Wendy Williams recently described what she feels is the difference between “Celebrity” and “Star.”  She said that a celebrity is now anyone we, as a society, celebrate whether good or bad and a star is someone who rises above and beyond in their field. I can accept that but maybe we as a society need to take a look at who we are celebrating now.

The types of famous people I care about are the ones who can teach me something I didn’t know, turn me on to a cause that means something, and possibly help make me a better me in the process.  Most times, celebrities are exposed to more information than we are. I am sure they are contacted to support this charity and that cause on a regular basis.  Plus they get to go places and meet people we don’t have access to.  This enables them to bring us information we may miss or not even be presented with in the first place.

Most famous people or celebrities, if you may, are really just down to earth people who happen to have a high profile job.  The ones who are totally full of themselves probably would be that way no matter what.  They would just be acting selfish and stuck up on a smaller level.  Seems like now we have people who make it their sole cause to become well known just so they can shun others.

The types of personalities I care about are the people who lend their voice to others that otherwise may never be heard from.  Sure, I want to hear about their latest projects because, 9 times out of 10, the people who are truly good inside chose great work.  Whether it is music, movies, radio, or television, I usually enjoy the work of good people.

I was thrilled to see Alyssa Milano win a VH1 Do Something award for her efforts to raise money for Charity Water for her birthday last year.  The way she used Twitter to bring attention to the cause was innovative.  Recently, she became involved in a campaign to help the clean up efforts in the Gulf Coast after the BP oil spill.  Alyssa started a flirty banter with the Old Spice guy and of course, always thinking of charity, she challenged him to donate money to the efforts in the Gulf.  You can watch the challenge and help out here: http://youtu.be/xeVY2qvyuPM and here: http://youtu.be/alO_cPaBtU4

Another very active spokesperson has been Ian Somerhalder from The Vampire Diaries.  The information he tweeted to his followers kept them informed of the latest findings and goings on in the Gulf.  He made a PSA to help raise money as well.  You can watch it and help out here: http://youtu.be/Da48aWQpOcY

Kathy Griffin, always the funny lady, lent her um… face to women’s health recently too by getting a PAP smear on live TV.  I am sure many women learned more about it or were prompted to stop putting theirs off.  You can see her talk to Joy Behar about it here: http://youtu.be/qnpJ-GI45oc

part of the campaign to end human slavery & trafficking

Of course there is the DNA Foundation that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore started to help end slavery and human trafficking.  You can watch Ashton talk about it here and learn how to help: http://youtu.be/1Ej-nEkPCkI

Another reason I care about celebrities has to do with memories.  Somehow over the years I have associated certain memories to my favorite television shows or songs.  I can remember when my Grandmother was beginning to deal with her Alzheimer’s disease, she was always so glad to sit and watch the Golden Girls on a Saturday evening.  We would watch together so we could share a laugh for that half hour each week.  So even today you can find me watching reruns of the Golden Girls as I fall asleep for the night.  It brings me a sense of comfort and good memories.

Saturday Night Live was a favorite of my Mothers when Gilda Radner was a cast member.  The Beatles’ music was always playing in my house since both of my parents are huge fans.  Donna Summer songs will remind me of summer days in our pool in the back yard.  My mom would listen to her music while she relaxed or did chores as we played in the pool.  Last summer I relived those memories at a Donna Summer concert at Jones Beach.   My aunt was a big fan of Tina Turner, as am I.  She introduced me to Tina’s music and performing which of course, has led to great memories.  In 2008, I was on cloud nine as I sat in the audience of Tina’s “last” concert on my very birthday.  So you see, the list goes on for me as I am sure it does for you.

What celebrities/songs/movies/TV shows have fond memories attached for you?  What charities or activities have you become involved with because of your favorite celebrity?

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A video playing around with the lyrics of the song “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga, a theme of “Misheard Lyrics” where the video displays what can be heard from the song and not what the actual lyrics are (for the majority of the song)

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Written by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

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It must be very tiring to be engage in conversation or answer all theose ‘@’ mentions. I think each one of those superstars gets at least 100+ questions or ‘Hello’ tweets on a daily basis, so I took some time and studied some of those incredible ‘tweeps’ and decided to write what I understood.

I’ll first discuss what makes them ‘Twitter Giants’ – to understand how a ‘Giant’ reacts – then I’ll be debating with my twin. Let’s answer this question:

1-What makes them Twitter Giants?

Commitment to Help First:

If twitter is all about sharing, (in my point of view) Twitter is  all about solutions. You have an issue with your computer, your dog don’t want to eat anymore? You ask for help, you will get answers. You feel bad or in a maze? You read an inspirational tweet.

And The Twitter Giants are the best to ask. You just need to ask and they will 99.99% of the time Answer you or redirect you to somebody else to find a solution to your problem.

Conversations:

Engaging Conversations makes feel your followers that you are more human than an annoying bot or a spammer, and helps you make connection throughout the world with amazing people you’d never think of knowing them a day.

Twitter’s Giants talk, oh my God they talk a lot to everybody, beside of helping tweeples, they talk and put smiles in our faces each time they say a word.

Content/Incredible Tweets:

They are consistent and share the best things you want to know, available on the net. And only god knows how many interesting pictures, articles, blogs, news, videos, are on the WWW.

Followers Ratio:

Whoever tells you that a Giant has 100k+ or even 10k+ followers, is just bull#$@#ing you. I know many tweeps that have only 350 followers or less and that fit in this category. Here they are: @getkiller, @fhk09, @JP2zo, and many more.

2- How Do they Manage Conversations?

The best Way to get an appropriate answer to this question is to ask a Giant. So I had this little public Chat with @AskAaronLee about the issue, then we moved in DMs.

Interview With @AskAaronLee

You may want to read the following from the bottom.

See? I just Asked and he Replied! So now Go and Ask him! (Good luck Aaron, Hope you paid your bills, tomorrow will be a busy day for ya)

Besides the lists there is another hint @adamsconsulting taught me. She usually answers by a single tweet to all the followers. She engage and replies a lot though, but as she has atleast 200 RTs daily I think that it’s a bit difficult to thank every one. =D

One thing you need to know: Twitter Giants are human beings hence they are all different in their way of managing conversations, tweets or lists. But they have this thing that makes them different. You want to know what it is? Check SuuuuperG post here.

I would like to take this opportunity to  thank the following  people for inspiring this article: @Fhk09, @2morrowknight, @Jason_pollock, @TechZader, @Nonkanya, @MASisMore, @Glitterglitzer, @modelsupplies, @Mistygirlph, @SuuperG, @AskAaronLee, @AdamsConsulting, @GetKiller, @Paul_Steele

Now you tell me how you manage your Timeline, who knows each one of us may be a Giant in his own way.

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Surprised? I don’t think you should. Although large companies have more budgets to spend they lack a few success key’s to be more successful in social media. What are those “magical” keys?

1. Relationship Building

Relationship building is the most important criteria when it comes to success in social media. This is why smaller companies are more success. They tend to know their customers and spend time knowing them. Restaurant owners are tweeting their customers to see if they even enjoyed their food.  By doing this they can get feedback’s and know the customer needs to improve their services and build loyalty with their customers.

I did a case study on how a local coffee shop uses twitter. Which is the best example for this.

2. Aim Small

By aiming small companies are actually aiming people who are in the local community and buidling a relationship within the community and this is when I say “the number of followers aren’t important” and “building a great relationship” is important.

Smaller companies also follow back their followers compared to larger firms who concentrate more on getting followers. Smaller companies follow back their followers and allow their followers to DM them whenever they have a question. @CoffeeGroundz even allow their customers to order take away using DM’s.

If they had that in where I am, I’ll just DM them whenever I feel hungry.

3. Quicker

Smaller businesses do better because they can reply to customers right away without going through channels. For  large firms, they might need to go through a few channels before replying to their customers. However things are starting to change.

One thing about smaller businesses is that they are themselves. I can’t say much for larger firms because they might have to follow their companies policy and is  limited to have a more professional approach compared to a more personal approach which is what smaller businesses are doing better

3. They are doing everything big firms doesn’t do

Yes! If you look at smaller companies, they are doing everything that large firms aren’t doing much. For example smaller firms are using linkedin Q&A to answer questions companies and future clients are asking and actually getting more clients. This helps them to get customers and building a two way relationship with their customers while large companies don’t really do all this. The linkedin is just a small example though.

Smaller and medium firms tend to be more adventurous and play around with new media and paid advertising like facebook advertising. I think large firms should spend more time on facebook advertising because they very well targeted.

So should you bother to use social media if you’re not started? The answer is YES? Why? Lets go through some facts

- 50% of respondents use social media at least once a day

This means they will be customers posting, blogging or tweeting unsatisfied products, unsatisfied services, or even unsatisfied COFFEE. If you own a coffee shop and have great coffee why not invite them to drop by and give them a twitter discount? If you do deliveries why not send them your coffee to try? (Be sure that yours is GOOD) Trust me if they can post about unsatisfied coffee, they’ll tweet about a great coffee.

Over 70% of consumers want access to company experts and support via social media channels and trust company information provided to them via social networks

Do you have company experts and support ready? If you don’t make sure you have them. You don’t want your competitors stealing your customers don’t you? I tweeted TWO companies in the same industry the other day. Both had similar amount of followers. One replied, one didn’t. Who will I continue to buy from?

I’ll let you guess.

Photo credits stuseeger

Read more here:
Small is The New Big in Social Media

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So I thought it would be fun to tweet the companies. I sent out few tweets to two companies in the leisure industry to see if they will respond to my tweets or not.

Two of the companies are big companies.

The Companies

Company A

Following: 9,000+ Followers 9,000+ Tweets: 3541

Company B

Following 120+ Followers 3,000+ Tweets 591

Results

Company A

Replied me in 30 minutes. It was a question regarding payment system which they changed. So I thanked them for replying.  After booking my holiday I sent them another tweet saying I booked my holidays and I am looking forward to it. They replied my tweet saying that they were looking forward serving me.

Company B

No replies. I wasn’t the only one that they didn’t reply though. Below is a screen shot from a customer.

They didn’t respond to that as well. Maybe they tried to replied in the email, I don’t know about that.

I’m not saying that I won’t be using company B though. I still use both their services despite Company B not replying. However here is a method that Company B can use to ensure that they respond quickly

How To Respond To Customers Quickly

1. Cotweet

Cotweet is one of my favorite tools to use. I use it on a daily basis but I still play around with other tools like hootsuite. I even wrote a blog post on 10 reasons why i personally recommend cotweet

Notice the “@” icon? What the @ icon means is someone is sending you a tweet. What companies can do is reply to all the “@” icons as soon as possible.

2. Twitter Search

I like to use twitter search, I use them a lot but not as frequent as cotweet. Usually I use twitter search whenever I am researching for something. If you’re a company and you want reply quickly you can use they key terms to:yourcompany so lets say you’re @dell so the keywords will be to:dell

Below is a screen shot of the search using twitter search with they words to:dell

This search results are tweets sent directly to @dell. Which means most probably they want a reply or is asking  a question to dell. Its similar with the cotweet “@” icon like I mention above. All this tweets will have the “@” icon if they used cotweet.

However, there is something bad about this search. Whenever people don’t put @username in front, then there won’t be a @ icon on cotweet and it won’t come out on the to:dell search

For example tweets like this

So what do you do about this then? For this you can use different keywords to search on twitter. You can use @username -rt compared to to:dell or @username

Why do we use the -rt? The reason why we do that is we want to get rid of the retweets that people are retweeting from dell or from you company. So doing this will get you results of people talking about your company without the retweets.

Here is an example of a screen shot with the keywords @dell -rt

Notice there is no retweet inside the search? Of course you don’t have to keep on using twitter search, best thing about the search is you can subsribe to it via RSS and have them sent to you.

There are other tools that you can use, but I like to keep it simple and use these two tools.

Here are a few more for you to play around:

1. SocialMention

2. Twitterfall

By doing so you’ll get to reply to your customers as soon as possible and make them happy. People are coming into social media to complain as traditional customer services aren’t working well anymore. Why not hire someone to manage your twitter account for you? It will save you from this type of things happening to your company.

So what about you guys? Have you had good or bad experience with companies on twitter. Share them below

photo credits: by Bitpicture

Read more here:
Businesses, Why Aren’t You Replying on Twitter?

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The writing and cast left me absolutely speechless, well, until I found the words and then I couldn’t stop beaming about it.  Halfway through the performance there was an intermission but I have to admit, I was so engrossed in the play that I thought it was the end and immediately thought, “NO! There has to be more!”  Much to my delight, I quickly realized it was only a break.  The funny thing is, at the end of the play I thought the same exact thing, “NO! There has to be more!”  I was that caught up in these words, in these characters.

Speaking of characters, the cast that evening was on top of their game.  Rachel Sorsa Khoury touched our hearts as the mother, Kate Westmoreland, and shocked us in all the right places.  She played the character with wit, humor, fear, and strength.  I felt like she was the entire cast of ”Designing Women” all in one person.  Susan Leslie made you both hate her and feel pity for her as Sister Timothea Parker, a very stubborn religious fanatic.  You didn’t know whether you wanted to hug her or slap her and then you found yourself routing for her when she was trying to help.  Luke McClure, as the son and oldest child, Dayne Westmoreland, gave his character charm, warmth, and just the right sarcasm an older brother needs to deal with a dramatic little sister.  There were times his strength was leading the entire family through crisis.  Matthew Scott Montgomery lent his character, Kendall Parker, just the right mix of bubbly “Glee” cast member and awkward teenage boy.  His energy as well as his quirkiness stole quite a few scenes.  Robert Lewis Stephenson put a masculine, take charge quality, along with a father’s vulnerability into his portrayal of Bobby Westmoreland.  Last but definitely not least was Caroline Shores, who claims it was her first time on stage and it was hard to believe, as Gracie Westmoreland.  She played the angst ridden teenage girl so well that I felt she was my own younger sister.  Between her exploding tantrums and her touching dramatic scenes she kept you along for the ride the entire time.

Without giving away too much, the title “Yellow” is perfect for this play but not for the obvious reason you will learn when you see it, and I do suggest you do your best to do so.  The title “Yellow” represented fear, cowardice, and joy at different times in the production.  Del Shores writing is always layered with humor, sensitivity, passion, and a touch of  drama.  I can honestly say I laughed, smiled, blushed, and cried all in one sitting.  For me, it was refreshing to see a play that could surprise you in so many ways.  The dramatic turn was unexpected as well as the explosive scenes and one particular touching scene.

The Coast Playhouse is a small, intimate theater which was the perfect place to take this all in but I can absolutely see this production translating very well in an off- Broadway or even Broadway theater.  I actually look forward to seeing it again on my next trip west and hope to see it here in New York soon.

If you live in the area or are planning a visit make this part of your entertainment schedule.  You can get tickets at www.YellowTix.netor by calling 1-800-595-4849.  Might I add, you will be pleasantly surprised at how affordable they are plus the enjoyment you experience is that you would hope to get from a much more expensive evening out. I encourage you to give a great standing ovation to honor these talented people and don’t forget to tell them Teeco sent you!

You can watch the charming Del Shores give a tour of the set of Yellow here: http://youtu.be/-p_qhFAtezg and to find out more about the play you can go to http://yellowbydelshores.com/YELLOW_BY_DEL_SHORES/Home.htmlFollow him on twitter @DelShores

To find out more about Jason Dottley you can go to www.JasonDottley.comwhere you can find out about his upcoming projects and music.  You can also follow him on twitter @JasonDottley

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Pungo Creek (the novel, not the North Carolina stream) climbs the family tree of the Foremans, following the lives of people whose tough existence has been bedeviled by poverty, alcoholism, violence, death, incest, and rape. It is a grim, gritty, and spellbinding tale.

Brenda Mantz is a powerful storyteller. Intellectually, I know I’ve never set foot anywhere near Pungo Creek, but my senses have experienced the smell of the wind coming across its water over the pines. The feel of the earth there on my bare feet still lingers. I can hear the voices of generations of the Foreman family blowing through the screens of the clapboard houses, the creak and splash of the oars in the rowboat on the water, fatback popping in the pan on the stove, and the Baptist minister calling out invocations toward a seemingly indifferent God. I have seen the furtive, telling looks on the people’s faces and can often taste the whiskey on their breath. Such is the potence of this evocative, tragic tale; the reader is drawn into the maelstrom and every sense becomes connected to the story.

I was stuck to the book from first sentence, which, granted, was the entire prologue and covered a couple of pages, but it hooked me and hauled me in as if I were just another fish in Pungo Creek. I was crushed, transcended, assailed, and defiant, totally engrossed by the characters while I read. If the novel had been longer my family might have had me locked up. If the story had been shorter I might have locked myself up and not come out until I could read more of it.

A riveting, gut-wrenching, satisfying read. Skillfully crafted and expertly paced. Whispers of Hemingway – understatement, vivid imagery, and characters you’ve never met – but desperately want to – Highly recommended!
- A. Kalm

Brenda Mantz’ first novel, Pungo Creek, was inspired by her own childhood on Pungo Creek in rural North Carolina where she grew up in a house shared by three generations. She is a freelance writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in Photo District News, Washingtonian Magazine, Solutions and Rough Notes. She founded InPrint Magazine, a magazine for professional photographers, for which she was honored with the Federal Photographers Award for Excellence. She is an active member of the International Womens Writing Guild and the National Writers Union. President of her own risk management firm in Washington, DC, Brenda lives in Falls Church, Virginia with her husband and their two dogs. She is currently at work on her second novel.

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This post has come to you with a plea for help.

As you may already be aware Carla Moreno (@carlitarocks) made the top 5 short list from 150 participants in the http://www.twitvid.com/queenrania competition. I cannot put into words how important to this is to Carla (and her kids she educates). Traveling the world, working with homeless children, teaching them about different cultures, these are the experiences Carla wants to share with the Jordanian people.

Last night voting was reset due to a technical glitch and all votes for Carla (and others) were lost. She had so much support and was doing really well.

Can I please encourage you to take a little time to revisit http://www.twitvid.com/queenrania and place your vote again for Carla and once again prove that the Twitter community working as a team can achieve great things.

I understand that people can get annoyed by seeing the same message over and over again but I am making no apologies for that. This is just too important to Carla.

I have put together a series of ‘Twitter friendly’ messages that you can ‘cut and paste’ to help spread the word.

Thank you all for joining together and helping to make this happen

Please feel free to cut and paste any of the messages below and post to your social media accounts.

Due to a bug voting has restarted. please VOTE CARLA MORENO only 2 days! www.twitvid.com/queenrania #VoteCarla

Vote for Carla Moreno and help her share her expriences with the people of Jordan www.twitvid.com/queenrania #VoteCarla

Dear Twitter community. This is a call for help! Pls visit and vote Carla Moreno www.twitvid.com/queenrania #VoteCarla

Voting glitch causes votes to not count. Pls visit www.twitvid.com/queenrania and vote again for Carla Moreno #VoteCarla

One woman, a video camera and a story that needs to be told www.twitvid.com/queenrania #VoteCarla

In the name of education, humanity and goodwill please visit www.twitvid.com/queenrania and vote for Carla Moreno #VoteCarla

Can Twitter rise to the occasion and help Carlo achieve a dream by Sunday? Yes! visit www.twitvid.com/queenrania and vote Carla #VoteCarla

A few seconds of your time can change the lives of people forever. Visit www.twitvid.com/queenrania and vote for Carla Moreno #VoteCarla

Greatness comes in many forms. This is just one of them. Let’s pull together and make this happen. www.twitvid.com/queenrania #VoteCarla

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