Today, we launched the public beta version of SaveUp, an online rewards platform that rewards you for saving and paying down debt.
I have been fortunate enough to work with SaveUp from the very early stages. This is a very exciting time for us. If you’d like to sign up, use this link to get 100 bonus credits. Feel free to give me a shout if you have any questions or feedback.
I have always had a fascination with generic monikers on the internet. Back in middle school, I collected AIM screen names by acquiring them through less than kosher means. I used the screen name ‘teddy’ for a while on AIM until someone offered me $250 for it. The funny thing is – 6 years later, I still stay in touch with the guy who bought it. He even swam against my roommate last year in a NEWMAC meet at Wheaton. There was a strange culture of people who discovered AOL exploits and took advantage of them to gain access to generic screen names. They generally congregated in AIM chatrooms to discuss their practices and tout their ‘elite’ screen names. Who knows what these people are doing now. What is usership like on AIM these days, anyway? I would imagine it has plummeted. I think dabbling in this strange practice back in middle school was my foray into domaining. The big difference is that domaining is actually a business – a big one.
After using the Twitter name, @ted0, for a while, I grew envious of the owner of @teddy. I shot him a Facebook message and much to my surprise, he handed the account over to me. This friendly German med-school student (??) could sense my profound interest in owning a more generic Twitter handle. However, having such a name comes with a lot of baggage – mostly in the form of several daily random @replies.
As you can see, I get a lot of junk @replies from people either entering @teddy by accident or thinking i’m someone else. I can’t imagine the crap that people with super generic names have to sift through.
I decided to do a little breakdown of the one letter Twitter users. Why? Why the hell not? Plus, I needed a break from studying for LSE exams… but that’s a topic of discussion best left for a separate post.
@a Andrei Zmievski
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: “Founder”
@b Brian Griffing
Location: Spokane
Occupation: Musician
@c Coley Cheng
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: graphic designer and UX engineer
@d Dave Bragdon
Location: Brooklyn
Occupation: ?
@e Erin
Location: Santa Cruz, CA
Occupation: ?@f Fred Oliveira
Location: Valley?
Occupation: “Founder”
@g Greg Leding
Location: Arkansas!
Occupation: State Representative
@h Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
Location: Dublin
Occupation: Engineer (PHP)
@i Kayla Hawkins
Location: ?
Occupation: ?
@j Juliette Melton
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: product design (?)
@k Kevin Cheng
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: product design
@l ?
Location: ?
Occupation: ?
@m Mark Douglass
Location: Kreuznach, Germany
Occupation: ?
@n Naoki Hiroshima
Location: Palo Alto
Occupation: “Founder”
@o Say-O.com
@p Paolo I.
Location: ?
Occupation: ?
@q Ariel Raunstien
Location: Tel Aviv
Occupation: “Founder”
@r Rex Hammock
Location: Nashville
Occupation: “Founder”
@s Sandy
Location: Portland, OR
Occupation: ?
@t Tantek Çelik
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: “Founder”
@u ?
@v William Lawrence
Location: DC
Occupation: “Senior Accessibility Specialist”
@w Walter
@x Gene X.
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: Photographer
@y Reyhan Dhuny
Location: London
Occupation: ?
@z Zach Brock
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: Engineer
So here you have it…the ABCs of Twitter. It’s quite clear and not very surprising that the majority of these people are from the Valley and involved in startups in some way. Most of the people with generic usernames on Twitter, or in any online service for that matter, are early adopters or friends or family that beta tested the product. Having such a username sounds like simply a novelty but in reality, it really can have an affect on your level of engagement with your followers, memorability/brandability, and most importantly, your level of awesomeness.
I checked on my tumblr yesterday, which really has nothing of substance on it. In fact, it really only consists of several pages of songs that I have listened to over the past couple of months. I guess I had linked my tumblr to my last.fm, which is linked to my Hype Machine. Eh, what’s the point, you ask? I don’t really post on my tumblr so I guess getting a glimpse into my musical preference is better than nothing, right? It is also linked to my flickr. The point is, you can have an active tumblr without actually posting anything to it. It may not be the most interesting tumblr and definitely not the most followed as you can tell by the lack of popularity of mine but it’s better than nothing I suppose.
I just stumbled upon a page on LSE that hosts the entries to the LSE Photo Prize Exhibition. One of my shots, which I titled “Oil Invasion” is up on there.
Check it out here: http://colle.ge/oil
“The Trans-Alaska Pipeline penetrates one of the most fragile, unscathed regions in the world. It is a glaring sign of man pillaging earth to aggressively expand world consumption.”
The exhibition was a lot of fun. My shot wasn’t selected for a “prize” but it was cool to see it hung up on the wall here at LSE. It will be hung in a classroom somewhere on the LSE campus.
So on the off chance that there are readers of this blog that aren’t also readers of WhileinAlaska.com, I’d like to give a shout out to my friend Dave, a skilled musician who is participating in a remix competition put on by Grammy nominated artist BT. Almost 300 people are competing in the competition and Dave is in 8th place! The top 10 will win signed copies of BT’s album “These Hopeful Machines” but I personally think Dave can place in the top 3! Please help Dave out and vote for him with the widget below. All it takes is entering your e-mail – don’t worry you won’t get spammed, this is legitimate! Also, please do listen to the song… it’s quite good!
I had a friendly conversation yesterday with the gal from Red Tettemer who contacted me to help promote an Under Armour internship. We had a debate over what constitutes spam. For the record, I’m not really offended or perturbed about her reaching out to me. I frankly don’t really care since I am no stranger to cold contacting people, especially back in my heavy domain buying days. It merely prompted some curiosity about the proper practices of cold-contacting blog publishers as a large reputable corporation. Maybe I’m just slightly flattered that WhileinAlaska.com was deemed worthy enough to solicit me for a mention. Or maybe it’s the skeptic in me that questions whether I was victim of a hard day’s work of crafting generic e-mails to everyone on CollegeBlender.
I thought I would pose the question:
Loading ...Personally, I think the keyword here is unsolicited but I think it even goes beyond that. I don’t think a message necessarily has to be sent in bulk to constitute spam. I consider asking a handful of random blog curators (by random, I mean, their only relevance to my product is their age) to write about my widgets to be spam. If I was writing to them offering a partnership in the form of an affiliate program or a link exchange, I think that is more of a “pitch” and less so spam. A pitch infers that you have something to offer.
Anyway, enough rambling on this topic. I welcome your opinion.
Red Tettemer is an ad agency out of Philly with some excellent clients, including Schwinn, Adidas, Comcast, ESPN, Leatherman, Fox, and many more. Under Armour is apparently among their long list of A-list clients and they are using Red Tettemer to pull a page out of Internships.com’s book of marketing tricks. The only difference: they don’t have Charlie Sheen attached to their project. And well, that could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.
Is the “super ultimate summer intern” the new marketing ploy to reach the lucrative college market? A “Social Media Marketer” from Red Tettemer’s team contacted me directly to suggest that I post information on WhileinAlaska.com about Under Armour’s college intern position, which she described as “the best internship opportunity out there for college students.” I was slightly perplexed for a few reasons: 1) my blog about living in the Arctic of Alaska could not be anymore irrelevant to summer internships or Under Armour 2) how many people did this “Social Media Marketer” manually contact to solicit for blog mentions? 3) WHERE did she find WhileinAlaska.com? My guess is College Blender,a blog wire of student-produced blogs.
I know that soliciting blogs for mentions is far from new but is it common for a company as large as Under Armour to allow an ad agency like Red Tettemer to essentially spam curators of small-time blogs to gain exposure for their campaigns? Wouldn’t we all like to have free media exposure? Yes, yes we would.
My business partner Dan Hussey and I are in full swing on the development of our higher-ed startup CampusFiles.com. We are very excited about introducing the project to the public in the fall. Until then, feel free to request an invitation on CampusFiles.com to have a sneak peek at the wonderful features we are going to have.
Sometimes I feel that there is a level of redundancy in social media. Okay, I know there is. How many ways are there for me to say the same thing? I could likely sum this post up in a 140 character tweet on my Twitter account. Alternatively, I could write a Google “Buzz” but it is already linked with my Twitter and who the hell uses Buzz? Or I could choose to post it on my tumblr. I could write a Facebook status but I keep that private so only my “friends” would see it. I could post a LinkedIn status but it would make sense to keep those updates relevant to my professional sphere.
I could really go on forever with this but the point is, there are many tools that do the same thing. That is not to say that you can’t use them all, however. There is an optimal use and audience for most of these networks and in some cases that might be subjective. So is this really redundancy? For me, some networks are more private than others. Take Path, for example. I keep my Facebook pretty private but Path takes it to the extreme. Your network is limited to 50 friends, as inspired by Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University. Dunbar concluded that you can only maintain meaningful relationships with up to 50 people. Call it the “anti-social-network,” if you’d like. Some networks, like Twitter for example, are the eptiome of complete exposure, encouraging as much interaction as possible. It really just depends what your message is and who you think might want to see it. Honestly, no one really wants to sit there and read about how you’re about to do laundry unless maybe you’re Shaq or something. But then again, no one likely cares when I check into Starbucks on Foursquare every day, unless of course, they need some tips on choosing the best Starbucks among the 50 in a mile radius in London.
On another note, Quora is awesome. I am obsessed. Check it out. That is all.
