Twitter 2.0

Twitter Related Sites

Why Tweet? Promote your business, Promote your blog or website, establish a virtual call center, get followers, build network, get ideas, get information, become popular , have fun.

Tweet from your desktop: Use a third party twitter client like twhirl or seesmic to avoid the effort of having to login to the twitter browser each time.

Tweet from your mobile: Press the devices tab under “Settings”, enter your phone number and click the checkbox that allows you to receive tweets on your phone as SMS messages. You’ll then receive a code. Send that code to 40404 in the US, 5566511 in India and your phone will be set up for tweeting.

Definition1: Social media is a publishing revolution.
Definition 2: Perhaps the best definition of social media is content that has been created by its audience. People create content, content creates conversations and conversations create communities.
Twi-facts : The top 10 twitter users had more than 80 followers and were following more than 70 people.
Twistory:It takes a special push to get a social media snowballing to a size big enough for everyone to feel comfortable about climbing on board. For facebook it was its marketing at Harvard and from there to other universities.
For twitter it was the boost it received with its SXSW award.

Kick Starting our Twitter journey:

1. At twitter your username’s not just a user name, it forms a part of your url and will be visible whenever you promote your twitter page. (e.g. twitter.com/billgates, twitter.com/stevejobs etc)
2. One Line Bio- Talk about any project you are currently on or give a more generic bio in terms of [Professional Description 1][professional description 2][personal description]. E.g.wedding photographer; creative artist, who likes to photograph his kids at embarrassing moments.

3. The most powerful way to win followers on twitter is to follow them yourself. Look for all your friends ,colleagues, contacts on Twitter and start following them.
4. Social media is all about personal branding, which means you need to present yourself well, which means have a nice and an apt profile picture.
5. Your sidebar is actually an ad. It functions much like google ad sense.
Background design:
1. Use photoshop or paint.net or gimp
2. Download a free template from box.net /shared/lgw2pz4gso
3. Twitterpatterns.com
4. Grungetextures.com
If you are following my tweets and I reply to someone else you are following, you’ll see that message when you log on to your twitter. But if I reply to someone you’re not following, you can only see that message by looking at my timeline.
5. Websites have users, Facebook has friends and Twitter has followers.
6. Whatever you are doing on the internet , produce content that’s interesting, fun and valuable.
Find experts on a topic related to yours and encourage them to follow you, and you’ll be giving yourself a massive and valuable network.
7. If you want to keep track of what people are saying on twitter about your products or your company, simply search for that keyword and then save the search.
8. Put your twitter name in your signatures.

Tweet your blog: If you are looking to show your posts on any other kind of web site though, an even easier option is to click the “goodies” link at the bottom of twitter’s pages. Choose “widgets” and you’ll be able to select a module to place on your web page.
Two ways to initiate a conversation on twitter:
1. Reply to queries
2. Ask for information
Classic Tweets: This is what I am doing now. E.g. Don’t just say “ I am cooking now”, say “ what you think about it as well or something else”
Opinion Tweets: This is what I am thinking now
Mission Accomplished Tweets: This is what I’ve just done
Entertainment Tweets: “I’m making you laugh now”
Question Tweets: Can you help me do something now?
Picture Tweets: Look at what I’ve been doing
Using Twitter for Product launches and also as a micro helpdesk
Corporate tweets that try to build brands tend to fall into 4 broad categories:
1. Company News
2. Customer Support
3. Feedback
4. Special Offers
One of the most important check points before releasing news about your company is to
take the “Who Cares” test.
***mystarbucksidea
Promoting a blog on twitter- pg 184

The Secret - by Rhonda Byrne

Choice Quotes

Choice Words/Phrases

The Secret

One of the most powerful laws of the universe, the law of attraction, has been extended in this book to a thought level with the understanding that thoughts have frequency and that like attracts like.
If you want to change anything in life, change the channel and change the frequency by changing your thoughts. The law of attraction will give you what you are thinking. The law is unmistakable.

In essence ,What you think is what you get but there needs to be clarity and positivity in your thoughts. It is important to think and feel about what you want rather than what you do not want for it can lead to very different results. e.g. You get 1 million dollars in a lottery and from then on start thinking about increasing the wealth manifold you would attract more wealth into your life . On the contrary if you start thinking of how to keep the money safe and You begin to think of various possible ways of losing it and how not to lose it.Now, by the law of attraction, you would start attracting events that match your thoughts, which means you might attract events that would steal away your money. Same holds good for competition in life. By the law of attraction, as you compete you will attract many people and circumstances to compete against you in every single aspect of your life, and in the end you will lose.

It is therefore pivotally important to think right. The author recommends Meditation as a means to quiet your mind and revitalize your thoughts. It is important to give up negative thoughts and meditation can be a powerful tool jst for that. Negative thoughts will attract more negativity into your lives and more negative scenarios.
Secret shifters are another tool that the author recommends - things that can suddenly bring positive feelings and positive thoughts to you. It can be a funny incident, it can be your baby’s smile, your top achievements, the person you love etc. Keep a list of these and use them as you realize your moving into a negative zone.
Use the Power of gratitude: Thank for what you’ve already got. Feeling good about what you already have is a positive feeling and will help you attract more positive feelings .

Use the Powerful process of visualization : Visualizations can get you closer to feeling and it is the feeling that really creates the attraction

Moral of the story: Begin to expect great things and as you do, you will create your life in advance.
So your purpose is what you say it is and your mission is the mission you give yourself

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled by Randomness

For those of us that have come to believe of things that anything can be done and that there’s nothing called randomness will need to re-think. Most of us tend to believe in the correctness of our strategy or the path taken based on the previous success. The key question is, how much of our previous success can vouch for the future. For eg. You have been getting 30% + returns on your portfolio over the last 5 years, is it fine to say that you have beaten the markets and that you know how to make 30%+ for ever. This is where the author begs to differ from the rest of us mortals. How many cases do we see of rags to riches and riches to rags? Is it appropriate for us to shed our caution and say “we have done this before, we know about it”.

Randomness
Lucky fools never think or realize that they have been lucky. They act as if they deserved the money. Lets take the example of Russian roulette, where there’s only one bullet in the gun and the gun is placed point blank to the person and the trigger is pulled. There’s a 1 in 6 probability that the bullet goes and the person loses L(L for life). Let us say a few thousand people try this. You’ll have a large number of survivors based on probability. But this does not nullify the danger in the game. These survivors have survived not because of their strategy or skill. It’s sheer luck.

Rendezvous with Randomness:
In the aftermath of the 1st world war, a few poets got together in cafes and performed this exercise. Each one would write on a piece of paper a pre-determined part of a sentence, not knowing other’s choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. After the exercise a really poetic sentence came out and that was “ The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine”. A totally random exercise.
We can find myriad accounts of traders building success and reputation in seven years and blowing it all up in seven days. Some of these traders estimate such an event to be a ten sigma event, with a probability of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. The market fall need not have been catastrophic but their leverages must have been.

The difference between probability and probability times the payoff: It is very important for one to be aware of the difference. Probability vs. expectation.
Eg. There is a 80% probability that the stock will go up by 2% and 20% probability that it will go down by 10%. Where would you bet? This is a very important diffence that traders need to understand. It is not just the probability, one needs to pay heed to probability times the payoff. Its fine if you lose 1 % 5 times and get 10% once. The latter is still the better.
Sometimes market data becomes a trap: Currencies/stocks that have shown greatest stability are prone to greatest volatility in a rare event. Eg. the peso problem

Our hindsight suffers from short sight- People tend to remember the immediate past and the immediate environments and when they say “it has never happened before’, it is generally applicable to a narrow time frame or environment.
“Why do we consider the worst case that took place in our lives as the worst possible case?”
Rare events are always unexpected, otherwise they would not occur. That’s the author’s speciality. The rare events with a extremely large pay-off.

The black swans are the rare events. No number of white swans can prove that all swans are white whereas on black swan can disprove the theory that all swans are white. It is the example vs. counter example.

Similarly 20 years of statistical data cannot prove that “ On a single day, markets do not fall by more than 20%”, whereas one instance of a market falling by more than 20% can disprove the earlier made theory. Where we are arriving at is the point that gigabytes and tera bytes of data and statistical analysis cannot prove much while one event can disprove an age-old theory. So the fact that so many of our experts talk about statistical inferences might be proved wrong on one good day.
So, the point here is, historical data has limited value. Don’t be blown away by the historical evidences in life.

Statistical Scams: How many people that you know might have got letters from some company xyz, stating that we are bullish on the market for the next one month and you realize he’s right and this has happened over the past three months and you subscribe.
Lets see how this can be done. Company XYZ sends newsletters to 2000 contacts. For 1000 of them, bullish view on market and the other 1000 bearish. The market turns to be bullish. Great. Next month he selects the 1000 contacts who got it right(bullish ones) and send to 500 of them a bullish view and the 500 a bearish view. This time the market turns to be bearish. Great. 500 of them got it right the second time as well. The third time, he sends bullish to 250 and bearish to 250 of the 500 that got it right last time. This time again, 250 of them get it right. In principle, these 250 people got his advice right all three times and that is a good statistical record. Beware you subscribe to anonymous mailers

Nonlinaerity: Our brain is not quite comfortable with non-linearity. It is tuned to the cause and effect model. It needs connections. This happened because of that or because of this, which needs to happen and when that “that” does not happen, we are confused. Most of the events are non linear in nature. Eg.one may own a security that benefits from benefits from lower market prices, but may not react at all until some critical point. Most people give up before the rewards.

Noise: & Finance Sites:
· Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates
· Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus.
The first one is noise. 1.03 points on dow is like less than 0.1% . This has happened because of lower interest rates!!! The 1 point move on an index close to 11000.??

Gist: Most of us like "Neo" - the hero in matrix would not like to believe that we dont have control over our destiny. Neverthess..let us not ignore the importance to randomness in the events and not getting carried away by our previous/historical success, as if we have found the secret formula for perpetual success .The idea is not to bring in the philosophy of fate, but the understanding of the fact that rare events are not predictable and no amount of the post mortem studies and analysis can make a black swan easily prdictable. We will keep having unexpected and rare events. So..it is important to be aware of this tuth and be prepared and perhaps even take advantage of these, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who makes his millions betting on these kind of events. So lets behave like mere mortals allowing ourselves the ability to contradict ourselves. It’s ok, if you thought something today and something changes then your opinion could change. Start everyday on a clean slate, like George Soros. and be prepared for the rare event which might have never occured before, but can occur in the future.