The Social Media Thing I Allude To

Hi Mods and Admins,

I mentioned the social media thing in a few of my posts, but didn't want to explain it in a lot of depth in case someone wanted to hijack what I wanted to do. So I'll explain it here.

We already have a Facebook group for Wordforge, and I was thinking of creating one or two for Twitter. There are some people who think Twitter is useless, but I have run into several business people in my networking meetings who say they swear by it. I know this one girl who make a good chunk of change per month and her sole advertising medium is Twitter.

Basically, the idea of it is this. On Twitter, you can add hashtags to your posts. Whether you are talking about #Obama or #Fruitcakes or #Paris, the idea is that you label your tweets with these tags, and so someone wanting to see what people are saying about, say, #Dubya can look up this tag and read the posts, then reply.

Some people use Twitter to follow celebrities and stuff, and sometimes these celebrities will even reply to you, but that is a different topic altogether.

My proposal is that we set up an official Twitter account for Wordforge and several for users of Wordforge. The official one will be for the mods and admins, where the other 2 to 5 would be for the members. This is in case one account is being used and another twitter user wants to get on at the same time.

When a big even happens, they can comment on it and add hashtags like #Sandy, #ArabSpring or #Occupy. They can be valid political commentary, or even trolling, and when people check out our page, they will see links to WF and a bit of info as to what we are about.

I put this here because I am wondering if we should set these up with official Wordforge emails (wordforger1@wordforge.net) or if I should just set these up with Yahoo or gmail addresses? And if we are using the official WF.net emails, how would we go about setting it up? I assume this is more of a tech admin thing.

Anyways, this is another avenue we can pursue to try and recruit new members. As I said in a rep comment, I nominate Ancalagon to be one of our test twitter people, as he seems interested in this.

This is definitely O2C territory.

I know less than zero about Twitter and I would talk to Anc in a PM if I were you to see if he is interested in being part of the work or if presenting ideas is all he wanted to do.

Supposedly, apostle...Ron Paul...god, I hate that name! I wish he'd go back...has a lot of experience with certain ways of getting the board out there and this kind of advertising...he's offered to help many times and I suspect he's contacted Lanzman a lot about it, given his mention of possibly handing the board to him before he decided on me.

However, he doesn't like me and tries to undermine me any chance he gets which makes me think working together would be a problem. Not to mention his thin skin and things he reports. His judgement is a question mark.

I don't know if you want to speak to him about ideas. I also don't know if he will even share without a staff position, but I thought I'd mention his supposed expertise on the subject.

Yes, and I do it, respectively. Wordforger1 though? :\

Rather than this, why not simply enable Facebook and Twitter integration? I see it on all the other vB boards I visit. Perhaps a hack of some sort? Tapatalk also has the capability to link my posts here (and elsewhere) to my twitter and facebook accounts.

Some folks here are virulently against that for some reason.

Good to see you in a rare Shelter appearance!

It's not an either or thing. Users are able to opt-in or opt-out as they see fit. I don't use the Facebook option because, for me, Facebook is just for keeping in touch with my far flung family and nothing more. But, my Twitter account is no holds barred, so I may consider linking it to WF.

Thanks.

We had that, if you'll recall -- a sharing bar at the bottom of each thread page, right above quick reply. It caused an unreasonably large CPU load for reasons that were never fully determined, and just killed page load performance. Also, it was used perhaps two dozen times TOTAL, over a period of months. Now, that was before Twitter got big enough to be included in the bar (I believe it included Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, email, and Facebook), so it's possible having one now would improve things, but it didn't then, and had serious performance implications.

Ah, I seem to kinda somewhat vaguely remember that now.

Sounds like you need to feed the hamsters some 'roids.