Twitter Experiment Wildly Gone Wrong…

About 8 months ago I first heard about Twitter. I joined it..why? becuase one of my good friends started using it, he recommended it. I had to do it. So I did it.

Upon signing up I made my first post. But the marketing part of my mind struggled to find how this tool can be monetized. In March 2008 while attending Yanik’s underground I spoke to many other marketers on how they were monetizing twitter? Not even one expert had a clue on how this can be monetized.

Fast forward Blog World 2008, about 6 months later. Most of whom I met at the expo were tweeting. I was amazed by how much Twitter has penetrated into these people’s lives. Guy Kawaski duing his keynote speech asked how many people here never heard about twitter please raise your hands..not even one hand went up.

Speaking about Tweets: During my recent visit to India. I spent a considerable amount of time in cleaning up my father’s small library. He has not been able to keep up with them due to his failing health and old age.

Upon scanning through some of the old books I came across a stack of magazines from the year 1982. I remember reading this magazine called “Sunday” as a kid. In one of the magazines I found an interesting small snippet about a musical group called Tweets.

The Tweets are the latest disco craze in europe. Their first album, Birdie Song, is topping the charts all over the continent. The group has also evolved a new kind of dance which it calls ???The Birdie???. The photograph shows three members of the Tweets Left to right.. Erin Lordan(17), Una Clancy(21) and Liouse Scott(18) Dancing ???The Birdie??? in London Recently”

Now if you try to look up Tweets the musical group on Wikipedia..You won’t find anything.

Now on to my Twitter Experiment..

Upon signing up on Twtitter I realized I needed to build a big follower list. Somewhere on some blog I read “The quickest and easiest way to increase the number of followers is by following as many people as possible”. For every 10 people you follow 2 will follow you.

So what did I do? In just three days I followed Twenty six hundred people ie, 2600 people.

Guess what? The next thing I know..Twitter had banned my account.

Now becuase I did not use my own name to sign up in the first place, many folks in the Twitter community did not like me :)-

Anyways I am back on Twitter now on my own name. If you want to follow me please do so.

http://www.twitter.com/srinisaripalli

I promise my tweets will be extremely insightful, educational and entertaining!

Blog World 2008: A Quick Review

You probably saw all the Blogworld & Social Media Expo 2008 pictures that I uploaded a couple of days ago here on this blog. I finally got sometime to sit down and write a detailed review of the event.

Blogworld2008 As A Whole:

I had great expectations from this event. As much as I wanted to, I could not spend much time in the sessions but I networked very hard. I did attend a few sessions but was very limited by the time. In fact when the event ended I was the last person to leave the conference center with Dave Taylor
and Jim Kukral. I even forgot to eat my lunch on the last day. It was hectic..:)-

There were about 2000 people in attendance this year.

Enjoyed the Parties and networking. Certainly the Dance of Judson Lippley at Zapoos.com party at the Planet Hollywood was itself worth the entire conference.

I fliped it…

Interviews

I usually carry my laptop, Video camera, Audio Recorder and Camera whenever I attend an event like this

Just before leaving California my wife wanted me to leave my FLIP behind so that she could record my daughter’s special achievement ceremony at school( She received a special award for finishing her first twenty books in Kindergarten..oops another blogger in making)

Hence I had to leave my FLIP behind.

Upon reaching Vegas when I realized I was missing my ultimate weapon( The Flip camera) I paid $30 to a cab to drive to the nearest Best Buy to buy one.

Why would you buy a $179 flip camera by paying $30 to a taxi?

You have to if you have to record some great interviews with the best in the business.

During the expo I sat down with Darren Rowse, John Chow, Christene Comaford, Anil Dash Steve Pavlina and many others and interviewed them. Some on camera, some on video and some

SIDE NOTE: I have enough content to launch a 8 CD Program and sell it for $497 at the minimum. People complain to me all the time about how hard it is to create an information product. I (like many others in the past) just proved how content can be created with in no time.

Don’t worry these interviews are for you and I plan to put all of them here on this blog.

The Promise

A company called Goosegrade.com started by three friends all of them 23 years old are on a path to fix all the errors in the content on your blog with their small and unique application.

Sama Hyder captivated the crowd with her talk on social media marketing and facebook marketing.

There were many small startup companies on the exhibit floor which I could not attend. But I came home with a feeling that Blogging as a whole is evolving very fast and is very much secured in the hands of the next generation solution providers, open source contributors and blogging evangelists in a mighty way.

My Take Homes:

Success in blogging is directly proportional to the time you can put into it. The more good content you can create, the more harder you network, the higher are the chances that you will be successful. There are no short cuts.

Jim Kukral told me about his daily video show on his blog. I have decided to start mine too. Lets see how it goes. Jim be careful..I am coming :)-

I missed out on meeting Mark Cuban, Ian Fernando and a bunch of other experts..Hence I am going there back in 2009

In Conclusion:

With 270+ speakers in action, there was too much to be learnt at blogworld 2008.

If you plan to attend BlogWorld 2009 Then make sure you attend as many sessions as you can in the areas that are not directly aligned with what you already are working on or are aware off.

The purpose of an event like this is to broaden your imagination & thought process and the only way one can do that is by going into little known territories and exploring the unknown.

There were a lot of sessions around Facebook, Twitter and Social Media. I saw a lot of people in monetization sessions. Tactics are very much important in any business, yet tactics with no Strategy are deemed useless.

I hope there will be more blogging strategy and road map sessions included next year.