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5 Tips for creating a successful Social Networking Site

5 Tips to making a successful Social Networking Site

1. Users must feel part of the group – start niche

2. Create small actions that easily connect to one another – avoid the “now what moment”

3. Always notify users of changes – keep things fresh

4. Have Community Managers – make it social

5. Pay attention to the details – user experience is EVERYTHING to the user

Why you should Retweet your friends on Twitter

 

What’s the deal with the RTs?

Every once in a while on Twitter, you will notice that at the beginning of a tweet, there are the letters “RT” before the actual comment or link. If you followed the advice on my last post about starting and becoming a master on Twitter and have downloaded TweetDeck , you would easily know that RT is short for Retweet.

A Retweet simply indicates that a person values a tweet so much that she tweets it word for word to her followers so that they can benefit from it too. Being Retweeted is a high honor because it means that people are willing to put their own reputation on the line and risk losing followers just to get your message across to more people.

Even Tech Crunch and some Twitter Experts consider Retweets the best indicators of a person’s authority and influence on Twitter (as opposed to follower count). There are also numerous sites that just track Retweeted topics or how many Retweets a person has.

Clearly, Retweets has its place of significance on Twitter, and you should RT often. Why?

1. Creating Value for your Twitter Followers

Twitter is micro-blogging. Just like blogging, people will only read your tweets if it creates value for them. You need to tweet things that are brilliant, hilarious, amazing, ingenious, unique or at least interesting to your followers to make them feel that you are worth the follow. However, you can’t always come up with the best things yourself. Retweeting is a great way to be that provider of great information without doing the work yourself.

2. Get noticed by the people you are Retweeting

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4 Steps to Master Lifestyle Gamification

 

Lifestyle Gamification is simply treating your life as if it were a game, and you are a hardcore player who is trying to be the best at the game.

Hardcore players spend hours everyday trying to improve their abilities and beat the game. When they are not playing, they are reading strategy guides, going to online forums, and constantly thinking about how to make their game stronger.

Most people agree that the Lifestyle Gamification philosophy (concept of playing your way to success) sounds appealing, but they have no idea where to start. This post will explain to you how to begin your quest of greatness and fulfillment.

Each step isn’t very easy (especially when it deals with understanding yourself better), but nor is playing a game the first time eh?)

Step 1: Determine the Game you are playing

First and foremost, in anything, you need to figure out what kind of game you are playing.

What are your life goals, what are you passionate about, and what do you want to achieve? Are you playing a game where you try to make an impact in this world by utilizing your skills and resources around you to solve world problems? Are you playing a game on reaching the top of your organization in the shortest amount of time, trying to accumulate as much money(points) as possible, or picking up as many girls as you can?

You have to think very carefully about what you care about and what accomplishments would make your life meaningful. Choose a game that you feel is worth it and when at the end of the day (or your life), you would feel good because you had accomplished meaningful things and had beaten the game with a high score.
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The 3 Elements of Perfect Leadership

Having started many clubs, organizations, and companies, I have my fair share of being a leader and getting leadership scars. I’ve also often been the leader while being the youngest person in the group. It wasn’t always like that. When I was a younger, I was the kid who everyone makes fun of while I worked my butt off trying to fit in my environment.

The process had to start all over again whenever I moved, as South Africa, Taiwan, Kansas, and California all had very different cultures. The turning point was when I started a chess club in high school, and during my sophomore year, I was elected President. With a new sense of responsibility, I realized that the whole organizations success rested on my shoulders.

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Seesmic Desktop will Destroy Tweetdeck through Gamification

This post is outdated. Click here to see my latest post on how Diablo III uses Gamification to become so addicting

TweetDeck vs Seesmic Desktop

Up to this point, I have always been a fan of Tweetdeck. I have told quite a plethora of people to download Tweetdeck as soon as they made their first tweet (yes, I do a search on that) . Downloading Tweetdeck is also one of the major steps in my post about how to start and fall in love with Twitter.

As far as I know, TweetDeck is the only Twitter App that raised sizeable funding during the “old days” (like 90 days ago) when people still wondered if Twitter would die any day. Good job Tweetdeck!
Continue reading Seesmic Desktop will Destroy Tweetdeck through Gamification