Guy Kawasaki, Alltop and Why Twitter Makes me Cooler than You

Today Alltop launched productmanagement.alltop.com and Rocket Watcher made the cut of the 25 or so blogs listed there. In addition to getting some traffic driven to this site, I get to put this nifty little red badge on my site that you see below my photo over on the right.

Whoop-dee-doo! How did this happen!?

In a word – Twitter.

So here is how it started. I’m a big fan of Alltop (click over there and have a look. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you to get back) Guy Kawasaki’s “online magazine rack” of blogs sorted by topic, and I’ve used it to find a lot of the bloggers that I follow. I find doing searches and trolling through the blogrolls of bloggers that I read is OK, but in general the Alltop lists of blogs with the last few posts were a big time saver for me.

So then I got to thinking – Hey, I want to be listed there too! So I clicked around on the site and noticed that anyone could submit to be listed. So I did. By email. It was even a funny email which I was sure would get Guy’s attention. Here it is in all its original glory for your entertainment:

Hi Guy,
I launched a new marketing blog called Rocket Watcher
a few weeks back focused on Marketing and Launching New Innovative
Technologies and it kicks ass. Please add it to marketing.alltop!
Top 5 reasons Rocket Watcher belongs on Alltop Marketing:
1/
My posts are smart because I’m Director of Marketing for XXXX’s
Incubation Program so I’m actually doing this stuff, not just thinking
about it. And I’ve been doing this stuff for 15 years.
2/ I do a lot of external facing stuff for XXXX so I’m almost famous
😉 Here’s me on TV talking about XXXX’s entry into the immersive
collaboration space http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/online-travels/#clip90507
3/ I post at least twice a week and not just crappy delicious links either.
4/ There’s more to marketing than social media or online marketing! Your marketing list needs to branch out a bit!
5/ I’m Canadian and Alltop needs more diverse new blood!
Please pick me and I will be forever in your debt!
April

Did I mention I have a PhD in butt kissing? And what response did I get back from Guy? Zilch. Nada. My dream of being on marketing.alltop.com – EPIC FAIL.

Hey, I can take being ignored. It’s not like I’m in marketing and my whole purpose in life is to get things noticed or anything.

Anyway, there I am on twitter.alltop.com looking for smart marketing folks to follow and after adding a few, I post the following Tweet “Can anyone recommend any good marketing folks to follow other than those listed on twitter.alltop.com”. Guy being an avid Twitterer and good marketing guy responded to me directly (I’ve been following him on Twitter for a while) and suggested I look at marketing.alltop.com, branding.alltop.com or socialmedia.alltop.com . Ho ho, I said to myself. Now that I have his attention I will get my little blog listed on Alltop. I will, I WILL! So I sent him a Tweet back saying “Hey Guy, you need a productmanagement.alltop.com category. I can send you links.”

[Aside – Hey, see what I did there? Instead of my stupid email that was all about me and my stuff, I offered to help him create a new category. Shoot, it’s almost like, say it with me, MARKETING.]

Long story short, lots of Tweets and emails exchanged and voila – productmarketing.alltop.com is there and is pretty useful if I do say so myself and yours truly gets to live her dream of being a real live Alltop somebody.

Would this have happened without Twitter? Maybe, but I doubt it. In fact, after I dropped a line to the guys at On Product Management about the new Alltop category they told me that in fact, they had sent an email to the Alltop folks months ago with the same suggestion and didn’t get any action. Here is another clue. From the Alltop About page:

Q.How do you decide which sites and blogs are in a topic?
A.
We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from
the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on
several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and
blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of
the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who
care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter
community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop.
Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what
it is today.

Um, Duh! If I had been paying more attention I would have pitched Guy originally over Twitter instead of email.

So the moral is that Twitter is pretty darn useful tool if you are trying to get someone’s attention in a world where everyone is overloaded with information.

P.S. Yes I know some of you Cranky people out there might question the importance of my amazing Alltop achievement. What can I say? With the economy being this crappy, I take success in any and all forms that it comes at me!