After I heard about Madison Lord’s lemonade stand’s cooler being stolen, I suggested to the kitestring team that we step up and help out. Turns out, some of our good friends also had the same idea! With the power of social media, we rallied our followers and the kitestringers came together with Mark Scutella (of Pinstripe Painting) to provide 10-year-old Madison with a brand new lemonade stand! I got to help paint it and everything!

The Cossart Exchange is also going to provide Madison with free entrepreneurship classes – she’ll be the youngest person to ever go through their program! Plus, she’ll get to sell lemonade for charity at the Ottawa Street Sew Hungry: Food Truck Rally! Tomorrow everyone is getting together at the kitestring studio to present Madison and her family with the new lemonade stand and the big news! There will be lemonade and cookies to celebrate! We’re so excited!

Wanna come?

Contact meg@kitestring.ca or margaret@kitestring.ca and let us know!

…what kind of twitter strategy really “works”? And what defines tweet success for organizations really?

I know, I know, awareness, image and reputation management, being able to reach a customer with a good or bad review in real time and being able to respond in an instant.

I guess, more specifically, I’m wondering what comprises a successful twitter follow for an organization’s twitter?

Today I tweeted about a kijiji link to someone selling a group of vintage cameras. Two minutes later I was followed by DigitalCamFan and UniqueAntiques. This makes sense right? Camera. Antiques. Antique cameras on kijiji.

Really?

Although I understand why this type of following on twitter occurs (mention + connection= profit), and could make sense in someone’s business mind, I have a hard time finding the time spent on following anyone who tweets about bananas as a banana company’s best investment. How do you measure the time spent by the banana company’s social media specialist against banana R.O.I?

For some organizations twitter is an excellent tool to reach, poll and even persuade their target audience to create, collaborate and even consume. But for DigitalCamFan and UniqueAntiques, that ten seconds they spent searching “antique” and “camera” was totally lost on me. And believe it or not, ten seconds can really add up.

Maybe our searches should be more specific than a noun and a geographical area. Maybe twitter is just a small step towards something even better. A social media that instinctively knows what you want, like that E-Harmony website claims to do for dating. Sometimes I wonder…

If you are using Twitter for business, or fun, don’t forget to add yourself to we follow, a Twitter user directory.

You get three tags you can associate to your Twitter profile, and it allows people to search for you in a different way.

Chris Farias – kitestring creative marketing + design
www.kitestring.ca

Illustration by Chris Farias

I don’t have an iPhone, and I’ve been known to openly bash Apple, even though I absolutely love their products. It’s a love/hate thing. I love my iPod touch, and am attached to it, but hate Apple and how proprietary everything they do it. I’m kind of an open source hippy sometimes.

My brother has an iPhone, he’s a technophobe, and his main use for it is to take pictures of himself while pooping at random public (and private) restrooms and then e-mail them to me. Luckily, they are from the waist up. Talk about a waste of an iPhone. Although, it’s no more of a waste than some of the applications that are out there. I mean, iFart? Come on?!?! You have a sophisticated piece of technology, and the best thing you can come up with is making it fart? Check out this video from CollegeHumor on cell phones, it’s great: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1899978.

Okay, back to the point. I’m going to go on record, like many others, and say that Twitter is going to be the biggest thing of 2009, by far. Facebook is now trying to copy it with its new home page, and more and more people are using Twitter. It is no longer just a haven for geeks.

I’ve tried a few iPhone apps for Twitter, and have landed of TwitterFon (iTunes Link). It does pretty much all you need with regards to the feed, friends, following, replying, Tweeting, and even searching…and it’s free! I haven’t tried any of the paid apps yet, because I’m cheap, and this one does everything I need it to do. So, try it out, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Stay tuned for more ways to use your iPhone/iPod touch to its fullest.

Okay, here’s a link that I heard about last week. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, but I figured that since most of kitestring is now on Twitter (@Chris_Farias, @jennhudder, @the18 (Brandon), @creative_error (Alisha), @DanielMercurio, Geekie where are you!?!?!?!) I thought this was at least a topical link: secrettweet.com.

Chris is really going to love this one. People can post totally anonymous tweets to the site, confessing their secrets, and some of them are pretty crazy. You can comment, or reply to them right from your Twitter account if you want, or do it from the site. There are some interesting things in there.