Don’t tweet @ celebs so you can tell your buddies “I was talking to @Alyssa_Milano today, and…”

July 31, 2009 By JD Rucker 14 Comments

My two favorite celebrities on Twitter are @THE_REAL_SHAQ and @Alyssa_Milano. They are entertaining. They keep it real. They tweet as if they were mere mortals sharing their exceptional day-to-day existence in the same stream as our mundane mortal lives.

Many who have celebrity friends on Twitter actually know and interact with them. My good buddies @Zaibatsu, @BuzzEdition, and @Murnahan talk to celebrities regularly because of their strength on Twitter. They are some of the exceptions.

Sadly, a trend has been increasing lately that takes advantage of the kindness of those celebrities who reply back to people who tweet @ them.  It’s been there since the dawn of celebritwitter in the beginning of this year, but I see it creep up more often every day.

Celebrity Tweets [Read more...]

Filed Under: Twitter

Movie Studios Pulling YouTube Videos is Asinine

July 29, 2009 By JD Rucker 4 Comments

I just don’t get it. Movie executives must have all gathered in a room and declared, “If there’s anything on YouTube that may entice people to go to the theater or buy our movies, we should make sure to pull those down.”

It started with random wanderings through some social media site when I noticed Cinema’s 10 Best One-Man Wrecking Machines. I love lists. I love movies. Sounds like fun.

There was a video embedded that I wanted to see. Pumped, I clicked play.

Copyright_YouTube [Read more...]

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Social Media Strategy, YouTube

How to Not get Banned on StumbleUpon

July 29, 2009 By Tammy Rucker 71 Comments

StumbledFor me, StumbleUpon is a great place to make connections, see great pictures, and find articles or sites that I would otherwise not be exposed to. The whole idea of SU is to share great finds with your friends and for great content to get exposure.

This concept has evolved, to say the least. Now you may be exposed to sites that are not relevant to your preferences just because it has been thumbed up many times by your friends, and their friends, and so on. These sites have been “pushed” through the system, for the sake of traffic/views. Recently SU has been trying to combat this situation by adding the share feature, and even offering advertisement etc. In addition, they are banning “circles” of mutuals that seem to be sharing, thumbing, and reviewing the same sites.

If you happen to be in one of these “circles,” you run the risk of getting “ghost” banned or completely banned.

Ghost Banned on StumbleUpon: You can thumb up, thumb down, discover… pretty much anything a regular user can do. The only thing is, your efforts don’t count. You can tell if you’re “ghost banned” by discovering a page, opening up a different browser, and visiting the review page of the site you just discovered. If it says “Discovered by someone” and not you, you’re a ghost. No word yet on how to reverse this.

Here are some things to avoid:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Social Internet, StumbleUpon Tagged With: ,

Social Blade Episode 2 is Live

July 24, 2009 By JD Rucker 1 Comment

It’s an hour and six minutes of fun, frolic, and social media discussion.

* * *

Read more on this Social Media Blog.

Filed Under: Featured

Digg Survives Negative Press, Will Likely Not Revert Diggbar

July 21, 2009 By JD Rucker Leave a Comment

UPDATE: As predicted, they did not revert. They are going forward with their plan. Two nice “concessions” – a blog post explaining it (I didn’t expect that) and a reverse on older URLs already in use prior to today (good move – don’t change what we’ve already tweeted).

* * *

I hope I’m wrong, but…

Patience. It’s a virtue.  It’s also one that is hard to channel when issues concern social media. The “real-time web” is not real when it comes to decisions and changes (or lack of changes) on large websites, especially when something goes wrong on social news websites. Such is the situation with Digg and their recent Diggbar fiasco.

Diggbar_Fiasco

Kevin Rose, founder and CTO at Digg, was apparently not happy with the rollout of the recent change to the Digg URL shortener. It received quite a bit of negative buzz once the story broke, but the fervor of complaints have dwindled to whispers.  Rose was just returning from a 2 week trip when the changes were made to push clicks from Twitter and other sources to the Digg story page rather than a framed source as other URL shorteners do.

The tweet you see above was a reference to “catching up” from this trip with the negative buzz as one of the top points of discussion. While many (including me) are hoping that the new code will be pulled, a lack of response at this stage is not a good sign.  Here are the possibilities: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Digg, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Did Digg Just “Bait & Switch” Twitter Users?

July 19, 2009 By JD Rucker 69 Comments

UPDATE: This image speaks for itself:

Rose_Diggbar

UPDATE: Leo Laporte had Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about this. You can see it on Twit Live – the Diggbar discussion starts at the 11:26 mark.  Here is an excerpt:

  • (Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)
  • Laporte: Is that true?
  • Rose: That’s a good question.
  • Laporte: You don’t know?
  • Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.
  • Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…
  • Rose: Correct.

UPDATE: Digg has confirmed via email that this is not a mistake and the shortener is working as intended.

UPDATE: Let Digg know how you feel through Twitter. Send an @digg via @socialnews reply and your tweets will be posted here as well.

TweetEither there’s an error happening with Diggbar or Digg just made a big mistake.  Before, those who clicked on the links when not logged into Digg would be taken to the source image, article, or video.

Upside Down DiggRecently, the links have been switched to point to a Digg landing page if you aren’t logged in – the pages where the story is posted on Digg, not the original source.

No word from Digg regarding this. No blog post. No onsite message. No reply to a recent email. They dropped it in and now it appears that they’re seeing if it sticks.

I’m still holding onto hope that it’s a mistake and not a conscious choice. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Digg, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Twitter Today: What are you… pushing?

July 18, 2009 By JD Rucker 19 Comments

Do you remember what Twitter looked like this time last year?  Probably not – the vast majority of the users on the site today weren’t around this time last year.  Things have changed dramatically over the last 7 months. For many, Twitter shouldn’t ask, “What are you doing?” Instead, they should change it to…

What are you pushing

Don’t get me wrong – the primary reason I came to Twitter was to get exposure for my blog posts.  I’m generally a social person and I do (did?) enjoy the interaction I was able to have with people across the world or down the block, but the noise levels on Twitter are approaching an intolerable level. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Social Media Strategy, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Why StumbleUpon’s Su.pr is the URL Shortener of Choice

July 15, 2009 By JD Rucker 13 Comments

Fans of bit.ly, DiggBar, ow.ly, or any of the gazillion URL shorteners out there will object. They will ask, “What makes su.pr so special?”

SuprStumbleUpon has done a great job at putting together the best features that are available on some shorteners and added a few things that that are less common or completely unique.  The only thing they haven’t done yet is properly publicize this amazing package of a URL shortener.

You probably know these things… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogs, StumbleUpon Tagged With: , ,

Imgur.com: How Images are Done on Social News Sites

July 12, 2009 By JD Rucker 5 Comments

Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.

“How the hell did flickr get through our defenses?”

Flickr_vs_Imgur [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reddit, Social Internet Tagged With: ,

Digg Dupe Detector: A Work in Progress (we hope)

July 12, 2009 By JD Rucker Leave a Comment

We’re approaching 2 weeks on since the unveiling of Digg’s new duplicate submissions detector. We’re strongly, strongly hoping that it improves. In many ways, the old, worn out version was more accurate.

Day one displayed a much-publicized “DOH!” when 2 stories ABOUT the dupe detector (the one linked above and this article from Brent Csutoras) hit the front page at the same time. You couldn’t plan it any better than this:

Digg Dupe Fail 2

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Digg Tagged With:
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