How to use twitter to promote your onlineshop – part 2

In the last article we have asked ourselves a few questions about twitter and if it fits to your product- and marketing environment. Now you might want to have some tips how to use twitter for your marketing/e commerce endeavors. Here you go:

1. Be useful!
There is nothing worse than sending out useless links to products noone was interested in in the first place. This is nothing less than spam, so don’t do it! If you want to use twitter, make your information useful. This means i.e. sending out gift coupon codes which will give your customers 5% off of their next purchase. For one many might retweet your offer due to its usefulness to everyone but it will also give you a great way to track your success on twitter if you use a special keycode. (mehr…)

How to use twitter to promote your onlineshop – part 1

Twitter has been a phenomenon for some time now - at least for us early adopters who play around with every new tech or application we can find. Although there have been some discussions about whether or not twitter has reached the masses, with just a few million users I think this is hardly the case…yet. Nevertheless twitter has been hyped as the new thing and I have to admit that I enjoy using it very much. And so do all the marketeers and social media specialists out there, proclaiming twitter as THE new tool for social media marketing. That begs the questions - is twitter really relevant when it comes to effective marketing? Lets see… (mehr…)

Interesting people to follow on twitter

When you join the twitter community for the first time, it’s hard to know who to follow and how things work.

To make a first entry easier, a lot of helpful people out there have compiled lists on who to follow if you are interested in a certain topic. I will try to compile a list of those posts to collect them in one place. Feel free to add additional posts in the comment section.

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Why I’ve come to love twitter

I’ve just stumbled over an article on Traffikd about why the author has come to like Twitter. I will use this to write down my own experience with Twitter so far, since I have a slightly different approach.

 (mehr…)

A fresh start – again!

Okay I have to admit that I have been pretty lazy over the last 2 month when it comes to this blog. Although I have been pretty busy in my job, I should have taken more time to write something here.

Why so lazy?

Well, thats the question, isn’t it? What I know is, that a few things have changed over the last weeks, the most important being that I think I finally found an area of expertise I want to focus on. This was clearly not the case when I left university over 2 years ago with a diploma in information management. I started out doing some marketing & pr stuff, some IT, but nothing really focused on one area.

The funny thing is, that I think I have found my home in Information Architecture and User Experience. So basically I have ended up pretty close to where I started in the first place, but now with a lot more pratical background.

So what now?

Being more of a generalist, I have focused on web related stuff in general on this blog. I am about to change that to more IA/UX focused articles in the future, since I would like to share some experiences I have made during my work. My current project should allow this kind of focus and we will see what the future holds in this regard.

Furthermore I will try to write this blog in English from now on. Firstly because I don’t want to focus on Germany only (I just know IA/UX guys from other countries but none from Germany…thats weird, isn’t it?). Secondly this offers me the chance to practice my written english skills, and that’s always a good thing.

Looking good!

If you have visited my blog before, you will realize that I have changed the design (again). Yes, I know, I should stick to one design, and hopefuly I will stick to this one. I’m just easily faszinated and there are so many great designs and styles out there to get inspiration from - as a designer I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

As I said I will stick to this new, minimalistic layout but will try to improve it a bit over the next few days. There are still a lot of bugs with this one and I appologize for that! I know I should set up a test environment but I just don’t have the time to do that right now, so the live machine has to do. At this point, there aren’t many who are reading this anyway :)

So, that’s it. I hope I can produce some interesting content for you in the future and I’m looking forward to getting more involved in the IA/UX community form now on.

Cheers,

Sebastian

Privacy – How a lack of media competence is threatening our future

The right of the individual to be protected against intrusion into his personal life or affairs, or those of his family, by direct physical means or by publication of information.
- Report of the Committee on Privacy and Related Matters, Chairman David Calcutt QC, 1990, Cmnd.
1102, London: HMSO, at 7.

Privacy is a human right. The need for a personal space, protected and hidden from those we don‘t trust has been part of our life even since birth of humanity. In  the modern life protected by law, we still see privacy as something holy, a basic human right. Since the triumphal march of modern communication and the internet, privacy of information and communication has moved into focus of our society. Therefore it is no surprise that topics about this basic right lead to excitement. But how can we protect our own personal space in times where information about everything is freely available and easy to access? Where can the line be drawn between what is private and what we want to share with others? And how does our changing live has an impact on our definition of privacy itself?

 (mehr…)