How to Change the World

Last Chance for Revenue Bootcamp and Facebook Providing $50 Advertising Coupon

2009-07-07T15:53:10-07:00

We’re rapidly coming up on Revenue Bootcamp on Friday. The event is almost sold out. Click here to see the agenda. Facebook is providing a $50 coupon that you can apply to advertise your product or service on it plus you can use this discount code to get $50 off the admission price: “FGK09.”

Two Bad Asses, Sheep Guts, Well-Hung Beef, and the 25 Best Store Names in Edinburgh

2009-07-04T21:38:15-07:00

I’ve been to many places around the world, but I’ve never seen a city with cooler store names than Edinburgh, Scotland. Here are the 25 best stores names that I saw on a recent trip. They run the gamut from clever and punny to downright descriptive.

Cocaine? Tofu? Stuff white people like? I never went in because I’m Asian.

God forbid you should go to an unlicensed sex shop.

Legend has it that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book here.

Edinburgh office of Sequoia Capital?

Two bad asses.

“Well hung” and “tender!” That’s the Holy Grail of beef, I guess—like “powerful” and “easy-to-use” for geeks.

Getting the VIP treatment at Crombie’s. That ball of stuff is haggis, and this is the owner of the store. I went to Crombie’s because I saw it in this episode of Bizarre Foods.

Check out the news coverage of Scotland at Scotland.Alltop.

Robert Meraner submitted this picture of a store that I missed.

Why I'm More of a Believer in GM

2009-07-04T15:44:56-07:00

What better pictures to post on the 4th of July than ones of a good ole, red-blooded Corvette. My buddies in the GM PR department loaned me one to drive for a week after we connected on Twitter—yet another frequently overlooked of tweeting!

This guy shows up at my house with the keys for a 2009 Corvette.

I had never driven a Corvette before, and it’s not what you would call subtle. But then again, it’s not designed to be subtle.

This is the essence of the Corvette: a big, bad-ass engine. But I was amazed that the car is rated for 26 mpg on the freeway. Popular Mechanics even got 32 mpg in its test.

I don’t think I got beyond fourth gear. The acceleration and it’s accompanying sounds are a delightful way to blow one’s carbon footprint concerns to hell.

I loved the embossing in the hood’s fire-suppression material.

If you flip a few levers like this, the roof pops out.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that you could carry hockey gear with no problem. For those days when you’re really in a rush to get to the rink, this is the car for you.

Tires can’t get much lower profile than this.

This is the heads-up display unit.

It displays RPM, MPH, and lateral acceleration. This was my favorite feature of the car.

Our solution to early-morning, top-off touring.

This shows how much space there is beneath the front air dam. Holy kaw: Is there a driveway in America that this car can clear?

After driving a Corvette for a week, I am more supportive of General Motors. I missed some features like a backup camera and lane-switching warning signals, but wow, the torque and engine growl makes me proud to be an American. And at approximately $65,000, it’s half the price of most German sportscars. If you’re a hockey player with one or fewer children and a flat driveway, it may be the car for you.

How I Tweet: Just the FAQs

2009-07-04T07:57:40-07:00

General

Question: How can you follow so many people?

Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, Directs, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki” and “alltop.” I am not reading everything everyone I follow tweets, but I answer almost every @ and Direct.
Question: Then why do you follow everyone?

Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that anyone can send a Direct to me. I like Direct messages because they are so much more efficient than email.
Question: Why do you use @GuyKawasaki and @GuysReplies?

Answer: I created @Guysreplies in order to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. For example, when people tweet, “@guykawasaki I loved Reality Check,” I don’t want to burden everyone with my thank-you @ reply. Also, people publicly attack me as a kind of “tweet bait” to get more followers. Because @GuysReplies has few followers, this scheme won’t work, and I can still appear to be “engaged” with the losers.
Question: Why do you repeat your tweets?

Answer: I repeat a handful of my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat the same news stories (without updates, simply identical reports) throughout the day.
Question: What Twitter applications do you use?

Answer: I’m on a constant hunt for the ultimate Twitter applications. Right now, I use TweetDeck on my Macintosh and TweetFlip and Tweetie on my iPhone.

My ghosts and I also use Objective Marketer to post tweets that contain links. This site enables us to create marketing campaigns and then schedule, frame, and track tweets. Disclosure: I am an advisor to Objective.

Finally, I use TwitterHawk to thank people who have shared Alltop pages with their followers. This site enables me to search for the string “pretty good stuff about” and automatically send a tweet.
Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?

Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much time he spends playing golf: “It’s what I do.” If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on the computer eight hours per day. When I’m not on the computer, I use TweetFlip or Tweetie to mark tweets as “favorites” that I handle later using TweetDeck.

Ghostwriters

Question: Do you use ghostwriters?

Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Neenz Faleafine. This is why you will see the initials “AC, “GR,” “NC,” and “LF” at the end of some tweets. If there are no initials, then it’s me or the automated feeds (see later).

I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people looking for interesting stuff are bound to find more than one. Incidentally, I measure the quality of my links (and that’s what matters most to me) by how many times people retweet me. One objective measure of retweets is here.
Question: How do you and your ghosts find so many links?

Answer: We mostly use Alltop to help us quickly find good stories. Principally, we scan Most-Popular.alltop, Tweetmeme.alltop, Science.alltop, Psychology.alltop, SmartBrief.alltop, and Oddities.alltop. I also have three RSS feeds that automatically post into my account via Twitterfeed: Toxel, Truemors, and How Stuff Works.
Question: Isn’t automatically posting feeds “cheating”?

Answer: The goal is to have interesting tweets that people retweet which encourages more people to follow me. Whatever works, works. The editors at Toxel, Truemors (other a porn video or two), and How Stuff Works are so good—why shouldn’t I “cheat”? Pick your corner.
Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and Directs for you?

Answer: No, they only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.
Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?

Answer: I’ve never hidden this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it (way back in January, 2009) here. My attitude is: “As long as the tweets are good, why does it matter who posted them?”
Question: How can I see only tweets from you and not from your ghostwriters?

Answer: You are making a mistake because they find great stuff, but try this search.
Question: Why do some people attack you so much for this?

Answer: Most are angry, little “SEO experts” who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy in order to drive traffic to their blogs or get other angry, little people to follow them.

Alltop Promotion

Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?

Answer: Twitter is a broadcast marketing tool for me. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don’t work for free) into it. The Alltop “advertising” justifies and pays for my tweeting—you can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.
Question: Okay, but what if I don’t want to see Alltop promotions?

Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me).
Question: What if I don’t like the Alltop frame that you place around the stories that you link to?

Answer: You can click on the “x” to close the frame, or a more permanent solution is to UFM.

Additional Resources

How to Achieve Revenue

2009-07-01T10:59:46-07:00

The harsh reality of the startup scene today is that revenue is the best, and maybe only, form of funding. While many conferences focus on gaining the attention of investors, we’ve put one together that focuses on generating revenue.

It’s called Revenue Bootcamp. It’s on Friday, July 10th, at the Microsoft Mountain View, California campus. Click here to learn more about it and to register.

The topics include increasing traffic, selling advertising, and utilizing other revenue streams. There is also a keynote and booksigning with Chris Anderson, the author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

The final session is a fireside chat with Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital (think: Google) and Paul Graham of YCombinator. Again, click here to learn more. Use this discount code to get $50 off: “FGK09.”