The Real Lance Brown

Web site company Moonfruit is having a contest on Twitter where people are encouraged to include #moonfruit in their tweets, with each such tweet being an entry into their random daily drawing. Problem is, Twitter’s search index is not properly tracking everyone. For example, my tweets (those with #moonfruit or without) have not shown up in Twitter’s search index for almost ten days. So is Moonfruit using that faulty index from which to find their pool of #moonfruit contest entries? My attempts to find out (by tweeting questions to @moontweet, who seems to be answering other questions freely) have been unsuccessful. So I went to their website and sent the following message using their contact form:

Hi,

Your @moontweet person seems to be ignoring my inquiries, and I’m just wondering if you have figured out some way to deal with the fact that unknown thousands of people’s tweets are not currently indexed by Twitter search. (See: http://ow.ly/gnUE)

Perhaps you are using some other index for your #moonfruit contest; again, no one has replied to my many queries. But if you are using’s Twitter’s own search index, then you are essentially defrauding a huge number of people, who are being told by your contest page that their #moonfruit tweets are entries in the contest, when actually they are not.

The mission:

To compile a list of three hundred and eleven 311 fans who are on Twitter, and make it easy for other 311 fans to find and follow them!

Options:

• There is a site called NinjaFollow that will let you mass-follow folks, if they are in a comma-separated text file. (Though I don’t know if they are trustworthy; we may need to seek out another way to do bulk following.) So if we get all the usernames, we can make a text file so people can literally follow all 311 311 fans in one shot.
• We can also make a list that links to each person’s profile individually, if people want to explore the 311 that way.

The toughest part will be collecting the 311 311 fans (with them preferably being good people for other 311 fans to follow). The simplest way to collect them is for 311 fans to self-identify and ask to be on the list. (The more complicated ways involve searching 311 Tweets, and using Twitter search, etc.)

This is an excellent interview with the owner of an electronics hardware supplier who has gotten has employees to blog as a central part of his social media and marketing strategy. The lessons he has learned could serve almost any business that is unsure about taking “the plunge”.

Rick Short Explains How to Turn Staff Into Prolific Bloggers.

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Here is the latest edition of my comic strip The Little Things, titled “Sympathetic President”.

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Lifehacker - Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained

Saving this so I can check it out some time when I’m being more productive.

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Mandy’s Film and TV Production Directory - television - video - broadcast.

Cool site where you can connect with film distributors, among many other things. Hat tip to Angelo Bell for telling me about it.

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Poetry Magazine pays $10 per line for poems, with a $150 minimum.

Submissions : Poetry Magazine

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Todd’s Film Blog: 10 Tips For Independent Filmmakers Seeking Distribution

by Todd Bartoo (http://twitter.com/Todfilm)

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