Streeeeetch! What’s Grant Doing Now?
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated my blog here at thestorry.com! 2010, so far, has been quite a substantial year of change for me and we’re only 2.5 months into it! I don’t want this to be a reflective post on all the reasons why I haven’t been keeping up with the blog, or a manifesto on how I’m going to become the world’s most dedicated blogger moving forward. I will be making some changes to this blog and creating a bit more of a theme around it in the near future though. I’ve also decided to build out a professional site to highlight the Grant Storry skill set at GrantStorry.com. I’m going to experiment with blogging and commenting on a blend of personal topics of interest, coupled with professional ones and see how that goes. I know that flies in the face of conventional wisdom about not mixing personal and professional; but I think it’s more important to be real, human, and whole. I’ve found people respond to me more authentically the more authentic I am to them. Professionalism doesn’t always have to equal “stoic non-human”, IMHO.
Quickly, the biggest change for me over the last month in 2010 has been leaving my corporate job as Senior Manager, Global Online Marketing and venturing out on my own as an entrepreneur. This path has been one I’ve been wanting to walk down since childhood and I’m very excited to begin the adventure and get to the point where I’m writing my own paycheck. I heard a great quote this morning at Yoga, “Find a way to get paid for doing what you love. Then every paycheck will be a bonus.” — in the 2 short weeks I’ve been doing what I love, I can safely say this is so true.
Finally, Jesse Learmonth just sent me a link talking about the C100 in Silicon Valley, an organization made up mostly of Canadians leaving down there to help Canadian technology companies get access to all the resources Silicon Valley has to offer. C100 is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment. It’s refreshing and encouraging to see greater linkages and resources for us Canuck-tech entrepreneurs down in California! I sense I may need to make use of their services in the near future 
Social Media… such a fad.
I just came across this video (below) recently and I think it’s been put together rather well. Due to a little incident at work today the message was a little more poignant. Social media sure has put some serious power in the hands of anyone who has an axe to grind or praises to sing- for better or worse. Enlightened companies and brand managers really have to start taking this medium extremely seriously. I always like the Cluetrain Manifesto as a good read to get a strong understanding of the sentiment and new landscape social media propels us all into. Apparently this university made twitter a required class for journalism students. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of this as newspapers struggle to survive.
New Search Engine “Hunch” launches today
A co-founder of the popular photo site Flickr just announced the official launch of her new search engine “Hunch” today. The team has raised $2 million in funding. The engine asks you a series of questions to narrow down what results to provide.
While it doesn’t “know” a lot right now, the whole engine is built on machine learning that will improve accuracy and breadth with use and time.
I asked it what I should have for lunch and it did manage to figure out I was in the mood for spicey food. I then went to Noodle Box and MAN did lunch hit the spot! Hunch’s hunch was right
Read more here:
How To Retweet on Twitter: Retweet, Retweeting
Many individuals, companies, and bloggers use Twitter as a promotion vehicle for their websites and products. There are tons of articles on this and, as such, I thought I’d focus on a tactic within Twitter that I think is underutilized by most: promoting other Twitter user’s content by “retweeting” it. When a Twitter user updates their Twitter account, this is called a “Tweet”. If you are reading another user’s “Tweets” and you see something of interest, you can promote the exact same “Tweet” to your followers by employing a “retweet”.
The concept of “retweeting” can best be distilled down to this concept: Take a Twitter message someone else has posted and rebroadcast that same message to your followers. Proper “netiquette” dictates that when rebroadcasting this message, you give credit to the original poster. While retweeting sounds great for the original tweeter (since there is usually a link involved), retweeting can actually benefit you just as much, if not more- and that’s what I’d like to touch on.
How to Properly Retweet
Retweeting is very simple. Here’s a quick how-to for you to understand how to properly retweet:
The common syntax starts off with the use of the label: “Retweet”. People also sometimes label their Twitter message starting with “Retweeting”. Either works. The next piece of your Twitter message is the credit. You can credit the original poster by simply using the @reply syntax, for example: “@originalTweeter”.
Lastly, you should add the link or post message from the original Tweet along with a brief commentary about the link and why it is relevant. Here is a full example of retweeting:
Retweet: @originalTweeter I just found the best blog in the world!! http://tinyurl.com/d9b8gs
It’s that simple. Soooo…. why exactly should you care about retweeting? Read on…
The Benefits of the Retweet
- Retweeting provides quality content to your followers on Twitter. If you have a profile on Twitter that is more individually focused, people will follow you on Twitter to keep tabs on what you’re up to and what you find interesting online. Because your followers will generally know you in real life, they get along with you and share your tastes and interests. Therefore, the items you Tweet about will appeal to them. Retweets will most likely be in line with what you find interesting and therefore, they’ll appreciate the increased breadth of items tweeted and retweeted. People also follow entities on Twitter that represent businesses or more commercially focused individuals. They follow these “people” on Twitter to gain some sort of value. As a business entity, you can retweet items that are complimentary to what your followers are expecting from you to provide them more value and keep them engaged with a higher frequency of communication.
- Retweeting will most likely build your “social media” persona brand and increase loyalty to your social media persona. If you point a follower to an external source that is highly relevant to them, the amount of trust that individual has in your persona will increase. This snowballs as you retweet more links that continue to be relevant to your followers and in line with the reasons they began following you to begin with. The next time you post a link, whether it be a retweet externally or to one of your Internet properties or articles the higher the likelihood your followers will click the links. Do not abuse this trust and you will become an authority and wield the ability to drive traffic to high value content by mere mention.
- Retweeting provides value to your followers, additionally it catches the attention of the original tweeter or content producer being linked to. Directing traffic to these sources is an act of kindness and active content producers, bloggers, and micro-bloggers tend to return such acts. The more energy you put into driving relevant valuable content to people who are interested in, the more you’ll get back yourself (Google model anyone?)
Happy re-tweeting everyone!!
Update: Just surfing on Linked-In and came across Mitch Joel’s post about Retweeting in the context of branding success. Check out his stuff too.
Also check out Retweetist for a whole site dedicated “retweet” measurement and tracking. You can also see who the top Twitter users are who have their tweets retweeted the most.