Those of you interested in increasing your networking circle on Twitter probably already have a good handle on how to do it within your industry niche. But there are distinct advantages to having a wide circle of connections within your own neighborhood, whether it's to raise your company's visibility as a corporate citizen in your region or just to get quick recommendations for restaurants in the area. There are many Twitter-related sites designed specifically for locating and connecting with locals; here are just three to get you started:






Localtweeps is still in beta, but it was created to "help localize the Twittersphere." Your listing is indexed by zip code, so at this time, you can only register once. (Note to @brevig, @colinhirdman, @joshbecerra and @zacksteven: it'd be great to be able to temporarily localize for when one is traveling to a new city.) Registration is fairly straightforward. After signing in to your Twitter account, go to the Localtweeps site and put in your zip code. It takes about five minutes for your name to appear in the database. Click on the "Search" tab to find others in your area, and you can then click and follow at will.

One nice feature about Localtweeps is that you can promote an event or special offer within this zip code.






Another site that's still in beta is StreetMavens. StreetMavens has a different function than Localtweeps in that its purpose is to capture what's happening in any given city in real time. Go to the site, click on your city and you'll see a listing of local tweeps and what they are currently saying via Twitter. From here, you can click on the individual user names and follow folks of interest. StreetMavens is a little harder to use than Localtweeps if you want to register yourself, but it's worth the effort -- particularly if you're a business, as you can register your profile to the site. If you want to see what the page looks like for the VOXUS neighborhood, go to: http://www.streetmavens.com/city/Tacoma



Chances are, you're already listed in Twellow.com, also known as The Twitter Yellow Pages. Finding your city in "the TwellowHood" is pretty simple, just click on the search tab if you don't want to navigate through the nifty maps. On the resulting list, tweeps are ranked by number of followers, so simply cruise through the list and find people of interest to you. Click on their Twitter user names to navigate back to Twitter so that you can follow them.

-posted by Rachel

Tags: twitter, localtweeps, streetmavens

There’s an interesting meme that’s been making the rounds lately: the newspaper as department store.

According to Wikipedia:

A department store is a retail establishment which specializes in satisfying a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice multiple merchandise lines, at variable price points, in all product categories.

While department stores first began to appear in the early 1800s, it wasn’t until late in the 19th and well into the 20th century that they truly hit their stride. The primary factors driving this growth were transportation, industrialization and urbanization. As commercial production and logistics improved, it became possible for a single, large store to collect and stock a wide variety of goods for sale from throughout the country (and world). At the same time, urbanization was producing a substantial pool of consumers in close proximity, who needed and wanted these products, and welcomed the opportunity to procure them from a single all-encompassing source at a fair price. A key factor driving this growth stemmed from the fact that, just as commercial transportation (ship, rail, and eventually truck) was booming, personal transportation and delivery was still in its infancy. The automobile was a luxury item until late into the 20th century, making it difficult or impossible for consumers to cover the ground necessary to visit a broad range of specialty retailers. By the same token, the lack of availability of these goods in a rural setting, coupled with the difficulty of advertising and supporting a small-scale mail order business, gave rise to the mega-catalog industry – which eventually produced Sears, Roebuck and Co.

In the 1960s, the largest store operations (both in sales volume and physical size) were department stores Macy’s, Hudson’s and Marshall Field. By the 1980s, the largest retailer in the world was Sears.

What killed the department store? Malls. While malls were always anchored by one or more department stores (which had the name recognition and volume to draw consumers), the inside of the mall was filled with small specialty stores that exchanged breadth for extreme depth of offering. Suddenly consumers could visit a single location (the mall) and select from a variety of stores that specialized in music, or cooking, or clothing, or shoes or what have you. In the 1970s people visited the department store to peruse a limited selection of a broad variety of items. By the 1990s they visited a store in the mall for a huge selection of a particular good, then went next door for the next one. While the department store model is still thriving in certain instances, its sole remaining advantage is to use its volume buying power to drive down prices (see: Walmart).

The parallels to the media industry are likely clear. Your local newspaper has catered to a broad range of needs and interests in the community, offering a single and authoritative, albeit limited, source for news and entertainment. When production and logistics dictates that this is your only choice, a natural monopoly is created.

However, the rise of the Web has upended this model. Now it is possible to instantly get any story you want, but also find it from a source that takes interest in a particular subject to the level of obsession (we call these “bloggers”). And if this was the first body blow (driving down circulation), the other was clearly the rise of sites such as eBay and Craig’s List, which have decimated the newspaper industry’s safety net: the classified ad.

So what does the future hold for the industry? That is the $64,000 question. Journalism, as a profession that is distinct from the newspaper, which is merely a delivery vehicle (i.e., “store” to continue our analogy), will survive. As will certain premier brands (WSJ, NY Times, etc.) that offer a distinct value proposition to the reader/consumer. However, it is likely that most newspapers will go the way of Sears: years of struggle to survive, until they are eventually forced to either reinvent themselves or find a place on the Web as a mere shadow of their former selves.

-posted by Paul

Recently, a friend of mine with World Concern, a Christian relief agency, conducted an interview with the ABC affiliate in Eugene, Oregon via Twitter.... better known as a twitterview. A twitterview works pretty much like it sounds -- a back and fourth of up to 140 character tweets via Twitter, the micro-blogging social media site that has caught fire lately with everyone and every organization from Oprah to CNN. Although not an entirely new concept, the twitterview has yet to be widely adopted by the mainstream media. The first mainstream outlet that I can find that made a foray into the twitterview universe was ABC's George Stephanopoulos twitterview of Senator John McCain in March of this year.


As a former journalist myself, here's my take on twitterviews. They're a great way to give complete public access to a media interview. The fact that questions and answers have to be given in 140 characters or less also cuts out a lot of extraneous information. On the other hand, the 140 character limit can also limit more in-depth answers and leave you wanting more. In addition, the fact that twitterviews take place virtually leaves you guessing regarding any sort of emotions being expressed during the interview.  Formal articles generally give you a feel for emotions, and radio and television interviews definitely give you a first-hand hear or look at emotions expressed.

Larry Magid had a great take on the McCain twitterview in CNET. His take, the twitterview definitely was not a journalistic high point, questioning whether the 140 character format makes any sense as an interview technique, especially when dealing with life and death questions.




-posted by Andrew

Tags: twitter

Facebook is now allowing user names for the URL. More info at the following links, along with a few important notes:

First come first served starting Saturday June 13 at 12:01 AM.

Names are NOT editable or changeable; they are permanent to that account even upon deletion.

You can only register user names for pages that existed prior to May 31, otherwise there's a waiting period to prevent squatting.

Companies can also protect their brands/trademarks even if they don't have a facebook page.

General announcement.

Additional info.

For administrators.

Go forth and claim yours...

-posted by Paul

Tags: facebook

As an entrepreneur, Mike Apgar is well known on the Seattle scene. Together with his wife, Gretchen, and his brother, Tyler, he opened the Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown in 1995 – the first cyber cafe to enter the local market. That was the modest beginning for what grew into a national ISP before being purchased by Best Buy. Today, Speakeasy is one of the nation's leading broadband voice (VoIP), data and IT service providers.

Not surprisingly, Mike began another venture, Ookla Technologies, in 2006... but left some folks puzzled and scratching their heads when he moved his family to Kalispell, MT soon after that. So how does he manage to run a startup long-distance? And just what is he doing?

We asked these questions for the latest installment in our series of Q&As at PR Pro*pul*sion. Here's what he had to say:

1) You grew Speakeasy from a mom-and-pop Internet cafe in Seattle to a national service provider. Based on this experience, what's the one piece of advice you could share with other entrepreneurs who hope to take their companies from the local to the national level?

I would ask yourself the question "Why?," and make sure you're comfortable with the answer before you take that step. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of satisfying their egos and try to "go national" without considering the benefits of focusing on doing everything they can do locally before making that risky leap. For most businesses, they have local advantages that won't translate on a national scale: understanding the social and business culture, personal and professional relationships, synergies with other local businesses, being a "local story" to the press... the list goes on and on and most, if not all of those, won't be working for you when you try to reach beyond your region. Prove you can dominate locally, build that foundation fully and be prepared to fall back on it entirely before you take the expensive step of branching out. When the time comes, soften your target by test marketing in another city in an entirely different region and you'll quickly learn a lot of lessons that will help you plan a much more efficient and successful national effort. Among the obvious exceptions would be ASPs or those companies where a local physical presence is unnecessary and/or service/product fulfillment and distribution has the same cost and process at a national or international scale.

2) You've opted to run your latest venture, Ookla Technologies, from Kalispell, Montana. Have you faced any unusual challenges due to your choice of location?

Our company is about as virtual as you can get while being more than just an idea. Since we have scaled our software development and technical functions using a work -from-home model, location hasn't mattered. We each require a reliable Internet connection. but outside of that, location is irrelevant. What has been important with regard to location is making a point of getting together in person at least 3-4 times each year, with occasional one-on-one visits to complement. The quality of communication that occurs in our planning and strategy discussions when we're together in one room results in a level of productivity that, in our experience, is impossible to replicate strictly through online methods. We get 90% of our work done by working virtually, but 90% of our corporate and product development discussions and strategy decisions are accomplished in person. I have had my team visit me in Montana many times, and we always find time to either hit the slopes, get out on the lake or do some off-roading. In that respect, this has been an especially great place to run the business as my team members are always eager to visit.

3) The Ookla Speed Test is quickly coming up to the one billion user mark. Where do you go from here with it -- or is Speed Test just a simple tool that doesn't need any amplification to maintain its popularity?

We plan to go to 2 Billion, then 5, then 10.... The Ookla Speed Test has become the global standard with nearly 600,000 daily users enjoying free and accurate broadband throughput testing in less than 20 seconds to any of the over 350 servers worldwide. In this respect, we don't have a reason to change! The success of this property has led to many organizations licensing our technology in order to have a branded Speed Test on their own server(s).

Much like the Line Quality Test we offer at www.ookla.com, we plan to launch an additional testing application site that does more than basic throughput testing. Before the end of the year this site (also free) will allow anyone in the world to test their broadband connection for latency, jitter and other line attributes important to applications such as VoIP and telecommuting.

I believe the reason Speedtest.net is popular is due to the attractive but highly utilitarian and efficient nature of its interface, combined with the fact that it is free, fast and accurate. One of the business rules we have at Ookla is to exceed the expectations of our users and customers at every interaction. While I think we have done that with our licensed products and at Speedtest.net, we look forward to doing much more in the future. Thank you for your interest and please stay tuned!

-posted by Rachel

Tags: mikeapgar, speakeasy, ookla, speedtest

Recent research out of the Harvard Business School shows that 10% of Twitter users are accounting for 90% of the tweets, breaking even the classic “80/20” business rule. Moreover, the median number of tweets per day is 0.01. Wow. And, there is some interesting data about how followers skew out... men are apparently more likely to follow men in this particular social media.

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other....Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

This surprised the researchers, since in a typical “social” setting, either online or off, most of the activity is focused around women. It would be interesting to see more research into why this happens not to be the case on Twitter. Perhaps given the 90/10 split above, Twitter is being used less as a pickup medium and more as a professional soapbox – an endeavor often dominated by men, both on the box and in the audience.

(via Kevin Drum)

-posted by Paul

Tags: twitter