Always Optimizing
Dec 3, 2009 Business & Marketing, Search and SEO, twitter
There was a game show on TV when I was a kid that I really wanted to try-out for and become a contestant. I don’t remember the show as much as I remember the Grand Prize offered each week: a 5 minute shopping spree at Toys-R-Us. I didn’t really care about being on TV or anything, I just wanted to be on the show for a shot at the prize! Was I a toy freak? No, not really. I just discovered a way that I could take advantage of the prize!
You see, I’d watch in agony each week as the kids who won would run through Toys-R-Us and make the same mistakes over and over. They’d all do the same thing: with huge eyes, they’d frantic their shopping cart through the store filling it with things like bikes, skateboards, basketballs, huge stuffed animals, radio control cars, and other huge items. I swear one time a kid tried to stick a trampoline in his shopping cart. Watching these kids would frustrate me because they were doing it wrong! They get to keep everything they could squeeze into one cart. If only they had my strategy, they could have gotten all those toys and more. My plan was pretty simple to. If I were on the show, I’d run straight to the baseball cards and fill the cart until it was overflowing. I could then maximize the space in my shopping cart with some of the smallest, yet highest valued items in the store. I wouldn’t need to run all the many aisles, I could maximize my full 5 minutes in a single spot. After I took home my loot, I’d open all the packs, sort them out, create a few sets, and resell those sets plus the highest valued singles back to my local baseball card dealers (there were many in the 80’s and early 90’s). With the money, I’d return back to Toys-R-Us and get the toys I wanted and still have a lot of money left over.
As my friends know, I’ve always been a entrepreneur geek. Sure I enjoyed making money, but what I enjoyed most was optimizing a little-known process (which could also be thought of as exploiting a loophole or exploiting the system). My career choices are pretty much par for the course from my humble beginnings. As a Search Engine Optimizer and Social Marketer, I look for ways to “optimize” the experience for my clients. I make their website more suitable for success within search engines and social networks. Back 3 to 5 years ago, I was simply exploiting holes in Google’s algorithm. These days I play their game, but still have many opportunities to leverage social networks like Twitter, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Facebook in the process.
I enjoy it. It’s fun to be able to make changes and see how it affects the traffic coming into the site. I’ve been on the tipping point for a few months with one of my sites, and I think we are about to release a product (another website) that will soon push it over the edge and give me the results I’ve been looking for for so long. One downside to this business is that it can be entirely frustrating to not get the results you were hoping for as soon as you want. But when you do achieve success, it is very rewarding. So I’m hoping this little extra “oomph” that my team has been working on for the past 2 months will really jump start something good. We’ll see what happens. But our shopping cart is full and we are more than ready!
Superbowl on Twitter
Feb 1, 2009 Blog General, Business & Marketing, twitter
Follow @Superbowl on Twitter. It’s the official Superbowl Twitter feed. And I like the style of whoever is behind it:
Sidenote: One thing is for sure, Sports marketers get it. I see them all over the social grid. They are where the fans are!
And Now, An Update…
Nov 30, 2008 Blog General, twitter
I admit, my upkeep of Blog #1 has been minimal lately. But I haven’t really been gone. Friends and family, peers and strangers alike have been able to keep updated on the world of JM through Twitter, Facebook, and others.
Lately I’ve been infatuated with Twitter.com. It’s a simple service that the majority of the world doesn’t understand. It’s easy to be confused at first. It starts by asking “What are you up to?”, to which an obvious first response would be “I’m wondering why in the world I want to tell everyone what I’m doing all the time.” I’ll admit, the premise escaped me at first too. Twitter really sounded like a tool for ego-maniacs to revel in their self-importance with their phantom fanbase watching. I was woefully misunderstanding.
A lot of people say that twitter has evolved. While that is true, I really think it is how the users apply twitter has seen the larger evolutionary scale. The way I use twitter is so beyond its original intent that the “What are you up to?” question is completely irrelevant. To me, twitter is a way of creating and maintaining online relationships. I can “follow” influential people in my business and personal lives and start or participate in conversations at will. If I want to talk football during the Broncos game (as I’m doing now), I can simply send an update and see if other Broncos fans are out there (and ther are!).
The context of the conversations on Twitter are entirely different than what you’d be lead to believe by their homepage. For example, I was at PubCon in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and was able to get updates about one conference session via Twitter while attending another. Those updates convinced me that the session I was missing out on was better than the one I was in, so I got up, snuck out the back and jumped in the session that had more value at the moment. We were able to cordinate large group dinners and meetups, and even make arrangements to meet vendors through twitter.
So, while my blog hasn’t been updated in a while, my Twitter feed has. Creating a blog post is a lot more of a commitment than sending out a simple twitter shout (“tweet” is the proper term). Coming up, I’m commiting to updating this blog a lot more this month, even contemplating another 30 day challenge, but for the most part you can always see what the latest is by following me on twitter.
BTW – if you want to jump into the twitter world head first, my friend John has an excellent free starters guide on how to use Twitter called “How to be a Twitter Rockstar“. Sign-up for his newsletter and it is yours free (and I’ll vouch that he doesn’t spam you either).
