It’s been about 9 months since I started my Instagram experiment, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s this: purposefully maintaining an Instagram account is really hard. From having the time to constantly produce unique content to keeping up with interactions, it’s an …
The magic of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook is that the people who you choose to follow often aren’t celebrities, they’re just normal people you have something in common with who are sharing parts of their lives. Maybe you like their photography style, or their careers, …
There are few things that are more frustrating in life than having a problem and not feeling like you’re being heard. It’s even worse when a company sends a robot or auto-generated message your way. While Amazon says it’s trying to fix this, it’s hard to believe most of the time that any messages are being read by actual human beings.
I ran into this issue when a review of mine was taken down without any explanation.
In profiles across Instagram of blossoming Instagrammers you’ll see in their bio lines: “DM for collabs” “Serious business inquiries only” “Email xxx@example.com for collaborations” But what does collaborating actually mean?
I posted a while back about how I was reposted by a large clothing company and, to my disappointment, it resulted in much less attention than I expected. This experience has been repeated on multiple occasions, but it’s also been challenged. Earlier this year I …
After I reached a reviewer ranking of less than 80,000 I started getting emails from Amazon sellers asking me to review their products. From an algorithmic standpoint this makes complete sense: products with more (and better) reviews are more likely to be seen by other customers and the best way to advertise to potential customers is by utilizing a system already in place on the website. Sellers will offer cash or heavy discounts to entice people to review their products – some ask for “good” reviews, others just ask for reviews.
Awkwardly, this is completely against Amazon’s stated policy, but it wasn’t always. Continue reading Amazon Reviews: How Amazon Encourages its Own Black Market
If you have an internet connection, there’s a pretty good chance that at some point in time you’ve ordered something from Amazon. Amazon is great for retail consumers, it’s great for sellers, it’s great for software developers (Amazon Web Services), it’s great for affiliate marketers, …
After hitting 1000 followers I didn’t feel any spectacular change or get any life changing epiphanies, but around 1,100 followers I slowly started to notice a confusing pattern emerge: the photos that I was posting weren’t getting the same engagement that they had been getting in the past. They were the same photos I’d always posted at the same times, but a pet photo that could have gotten seventeen ‘likes’ in four minutes was suddenly taking ten or fifteen minutes to reach that same level. At first I thought maybe there was a delay in the hashtags displaying, but I noticed the photos were still getting a significant number of views so it probably wasn’t an exposure problem.
I was asked by one of my old friends from college to capture the moment he proposed to his long-time girlfriend, Katie. I’ve known both of them since freshman year at SMU and was both honored and excited to be able to see this moment. …
