newmediaMike

Twitter suspends Canadian SMS service

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Oh no! How are we ever going to survive without our SMS notifications?

There was an announcement on my Twitter tonight about them suspending Canadian SMS service. The website had this message:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

I really like the way they worded it at the end “… realistic scalable solution for Canada …”. I’ll miss getting my notifications, but at least I can still send messages via Twitter … for now.

Tags: Canada, SMS service, suspend, Twitter

Happy Birthday newmediaMike

This is hot on the heels of my 300th post, but today is the one year anniversary of me blogging as “newmediaMike”.

It was one year ago today that I put my first post on newmediamike.com. Contact me if you need a mailing address to send flowers, greeting cards with twenty dollar bills in them, etc.

It’s been a great year. I’ve met a lot of great people, learned a lot more about this wonderful industry I’ve been in since Nov. 1 1994.

It’s been a year of changes too, when I launched this blog a year ago I was juggling a number of new media projects that in retrospect were almost “old”new media. In the past year duplication which was the mainstay of my new media career has bottomed out.  BluRay has taken over HD-DVD and is starting to slowly, and I do mean slowly push DVD creation out of the picture, (pun intended). My other love, web video has continued to get increasingly hotter. I have several web video posts I’m polishing for the near future.

The one “media”, which isnt’ a physical media yet has continued to grow is social media. Today social media is more than a buzzword, more than just Facebook and Twitter. Social media is the new way we communicate and interact. It was through social media that I landed my new job. When it was announced that my position at Creative Post was being eliminated back in August I put out the word on my blog, Facebook and Twitter I was looking for work in SEO or social media. A new friend from Twitter who I connected with through his wife on Facebook, who I wrote about on my blog helped get me this SEO job. Through this convoluted social media connection I started a full time position as the in house SEO Specialist for Direct Energy.

At one of the first meetings I attended at Direct Energy they were discussing how they were planning to approach Social Media. As marketers it is the new frontier, albeit a scary one where the consumers pull the agenda instead of the marketers pushing theirs. I know it’s not as scary as it seems and I am looking forward to being in the forefront of the SEO and social media efforts of Direct Energy.

OK, so now that we have these milestones out of the way, let the irregular scheduled blogging resume.

Tags: birthday, blog, Blogging, marketing, SEO, video, writing

Post Number 300

I realized a couple of days ago that my next post would be number 300.  For me it is a mini milestone - it has also been 52 weeks since I launched newmediaMike. When I hit 200 posts on DigitalMediaToronto I shut it down and started this blog.

I’m not going to shut down newmediaMike by any stretch, I’m just getting warmed up.

It’s been an interesting 52 weeks that’s for sure. Since I launched this blog my interest in SEO has been revived and I have successfully launched a consulting business providing SEO services. I turned the big FIVE-Oh. I recently left my job with Creative Post where I was the Director of Sales for new media. My own personal online brand “newmediaMike” has really developed, my SEO consulting is starting to take off, I now have a full time contract with a Blue Chip company to provide them with SEO services in addition to providing SEO services to smaller companies.

So I’m going to use Post # 300 to make three announcements.

One is that newmediaMike will be continuing on with our focus on SEO, social media and web video. Now that I’m working full time out of the house again I’ll probably blog a lot more then when I was home. Not sure why it worked out that way but it did. I have a number of articles on social media and web video I have been researching, but I was waiting to do this big number 300 before publishing them. I’ve also had some requests to bring back my SEO Tips, so look for more of those as well.

Two, I am now a full time SEO Consultant - once the ink is dry on the paperwork I will announce who my Blue Chip client is. I am still looking to take on other clients and keep building this business. As I’ve said in previous posts, with the economy in such a severe downturn this is an excellent time to be an SEO Consultant.

Three, I’m re-launching my personal blog at blog.MikeAllan.com. I originally launched my personal blog back in August, then got distracted by my employment situation. Now I can put some efforts into writing more personal not tech blog posts. As I allude to in my latest post, my personal life has been quite interesting for the last 6 months, my personal blog will become my outlet to blow off steam.

I hope you will keep reading and if you don’t follow me on Twitter I hope you will.

Tags: blog, Blogging, personal, SEO

How a newbie uses Twitter

This is a comical look at Twitter from YouTube’s own LisaNova.  OK I say “YouTube’s own” because she is well known because of YouTube. In this video though I think she is channelling the person with the most subscriptions on YouTube, 15 year old Lucas Cruickshank - aka “Fred”.  Matthew Ingram has a great piece on Fred on his blog.

PS- Just for the record, I’ve never said OMG on Twitter - should I twit those three letters please feel free to stop following me - and I’ll know who you are thanks to Qwitter!

Tags: Funny, LisaNova, newbie, Twitter, video, YouTube