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Neilsen says simultaneous web/TV use on the rise
New figures from The Neilsen Company show that more Americans are multitasking — surfing the web while watching TV.
They say nearly 60% report doing it at least once a month. That’s 134 million people!
I found the report on Mashable, so if you’d like to read more, click here.
How to follow a Twitter chat
Have you ever walked into a room where everyone was talking, engaged in an activity and it seems like everyone knows what’s going on but you? Now imagine they’re talking 90 miles a minute. That’s what attending your first Twitter chat can feel like.
The best way to follow a chat in Twitter is to use a client like Tweetgrid, HootSuite, Tweetdeck or Tweetchat. I’ve found it easiest to follow a chat if I do a search for the hashtag the chat is using, the moderator’s twitter stream, @ replies to my name for starters. I have consistently had the most luck with Tweetgrid, and I recently learned it was developed in my home state of North Carolina — so I’m recommending it to you. One more cool thing about Tweetgrid: you enter the hashtag of your chat and Tweetgrid adds it to all your tweets so you don’t have to re-enter it and the character counter includes it so you don’t go over 140 characters. Here’s a peek at one setup I use a lot.
Using Tweetgrid for #journchat
Now that you’ve seen how I keep up with a chat, here are some tips for participating without annoying regular chatters:
1. Check the moderator’s Twitter stream for preliminary information about how to join in.
Sometimes this is in the steam, sometimes there’s a link to a place where you can read some basic rules about how this chat likes its members to participate.
2. Retweet the moderator’s questions to give everyone participating a chance to see them.
Depending on the speed of the Twitter client other folks are using, they may be answering questions 1 and 2 while your moderator is on 3 or 4. Retweeting the question helps pass along the information.
3. Use Q1, Q2, Q3 etc., when you are answering the question.
Example: Q2 No, the press release isn’t dead, but needs to be rethought.
4. Watch your character count.
If your answers are less than 140 characters, they are easy for fellow chat participants to retweet without changing or with adding a quick comment. Aim to leave 10-15 characters free if you can.
5. When you see a good answer, go ahead and retweet it. Even if you don’t agree with it.
You can mention that you agree, disagree, or spit out your Diet Coke when you read it. Retweeting a comment is a great way to further the dialogue and keep the conversation going.
6. We don’t have to all agree, but we do need to respect other opinions.
There can be some good dialogue going on, but remember it’s a conversation and not an argument.
7. Follow people you find interesting or retweet.
It’s a great way to find new tweeps with a provocative point of view. And if you happen to be pithy and find a lot of new followers after a chat because of your comments, you can follow back, thank them or just engage in a conversation with the new folks you meet.
There are chats ranging from interest in journalism/PR to small businesses, to blogging to personal finances. Meryl K. Evans (@merylkevans) started a list on her blog that has since become a Google spreadsheet updated by many folks. Find a chat you might be interested and mark your calendar. Remember, the comments fly by quickly, and you might need a little practice before you keep up. If you need more time, you can always perform a search using the hashtag after the event to read the comments at your leisure.
For those of you who are old pros at Twitter chats, what advice would you add?
How to "get" Twitter
Twitter's new home page is designed to help newbies figure out the microblogging service.
You’ve probably heard someone say they don’t “get” Twitter. I hear that a lot, especially since I’m pretty active on Twitter and I tell all my colleagues and people I meet about it. I understand the confusion. It can be a lot like attending a huge party, solo, where you don’t know a soul. Everyone’s talking, they’re in a conversation. You could feel overwhelmed. Shy. Not sure which conversation to join, or even if there is a conversation out there that addresses your passion.
So use that party analogy to get your feet wet. You wouldn’t bust into the party and start shouting at the top of your lungs about your company, your product, your newscast, your blog or your children’s accomplishments, right? You’d probably walk around the room, smile on your face, looking for an opportunity to talk about something that interests you, meet some new people, maybe by starting with your neighbor at the bar or buffet line.
So here are some ideas for getting your conversation started on Twitter:
1. Listen. Use the Twitter search tools (there’s a search box right on the home page) to find conversations regarding topics you’re passionate about. You can search with a keyword to start with, like books, public relations, marketing, or health care. You can also search for Twitter users to follow by using sites like Twellow (a yellow pages-type listing), Twitter Grader or by checking out the people your Twitter friends are following. There are even sites that lists journalists who use Twitter, which is handy for my public relations colleagues.
2. Talk transparently. Be human and honest about what you are doing and who you represent. You don’t get all dressed up in a costume to go to the grocery store — you’re yourself there. Be yourself on Twitter.
3. Remember that Twitter is not a broadcast channel for your company, your blog posts or your personal branding efforts. You should be passing along good information that everyone can use. For every one Tweet about your branding/your company/your blog, you should be passing along 4-5 other Tweets about interesting information, responding to other people’s Tweets and otherwise genuinely conversing. I’ve seen some recommend a 10:1 ratio, others say 80/20% or even 30/30/30.
As they say in Pirates of the Caribbean about the Pirate Code … “They’re more of a guideline, really”. So jump in the Twitter pool. The water’s fine. We’re starting a game of Marco Polo in a few minutes and you’re invited.
Guest Post at The BeanCast
My dear little blog, I’ve neglected you shamefully. But today offer you this tidbit: a link to my guest post about social media on The BeanCast.
More soon, I promise.
Mwah,
Steph
Three reasons to visit Alltop.com
I started following Guy Kawasaki on Twitter months ago, after I had visited his website Alltop, a website that aggregates blogs based on their topics. They call it an online magazine rack. Interested in scrapbooking? Visit scrapbooking.alltop.com. How about personal finance? (personal-finance.alltop.com). Maybe you’re a huge Carolina fan? Unc-chapel-hill.alltop.com is the site for you.
Three reasons to visit the site:
1. There are so many topics, with new ones created all the time. They are updated 24/7 so there’s always something interesting to read. I have found personal and professional inspiration here.
2. You can create your own personal Alltop. Find the blogs on the topics you’re interested in and create your own personal mix of news, chat and comments. Plus it’s really easy to share links and more with your social network. Mine is alltop.com/stephskordas.
3. Inkslinger is now on pr.alltop.com!
I’m sure there are many more reasons you’d visit Alltop. How are you using it to find the best conversations and topics?
Technorati sez:
Post this here:
Coveting Chic Technology
How I’ll be HP’s Cupid for an HP Vivienne Tam Special Edition Notebook
So Cupid only has a bow and arrows to make people fall in love, but I have a love of writing and the World Wide Web at my fingertips. My husband and I have long been HP users – we started with printers back in the 1990s, and then I bought the coolest HP scanjet (the vertical one that’s see through? Love it! I’ve seen it on CSI too.) and now we have an HP media center PC. I love it, but rarely get to use it.
Did I mention my husband was born on Valentine’s Day? And that he is a PC gamer? With a lot of games? Each year for his birthday, I get him the game he’s dying to play and he goes off to bond with the computer and his military strategy game. While Valentine’s Day is important to us, I like to celebrate it more as his birthday. It seems more fair that way. I don’t have to buy him a present on my birthday (which is the anniversary of an event that ended World War II, but that’s beside the point), but he feels obligated to buy me one on his.
So if I won the HP Mini Vivienne Tam Special Edition Digital Clutch, he would be so off the hook. He would be
free to hog the PC downstairs, while I could take my beautiful peony-strewn digital clutch anywhere. I could surf the web from my daughter’s homework spot at the kitchen table to help her with her studies. I could take the HP Vivienne Tam Digital Clutch up to the baby’s room to download lullabies for my MP3 player to soothe her to sleep, or play soothing videos when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Both girls would learn that technology is beautiful as they admire the sleek lines and bold floral print.
I could take my darling digital clutch to my room and indulge in a little me time as I catch up with friends and family with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’d tell all my fellow Twittermoms about my cool HP digital clutch, and maybe, finally, I’d be able to use the computer at night and attend tweetups and chats that are right now out of my reach because my darling husband’s left flank is sneaking up on a squadron of enemy fighters and that strategy he’d been putting together for days would fall apart if he stopped, or my tween has to attend to her Webkinz before they all become sick from unhappiness or whatever happens to those digital pets.
I could take it on business trips and impress my clients and strangers in the airport – especially those folks who are huddled around the one outlet at the gate, trying to get enough juice to keep their dwindling laptop batteries charged while I surf the web with plenty of battery power in this fashion-forward and technologically chic digital clutch. And since it fits right in my handbag, I would never have to pay those extra bag fees or juggle a laptop bag and purse again. If I were in New York very early in the morning, I would go stand behind the fence at the Today show and just hold my HP Mini Vivienne Tam Special Edition Digital Clutch up in the air instead of one of those signs about it being my birthday. You know all the camera operators would zoom right in on me for that.
I would tell EVERYONE that I am online and HOW I am online and finally my New Year’s resolution to stay in better touch would come true because I would be able to finally get the digital pictures off my camera and uploaded to the web via my HP Mini Vivienne Tam special edition notebook so my girlfriends and I could talk about everything that’s going on with our lives since we all scattered to the four winds. I would infect them with desire to have their own darling HP Vivienne Tam Digital Clutches, and their husbands would see the light – how adding one tiny little piece of technology could make a home run happier and healthier because let’s face it, the saying is true: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t NOBODY happy.
In closing, a brief limerick:
There once was a girl from Carolina
Who thought that there’d be nothing finer,
Than an HP Vivi Tam Digi Clutch
She would use it so much,
As a Facebook Fashionista, Diva web surfer divine-er.
Happy Last Year of the Aughts, or Double O’s or Zeroes!
I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the New Year. I know all the media and the economic news shouldn’t make me feel this way, but I’m thinking a positive outlook is the way to go right now.
And there’s something to celebrate. This is the last year of the first decade of the new millennium. So we’re nine years in and we haven’t figured out what to call this decade. We called this decade the “early 1900s” the last time it happened. Should we dust it off with a smidgen of an update and refer to this long trek through terror, war and economic uncertainty as the “early 2000′s”?
It doesn’t have the same ring as the “nineteen hundreds” does it? The “two-thousands” just doesn’t have the same historical weight to the term to me.
Then there’s the Aughts, which is what people in the “early 1900′s” called zeros. Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” is supposedly a member of the Indiana Music conservatory’s gold-medal class of aught-five. (05) But he was lying about that. So should we trust the aughts?
I’ve heard some people propose the “double-o’s”. Like 007. Bond. James Bond. So last year would be double-o-eight? This year is double-o-nine. Licensed to chill.
And then there’s the Zeros. Which brings me to this:
There’s nothing like Schoolhouse Rock to put things in perspective. Where would we be without zero? My hero. How wonderful you are.
7 Secrets About Me
Thanks to my co-worker, Mark Tosczak, I’ve been tagged in a meme. Which is different than being tagged by a mime, I’m sure. So now I have to come up with seven things you don’t know about me.
1. I have ridden an elephant. I got to be honorary ringmaster of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus when I was a TV news anchor. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time. That elephant was so tall that I had to duck to get into the tent. And they are very scratchy. I loved it!
2. I’ve met Vanilla Ice. I interviewed the Ice-ster during his 21st birthday party, 2 weeks after Ice, Ice Baby was released and was racing up the charts. He was in Wilmington for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. He was “celebrating” and rapped all his answers. Between the slurring and the rapping, I couldn’t understand anything he was saying to me, so turning that video into a story later was a big challenge. On a cooler note, I also got to interview Melissa Etheridge a few years later. I understood everything she said, thought she was amazingly cool and the story was very easy to put together.
3. I have sat out a Category 3 hurricane on the porch of a motel in Carolina Beach. It was Hurricane Bertha, and three news crews from my station were stuck at that hotel when the bridge back to the mainland was closed due to winds. I knew something they didn’t. Carolina Beach flooded during an afternoon rainstorm in those days. Luckily none of us were seriously hurt, but a photographer was injured when he was struck in the forehead by flying shingles. Hurricane Fran, a couple of weeks later, was worse. But that’s another story.
4. My hubby and I were born in the same hospital six months apart, but grew up on opposite coasts due to military deployments. We’re both Marine Corps brats. It’s an official term, and one we’re both proud to hold. We came within a day of never meeting when he was offered a job at my TV station, which I pressed the news director to extend. He took it. The next day he was offered a job at a much, much bigger TV station, but he’s honorable and stuck with my small market station.
5. I have seen ball lightning. I know it exists. It happened during 1989′s Hurricane Hugo, when I was foolishly standing on Carolina beach at midnight, holding a cell phone antenna in the air so I could broadcast back to my radio station, which had nonstop coverage. It was at the exact moment when Hugo made landfall to my south, I believe. The wind all of a sudden became a wall, sea spray blew into the power transformers on the pole and they started exploding. I saw ball lightning (different from the transformers exploding) and immediately whipped that antenna down and simultaneously crouched. I crouched over so fast I actually strained my back. Then I cautiously made my way back to the radio station’s Isuzu Rodeo, which was parked on the OTHER side of the exploding transformers, which continued to blow and shower sparks down on me and the DJ who was escorting me. My breathless report once we got back to the truck earned me a spot on the CBS Early Show the next morning, where I was interviewed by Harry Smith.
6. I collect flamingos. Not in a scary weirdo way. They are delightfully tacky, but I am picky about which ones I collect. Basically, I have some coffee mugs, a few stuffed animals, a pin or two, Christmas lights/ornaments, a bath mat (present from my hubby) and a sweater. My criteria: they have to be both cute and tacky. Mostly cute.
7. I read voraciously. All the time. Like when I’m blow drying my hair. (Which may explain why I look the way I do. I don’t mean to brag, but I also did this as a TV news anchor, when good hair is a must.) I have some books autographed by the authors, which I treasure. I don’t usually lend my books. I’m starting to get better about this though. I like mysteries the best.
8. Bonus secret. I’m hooked on Animal Crossing for the Wii. I find fishing at night strangely soothing. Plus I have new areas to chat about with my tween. We talk about the people who live in our town, gifts we’ve been given, milestones we’ve achieved. We’ve been sending each other messages through the town’s mail system too, which is always fun.
So now I have to tag other bloggers I know. This is the tough part, because most of the bloggers I know have already been tagged. I’m gonna have to think more about this part and do some tagging later. If I don’t post this soon, I never will.