Interactive Marketing Cafe

observations and strategy by melonie gallegos

What’s the best Twitter photo service? January 6, 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized — Melonie Gallegos @ 8:18 am

None at the moment. Here’s what I really, really want:

  • Reliability
  • Option to also post to Facebook Fan Page or profile
  • Syndicates to Flickr
  • Tags and search features to search by tags
  • Post by email, SMS or Web
  • Site is mobile friendly so everyone can easily view pics from their phone
  • Ratings
  • Multi platform sharing features
  • Also hosts video and syndicates to YouTube

Posterous covers most of the items in my wishlist but it’s a broader host for all types of content, not a clean photo gallery. At its core it’s another simpler type of blog. For Twitter I prefer more focused apps like Twitpic. Ow.ly and TweetPhoto. I switched to the latter months ago and am switching back with high hopes and am dissapointed to report that TweetPhoto has been unreliable one too many times so I’m ready to switch. It has a habit of not posting to Twitter, then days later broadcasting all the photos it didn’t tweet at one time. “The sunset over the beach today” sounds a little ridiculous at 7am 5 days later… It also has struggled with half working features like tagging with no ability to search by the tags. TweetPhoto has tons of potential hopefully they’ll sort it out. Until then I’ll save myself the headache with Posterous or  Twitpic. Ow.ly is in my consideration set, which is your best option if you’re a Hootsuite user, it has full featured tagging and ratings plus great sharing functions. If they expand their reporting features on files and photos, and add email submission I’ll be more apt to use it. I use Hootsuite but my tool of choice is still TweetDeck because I like it’s interface just a little bit better for personal use – particularly on managing lists. Of the three Twitpic is the least feature rich, they offer tagging, no ratings, no integration to other social networks. If I had time this morning I’d create a comparison chart – if you have one please share.

A final note on Twitter photos. I’ve thought a lot about the best tool for photo contests and my recommendation is to let your followers use what ever they choose to submit photos on Twitter. The more requirements you put into submission that take the user out of their normal behavior the less participation you will get. Ask them to use a hashtag in their post and it will easy to pull up entries through a search. This will work fine for random winners or best photo chosen by you. If you want to award best photo chosen by users you’ll have to look further into running it on one platform that offers tags and ratings, and a working search function to pull tagged photos.

If you have other suggestions please share them in comments your feedback is appreciated.

 

The monetization of Twitter begins… June 8, 2009

Filed under: Uncategorized — Melonie Gallegos @ 9:07 am
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Not by Twitter, by app developers. That should come as no surprise with Twitter’s open API, it has been 3rd party developers who have latched on to the platform to provide innovation to the community in lightening fashion. Yesterday 83 Degrees, a software firm, launched Super Chirp “a system to enable the simplest form of paid content. It makes use of Twitter’s social connections and distribution channels”. In a nutshell it allows people to charge followers for premium content.

I personally have yet to meet a tweep whose content I’d be willing to pay for (not to say that I do not value and love the content of those I follow – I do). There is so much good content out there it’s hard to keep up and filter the noise. And, in this space so much of what you get and what you give has value that is not $$. While I’m not sold on paid content (yet anyways) I do see opportunity to provide Twitter  users with transactional capabilities. Just the other day a business owner asked my advice on taking customer orders through Twitter and Facebook. He had a brilliant idea. Wouldn’t it be great twit your lunch order to your local cafe or the ‘usual’ to your corner coffee shop? Super Chirp is a good start and I hope to see more extensions of this type to bridge the need and desire for transaction twitters that will heighten relationships.