The Reel Motion Blog

We live in strange and turbulent times.

At around 5pm EDT on Friday the unique number that identifies each and every status update on Twitter hit the number 2,147,483,647.  Big deal, right? Except that number is the limit of a signed integer and so that means that potentially many third party twitter apps-the way most people interact with the service-could fail as they begin to interpret the number as negative thrusting us into the Twitpocalypse.

But take a look around. Stoplights are still working. Planes are not falling from the sky. Your toasteroven, well, it’s still broken. But the point is that almost nothing happened. Twitter called all-hands-on-deck with its developers Friday evening just in case killer robots rose up from the earth and began taking over major cities but nothing quite that dramatic happened (much to Michael Bay’s dismay.) Instead, a few twitter iphone apps failed for a while but that could have just as easily been chalked up to Steve Jobs having a cold. In the end, twitter will keep on rolling.

Which brings me to a very similar, although much less publicized event, the Blogpocalypse. You see, much like the Twitpocalypse, the Blogpocalypse occured when several robots, programmed for human destruction, showed up at the doors of the Reel Motion Media office. In exchange for our lives they demanded a new Reel Motion website be built. Luckily, we were prepared for just such an event and went live with our new site. The robots were impressed and they appeared ready to leave. On their way out the door they unleased one final assualt… Wordpress Spam! Hundreds of male enhancement peddling spammers descinded upon the blog. An epic battle was fought between good and evil. And good prevailed, sans enhancement.

In a nutshell, that’s what happen over the past month or so. The bottom line is, we’re back and stronger than ever.  Stay tuned for the future of marketing and video communications. The robots gave us a glimpse into our future and our future is now.

Twitter is a great tool for businesses looking to communicate with their customers, but it’s not always the most user friendly for the people behind the brand. That’s where CoTweet comes in.

CoTweet sharing a twitter account amongst multiple users dead-simple. This is important because for a business to effectively use twitter it’s often important to have multiple departments and people working together.

You can see a more in-depth review of CoTweet here, but here’s some of the highlights for us:

• Assign tweets to users – Got a question you don’t know? Assign it to someone who does and they receive a notice to answer the tweet
• Integrated bit.ly – Shortens urls and tracks clicks so you can see who’s really paying attention to what you’re saying
• Tweet Dashboard – Keeps all @replies and DMs in an “inbox” style system so you never miss a message from a follower
• Conversation Tracking – Shows all conversations your account has had with a user so you have the background info at your fingertips to better serve them
• On Duty – When a user is “on duty” they receive messages at set intervals alerting them of any new tweets.

The biggest downside is that CoTweet is still in a closed beta, for now. But don’t let that discourage you. We got an invitation within a few days of asking for one and even if you don’t get one, it won’t be closed for long by my guess.