New Girl in Town Makes Twitter Pages Dynamic

Twylah is about to get famous for her amazing talent at bringing together one's Twitter stream into an exciting dynamic webpage that automatically groups and presents your tweets by topic, letting followers know what you're all about.

This creates a better brand experience for business, non-profits, and individuals resulting in more followers, engagement, and click-throughs etc.

Your tweets show up with links and pictures intact. You can pin three of the trending topics to the navigation bar so they are always clickable.  You can also hide up to 10 topics so they don't show up, which is good for older, less relevant tweets.  

Check out my Twylah: http://www.twylah.com/PinnacleComms

Three cool features available through Twylah:

1. PowerTweet button can be dragged to your browser window so you can quickly and easily tweet any web page you're on.  Fast content!  And for each PowerTweet, a custom landing page is created that includes all the links and text of your tweet. Followers can click that backlink and see your dynamic webpage. Your followers get easy access to more of your related tweets, increasing their engagement.  
2. Widgets to create clickable Trending Tweets buttons or thumbnails of your themes are available in Twylah's Resource section, making it easy to embed attractive links on your business website.
3. It's free. Whether for your business or your own personal account, Twylah can help create your brand by telling your whole story.

To check out other Twylah webpages (celebrities, companies, musicians etc) or to request your own, click here: http://www.twylah.com/

Free QR codes and Short Links are Big with Bitly

Ever get links inside emails that are so long they wrap around and around? All too often they don't work.  If you want to shorten a web page address, use bitly.com.  Unlike some  other url shorteners, bitly tracks click-throughs and creates QR codes too! And for more prolific or public entities, bitly lets a corporation brand its own shortener.  While that gets technical, here's two introductory 60 second videos to get you started.

 

 

First, an on-screen demonstration of how to use bitly to shorten long webpage urls:

 

 

And, this second video shows how to get a QR code from the shortened link. 

 

 Organizations can use QR codes on business cards, ads, and brochures for example to allow people with smartphones to quickly get online to the business's offer page, video or website.

 

With Bitly, shortening links and making QR codes are simple, fun and free to do!

Businesses don't need an advertising agency to create a QR code.  To learn more, read my previous post on QR codes.

 

 

To create these videos I used the Camtica Screen Recorder Software which is the webpage url featured in the bitly video above. I downloaded the software and put these together intuitively without reading more than the page featured above -- so it's really simple to learn and use.  I did have to do a few takes though to get it right because I was ad-libbing! And Camtica can also take a video of the presenter speaking as part of the screen shot, but I chose not to do that for this demonstration. Maybe next time!

Basically, Camtica easily lets you record any desktop activity with voice, webcam and animated mouse clicks.  I really liked the yellow highligher around the mouse. A nice feature.  The resulting video can be saved in various formats including AVI and WMV.  I also uploaded these two demos to YouTube.  So Camtica is a great way to:

• To create professional screen recordings, demonstrations, presentations, screencasts, tutorials and more
• To generate effective videos that help you train, teach, sell and more
• To create demonstration videos for any software programs
• To show customers how to use your product
• To create on-demand interactive training, tutorials for school or college class
• To create a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions
• To share your recordings on YouTube, Screencast.com and other videos sites

It also:

• Records entire desktop, selected rectangle region, dynamic region around mouse cursor, webcam
• Records anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen and rectangular regions
• Records desktop screen with audio and webcam together - personalizing your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself over * your desktop at any position
• Records video chats, Skype video calls, games, flash movies played on sites
• Offers Free lifetime updates and upgrades

I am looking forward to using it more in the future, but now I need to turn my attention back to work!  Thanks for reading and commenting, and letting me wish you a Happy 2012!

Lorelei 

Facebook gets Timeline mostly right.

Who is Andy Sparks, you ask?  Watch this short video from Facebook and you'll know! In one-and-a-half minutes you see his whole life (to-date), from birth through grade school, marriage, and raising his own child.  




And now you can have your whole life on-line too in pictures, video and posts through Facebook's new Timeline profile view.  In beta-testing for awhile, as of December 15, it's available everywhere by following this link https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline.  
With Facebook Timeline, instead of scrolling through pages and pages of posts, viewers of your profile can click on any year or month and get a snapshot of your life.  So it's a good idea to review those posts, because what you said in 2007 may not be all that relevant or accurate any more!


Once you get started transferring your profile to Timeline view, you have 7 days to complete it.  My personal page took just about 2 hours to go through because it's pretty light yet still goes back nearly 5 years. 


You can select pictures to enlarge, posts to hide from view, and add a oversize cover shot at the top of your profile.  Facebook has made creating your Timeline quick and fun and made scrolling someone else's life a lot easier.  


And they've got it mostly right; however, there are a couple things I hope Facebook cleans up. For example, review your privacy settings as things like who can see your friends reverted to everyone on my page.  Also, some of the display/app boxes near your name can't be deleted, and the map app box is particularly annoying.  It is painfully slow to add or correct a few key geographic locations of holiday locations, life events etc. I gave up and wished I could delete it. 


I'm sure it will get better over time. What improvements would you suggest? 


Have you updated your page yet? If not, I hope you have some fun updating your page before Facebook does it for you!