Last week when Will and I started talking about doing a Twitter mashup we never thought it would take off so fast. The night before last, just before we went home, Will put up the site - Tweetvolume.com - and sent it to one Twitter mashup blog. The next morning I sent it to two people. On Tuesday Googling "tweetvolume" returned no results. Today I got 9520.
We've already thought of improvements and features to add. But some will have to wait until Twitter's technical problems improve. We'll keep you posted. Try it out and have some fun.

Jeff

The Church of The Customer blog tells us about Fog Creek Software's service called Copilot, which can be used for remote computer assistance over the web. They decided to give away their service for free on Mothers Day. It's a simple holiday promotional idea that reminded me of the event a few weeks again that temporarily closed down our office. Ben and Jerry's gave away free ice cream on their anniversary. How did we hear about it? Our high-school student intern came in that afternoon and told us about it. When we went for our free cones there were a lot of high schoolers waiting in line. What a great way to start building brand loyalty among the youth.

Delmonicos was a great little Italian deli I used to frequent. It was run by two brothers in their 70's. Whenever you walked into the place one of them would slice off a piece of cheese and salami and hand it to you on a big sheet of wax paper. I couldn't walk out of there without buying something.

Free samples are an important part of new product introductions and an obvious tactic in food marketing, but often it's not considered in cases like software, big ticket items and intangibles. If you can't give your product away, there are creative ways to provide a loyalty-building interaction that works the same way.

Jeff

There were some really bright folks at the New Orleans Basic Training. Thanks to CoBrandiT you can watch some very informative and though-provoking interviews with some of the best minds in WOM marketing. There is even an interview with David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and one of the most interesting keynotes from the conference. Watch them here.

Jeff

The letters are from Action Mailing. The tagline on the envelope says: "mail with results" I got three of them, all addressed to Jeff Rabkin at WOWZA, on the same day.

The letter starts out: "You can count on Action Mailing to help you navigate the upcoming postage rate change!"

Direct mail is never easy. No matter who you are.

Jeff

We recently learned, thanks to Techcrunch from this article, that Digg, arguably the most influential social news site on the internet, has bowed down to it's users at the risk of being shut down completely.

The story goes like this: Digg, one of the most popular social news sites on the internet, deleted a user's post. The post contained a link to a decryption key that provided instructions for hacking HD DVDs. This stuff happens all the time. Someone posts something that ticks-off a big corporation, the corporation complains and the site removes the offending material. But this time users went crazy. After the story was pulled from the site other users started reposting the story, over and over again. Digg kept deleting them and they kept reposting. It was a kind of war between the users and the Digg Administrators. Finally, after the dust settled, Digg gave in saying,

"... after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

Corporations had better start getting used to a new reality: the people are taking over.

Will