I’ve been using Twitter to let people know when & where I’m playing, and even a bit for taking song requests. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has come up with some tips for musicians to leverage Twitter to connect better with their fans.
@JohnnyDiggz is my Twitter username. Sean Combs walks around wearing a black T-shirt with white text that says “@iamdiddy”. One of Twitter’s biggest advantages is the simplicity of its username system. Create a username that is easy to remember and let people know how to use it.
Speaking of, even if they don’t have a Twitter account, did you know that people can start following your updates just by sending a SMS Text from their Cell phone? Try it out…send the following text to 40404.
follow johnnydiggz
It’s that simple. For the rest of the tips, check out this link on Billboard.com:
I’ve been asked this 3 times in the past month….How do I insert music notes or hearts into my Facebook or Twitter status?
Even my mom knows how emoticons work, but these aren’t your average smiley face characters; you’re entering the strange world of ASCII SPECIAL CHARACTERS!
1) Copy ASCII symbols from here (copy paste them directly)
♥ – heart
♫ – Two musical notes
♪ – One musical note
☺ – white smiley face
☻ – black smiley face
☼ – sunshine
2) Make them yourself!
This works for some people and not for others, but each of these characters can be typed on your keyboard using the ‘alt’ button. If you’re on a laptop make sure you ‘Num Lock’ is on!
Next, hold down ‘alt’ (the one in the bottom left of your keyboard) and press type the following:
Hold ‘alt’ then type 1 -☺ (white smiley face symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 2 -☻(black smiley face symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 3 – ♥ (heart symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 4 – ♦ (diamond symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 5 – ♣ (clubs symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 6 – � (black diamond with question mark)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 7 – • (round bullet)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 8 – ◘ (block with white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 9 – ○ (unfilled white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 10 – ◙ (block with filled white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 11 – ♂ (man symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 12 – ♀ (woman symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 13 – ♪ (One music note)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 14 – ♫ (Two music notes)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 15 – ☼ (sunburst)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 16 – ► (black triangle pointing right)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 17 – ◄ (black triangle pointing left)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 18 – ↕ (up and down arrows)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 19 – ‼ (bang bang, or two exclamation points…it’s one character)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 20 – ¶ (paragraph symbol)
For those that can’t get enough comic tragedy in their life, comes F My Life (as in Fuck My Life!). A co-worker introduced me to the iPhone App (available in the App Store as FMyLife).
Download the app, and anytime you’re feeling down about your own life, you can always be assured of an instant ‘pick me up’ at the expense of the real-time tragedies of anonymous contributors.
You can even submit your own tragedies.
One of my recent favorites:
Today, I received my passport in the mail. They got my birthdate wrong. Then I picked up my birth certificate that I had sent in with the application. Turns out my parents have been celebrating my birthday on the wrong day for 16 years. FML
I’ve been trying to figure out what possible good hashtags do on Twitter. Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to tell everyone to use a # in front of a keyword and this would somehow help. How?????
Seeing as Twitter itself does nothing with these hashtags, what’s the point? If you go to search on twitter for #cowbell, you’re not gonna get all the people who just typed in cowbell (minus the # sign). So why use the # sign at all? Just search for cowbell!
Please Twitter people…help a recovering #DBA understand. I don’t think I’ll go as far as this guy, Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter | Extraface.
In their everquest for new eyeballs, advertisers have jumped on the latest bandwagon…following Google’s pay per click model into the relatively new world of Tweets and Twits.
Berlin-based Rocket Rentals has launched Magpie. Through their “global initiative”, Twitter users can sign up and earn cash based on the number of Twitter followers and the “hotness” of their tweets.
There are several ways to get paid, but my personal favorite:
“Pay-per-View: You get paid a base amount for allowing a tweet to be placed in your stream – this amount depends on the number of your followers and the hotness of your tweets.”
And, pray tell…how much can you earn? What is the price they think you’re willing to sell your friends eyeballs for? With Magpie’s handy profit calculator, you can find out!
For example, I put in Wil Wheaton‘s Twitter name, Wilw. They say the leech balls kid from “Stand By Me”‘s Twitter base is worth up to 28,944.39 Euros…a month.
That’s $38,174.89.
Clerks Director and film geek Kevin Smith: $6,469/month
“Like A Surgeon” parodist Weird Al Yankovic: $10,957/month
And who’s paying for these eyeballs? Apple. Skype. Cisco.
Yep.
How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying – ReadWriteWeb.
Here’s the thing: Facebook relationships are basically a 1:1 ratio. You’re either Friends with someone or Not Friends. There’s no real in-between.
Twitter has more relationship possibilities:
1) You can follow someone and they follow you back
2) You can follow someone and they don’t follow you back
3) They can follow you and you don’t follow them
4) No one follows either.
If you look closely at the latest Facebook update, you can see that they’ve realized the value in not treating all friends equal. The improvements to the newsfeed are aimed at making it more Twitter-like. Suddenly Facebook looks like your Twitter feed!
S0 why use Twitter?
That’s exactly what the folks at Facebook want you to think…why use Twitter?
I think the attraction to Twitter is simplicity. It’s easy to wrap your mind around the concept. You’re a fan of someone/something…you want to keep up with what’s going on…so you see their newsfeed. It’s like getting your own custom CNN newscrawl. It’s got the voyeuristic attaction that Facebook lacks (yet MySpace had).
But Facebook is certainly trying to compete…just how far will they go? Joshua Porter at Bokardo thinks they’ll go all the way…
Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric – Bokardo.
Glowing faces. Young faces.
Disengaged, young, glowing faces.
There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “The Game” where the entire crew becomes addicted to a simple video game. Well…almost everyone except for young Wesley Crusher and his girlfriend (one of the few episodes with a tasty young Ashley Judd). As was common for NextGen episodes, in then end, Wesley Crusher saves the day.
Now he’s part of the problem.
Wil Wheaton, who starred as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, has over 300,000 followers on Twitter. One of his recent Tweets: “Kings have given up 7 shots on goal in the first 6 minutes of the 1st, and taken 1. Oh boy, it’s going to be a long night.”
Do we really need to be getting color play-by-play from the kid from Stand By Me? (the one who isn’t dead, isn’t one of the Coreys, and isn’t married to Mystik?)
Apparently so, because lately it seems like what’s going on in Wil’s world (and the rest of the Twitterverse) is more exciting than the world that surrounds us. This is what is causing the glowing faces: Twitter, Facebook and the like.
I see it all the time when I’m on stage at Howl at the Moon. At any given moment, it’s likely that at least 1 person at each table is somehow interacting with their phone rather than being engaged in their surroundings. I’ve seen it at nightclubs too…remember that song, “No Parking on the Dance Floor?” I think it really needs to be updated to “No Tweeting on the Dance Floor!”
The under-30 crowd seems to be the worst of the offenders, and in my experience it seems to be slightly skewed towards the women. Twitter has replaced the knitting circle as the preferred way of spreading gossip.
And what is so unique about Twitter that has everyone all aflutter? The concept of public message boards hearkens back to the days of dial-up BBS’s. In fact, BBS stands for Bulleten Board System. They’re digital notes on the fridge, on display for your roommates to see (as well as everyone else) .
And the vast majority of it is the most mundane of mundane of information. I can fully admit I’m narcissistic enough to maintain a blog and I’m fairly active with my Facebook account. Sure, I have a Twitter account…I just rarely use it. My updates are autofeeds from my blog..it’s simply a notification tool I use let people know I’ve created some new content. I guess I just don’t care enough about which flavor of yogurt Wil Wheaton ate for lunch today.
Moreover, it’s practically impossible to follow any threads or conversations on Twitter. Unlike Facebook where you can read whole threads, on Twitter you’re often reading replies to unseen messages…it’s like overhearing half of an annoying telephone conversation. Yes, I know there are tools that do this for you, but I’ve got better things to do than read through other people’s attempts at publicized witticisms.
When I was in my teens I worked at a summer camp in North Carolina. The owner had a rule banning headphones (whether plugged into a CD player, cassette player, radio…whatever). Why? Because they were anti-social. When you have headphones on, you’re isolated from the world around you.
I find it very disturbing that the “new social media” is, in many ways, creating the same anti-social behaviors that headphones created. Glowing faces. Disengaged, young, glowing faces.
Start looking around and you’ll see them too. They’re everywhere.
Diggz and Ryan talk about movies, Blip.fm, Twittering, Social Networking, and being lost at sea. Plus Diggz updates everyone on his movie projects.
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