Testing new Twitter tool

I got an alpha invite for a new Twitter app called Tweetboard that does a couple of things:

1. It surfaces my Twitter feed onto my personal site. To date, I haven't found a clean way to pull in Twitter feeds into my platform so this is a half-step in that direction. The Tweetboard window sits to the left side of my site, hidden under a "tweets" tab. Click on the tab and it opens up an adjustible screen. Click on the tab again and you close the screen. Voila!Tweetboard is an app that's simple to install and use
2. It also introduces the ability to host nested Twitter discussions within my site. I don't get enough traffic or comments yet to probably justify that feature but we'll give it a try anyway.

The Tweetboard tool itself was simple to install: Just had to slap some javascript onto my templates and tweak a few things. Took all of a few minutes.

The video above is a review of Tweetboard. It's kinda over the top, but highlights the general features.

Lemme know what you think, or better yet, toss a few posts in there to see what happens.

Cart before the horse or horse before the cart?

My team at bakersfield.com launched a new site this week called BakoDeals that features coupons from local businesses. As a website, it's not breaking any new ground in the world of local coupons. But what's different is the site is an offshoot of an @BakoDeals Twitter feed I launched months ago as an experiment in local advertising.

The @BakoDeals Twitter feedI launched the feed initially to experiment with a potential new form of ad delivery and soon began promoting local deals of all kinds, whether they were paid ads in The Californian or Bakersfield.com, or from competitors or elsewhere in the community.

Feeble attempts at advertising -- embedded "house ad" sponsorships, a bungled effort to sell a paid Twitter ad -- went nowhere. What did gain traction was our promotion of local deals, regardless of source. Our only guidelines were that the deals be genuinely valuable and of interest to more than a few people.

Click to read more ...

Getting back on the grid

I've been off the Twitter-Facebook grid for about two weeks. Just been buried at work and home; lots going on, in a good way.

But living without key social networks when I'm in the business of creating social networks has been an interesting experiment. That "digital silence" has crystalized some things for me in terms of how and when social media can be effective.

But tomorrow, plan is to dive back into Twitter, catch up on Facebook and immerse myself into finishing a PRD (product requirement document) for a cool new site we're building that'll stretch our social commenting efforts in new ways.