Stangs Garage » Twitter

The day I broke Twitter…Again.

stang5_0 — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:16:38 +0000

Well, not really all of Twitter. Actually, I didn’t break Twitter at all, but you would’ve thought I did.

First off, let me apologize again to those of you that follow me on Twitter, or should I say, those who are still following me after this morning. I really am sorry! It’s not like I sat there slamming down the Tweets to blow up your streams. In fact, to be honest I was trying desperately to recover The Garage this morning after a core upgrade started throwing 500′s.

It wasn’t until I started hearing from those who still give a damn, that I realized the same thing happened again that happened when I migrated my site to my own hosting solution. I immediately tried to apologize to my followers, but due to the slam, I was over my limit for the time being and had to wait. In the meantime I deleted every one of those Tweets. And there were indeed several.

If you are a true follower and have come to know me by now you can skip all this if you want. You know by now that I like to tinker.

The Garage has always been a playground for me, and to an extent, at your expense. Everything I know is self-taught for starters, and as I learn more things, and play with different code, I tend to blow things up. I’ve only had the site since 1998 so cut me a little slack Yea, I know. A development environment might be a better place to play with my toys in case they explode, but I guess I just prefer a LIVE environment. More often than not, I can back things out quickly before you even notice and go back to the drawing board.

With regards to what happened today, I think I have identified the plugin that was the cause of all of this. It essentially bridges my posts to Twitter seamlessly as I post them. The trouble is, when I was coming back from my 500′s, it reposted I can’t tell you how many of my posts back to twitter and filling your streams. That being said, I am pretty sure I have identified the culprit and will keep it off in future updates. I can’t say for sure so please don’t hang me out to dry when accidents happen. That may not be it at all. I have never claimed to be a pro at all of this.

Apparently those who don’t know me seem to think every now and then, it’s my intent to flood our Twitter streams with redundant garbage. Why in the world would I want to look like a complete ASS and flood your stream intentionally, let alone my own? If I didn’t do anything to try to clean it up, or didn’t try to aplogoize, then fine, unfollow me or whatever you need to do. But an honest mistake which I really had no knowledge of? @Stang5_0 is my personal account folks. I’ve taken pride in the building of my follower base as well as the friendships I’ve developed.

Again, I am very sorry for flooding your streams. If you feel I am not a big enough boy to handle a Twitter account and need to unfollow me, so be it! Shit happens, and what happened today was an accident that I didn’t even know was happening.

Those of you still reading this and still following me, Thank You for your support! Thank you for understanding it was an accident. Yes, it was not the first one of this kind, but I play with code. It’s what I enjoy. When possible, I try to learn from my mistakes as well. Just because I play with it, doesn’t mean I know it. I don’t always know what causes my site and things to blow up, so I don’t always have an answer. And sometimes, it goes BOOM again. But I usually try to figure it out.

That is all. Thank you.
Stang

Marketing on Twitter with a contest.

stang5_0 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:39:52 +0000

With more and more businesses jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, we are seeing more contests with some fantastic prizes being put on by these new-to-Twitter businesses. A wonderful marketing strategy for several reasons, one of them being exposure of the business name through ReTweets and Tweets alike. FREE

Having won concert tickets, meals, even a wallet on Twitter, I’ve seen a few different methods of having a contest. I would like to explore a couple of these methods as well as how not to do a contest.

I want to also go on record saying that my interactions with the local businesses in Phoenix are quite enjoyable and winning a contest is only gravy. Half the time I don’t even realize there is a contest, I’m just interacting. My point of this blog is that when you have a contest on Twitter, you really need to know the ins and outs of Twitter and how to give everyone a shot at winning. I am also writing this as a result of being burned twice now in a contest held by businesses that do not understand the Twitter time-stamp.

The first person to answer…

If you have a contest like the contest I entered yesterday where you are looking for the first person with the correct answer, never ever use web-based Twitter. If we take a look at the results from yesterdays answers, do you see a difference in the time? No you don’t, but you do see that the posts are done in chronological order. That being the case, I clearly beat out the winner, @UrbanRealty.

Aside from all of our answers happening 21 hours ago, how do you tell who was really first? Sure, it looks like mine came up first, but when you get down to it, how do you differentiate from the entries? I can think of at least one way, and that would be to use TweetDeck which will show you the time stamps. It’s how I determine the true winner in a contest. It’s also how I have pointed out to friends on Twitter that they should have won a contest. Take a look at the excerpts from TweetDeck regarding the contest yesterday. Now that you can see the actual time stamp, it would seem that I won by at least 20 minutes. It would also seem that if I wasn’t to be the winner here, at least @lizaasbury should have beat out @UrbanRealty.

So that being said, while I agree that this type of contest is fun and can be fairly easy to run, if you are going to do so, please use the adequate tools to determine the true winner for your contest. If people get word that you are not being fair in your contests, your attempt at marketing via Twitter contests may have an adverse effect.

If you are not sure, ask the community for advice or help. The Twitter community is a phenomenal collection of brain power as well as helpful people who I’m sure would be glad to assist. I for one would be glad to help you get started on Twitter and run a few contests, just hit me up.

Scavenger Hunts

Everybody likes a good scavenger hunt. As a matter of fact, @TheFatBoys ran a really good one last week where they had you visit various websites looking for various text and pictures. I’ve seen a few of these web-based scavenger hunts and really admired the creativity behind them.

I can see though where time stamps would be helpful here especially if you have a couple folks tie with their final answers.

Another interesting way of holding a scavenger hunt is by using the city as the game board. In most cases pictures are the missing piece here, thus the object of the city-based scavenger hunt. These types of scavenger hunts take some fore-thought and planning but can be quite good especially if you get other businesses to play along. Maybe collecting a book of matches from a particular restaurant or bar might be an item or challenge.

This type of contest is a great choice if you want to get some great collaboration going. Obviously it can be expanded on as well in numerous different ways be it by theme or by challenge. Plan your time accordingly though, and try to avoid times where traffic is heavy.

Random Drawings

These contests seem to be getting more popular although I’m not sure exactly how they are run. While I’m not aware of any type of app yet that would make facilitating this type of contest easy, about the only thing I can think of is the old fashioned way. Write down all the entries and pull from a hat, but as a little CYA, you may want to do it LIVE on UStream or get some sort of video just to show the contestants you are for real. I have to wonder how folks are doing random contests. Just running their finger down the screen to find a winner? I’d be interested in hearing your ideas on a random contest via Twitter and what the fairest way would be to run such a contest.

I’m sure there are more ways of running a Twitter contest, but my point here again was mainly to do it right. If you’re going to run a Twitter contest, be sure you are tracking your potential winners correctly. Especially if your name is on the line since we all know how viral the Internet can make things.

Please feel free to share your thoughts here in a comment. You can also FOLLOW ME on Twitter or catch me on Facebook.

All you can eat pancake breakfast tomorrow!

stang5_0 — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 06:46:53 +0000

I’d rather not wait till tomorrow, I’d like them now please.

So between 8 and 11am at some point, I shall graze heavily at the All-You-Can-Pancake Breakfast that the blockwatch is putting on tomorrow. That’s the plan anyway, but knowing me I’ll get a bright and early start on the yard and forget all about it.

Wow, what a week it has been eh? Work as usual has been busy and then of course coming home and spending time tweaking The Garage. Probably the most frustrating part of it all, is spending most of my time fooling with the code. It seems I spend more time fooling with it then I do enjoying it but that will change in time. I’ve had a fair share of assistance in troubleshooting which has been more helpful than you know. I don’t always have time to test everything right away so I rely on you guys to stumble over it and let me know

So far I like the feel of things, although I’m not sure I am fond of the gallery yet. I think it has potential, I just need to RTFM as it were. I am pleased with the forum and am anxious for it to get going. Once I get where I want to be I will be able to spend more time on content making it worth your time to drop by and say hi.

I’ve gotta tell you though, I feel like such a newbie right now considering this site was born in 98 and has internet roots that go further back then that. That’s quite a few years of content, some I’m not although proud of, but it’s a diary right? I’ve thought of sifting through the archives and bringing them back in their original dated form but I don’t know yet. Looking back, some of it seems so irrelevant, yet it was a part of who I am or I guess was. It all depends on how you look at it. So if you see some material with some crazy dates, those are actually taken from articles of Garage Days past.

I imagine I wouldn’t be hip if I didn’t mention Twitter at some point and YES, you can follow me on Twitter now too. But earlier in the week, @aplusk beat out @cnnbrk in a little contest for followers. My wife asked me this morning what Twitter was, and the answer didn’t really come to until later on in the day. It should be noted, that Ashton had a good answer when Larry King asked him tonight what Twitter was.

Having been involved in or on the net one way or another for many years, I have seen toys and goodies come and go. In fact, one of my favorite programs back in the 90′s was AOHell. I still have an 80 meg drive with windows 3.1 and a working AOHell on it. Talk about Smithsonian material eh? That’s another story for another time. Twitter is many things. Yes, to an extent with some folks, it’s a toy. I think the smart guys and analysts though, they see it as a tool of many sorts I’m sure for many things. In simple terms, I see it as a way to measure the pulse of the planet. Yea, the planet is pretty big, but if you can hit the net, you can twitter. Dial-up, DSL, or tin can; if you can hit the net you can share your thoughts. Pulse can be many things from the moods to the music people are listening to. From a statistical side, server hits are quite measurable in countless ways and can tell an analyst when the world is sleeping and when the gears are turning. Sure there are other platforms out there that are quite popular like Facebook and MySpace. We all know about those. But it takes less time to type 140 characters or less than it does to even start with any of the other sites out there. I think what we will see is with an easier method of updating, more and more people will Tweet on a more frequent basis.

If there was ever an RSS feed for the world, Twitter is it. I think it’s awesome that the celebs have a real side too. I know that there are several band sites for example that are run behind the scenes by the management companies and not the musicians themselves. Yea, it’s kind of sad but that’s life. Twitter affords high profile folks to give back to their fans on a more personal level. I know there are those that would never get it, and that’s fine. I like to talk to the person behind the personality, the person that wakes up with bed head like you and me.

I think I mentioned I went and saw Ten Dollar Outfit the other day. I’ll tell you what, talking with the guys out back was right on, just what I’m talking about. Come to find out, it wasn’t the entrance I was at, but what did I know since that was the first time at The Rhythm Room for me. Nope, I was at the back door by the green room..Lost. Don’t remember off hand what we were talking about but it was just laid back.

Oh I know, I was talking to Kaleb Anderson about my complete lack of rhythm. Until of course Rock Band and Guitar Hero. While I have my two hand drums, it was the games that got me to understand a beat. Sure, I have a vast knowledge of music and am a good listener, but to make a rhythm was brutal. Hooray, I can make a beat now. At any rate, he said he saw that with a relative of his also.

So yea I know, I went way off on that one. My point though, was having just a down to earth conversation about whatever works good for me.

By now you are probably wondering what all this has to do with pancakes. Not a damn thing, but I will graze tomorrow.

peace