By Mickey
Comedian Michael Ian Black takes over the 9:30 Club Twitter account to answer questions on Friday, May 23 at 3pm before visiting town for his show at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday, May 27. (You may remember him from Wet Hot American Summer, Ed, The State and many other appearances.)
Be there! Both times!
Twitter Takeover!
Michael Ian Black
@930Club
3pm
Friday, May 23
All ages
By Tom Bridge
Courtland Milloy, coiner of the phrase “myopic little twits” is now on twitter, at @courtland51, and he really just wants to “track millenials & find out if they anything in dc other than party and gentrify.” That means he’s looking for you, DC twitterers, to point him toward Gen X and Millenials who are doing things in the city.
Drop him a line and tell him we said hi?
By Tricia Barba
In the world of DC restaurants talking about opening for months before they actually do, Twitter has become a way keep potential patrons excited about the food that’s coming soon. At the same time, other establishments wait until almost opening day to start Tweeting incessantly. Khan’s Bar & Grill, which didn’t open until late March, is somewhere in the middle.
Using the handle @KhansDC, this Mongolian grill has tweeted since early March giving us all sorts of scoop.
The risky
One March 7th, Khan’s wrote “Forecasting an opening day of the 21st!!!!!” Surprisingly, they weren’t wrong.
The sarcasm
On the same day we were treated to “Is in total shock that the Health Inspector STILL ISN’T HERE!!! Guess they take their scheduling window training from Comcast.”
One word, bold.
The week’s winner: Continue reading
By Tricia Barba
‘Venison, Bourbon Steak’
courtesy of ‘bonappetitfoodie’
Let me just start this by saying that if you haven’t tried Bourbon Steak’s fries yet, please do…but that’s a totally different story.
The restaurant, located in Georgetown’s Four Seasons, hasn’t stopped tweeting since it first logged on back in December 2009. @BourbonSteakDC currently has more than 2,100 followers and tweets about five times a day. The polite restaurant will always thank you on Twitter for coming in to dine, and recently it got be excited about an event I had somehow forgotten about.
By Patrick Pho
As a social media professional, I fully understand the risks of my job. It is a job that doesn’t end after 5 PM or when you walk out of the office. We remain connected at all times through Blackberry devices or iPhones. Yesterday morning my alarm went off and I rolled over to my bed stand for my iPod Touch. Like most mornings I check Twitter as my body slowly awakens. As I checked my timeline I noticed an odd tweet from my friend Gloria:
By Tricia Barba
‘shrimp n grits’
courtesy of ‘@heylovedc’
New (and even old-time) Tweeters can learn a thing or two from Chef Geoff Tracy. With @chegeoffs, Tracy might not hold the record for the most tweets per day, but all the messages he sends out are either informative (specials of the day), enticing (pictures from the kitchen), or funny (as you will see below).
The famed chef from Chef Geoff’s and Lia’s writes on his Twitter profile “Don’t get pissy here.” Love it. Tracy has about 1,700 followers and is constantly telling them what’s on his mind and what’s coming up at his restaurants. His account is unique and personal.
By Tricia Barba
Photo Courtesy Co Co. Sala
I love following restaurants on Twitter so I can hear about everything from what dishes they’re cooking up, to what events they’re hosting, to what specials they might have coming my way soon. Last week I took a look at how DC restaurants use Twitter successfully. Today I’m happy to award We Love DC’s first Food Tweet of the Week award to Co Co. Sala!
The chocolate lounge & boutique serves American cuisine and specializes in espresso and chocolate-based drinks, artisanal chocolates, and exquisite pastries. Co Co. Sala first got on Twitter in June 2009, but started using the social media tool actively in June 2010. The restaurant currently has more than 4,000 followers and sends out about 20 Tweets a day, all actually in conversation with diners.
See the cutest tweet ever after the jump. Continue reading
By Tricia Barba
“These days at a restaurant you have plates, tables, food and Twitter.”
-Barcode owner Antonis Karagounis
“People regularly ask for restaurant suggestions from other Tweeps on Twitter. When we are able to find those requests and immediately welcome them to our restaurant, they are floored by the quick response and personalized welcome. We’ve been lucky enough to gain many new diners this way.”
–Bourbon Steak Publicist Sangeetha Sarma
A recent Restaurant Week experience reminded me that you can’t always expect restaurants to be on 100% all the time, but if someone or something fails, speak up.
Like many patrons, I had an issue, vented about it on Twitter, and received a very satisfying response. SO I decided that every Friday I will write a small piece about The Week’s Winning Food Tweet. This could be a restaurant itself, a food truck, a chef, a manager, etc. The winner will be someone (something?) who puts a smile on my face for a different or interesting perspective.
The free, 140 character service has revolutionized the restaurant industry. It’s necessary for restaurants to actually engage their followers in order to create loyalty and really make patrons & potential patrons feel like friends.
I wanted to take a look at the Top 5 ways that restaurants use Twitter effectively. That means they aren’t just tweeting the daily specials, but following my rules to inform, satisfy, calm and entertain!
By Erin McCann
When Dismemberment Plan’s “Emergency & I” was first released in 1999, “tweet” was the sound a bird made. This weekend, as they played three reunion shows in our city’s finest venues (check back at 3 for Brittany’s review!), it became an often hilarious and sometimes poignant way for some fans to experience the event. Many of you might complain that in the age of smartphones, we’ve forgotten how to kick back and just enjoy the music. But as someone who spent Friday and Saturday night’s shows following along from home, and Sunday night’s show sending photos out to friends who couldn’t make it, I’d argue that there’s some communal value in the concert tweet. There’s room for poignancy, humor and nostalgia in those 140 characters, all of which were on display by some of DC’s tweeters this weekend. Below the jump, a collection of our favorites.
By Tom Bridge
‘loose lips’
courtesy of ‘amy_b’
Twitter was all abuzz late this afternoon as rumors of a four line resignation email to DCPS staffers spread like wildfire. While Michelle Rhee’s tenure is in question with the election of Vincent Gray, nothing has been written in stone yet, and no announcements concerning her departure had been made.
We Love DC has obtained a copy of the email that sparked this rumor, and I have to say, if you read this as a resignation email, you likely need as much reading comprehension help as so many of the DCPS students do. The email was sent this afternoon at 1pm and was titled “Keeping It Moving”:
Historical Facebook Update by Wylo
Although this incredibly entertaining “historical facebook update” is a joke, it definitely once again raises the question, are tweets and Facebook status updates going to one day be considered significant historical artifacts?
Although the Library of Congress is already preparing for this outcome, it remains to be seen whether or not 140 characters of thoughtfulness from the likes of Snoop Doggy Dogg will ever hold as much clout as its counterparts.
By Max
Twestival 3/25/10 by @heylovedc
I have to admit, I don’t tweet. In fact it makes me slightly uncomfortable to say “tweet” unless I’m doing an impression of a baby bird. While I do have a Twitter account, I only use it to follow Andy Roddick and other tennis related people and only when I’m covering a match that they’re playing in. But I really don’t care where you are now, or now, or even now. I don’t care what you’re thinking about now, now, or twenty seconds from now. I don’t care what you had for breakfast or what you’re eating for lunch, right now. But you know who does? The Library of Congress.
That’s right, the LOC will be acquiring all public tweets since Twitter was founded in March of 2006. However even though I’m in the technology business, I don’t quite understand what this means. Is someone going to ship them terabytes of data on a hard drive? Are they going to continue to archive tweets going forward into the future? How will the public be able to access this data? I’m sure they have it all figured out, and I really think it’s great that the LOC is keeping up with the times instead of being a collection of old, dusty books. You can find them online on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to name a few sites. Or you can find them at 101 Independence Ave SE, now, now, and now.
The Nissan Leaf Tour is coming to DC next week so Nissan can show off their new, all-electric, zero-emission* car to one of the most traffic-choked regions in the country during the DC Auto Show. To celebrate, they’ve given us an eco-auto prize pack to give away via Twitter. You can win:
1 – Nissan Leaf tour t-shirt
1 – $150 TerraPass.com gift certificate
1 – Eco Touch car cleaning kit ($49.99 value)
Here’s how to enter:
You have to follow We Love DC on Twitter (so we can DM you for details on shipping your prize). Then tweet something that mentions @welovedc, @nissanevs, and the #leaftour hashtag.
The winner will be chosen on January 25th.
*Zero-emission, unless the power plant the electricity comes from is coal-based, which most of them around here are.
By Tom Bridge
‘Dropped list.. i’d like some’
courtesy of ‘Tyrannous’
We’ve got a new feature to announce here associated with our Twitter Account: Local Lists! We’ve got five to start with, and we’re working on four more. Here are the five we’re announcing today:
We Love DC Food
We Love DC Blogs
We Love DC Sports
We Love DC Music
We Love DC Theatre
To start with, all of these are venues, either restaurants/bars, concert halls, theatre companies or their management. Are we missing someone? Either put it in the comments here, or email twitterlists at welovedc dot com with the appropriate folks. What else would you like to see us turn into Twitter lists?
By Tom Bridge
‘TwitterFailWhaleScreenshot_2’
courtesy of ‘MikeBlogs’
One of the first rules about having a Twitter account is that, if your messages are public, you have to assume that everyone you know can and will read your tweets. So, that means if you’re talking about work, or end up saying something like, “In americas ghetto anacostia… If i get scared i will just yell chinese carry out! They will not shoot me.” while working for the DC Jobs program? That means you’re going to get fired.
Congratulations, David Le, that, coupled with a few of the other tweets from the article makes me glad the city fired you.
By Tom Bridge
I’ve watched over the last six days how an election in Iran was wholesale hijacked, how the people revolted, how they circumvented their government’s heavy-handed filtering of the Internet, and how they used social media tools to keep right on going. So, I present to you, a guy who may well have saved lives and continued a nascent revolution. His name’s Jared Cohen, and he works for the State Department. No, he’s not a new hire, not a product of the Obama Revolution, he’s someone that Secretary Condi Rice hired in 2006 to look at the Middle East, how to talk about the Middle East youth movements, and how to engage with a part of the world that we have a hostile relationship with.
But Cohen’s achievement was picking up the phone over at Foggy Bottom and asking Twitter and NTT to postpone the maintenance window to a time when it wouldn’t have such a drastic consequence on the unfolding of history. Well done, Mr. Cohen. Well done.
By Katie
‘Pret lunch…’
courtesy of ‘Matt Seppings’
So… I joined Twitter. I know, right? I did it in the name of research for this story, and have liked it so much I think I’ll stay for good. (That may or may not be a hint for you to start following me, cause that makes me feel important and fuzzy and stuff.) So I come at this with an outsider-turned-quasi-insider perspective.
It seems recently all the DC food blogs I follow have gotten on Twitter, and are busy building a little community for themselves (ourselves?) complete with a list of the who-is-who. But us internet-types are always early arrivals, so the other half of my story is who else in the DC food scene, namely DC restaurants and more namely, which DC Chefs, are on Twitter. And then I’ll muse a bit about what twitter can do, and what others hope it can do, for the DC food scene and the betterment of our local food offerings. Ready? Let’s do it. Continue reading
By Tom Bridge
boulevard diner
courtesy of Paul Keleher
You might’ve caught the Washington City Paper’s piece this morning on the soon-to-be delivered Capital City Diner, about an old rail-car-style diner from upstate New York being moved to DC to be put up in Trinidad. If you missed it, it’s well worth the read, so head on over, and then click back.
Today, as it turns out, is the move-in day for the diner itself, being delivered to its new home over in Trinidad on the back of a semi. One slight problem: DCRA has not, and apparently will not, approve the foundation that the diner is due to be sitting on. According to their twitter feed, at one point a DCRA inspector came and left without approving the foundation, and after a few back & forth tweets, it seems that DCRA themselves headed out to the site to get things resolved, but not before the diner was given a parking ticket by the city. Now, I’m not exactly sure the last time an entire restaurant was given a parking ticket, but I have to feel for Matt Ashburn, who must feel like insult is being added to injury at this point. Young and Hungry has some more detail as well.
[Update]: DCist has talked with Ashburn, and he’s gotten permission to put the diner on the foundation. We’re still waiting to hear back from @dcra on Twitter, here’s hoping we can get to the bottom of what happened.
[Update 2]: DCRA has put up a couple public replies about what happened today: “But he had some serious issues with architect who took advantage of them.” and “But architect essentially forged engineer’s signature. The REAL engineer confirmed this.” Ouch! That’s shady shady shady! Fortunately, DCRA & Capital City Diner are kissing & making up. From @dcra: “The @capcitydiner guys are great and are now doing the right thing. We’ll do anything they need to make it happen.”
By Don
‘Towers of Power at Sunrise’
courtesy of ‘macmoov’
While I mean that in a “give em hell” sense, there’s also an opportunity to tell them exactly how you’d like to see them use this new tool. Their social media lead, Andre, sent us a message which asked us to share this with y’all:
Their twitter id is PepcoConnect if you want to follow them and see how they end up using the service.
By brownpau
‘Tea Party in DC’ (courtesy ‘skye820’)
In addition to Tax Day, today is the official Fox News/Freedom Works “Tea Party” Day, when thousands, nay, millions of outraged conservatives who do not know what teabagging really means will descend on DC to protest taxes, because a Keynesian stimulus package and a ~3% increase in the marginal tax rate for the super-rich marks the end of the Republic as we know it. Updates and pics after the jump: Continue reading
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