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I had an interesting discussion about Twitter with a good friend over the weekend. She is a well educated medical professional and is 47 years old. I was sitting at my dining room table after eating barbecue and my Moto Q phone started dinging that messages where incoming.  For several of the people I follow on Twitter I have my phone set to send me messages when updates are made.  I picked up the phone and was reading through the latest batch of texts and she asked what I was reading.  I said “I just received some Twitter upatess”, and she looked at me with kind of blank stare and said “what in the world is a twitter?”

I suppose I just assume because I know what it is that everyone else knows also. Wrong! Her 16 year old daughter piped up and immediately said something to the effect of “oh mom don’t you know anything!!” So I tried to expain to here as briefly as possible what social networking was and more specifically what Twitter was and how people us it to keep others up to date with various aspects of thier life. I told here there is everything from business to personal messages flying around and you can really get insight into what other people are doing and what they are interested in.  More importantly though this conversatoin turned to the whole use of mobile communications devices and social networking and the impact it is having on lives.

She admitted she was technologically resistant as she thinks it takes too much time to learn to use these advances and that they are too complicated. I told her on the contrary they can actually make your life easier.  I showed her an example with one of the people I follow on Twitter who is an employee of Southwest Airlines and where he periodically posts special announcements about reduced fares.  I showed her a contact of mine on Facebook who works for Dell Computers who offers discount codes only for Facebook contacts.  I could see the light coming on as she listened.  Then she said how can all of this be used in my day to day life. I gave her this example.

A friend of mine went to a locally owned regional store that sells electronics, stereos, televisions, computers etc….   He saw a nice 52″ high definition television but thought the price was too high. The salesperson was really putting the pitch to him to buy the TV but Kevin, the shopper told the salesperson to hang on while he looked something up. He then proceeded to pull his Iphone out of his pocket and went online and found the exact same television at Best Buy for almost 400 dollars cheaper with free delivery as well. He showed his Iphone screen to the salesperson and said I would really like this tv but I can go across town and get the same model for this price. The salesperson said wait a minute and went to talk to the store manager and he came back and said they would match the price and he got his new tv.

This is just one example of how technology and social networks are working in business and personal lives to make things easier. I told my friend that the time is coming when department stores, restaurants and other business will offer special discounts via Twitter, Facebook and other similar programs which will be advantageous to both the consumer and the business. I told her imagine getting a message on Friday evening that says something to the effect that on Saturday from 9 until 3 XYZ department store is offering 50% off everthing in the store to Twitter followers only and to use promo code “whatever”.  Only Twitter followers of that particular store would get the discount.

I told her that was only the tip of the iceburg and that there is so much more possible…………..  So if you are over 40 and not quite sure what all this Twittering, Facebooking and other “ing’s” are all about, just ask a user and you will be suprised at what it can do for you.

Do you ever get an idea and get excited about it but just cant seem to figure out how to implement it? Maybe it isn’t that you can’t figure out how to make it work, you just don’t have the skill set or resouces to make it happen. I have found myself in this situation a couple times in the past and let a great opportunity pass me by.

The first time was back in June of 2000.  I purchased the domain name PanAmerican-Translations.com and set about setting up a system to duplication English websites in Spanish. In this instance I worked with a local native speaking Spanish language school teacher to duplicate a Houston based industrial website. It worked great. It took us about 3 weeks to duplicate the site and it was identical in every way except the language.  At that time it wasn’t hard to get up the search engines and we were near the top of AltaVista which was the top search engine of the time.  We received calls from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of PA for a site translation and a little known site at the time called Overstock.com. We scrambled to find help and resources who could see the potential, but here in rural Kentucky in 2000, the Internet was still not well known. Well needless to say we missed those two opportunities. We did approach a local businessman about an investment of 50K to get us started and he was ready to help us when at the last minute he was told by a fellow businessman that this “Internet thing” was never going to take off.  uuggghhhh…   We tried for several more months but could not garner the resources we needed to make this work. I wish I knew then what I know now. Now that is a saturated market.

I had several other ideas over the past couple of years that I could not get off the grown for technical reasons. Basically I did not have the knowledge to write the programs needed to make then work. One idea was to build a website with secure access that would allow parents to log into a network of daycare facilities at any time to check on their children via webcam.  We would place webcam’s in daycare’s and then provide parents with login credentials to be able to access that particular daycare and view their kids and chat with the people working there.  There were serveral other ideas over the years that never came to fruition.

Now I find myself in a similar situation. I have an idea but don’t have the technical expertise to make it happen. But I have also figured out what my major problem is. I had a fear of revealing my idea to someone that might be able to write the program. I thought they would take the idea and run and leaving me hanging. So I guess the problem I have is not so much technical but one of trust.

I have an idea for a Twitter based site that I believe would do really well and am looking for a programmer that would like to take a chance on an idea with me.  It is a rather simple concept that requires users to be able to log in and manipulate their data and make parts of it visible to others.  So, if there are any programmers out there who are into social networking and looking for a new project, send me an email at info@logodesign77.com.  Who knows………we may have a dud, but then again we may have the next great idea.

I am curious how many companies are offering special discounts on products and services via Twitter only. When you think about it, Twitter based discount offerings is a very good idea to gain followers as word gets out that discounts can be had. By doing this you can almost guarantee a higher visitation rate to landing pages than you would via other means such as AdWords. By giving a reason to follow and offering daily discounts to your products or services you can increase the traffic to your website and conceivably see an increase in sales conversions.

The next time you have a special discount, why not use Twitter to advertise your savings and see what happens. I would be curious to see the results.

On May 6th I posted how a theme change on the blog caused my Google ranking to drastically drop and that I intended to go back to the old theme and layout.  Well I made that change and waited for the friendly Google spider to pay me a visit. I am pleased to say that x7SEO.com is now back on the second page of Google for the search “learn SEO”. Now I just have to work to get it to the front page of Google. One step at a time.

Lesson learned:  Be prepared for a change in your search return positions when you make major changes to the layout of your site or blog……..

What has your experience been?

Can you say WOW.  If the reports are true and Twitter starts to crawl links contained in Twitter posts and then the content within those pages that the crawler visits, then there will be some very interesting changes in the search world. (visit Cnet.com to read the entire article) Could it be that a socially driven search function will bring back even more current and relevant data than Google?  One comment that was made basically said that Google, as fast and accurate as it is, indexes only websites and does it slowly. It is thought that Twitter would essentially crawl a link and page as soon as it is established via a Twitter post. That would be lightening quick.

Several days ago I posted how this blog had jumped on the Twitter train and how Twitter is being used on several of my websites.  Within the last few days I have seen a jump in traffic with a significant part of the increase coming from Twitter.  Maybe I should have gotten on board sooner, but as they say, it is better late than never.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes the dynamics of traffic generation.