In our opinion, the job of a creative designer is to create works of art that fully compliment the visual aspects of a company’s brand, and to totally encapsulate that company’s brand image. LightGate Studios, Inc. was forged under these very principals by one man, and it has been our “designers” that have helped sculpt what LightGate Studios, Inc. is today.

LightGate Studios friends, colleagues, partners and close clients received some disturbing news Friday morning, May 11, 2012 from the CEO of LightGate Studios, Jason Silvestri, that the Founder and President of the company, Hal Fisher, was leaving the company to pursue other opportunities that would advance his career and also make more time for his family. A request that gracefully honored.

To read more on this story go to LightGate Studios News

Please see LightGate Studios 2012 for more information.

So many of us have been taught that twitter, passion, blogs = win. I am sorry, but that is bullshit. It’s about becoming an expert at what you do and be willing to invest that money into your products that will make you win in the end! That goes for personal brands or businesses.

YouTube is most certainly an interesting platform, with ties to Google search and much, much, more! Many people have asked me, “What is the best way to separate tags on video posts via YouTube?”

For newly uploaded videos, using a comma is the quickest approach. Conversely, once you have submitted those tag changes, if you try to add a tag anywhere within the tag line after that using a comma, you will lose all tags except the one you just added. From a user’s standpoint, YouTube separates all tags with spaces. Using double quotes to add a word (tag) that has multiple spaces is best.

So to clarify, use a space to separate tags within a YouTube tag line. Use double quotes with tag words that have spaces (e.g. tagline: bike “outdoor sports” biking bicycle riding “downhill trail” mountain road “Jason Silvestri”).

In addition, it is extremely important to add tags that are relevant to your video; much like search terms within a search result. The concept of which goes outside the scope of this post, but questions on the subject or on SEO for YouTube in general are welcome.

Figure 1 shows an example of adding tags to a tagline on YouTube Videos.

Figure 1:

Please Note:
I am not taking on speaking engagement at this time. However, I may in the summer of 2012 if the right opportunity presents itself.

Please see below for my latest speaking engagement:

If you had five minutes to talk to Corvallis what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides that rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you talk about launching a web site? Would you teach a hack? Would you talk about a recent learning, success, or some failure you hope others will learn from? Would you try to inspire people to act?

Ignite asked me to come speak at Ignite Corvallis. Naturally, I accepted. Ignite brings a style, as well as a presence, that is both innovative and educational. You will not find a playing field quite like it. It being my first speaking engagement and all, I had so much to say, but there was so little time. I did what anyone would do. Aside from being pretty nervous, I went at it top level; covering all the major topics on my mind for 2012. Conversely, there is so much more people need to understand about the tools and practices so many of us were led into using this past few years by the quote on quote, “social media mentors.” It blows my mind, and has me scared for a lot of people’s well being. I am serious! So many people were taught the formula, (social media/blogs/passion = win) when in reality, that propaganda came from hope peddler’s who have had their bums wiped by Daddy since they can remember, and never knew what it was like to survive. Got a problem? No problem, because my money can solved the problem kind of people. There are other factors missing from the algorithm.

In 2012 it is about surviving. Don’t listen to that, “you can be a celebrity-blogger” bullshit. You need to work hard, educate yourself, and become an absolute expert at what you do to become what I think is an Internet Rockstar. Even then, you need money, a great message, a serious product and/or service, a great looking and creative brand, and the list goes on! These are all things those mentors don’t tell you in their $11.95 books they push to you. My new objective in late 2012 and early 2013 will be to create a better deliver system of my support to brands that value me and my movements. Until then, I suggest all who follow me to do something much different then what all these social media mentors are teaching. Think big, but act small. Understand what you want and capitalize on that feeling moving forward. Get better at what you do, plan to spend a lot of time and money into your brands making the CORRECT decisions and I can almost guarantee you promise in your next venture.

See the other great speakers who were in the lineup:
Website: http://ignitecorvallis.com/
Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/ignitecorvallis

Visit the ignite website to see previous ignite presentations & videos:
Website: http://igniteshow.com/
Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/ignite

At the end of the day, when all the smoke clears, there is family. You sometimes forget the importance of family until it is too late. You need to be able to balance family in between all the chaos of trying to make it in life.

This re-post is a reminder that all things come to an end. How you shine in those hours, days and years will be your weight you carry forever. Were you truly good to people?

As a former Product Lifecycle Management consultant, I understand very complex business workflows and lifecycle processes that go beyond the scope of common web development, so when I heard Eric speaking words of “lean manufacturing” and how his team approaches startup development I was immediately hooked on watching The Daily segment with Eric, hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk.

The concept of lean manufacturing, as well as Eric’s book in generally (that is without reading it myself yet), looks at product manufacturing and its lifecycle process a little different then how we PLMers were accustom to seeing the various PLM & ERP systems and workflow processes of the day. Instead of looking at the extremely larger ‘big’ picture, and working on ways to bust out production action items on massively scales – doing your best to accomplish all client requests no matter how big or small – lean manufacturing says let’s look at the singular product and now develop it in ways that solve just the primary component; get that working; spend the time developing the core components of that piece in specific. Then, worry about all the bells and whistles once you know the core is complete. This is a very interesting concept that was not really tailored to person brand development and business startups until now.

I must also give Gary Vaynerchuk some props for introducing him to our game, whether legal made him do it or not. He could have always played sick that day. Eric is a total opposite kind of brand changer than you’ll find within Gary V, so it was interesting to see them interact. I feel Eric’s methods are going to catch on much quicker than most people think. Products such as DropBox, Toppler and many others have already taken on the concept of lean manufacturing.

Please visit The Lean Startup for more info on Eric’s book and lean manufacturing in general.

With over 45,000 followers on Twitter, I consider myself someone who is relatively creditable in understanding Twitter, and how to utilize best practices with the social networking platform we have grown to love.

Twitter is indeed a place I visit several times a day. I connect with the people I know, and I also connect with the consumers I deal with day to day in the Social Media space.

I use Twitter as a giant customer service board to interact with a lot of people, across a lot of different countries around the World. A vast majority of people think that Twitter is mostly used in the US, but that is actually not true. In fact, only a fraction of the US market uses Twitter compared to other countries around the World. This was at least the case in 2010. This is also why you will sometimes see me operating my Twitter account in the early mornings. You will see me interacting with people across the globe, even taking the time to use translators to decode and respond to tweets that are directed to me.

There are so many other reasons why I use Twitter, but the topic I want to talk about today deals with how I follow people and unfollow people based on my interaction with them on Twitter. I can’t count the number of times I have answered tweets and emails on the subject. You think I would have posted something on it by now. My apologizes.

The tips I explain below are actual methods I use day to day, and I am not necessarily saying to do as I do. Conversely, I have been asked enough times to explain, “How do you follow?”, “Who do you follow?”, and “Why do you follow!?” that I felt compelled enough to release this article to aid people in trying to understand my approach.

I will first very quickly answer the ‘who’ and the ‘why’, and then go deeper into the ‘how’.

(1) Following in general:
I follow bunches of people all the time; manually and automatically. I do bulk follows. Sometimes I only follow 2 or more people in an hour, or sometimes just a few in a day. Sometimes I won’t follow anyone for days. I will follow Twitter suggested results. I follow people other twitter users might suggest to me. I sometimes participate in follow Fridays (#followFridays & #ff) as silly as many of the A level Tweeps think that is. I will do it all. Most importantly, I follow back in a timely manner; 1-3 days tops. And yes, sometimes I miss people. I often suggest to those people to simply send me a tweet and say, “@JasonSilvestri follow me back!

(2) Twitterbacks:
Back before Twitter 2.0 (a.k.a. #newTwitter), Twitterbacks told a big story about the Twitter account you were looking at before you clicked that follow button. The new Twitter now provides a browsing method to the right of your screen that will show you the latest few tweet from a person within your Twitter account domain, and you only now see a users Twitterback if you click deeper into their profile info. Needless to say, if you want a follow back from me, try not to have a generic looking Twitterback because I often consider that something to flag as a robot in my brain when viewing it. I would be more likely not to click that follow button if I was looking at a generic twitter page.

(3) Profile Pics:
Due to Twitter’s latest browsing options, it makes it very easy for someone like me who gets hundreds and even thousands of new followers a week to still manage the follow back process manually. Profiles pictures are important to me when doing rapid follow backs while sifting through my new followers. Having that little birdy or the egg as a profile picture will surely make me pass on the follow. People who are not interested enough to post a real picture of them, or at least a business logo, usually shows me a lack of interest and I generally don’t like to follow that. It is also another flagging indicator that the account may be an autobot account.

(4) Bio Description:
For the very same reasoning I use in determining a follow back based on a profile pic, I will most likely pass on a follow back to a user account with no bio description. Yet another autobot flag goes up in my brain, and yet again, the showing of interest/effort towards your own brand is key to me. The lack of interest and effort really just turns me away. I think that goes for most Tweeps too. People want to see some indicator that you are using twitter to strike a reason to interact with you.

(5) Content:
If the content you are tweeting looks programmatic, uneventful, too vulgar (and trust me I can handle a lot), or seems so to be useless #quotes I generally steer away from it. In addition, too much content being posted (e.g. several tweets in a matter of seconds) from one of my followers will surely make me unfollow them, or just never follow them to begin with.

(6) Timeline Spam:
I think it is sort of OK to do automatic tweets to some degree. I use to completely frown upon it back in the day, but I have learned to accept it and even sometimes use the process myself. This is because I realize and appreciate the fact that we are all trying to reach thousands of our followers when thousands and even millions of other people are trying to do the same at one time. On the other side of things, I feel it is EXTREMELY important to always keep focused on replying back to tweets, and also sharing other people’s content as well.

(7) Direct Messages(DM):
I don’t often check DMs, but when I do, I drink DOS EQUIS. No, no. I am kidding. Seriously, though, I don’t often check DMs. I know I should, and I know I have missed some important messages throughout time. It is just my opinion that DMs are more of a spam box than even my public tweet mentions. There will be times when I check DMs. It is during these times that I check who is really spamming me. If I see unnecessary, repetitive, DMs to me I will unfollow.

(8) @JasonSilvestri unfollowed me today:
Nothing gets me going more than the auto messages I get from people saying that I unfollowed them today. 9/10 when I check to see if I am following them, I am. I then tend to unfollow shortly after.

(9) Twitter Account Cleansing:
Occasionally, I will do a twitter following purge where I just go on a spurt of removing followers in hopes to remove as many autobots as I can, while still preserving my loyal followings. I have only done this about 3 times since 2008. Unfortunately, I have had collateral damage. I ALWAYS suggest that if we were once following each other and for some reason I no longer follow you, please feel free to tweet me anytime and just say, “@JasonSilvestri, re-follow me!”

Please be sure to check out Guy’s website at http://www.GuyKawasaki.com/