

Do You Care That @BarackObama Doesn’t Tweet?

Ari Herzog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:50:00 +0000

The blogosphere is abuzz in the wake of President Barack Obama’s statement in Shanghai last night that he doesn’t use Twitter, nor has ever typed a tweet. MG Siegler at TechCrunch reacts and opines:

This is interesting considering the Internet, and social media in particular, was considered a large part of his ascension to the Presidency. Obviously, he had a killer team around him that was able to embrace the web without the then-Senator getting too much involved. Still, it’s somewhat surprising that he never sent any of his own tweets during the primaries.

The Presidency comprises more than the person elected to the office, but also includes aides and assistants and directors and managers. Macon Phillips is one. Vivek Kundra is another. Bev Godwin is a third. They are individuals appointed to roles that (in)directly support the President and are allowed to speak on his behalf — or the Presidency’s behalf.

Should it matter that Obama never tweeted?

Pay attention to the following comment by Brian Ahier, an Oregon city councilor:

As an important clarification to an error in the article, the Whitehouse communications team only send tweets from the official Whitehouse Twitter account. There are very strict rules that regulate the mingling of official accounts with campaign and personal accounts. @BarackObama is the account of the Obama political campaign. @WhiteHouse is the account of the Whitehouse.

I wrote about the connection between social media and the presidential election 12 months ago, and compared the number of Obama and McCain followers on various social media sites between August and November 2008.

It’s no more surprising that @BarackObama’s Twitter followers jumped from 111,000 in November 2008 to over 2.6 million today, than to read about the President not tweeting himself.

It’s also not important that he doesn’t tweet. He has more important things to do.

-- Thanks for reading Do You Care That @BarackObama Doesn’t Tweet? at AriWriter

12 Million People Tweet 27.3 Million Times

Ari Herzog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:25:42 +0000

…every day.

Think about that for a moment. Brian Solis indicates this is comparable to the number of Yahoo instant message status updates sent every month, with the caveat Yahoo has five times more users than Twitter.

Swedish research firm Pingdom tracked every Twitter message sent from October 21 to November 11 and published their findings that 27.3 million tweets are sent every day around the world.

It’s intriguing that Tuesday is the most popular day of the week to tweet, as my Twitter statistics indicate Friday is most frequent.

These statistics provide further proof that Twitter has established itself as a global force for companies to reckon with. People are tweeting. Maybe they’re tweeting about your brand — from their cellphones while in your stores. Are you listening?

-- Thanks for reading 12 Million People Tweet 27.3 Million Times at AriWriter

Finish Her Sentence Anonymously

Ari Herzog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:20:01 +0000

You can see what Sarah Morgan wrote by clicking here.

-- Thanks for reading Finish Her Sentence Anonymously at AriWriter

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