But the nice people at High Road have apparently decided I’m “hip” enough for a Smirnoff party! Thanks peeps!

Looking forward to this event, the #SmirnoffExp as they call it, and I will be sure to post a review of expectations vs actualities. Plus, the ever-famous Guy Gal will be my date, so how could it possibly be a bad night?

But I will give kudos – the invite was pretty sweet. Nicely done, High Road & Smirnoff Canada! They’ve also offered this handy little Twitterfall widget so I can “share the conversation with my readers.”

…Let’s just not tell them I have like, two readers. (Hi Mom and Aunt Jan!) Our little secret, k? Wiiiiiiink.

Adorable. People liked it; they felt sorry for poor ol’ Salty. It conveyed the message well (thanks to Knorr, you won’t need Salty around anymore) but kept it lighthearted. And Salty was so cute!

But it seems the ad idea is now bigger than the product it is trying to sell. Let’s take a look at an ad I found today:

The product isn’t even mentioned. Heck, you don’t even see it until a minute in, in the final lockup. And the copy doesn’t even speak to the brand benefits. Is this an issue? Well, no, I don’t think so. Because what it does speak to is the ability to get your own FREE salt & pepper shakers by visiting their website (sidekicks.ca) I can’t lie, I’m now checking this out to see how I can get them. I’m sorry, they’re just so cute!

So… clearly the high value task here has shifted between the first ad (buy our product) to this ad (visit our website). Upon looking at the site though, the user has two options: buy the s&p shaker now for $14.99 plus shipping (an additional $7.29) or buy 3 packages of Knorr Sidekicks plus shipping.

Hm. Pay more monies ORRRR get tasty foods and pay less monies. Gee, wonder which one most people will go with. Just another indirect way to sell Knorr Sidekicks. But with the added bonus of a unique hit to their website. It’s win-win. Also win for consumers who will get a cute Salty’s in their daily lives. I’m seriously considering buying these. I wish I was joking.

Some other cute Salty’s ads can be found here and here.

In any case, you can check out Salty’s Twitter, Facebook fan page or his YouTube channel. Few items I need to off shoot and rant here about regarding these properties:

1. Most of the Twitter stuff pushes to product pages, which is fine – IF labeled as such. Instead, they’re just teaser copy and links, without disclosure of what the link is. Kind of annoying, clicking on a link thinking you might see something funny or of value to you only to find yourself on a Knorr Sidekicks product page.

2. The Facebook fan page wall is linked to the Twitter account, so all status updates on the wall are the same content as on the Twitter account. This basically says to me, “Why bother following Salty on Twitter? You can get the same content and more (ooohh, a photo album with 8 photos, if you could call that more, so impressive) on Facebook.” Don’t duplicate content. Doesn’t work in SEO, doesn’t work in SMO. Give users a reason to follow each individual account if you’re going to be on these properties – an incentive, if you will: exclusive content, funny tidbits, etc – that you can’t get already on another property. It’s fine to link out to the other social media properties, totally fine, but offer more than what is basically a RSS feed. And if that’s the case: Don’t bother signing up to that property.

2. No sharing of YouTube videos? Are you kidding me? What’s the point of putting it on YouTube then? You might as well just embedded a Quicktime video onto your site and called it a day. Lot of good non-embeddable content on YouTube does me, or anyone other fan out there. I don’t want to link in my blog posts, I want to SHOW.

Ok, rant over. I’m done now.

So what do you think? Think this ad idea has enough legs to stand on its own and support a product it barely talks about anymore? Let me know in the comments.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Twist, or any other sites like it but I was just amused to see “Harry Potter” as a top trending topic.

Not surprised, mind you, just amused. After all, I went to the midnight screening last night (hello, geek alert) complete with Harry Potter-inspired scar on my forehead with my friends:

Like many of my friends, offline and online, we Tweeted about the film before and after the movie. Which is why this graph of the trending topic “Harry Potter” made me chuckle to myself:

You can tell exactly who was Tweeting about this trending topic, as it took a sharp downturn for the 3 hours the movie was playing in most eastern cities at midnight. Then back up again, as we raced to share our favourite moments, lines, scenes and characters.

Back in the day, before Twitter came along, I’m sure Yahoo! Groups, or MSN or even sites like FanFiction.Net would have seen a similar spike around movie premiere times. But thanks to Twitter, we now have an easier, highly addicting ADD way of talking about what we liked:

and what we didn’t:

Good times. I just wish I was running on a little more than 3.5 hours of sleep today!

So today is the last day of The Great Write-Off of 2009! I think it’s safe to say that if there was a “winner” for this challenge, it’s me. Dan kind of dropped off the face of the earth for a little while and hasn’t recovered since. Sorry you suck, Dan. :(

Nah, in all fairness, I think Dan has a lot less free time than I. Still, I’m a busy girl and I’m proud I did my absolute hardest to post every second day, on-time. It’s been fun and hopefully I’ll keep writing here.

One of the reasons I came up with this idea for a blog off was that I knew I needed to populate my website with more content and I also needed a promotion of some kind. I needed new eyeballs. Coming up with a challenge was the solution to forcing myself to create content but approaching Dan and baiting him into a blog off was my solution to getting new visitors to my site and hopefully new readers.

I’d say it worked, wouldn’t you?

In case you can’t see that very well (silly narrow content window!), traffic is up 532% over same time period last month (though it should be higher because, as you can see at the beginning of my month, I changed the layout and as a result my GA code got dropped). I have an increase of 524% in pageviews, and average time on site rose 28%.

Who doesn’t love statistics like that?

As you can see, my biggest spike in traffic was as a result of my interview with Zephyr of CollegeFashion.net. She posted a link to the review on her Twitter account, which has 3,950 followers, so of course some of them wandered their way over here.

I think my favourite post however, was the one about moving to a new city and trying to start over. It’s definitely a subject that is close to my heart (having done it in Toronto and then Sydney, Australia) so I feel I can talk to it with some conviction. Plus I do love Eric’s photo – it’s definitely one of my favourites of all of his.

In any case, it’s been fun and I’m surprised I’ve had enough to talk about, really. Some posts fell flat but some were well recieved and on the whole, I think I came out with some quality content!

Thanks for playing along, folks. It’s been grand!

We’re almost at the end of The Great Write Off of 2009! Tomorrow is the official end date and I’ll be posting then as well. Until now, onto today’s topic: Unsolicited Spam.

Was I ever angry when I logged into my gmail account today to see an unsolicited e-mail from a real estate agent. I rarely hand out my gmail e-mail as a preventative so I am angry and sad that I’ve been blasted. My question is really, “How did she get it?” I wish I could know.

The e-mail in question:

Ha! She left her Twitter account at the bottom – GREAT! I quickly Tweeted at her with this:

Well, I can’t undo the fact that she has my email address now but damn, if I don’t feel better about yelling at her. And who knows, maybe she’ll respond to me and I can figure out how she got it. One can dream…

For Day 10 of the Great Write Off of 2009, Dan of DanHocking.com writes about how social media aggregated uninformed opinions really well. He says:

Creating this strong movement of uninformed opinions and groupthink really leads to some interesting interactions. It also acts to turn me off of social media. I’m not really interested to listen to the same message over and over again; let alone the same incorrect message.

OK. Sure, I suppose that social media does push these kinds of uninformed opinions on you, whether you want it or not thanks to Twitter or your Facebook news feed. Before the push of social media to you, one could avoid this kind of ignorance by simply avoiding certain spaces online. However, I wouldn’t say that social media is really to blame for pushing this in your face. Wander down to the nearest watering hole, and if you get enough (sorry, stereotyping) guys, in their 20s or 30s, who have been drinking for a while, soon enough you can find the exact same thing being yelled at the top of these guy’s lungs. Stupidity and a feeling of having a right to any opinion – right or wrong – is hard to avoid, sadly.

However, I like the points brought up by Dan and think that it is true – social media has this really great (and awful) way of repeating incorrect information at lightning speed. Think of all the rumours that fly around when any kind of accident or tragedy occurs. The social media-sphere is more concerned with getting the information right now but not the right information now.

I remember a case study on the Toronto Propane Explosion that happened last year. It concluded that while Twitter, Facebook and blogs had information on the incident over two hours before any reliable news site had a mention of it, at the end of the day, the news sites were by far more accurate in the information they reported. This is one of social media’s great failings.

Great blog post, Dan and some great discussion happening in the comments! Everyone should head on over and check it out.

ONE. Free stuff.

Twitter is great for giveaways. Just today, I was quick enough to reply to this challenge that I’ve won a cooler from Canadian Tire:

Thanks, Canadian Tire!

TWO. Laughing at funny things friends write.

I love my friends, both on Twitter and off Twitter. I have some close ‘real-life’ friends that tend to crack me up with their random and insane updates and I’m glad they’re using Twitter so I can get a good daily dose of laughter:

Apologies for the language. Debated whether or not to include but it was just too random to not.

THREE. Learning about promotions and sales from companies I like.

One of my favourite reasons I like Twitter is that I can get updates from companies or services I have an interest in. I follow enough blogs that I don’t really want to necessarily add a corporate blog to my long list of blogs on Google Reader. Usually this is because I’m not terribly interested in new updates to the site, or company changes, but simply the sales and promotions. I find companies use Twitter to just push the sales and promotions, like this:

Because of this Tweet, I ended up purchasing a shirt from Cameesa. Just got it today! Thanks Cameesa for letting me know about the sale!

FOUR. Sharing and learning from great people in the industry.

Probably one of my favourite parts of Twitter is learning from people I find to be absolutely brilliant in advertising, marketing, digital and social media. I’m such a new player to this game, any and all information I can soak up, I will. So Twitter allows me to really take a seat in the back and watch the show. There are many really great minds on Twitter and I love following them all, such as this guy, Bud Caddel who works at Undercurrent in NYC:

The added benefit of listening and learning is that I am slowly building up my confidence with regards to my own opinions. I can own them more effectively when I see that there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong opinion to have on any given topic. There are many individuals in this industry that don’t necessarily agree on everything but this leads to discussion, which inevitably improves our thinking on certain processes.

FIVE. Funny links that users feel compelled to share and I’m thankful they do.

The internet is a strange and wonderful place and I welcome links sent to me over Facebook, messenger services or Twitter. Twitter, however, allows you to spam everyone on your friends list with funny and/or awesome links such as this one from Jessica:

I’m pretty sure my life would have been incomplete without that link. Just sayin’.

Bonus Love:

SIX. A Tweet from space.

Twitter doesn’t get any cooler than this!

So those are my Top 5 Reasons I Love Twitter (Really Six). There are many, many more reasons but these are definitely some of the main reasons.

What do you think? Can you name any additional reasons to love Twitter? Or perhaps reasons why you dislike Twitter? Feel free to share in the comments!