Another Friday, another round of recommendations.

First up is @stillawake. I’ve recommended Joanna many a time and, while I try and steer clear of repetition, she always manages to comes up with a new reason to be included. This week: her ace snap of poppies outside the Bristol Council House.

Second up is my Gradwell workmate @Chutzpah84. He only used to moan about (and RT) all sorts, but now his moaning is interspersed with updates about his new-found love for biking. He is cycling everywhere and is a guy to follow if you like to bask in the glow of someone who has just found a new joy…

Thirdly, another of my Gradwell colleagues, @lgladdy gets a nod. He is always uncovering a bargain, delivering some very up-to-the-minute tech news or just giggling infectiously. Do me a favour, if you end up following him, tell him he doesn’t need that new gadget he is about to order…

Fourthly, @atkirby. Follows some very interesting people herself, so tends to RT lots of great links from a wide array of areas. She also chips in with her own tweets and is always happy to lend a hand to people in need. She likes her tea.

Lastly, @convoy104. Simply because of this.

Bristol Harbour Festival – @BristolHarbFest
Every year, around my birthday, thousands of people, hundreds of boats and plenty of stalls and performers descend on Bristol’s harbourside for the annual Harbour Festival. Starting on Friday and finishing late on Sunday, the festival sees the centre of Bristol come alive with street performances, music sets and delicious food, as well as a few sailing-related things.

Loads of information about the activities and schedule – including the legendary fireworks on Saturday night – can be found at http://bristolharbourfestival.co.uk/

Joanna Papageorgiou – @stillawake
I’ve recommended Jo before, but she deserves another plug! If you want to find out more about Bristol and its great, hidden places to eat or you just want to view a pretty snap from around the city, this is the lady to follow.

Jo also has a blog at http://ephemeraldigest.wordpress.com, which is a good read. And she’s due some congratulations for becoming a new owner of a little belly-bump-being.

Bristol Culture – @Bristol_Culture

Another great Bristol resource for discovering more about the great city. Events, reviews, music, foodie hideaways – brilliant. And yet another great blog to go with it: http://bristolculture.wordpress.com

Giraffe Restaurant – @giraffetweet
Although they’re a chain with branches in Oxford, Cambridge, Reading and Manchester among others, the Bristol one was recently named the best! They make a mean Hot Thai Duck Stir Fry and also run a competition (#dinnerwinner) every Friday to win £40-off in any branch. Lastly, they just seem like nice people.

Marketing Donut – @MarketingDonut
If you’re interested or involved with small businesses, these guys are a great account to follow. They provide some great blog articles (with their sister site @StartupDonut) and special offers. They also have a great forum for like-minded businesses to get together and share knowledge, experience or advice.

Joanna Papageorgiou – @stillawake
Our paths crossed when I wouldn’t shut up about running the Bristol Half Marathon, but we also seem to have similar interests in photography, social media, music and the wonderful city of Bristol. Always manages to post an interesting link.

giraffe restaurant – @giraffetweet
Bristol has one of these in Cabot Circus and the Hot Thai Duck Stir Fry is incredible, so I followed their account. They post offers and competitions, but also have a real human side to them and a great sense of humour.

Stuart Herbert – @stuphotos
As I get more and more into photography (you can see my snaps on my Flickr stream) I’m finding more and more people who are taking great pictures. My @GradwellTweets colleague Stuart is buried deep in camera and photography knowledge and can take a mean picture, while also intelligently blogging about the history of the area he is snapping. He also provides you with a new desktop wallpaper every day throughout the working week.

Have a good weekend everybody!

In an attempt to continue on from last week’s #FollowFriday post here are my recommendations for peoploe you should e-stalk on the Twitters.

@Clear_Thinking – Worked closely with these guys for over a year. I learned a great deal and they just lovely people. They publish really useful and insightful marketing tips on a regular basis, know what they are talking about and have the experience to back it up! They also have fascinating collection of clients, which they often refer to, meaning you uncover interesting things like Trollbeads.

@bristwestival – A fantastic event on March 25th, bringing Bristol’s Twitter community together for some music, food and a natter, while raising some vital funds for Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation working to reducing suffering and ending poverty. I attended last year’s event, which was raising money for charity:water, and had a fantastic time even though I’d just gotten into Twitter. Now I know more, its bound to be even more enjoyable! (I’m trying to drag @lgladdy and @Chutzpah84 along)

@tfma_event – I’m off to this event on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, so its interesting to me to follow them. They’ve got Google giving an Analytics masterclass as well as other keynotes speakers helping you get the best from digital marketing, CRM, SEO, PPC – all sorts marketing focussed.

@lgladdy – Although I recommended him last week and I’m trying my best to vary them, my workmate Liam gets another nod. His recent work on my wedding list and the Gradwell homepage – http://bit.ly/64N0fI – is fantastic, with the addition of a new navigation, oversized footer and, best of all, a telephone number search. It also doesn’t hurt that he is a genuinely nice guy, bargain hunter and proud geek.

Until next week fair followers…

When I started this blog, my first post was about a new in-depth way to take part in the popular Twitter trend #FollowFriday. My blog post even inspired my workmate @Chutzpah84 – who I recommended in that post – to create his own blog with his Follow Fridays.

I’ve been a bit slack on following my first go, since that was the 27th of November, but here we go…

The first round goes to my new workmates who are still terribly bewildered by Twitter, so help out @hamsterpawz, @jameskellock101 and @mr_ozmaster. These guys all work together in the Gradwell Sales office, and have felt that Twitter has passed them by, so are drastically trying to catchup with everyone else!

My second recommendation is another Gradwell workmate. @lgladdy is a great source of tech news (with a little iBias), hot bargains and new interesting apps (such as Glympse). He is a generally happy, giggly fellow who seems to thrive when given a project, whether it be develop the Gradwell homepage or find me some cheap shoes!

My third promo slot goes to a podcast. This only really applies if you like football, but the @FootballRamble is a fantastic listen. Very funny down-to-earth guys, who can deliver an in-depth analysis of the latest football news when needed, plus there is the profile at the end of every episode, teaching you about some of football history’s great players, teams, competitions and venues.

Staying on the football lines, @optajoe is like a sporting rainman and gets my fourth nod. An endless feed of stats and sequences relating to the latest football news and results. How many goals have a certain team scored in the last 15 mins of each match? What percentage of goals have been conceded from corners? What are the head-to-head results of an upcoming clash? Opta Joe is your man. And if you like different sports or countries there is Opta Jean, Opta Jim, Opta Jose and Opta Paolo to choose from!

I do have a few more to recommend, but I’ve run out of space on my tweet for all their usernames, so they can wait until next week!

I’d first like to suggest @GradwellTweets. I’ll come clean. I work for Bath-based Gradwell, but they have great offers with other companies, innovative telephony products and were recently named as one of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK.

My second reccomendation is really a double-header. @BryonyThomas and @CherylCrichton. I worked with Bryony and Cheryl on a year-long project for Gradwell. They are now both Clear Thinkers at Clear Thought Consulting and are producing fantastic blogs, the most recent being about writing a thorough brief to suppliers, as well as being generally excellent marketing consultants!

Next up is @quidcodeals. From the cashback site Quidco, this feed gives you the best of time-sensitive deals from participating retailers. For example, yesterday there was free £12 chocolates from Thortons and an extra 20% off at Burton – well worth following in the build-up to Christmas.

Penultimately, my work colleague @Chutzpah84, or Rob Weeks as I know him. An all-round nice guy, Rob’s tweets provide an insight into the ‘everyman’ life and findings on the Interwebs of a new dad in and around Bath/Bristol – although he does like talking about ‘The Restaurant‘. Also helps out at Freelance Supermarket, which showcases the best of freelance services in the UK.

Lastly, @efficiencycoach, because I can’t steal her idea without giving her a mention!

Follow Friday – often seen as #ff or #followfriday – is a great way to broadcast your favourite users to new followers, and its something I usually partake in myself. It is a way of showing your followers the interesting people that you keep tabs on and is an endorsement that their tweets are well-worth a read.

However, the system is very flawed in the fact that a typical follow Friday post will be the hashtag and usernames (e.g. #ff @jakepjohnson @GradwellTweets), without an explanation as to what the user tends to post about, what they do or why you think they are worth following.

Today I came across a Twitter user who I had come across a few times from various RT. Heather Townsend, known as @efficiencycoach, tweets a simple message of “my #followfriday recommendations for this week” followed by a link to her blog, explaining why these people are worth following, what they’re like as people and why she endorses them, as seen below:

I found this to be a much better than the traditional #ff post as it gave an insight into the users and wasn’t just a list of names. Although Heather’s method of recommendations requires the visitor to follow the link to the blog, it does not require more effort, in fact, it could quicken to process. The traditional process is as follows:

1. Click on the recommended username
2. Read 5-10 tweets to get a feel for the personality of the user
3. Either follow them or go back to the original post and do it all over again
   

Heather’s method for #ff allows you to find out about more than one recommended user in just one click! Instead of going to several user pages and reading hundreds of tweets, one click gives you snapshots of several users.

It is also better for Heather to post like this because the recommended users can see what Heather thinks of them and why she recommends them. It becomes less of a nod in their direction and more of a testimonial!

I thought it to be such a time saver – and of benefit for those being recommended – that I set up this blog to do the very same next Friday!