Blogging and twitter whirl....

This week I felt terrible. I realised I had been neglecting my newly resurrected Amplify blog :(



So an update is in order...



Last weekend I wrote on my sandpit blog about stealing other peoples blogs. It got good traffic but no comments (I can live with that ;) )

The other day, by accident I came across a courier company who had taken one of my ezine articles and stripped my links out of it, then posted it as their own work.



So I pinged over a ‘cease and desist’ email and got a hugely patronising response back…



No need for threats here …. I’m VERY, VERY sorry and I will more careful in the future … I was just worried about who I was linking to and was lazy not to check it out … I used an article once that pointed my visitors to porn …



So Laura … could you send me the html that you would like me to add to my article and I will get it up ASAP …. or would you rather me remove the article?



Awaiting your reply …



Bruce



Well, I tore Bruce a new backside for stealing my work. The annoying thing is, he could have used it correctly and linked back and no damage would have been done. Right now I know a few things about Bruce that he thinks I don’t... Stealing other people's blog posts

So, he gets your name wrong, big deal you may think. Well this guy is trying to make a living delivering things, he should have an eye for detail or he'll collect the wrong cargo!



Over at Business on Twitter (owned by the lovely Nikki Pilkington, who lets me have a weekly column to write about twittery things) I wrote about Carol Vorderman and how she is giving away her shoes on twitter... yes really. She has kipper feet ;) (only teasing).

Is there something business related that you can give away via twitter that would benefit many?



Remember, this isn’t just Carol Vorderman giving away her shoes, she has to package them and send them, so it’s costing her money to do this. So if you are planning a series of giveaways for physical products then you need to factor in all the costs.



Does a physical product giveaway work better on twitter?



If you have an exclusive product that would benefit from great ‘Word of Mouth’ then a physical giveaway is a great idea. If it’s portable, then people will show it to other people and talk about the product. It may lead them to searching you out on twitter or searching for the product.



That doesn’t work quite so well for a generic product as the search may not lead back to you and your business.

I also wrote about twitter turning us into a nation of whingers. It seems like we have ceased to use a complaints procedure and gone full bent on moaning about companies using social media tools.

There is something utterly repellent about someone who whines all the time. Lately when I look on twitter, someone whom I am following is whining about something, if it’s not #Barclays it’s #BT, if it’s not them it’s some other big name being berated for not doing something for one of their customers.



Let’s be honest with each other here, if you were the boss of BT, how likely would you be to go on twitter? If it was me, I’d say no way, I get nagged enough at work. Does Engagement really mean answering a never ending stream of gripes from customers?



Is twitter turning us into a nation of whingers

I have wrote over at blogmistress too, my usual column about the love involved in a multi author blog :) Will make that tomorrow's Amplify! :)



I shall leave you with Chainsaws...

Getting social media - yes people who 'get it' and acting like smug marrieds have been winding me up this week. So I took a chainsaw to them. I don't get social media is here

Let's not be strangers :)



Sarah

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/dpvu