Alliance Blog Reviews

Digital creative agency Collective has unveiled their ‘Naughty or nNce’ Twitter-driven app, featuring their very own Collective Santa . Users can find out whether they’ve made it onto Santa’s Naughty or Nice List before discovering what they deserve in return. Visitors enter their Twitter username to wake Santa from his snooze. They can then watch as Santa checks their tweets for various naughty or nice key words while he boogies to the music. Once the results are in, Santa responds by telling the user if they are naughty or nice and what they deserve this Christmas (anything from a “ruddy good talking to” to “a little donkey”). If the user has been naughty, they’ll be encouraged to add some Christmas cheer to their tweets and try again. Results are shared on Collective Santa’s Twitter page and can also be shared on the user’s Twitter or other social networking pages. The user can also choose to add a new naughty or nice profile picture to show all their followers. Greg Doone, managing director of Collective, comments: “It’s great to see Santa embracing new technologies like Twitter, and we’re delighted to have helped him make his naughty and nice list this year. By the way, is there any chance I could have an iPhone 3Gs please?” Look for @CollectiveSanta on Twitter. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Spread Christmas Cheer with ‘Naughty or Nice’ Twitter App

View original post here:
Spread Christmas Cheer with ‘Naughty or Nice’ Twitter App

Alright, folks… crunch time. The end of 2009 is near, and you know that for virtually everyone who actually celebrates one holiday or another in December, it can get crazed. We’ve heard of surgeons using Twitter while in the operating room, airplane passengers Twittering during a flight emergency, people raising money to fight cancer… all amazing things in their own rights without a doubt. But what about the hectic holidays? First, answer in the comments how you think Twitter can help with holiday preparations, and then vote in the poll as to if you’ve already experienced the “Miracle of Twitter” this holiday season. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . How Can Twitter Help With Holiday Preparations?

Original post:
How Can Twitter Help With Holiday Preparations?

On Twitter, you have 140 characters to play with. Most people stick to the 26 letters, 10 numbers, half a dozen punctuation marks and currency signs. Fact is, underneath your fingers there are a treasure trove of characters to make your tweets more interesting, shorter & more colourful. By making your tweets stand out, you will get more people actively reading them because subconsciously your eyes are drawn to them. If your tweets are useful (and I’ve no reason to doubt why they should be), you should end up with more clicks on links, more retweets and generally more twitter love. Here’s a few of my favourite special characters that I like to put in Tweets. I explain how to get them on the most common form of keyboards – the US Keyboard Layout (which is used by the most of the western world). If different, I will also include the UK keycode, between them that should cover most of the keyboards in English speaking countries, but if English isn’t your native language, these may be different . The characters are there, but you’ll have to dig to find them. 1. The Ampersand How To Get It: Press Shift + 7 When Should You Use It? This character is very simple, as it shortens the word “and” to 1 character, saving yourself two characters in the process. 2. The “At” Sign How To Get It: UK Keyboards – Shift+’ US Keyboards – Shift+2 When You Should Use It? Used all the time in emails, the @ sign can also be used for events (for example, the show begins @ 7pm). Saving yourself one character in the process. 3. The Asterix How to Get It: Press Shift + 8 When You Should Use It? This is one I use all the time for emotions, verbs, basically what I am doing. If I’m writing **smiles and nods**, I’m smiling and nodding. This is great in conveying how I feel about things, as well as emotions that are difficult to convey such as sarcasm. 4. The Music Symbol (Joined Quavers) How to Get It: Hold Alt & Type 14 When You Should Use It? I’ve begun seeing this more and more when people are talking about music & songs they are listening to, particularly when using services such as Last.fm & Spotify . Often people will post music recommendations, followed with joined quavers, to show that it’s a musical link. It’s a great idea to do this, as it can be a text based warning to users, by saying “this link is a Spotify link, so a song will automatically play when opened”. This’ll stop users opening music links when they really shouldn’t be. 5. Hearts How to get it: Hold Alt & Type 3 When You Should Use It? The obvious place is by sharing a link that you love, or a twitterer you love, or anything you “More than like”. This negates the old

Read more here:
8 Characters to Make Your Tweets Sparkle

Managing your followers is one way to make sure your tweet stream is always relevant. One technique using ReFollow is about removing people, the other about adding. The two most important ingredients for great people to follow are: 1. Current 2. Engaging Current meaning they are still active on Twitter. With a high drop-out rate, people tend to leave Twitter and never come back. A useful way to find out who has left is to login to ReFollow and click on the top “I’m Following” and then on the top-right “No tweets in X days”. I usually choose 30 or 90 days, since not everyone is a daily tweetaholic like me. At this point you don’t have to choose “Select All” and “UnFollow”. At the very least it allows you to look over the list and realize some people that you really like or know personally haven’t been on in a while, and maybe drop them a line. The best thing about ReFollow though is finding people that are engaging with you that you may not be following. Choose “I’m not following” from the choices at the top (make sure this is the only one checked off) and then on the right hand side in the middle of the page, check the option “Users who have @mentioned me”. This will show you all the people on Twitter that have mentioned/replied/retweeted you that you are not following. I love doing this search because it shows me who is making an effort to reach out. It shows who supports me, and that makes me happy and I want to see who they are so I can possibly support them. This is a great option especially if you’ve fallen behind or don’t get notifications at all about new followers (like me). © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Use ReFollow.com To Find The Most Engaged and Dearly Departed

The rest is here:
Use ReFollow.com To Find The Most Engaged and Dearly Departed

By Sherice Jacob – web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick! Follow her @sherice Did you know that your Twitter tweets are ripe with search engine juice that you can put to use to get more marketing exposure? Of course, links you post on Twitter, including links in your bio, are automatically no-follow, meaning the search engines will follow them, but “link juice” (like Google PageRank) isn’t carried over. That doesn’t mean the party’s over for optimizing your Twitter page though. Search engines do index Twitter tweets (through “statuses” – which look like this ). So how can you help ratchet your tweets up into search engine results as well as increase your number of followers? By including relevant keywords within your title on your status pages. Twitter creates the title for your status pages by taking up a slew of characters for itself. You can’t change that part (such as Twitter / Sherice Jacob) but you CAN change what comes after it. There are only about 27 characters available for you to use (and you thought fitting something into 140 was tough!), but every little bit counts. In addition to showing up in search engines, when you include keywords in the titles of your status pages, you also become more visible through Twitter’s own search interface, as well as the many search sites out there that comb through Twitter posts and tweets for certain keywords – like this: If I were looking for twitter tips, and these tweets came up in the results, would I want to follow these people to see what else they had to share? Absolutely! And if you click on “View Tweet” for any of these results, you’ll be taken to – surprise! The status page! Status pages are static – which means they will stay there forever unless you delete them or Twitter disappears from the face of the Earth (not likely!) – so use them to your marketing advantage and start including a few keywords in your titles and tweets. Now that you know how to better leverage your titles and statuses, get to work and start optimizing those pages with every link you post! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . How to Squeeze Every Last Drop of SEO Juice from Your Twitter Page

Go here to see the original:
How to Squeeze Every Last Drop of SEO Juice from Your Twitter Page

Ad.ly , is a brand new advertising network only very recently launched that inserts ads once a day on your twitter account. The ad network seeks your approval first so you would basically be “indirectly” tweeting the ad. Its almost as if you’d be “endorsing by approving” their ad. Interesting… This sort of control is great to have on advertising right? As the publisher so you’re technically deciding very directly what your followers see. This is great in comparison to something like Adsense where the ads are more based on bids than on the content and much less approved by you (what control you do have is choosing who you DON’T want to advertise!). This could be counted as a win-win for both the advertisers and the users on twitter. On the one hand, ad.ly “enables advertisers to reach the highly sought after Twitter audience by connecting brands with the most influential people in the community”. And on the other hand, the publisher gets to choose which ads they think their followers might actually benefit from! It’s like an affiliate marketing and advertising hybrid! When you sign up as a publisher you can actually set your required weekly price from the advertiser, which is another great level of control. That being said I would probably go with the recommended amount or a little less, to get maximum benefit from it. It’d be a shame to lose out on advertisers because you set your price too high right!? On a side note, you can actually donate a part or all of your earnings to a charity of your choice. Excellent! I hope that someone like Bono will use their sea of followers to feed the hungry instead of simply adding to their millions… Over all ad.ly seems like an excellent addition to the world of Twitter. Who wants to start a bet that Google will buy it!? By the way, ad.ly is currently holding a competition for who can get the most users to sign up using a custom referral link. The winner gets a Macbook Pro! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Ad.ly on Twitter

The rest is here:
Ad.ly on Twitter

Twitter spam and phishing attacks are on the rise, which is unfortunate because it’s causing a lot of people to lose friends, often times unknowingly. For instance, last night I received nearly 25 spammy DM’s, all of which were from people that I don’t talk with on a regular basis. It left me in an awkward position because I didn’t have time to DM them all back to give them an update, but I knew that most of them were probably losing followers by the hour. It all started with auto DM’s and Mafia Wars games. People would sign up, give access to the application, and then it would DM spam every one of their followers until either they all unfollowed them or they removed the application. From there, it moved to more sophisticated attacks, such as the recent “Hey, is this you?” type of messages. There’s also the “hey, check out this I.Q. quiz thingy.” Although the links might seem harmless, they are actually bait to get you to click the link, give up your info, and then let your account be used against your will in the same way as before. In the future, you can expect things to get worse, that is unless you do something about it. That’s why I want to educate you here, because it’s spam like this that can open your account to virus attacks, malware, or worse. 1. Don’t click DM links unless they are from someone that you talk to often or that you trust won’t fall prey to these attacks. If you see the same message over and over again, it’s a phisher. If you aren’t sure, then send a DM back and ask about the message. Most of the time, they won’t even know they sent one. 2. Check your outbound DM’s on a daily basis to make sure you aren’t spamming people. If you are, head to the next step. 3. If you do find your account compromised, then change your password immediately. In fact, it’s good practice to change your password often to avoid things like this. If your account does become compromised, it’s possible that you might lose access completely. If this happens, you’ll either have to appeal to Twitter to save your account…or you’ll have to start over from scratch. 4. Check your application preferences to see who you’ve allowed to access your account. Click on Settings -> connections to get that menu. If you can’t tell who’s using your account to spam others, then remove each one and start over. Only give access to programs you trust. Only use applications that use OAuth to access the Twitter API. If you don’t see it, then go elsewhere. The problem with Twitter spam is that it often kills someone’s credibility and unless someone is kind enough to tell you that you are spamming them, you’ll see your follow counts dwindle without a clue as to why. The best way to protect yourself is just to be smart and use common sense. If you see someone caught in a spam attack, let them know before you drop them. If that doesn’t work, then kindly move on. Remember, if the link looks suspicious, then it probably is. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Spam, Phishing, and Hacks – How to Shore Up Your Defenses

View post:
Spam, Phishing, and Hacks – How to Shore Up Your Defenses