Welcome to Smuggle Me

Here are the details for the third Las Vegas Lunch Tweetup:
Location: Metro Pizza – website – map
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, March 10th

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Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
lollieshopping
Sara_Mooney
vegasgeek

As I discussed at the first Las Vegas lunch tweetup, I’ll be trying to do a tweetup about every other week. We have a new location this week so make note. Everyone’s welcome so let me know if you’re coming so I can let the restaurant know.

This month will be at a nice little italian restaurant on Tropicana not far from UNLV.

Here are the details:
Location: Sergio’s Italian Gardens – website – map
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, February 24th

Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome as long as we don’t get too big for Paymon’s.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
JustJulie
PalidinLV
vegasgeek – Solid maybe
JessBerlin

After I experienced a bit of jealousy over all those people that were going to the Beer and Blog Las Vegas, I decided to do my own Las Vegas Lunch tweetup. Evenings are just too hard for me with my little ones. Here’s my original tweet announcing the Las Vegas lunch tweetup.

Here are the details:
Location: Paymon’s Mediterranean Cafe Map – website
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, February 10th

Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome as long as we don’t get too big for Paymon’s.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
roadup
lollieshopping
JustJulie
vegasgeek
nothus
JessBerlin
fostermatt – Tentative maybe
courvo
ghp2006 - Try to make it

I’m far from an expert on using Twitter to market. I’ve seen a ton of interesting ideas out there that people are using to connect on Twitter. You definitely have to be creative, but it’s a great place to apply your creativity.

The thing that surprises me the most about marketing something on Twitter is how an individual tweet can drive traffic. Certainly if you have 6000 followers and you post a link, then you’ll generate traffic. I’ve seen some traffic from that type of twitter marketing, but it’s never been huge (granted I have less than 1000 followers).

What I’ve found more interesting is when an old tweet generates traffic. For example, here’s a tweet that was generated from a blog post I wrote about Jason Mesnick getting engaged at the end of Bachelor.

Not only was this post done 15 days ago, but how many people look at individual tweets? The answer is not very many. I can only assume that the search engines have found that tweet and some search engine (most likely Google) has been driving traffic to that tweet which of course prompts people to visit my blog post.

I’ve had this happen multiple times. I can’t figure out the exact rhyme or reason to why it happens, but considering how long it’s taken me to set up a twitterfeed, it seems like a worthwhile addition to anyone trying to market an RSS feed.

I think that most people that know me online know about my Twitter account. I love Twitter. I can’t really explain why and I feel kind of sheepish when my wife or someone sees me watching my twitter account. To someone not on Twitter it probably feels like I’m stalking these complete (or nearly complete) strangers.

Well, I don’t feel like such an outcast when I look at how Dell is using Twitter. My only problem with what Dell is doing on Twitter is that it takes me too long to figure out which of Dell’s twitter accounts I should follow. There are so many that I haven’t taken the time to figure out which ones are relevant to me. I think I might like a firehose version of all the Dell twitter accounts. My stream on twitter goes so fast that I’d rather just subscribe to all the Dell Twitter accounts and then remove them as I see ones that aren’t relevant to me.

Today I was trying to click through to Facebook and got a screen saying “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Of course, this all comes a day after Michael Arrington declared on Twitter that Facebook was loading faster than ever. I actually tried it myself when I saw the tweet and he was right. Facebook was zippy last night. Too bad tonight they decided to follow the twitter model and declare that “It should be available again within a few hours.” Nice of Facebook to leave it vague so that it can be down more than a few hours.

Seriously? Did Facebook actually post on their website that I have to wait a few hours for my Facebook addiction? Seems like Facebook might want to recruit a few more Google engineers that can find a way to recover/update in less then a few hours.

Tonight, twitter has been alive with the news that Andrew Barron is selling his twitter account on eBay. It’s already up to $455 at the time of this posting. People are hating on him for selling it, but I have to admit that I think it’s a great idea. We should have known that it was only just a matter of time until someone tried it. Techcrunch even covered the sale. Should be fun to see how much it goes for. It only has 1400 followers. I wonder what Scoble’s 20k followers are worth.

When I was reading my twitter feed today I found Jules and blm03 talking about using TwitterFeed to publish when you do new blog posts. I think this might be a good idea. Definitely better to be able to automate the posting of your blog feed. I’m thinking that I might try it. I just wonder how many people it will annoy on twitter. Considering the number of posts I’m doing right now I don’t think I should be too worried.