Update: Holy Kaw
By far, the biggest change to my tweeting is the creation of a section of Alltop called Holy Kaw. I started it because of the popularity of my Posterous blog where I uploaded pictures and summaries of interesting stories—basically stuff that was too long for a tweet and too short for a blog post. I noticed that these posts were getting thousands of page views, and there’s nothing that I hate more than an unmonetized page view, so we added it to Alltop.com. By the way, it’s pronounced “holy cow” as in “holy Kaw-asaki.”
This is how Holy Kaw works: a team of ghosts and contributors and I scour the Internet to find interesting, educational, and funny stories. The editorial test is that the story elicits a “Holy kaw!” response when one reads it—for example, “Holy kaw, Facebook is now worth $23 billion!
"We write up the story or embed the video and post it to the Holy Kaw part of Alltop (we still use Posterous for this). These stories are then tweeted out to @GuyKawasaki and @Alltop.
We never write up so much of it that there’s no reason to go to the source. For example, if it’s a “top ten” story, we only include two or three of the ten. We include a link to the source story—we’ve never had a complaint from the sources because we send them thousands of page views. Indeed, this works so well that sites such as HowStuffWorks.com and National Geographic have contributor accounts so that they can write up their own stories on Holy Kaw to point back to their site.
We make money because there are banner ads on the Holy Kaw pages, and there is a link to a relevant Alltop topic site—for example, if the Holy Kaw story is about social media, we include a link to Social-Media.alltop. There are also ads on the Alltop page, so we monetize the Holy Kaw page itself, “self-advertise” to an Alltop topic, and then monetize the Alltop topic page too.
General
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Question: How can you follow so many people?
Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, Directs, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki” and “alltop.” I am not reading everything everyone I follow tweets, but I answer almost every @ and Direct.
Update: no change.
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Question: Then why do you follow everyone?
Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that anyone can send a Direct to me. I like Direct messages because they are so much more efficient than email.
Update: no change.
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Question: Why do you use @GuyKawasaki and @GuysReplies?
Answer: I created @Guysreplies in order to reply to @s that all my followers do not need to see. For example, when people tweet, “@guykawasaki I loved Reality Check,” I don’t want to burden everyone with my thank-you @ reply. Also, people publicly attack me as a kind of “tweet bait” to get more followers. Because @GuysReplies has few followers, this scheme won’t work, and I can still appear to be “engaged” with the losers.
Update: I no longer use @guysreplies because the only people who see my @replies are those who follow both me and the recipient. I added @Alltop as another account for people who do not want to see repeat tweets. It has the same tweets as @GuyKawasaki, but only once.
