As a social media consultant I often get asked,”Why should I have a twitter account if I am not going to twitter?”.   There a few good reasons from both a business and personal perspective.   As we all know Twitter has developed into much more than a micro blog application where people randomly tweet nonsensical blurbs about less than noteworthy happenings (Although that does happen).  Twitter has been pushed to the fore front as both a reputation management and news reporting tool that allows thousands of people to keep up with the latest happenings whether it’s the earth quake in Chile or an unhappy client that has decided to let everyone in the twitter world know.

Today twitter kicked off  its first @chirp conference and needless to say there were was quiet a buzz after the first day.  Some of the highlights included twitter making a few big announcements

1. They are going to remove the rate limit.  Developers will be able to make calls whenever they want  which truly makes twitter a “Real Time” company.

2. They previewed their @anywhere app.  This for me was truly the highlight of the day.  The @anywhere app will give developers and web devs the ability to integrate creative interactive apps in any website. (I have already started playing on this site)

3.  Last but not least twitter has finally decided that they want to make money.  The announcement of twitters “Promoted Tweets” advertising program received mixed reviews.  Based on what the examples I have seen it doesn’t seem obtrusive at all.  For now twitter is only displaying promoted tweets on twitter.com as it’s on a controlled release.  It will be interesting to see how this new advertising program works out.

After working for a few successful start ups and starting a business myself I have given a lot of thought about what were the most contributing factors of the success those companies experienced.  There were of course the obvious factors.. innovation, new technology, market timing.. but it wasn’t till I watched Simon Sinek that I had the ah ha moment. In that video Simon made this claim “People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY YOU DO IT.”  This simple statement was an epiphany moment for me.  After watching the video I started to reflect on my past work experiences all the jobs that I had truly enjoyed had people that were passionate about what they did and their passion was contagious.  This passion was and  has been the driving force in my decision to start my own business.  I have embedded the video below I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Although this may be a little off topic I thought it relevant since it’s an issue that has repeatedly plagued my site.  Since I migrated my site from asp to php/WordPress it has been difficult at best to find a form that works consistently across all browsers as well as deliveries.  Like most people somewhat new to WordPress I decided to ask a few friends for some direction on which form worked the best and had the functionality that I wanted.  Overwhelmingly the majority said Contact Form 7 as it had the ability to create custom forms and was fairly straightforward plugin.

My friends were right, Contact Form 7 was easy to implement BUT it was very buggy.  Once I added the form to my site I ran through a series of test emails to make sure I was getting the delivery.  What I found was that form submissions from email accounts using Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail would show a warning that the form could not be sent at this time.  Needless to say it was frustrating at best. 

Being that Contact Form 7 was a fail.  I scoured the web to find form plugin that would work consistently as well as easy to configure.  After finding a few good candidates I proceeded with the implementation.  Again I ran into the same issues, inconsistent deliveries and or errors until I found a plugin named Formidable.

Formidable is by far the best contact form I have seen for WordPress.  What makes this plugin so great is that it is easy to create and has had 0 issues with form deliveries.   What makes Formidable unique is it’s ease of use and reporting capabilities.  Instead of having to type out your form like in Contact Form 7, they have a simple drag and drop system that takes all of the guess work out building a form. 

Formidable Pro also has great reporting capabilities which give form submission data i.e. which page, browser type, and ip info.  Although Formidable Pro does cost it may be well worth it to those that require more data.

So far its been a very interesting few days since Google’s release of Google Buzz. It seems that Mashable has found the most practical Buzz uses, tips, and tricks, but the fact is it still seems as though Google showed up late to the Social Media Dance. For your average social media user it is often an impossible task to get them to adopt new platforms, technologies, or tools. It will be interesting to see if Google can overcome this steep obstacles. I am withholding judgment for now but Google Buzz does have potential especially for all those gmail users.