What makes a successful headline and what makes people share it may actually be completely different from each other. Nick Diakopoulos takes a look at some data from the NYT and finds out that it may not be so straightforward as you thought.
07
Jan
Is it Better to Share on Google+, Facebook or Twitter?
Sharing content across Social Networks is great, right? Where do you get the most success from though? Each have their own plusses and minuses but what are the base line stats?
23
Dec
Twitter by Mail?
For a month, with a billion stamps, he moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.
18
Oct
Infographic: How Non-Profits Are Using Social Media
Canny Third Sector organisations have flocked to the social web as it gives them the opportunity to tell their, often compelling, stories direct to the communities they represent. This infographic from craigconnects charts how they’ve done this.
26
Aug
These views are my own
The title to this blog appears, in one way or another, in the bio section of an alarming amount of profiles across the social web. You may have hardly noticed it or possibly just taken it for granted but it’s very illustrative of the current state of play in the relationship between society, work and social media. The times certainly are changing in terms of how people define their selves, in the last few years it has become more acceptable to exist in a more open and consistent way and people also seem to genuinely feel that, whilst their jobs may not define what they are, what they do forms a fairly large chunk of who they are. And, in one sense at least, why shouldn’t people feel like this? They have more than likely got a decent degree in doing what they do and have probably done their time at the whims of a nightmare boss for a few years too, by any measure they have won their stripes.
One of my most popular ‘off the peg’ group sessions is around defining the boundaries between you, that is “you” the person, and the professional you. I use the “These views are my own” line as an example of how one may choose to successfully negotiate this boundary friction but, if I’m really honest, I’m not altogether too sure it does.
I guess the nub of the matter here isn’t the people whose profiles contain this disclaimer text but rather the companies that they work for and just how risk averse they are. I’m not entirely clear who would misconstrue a Tweet from somebody’s clearly personal account but, as the legal world moves at a snail’s pace, one could probably make a fairly decent case that it could constitute an official statement if your lawyers really tried. The ‘views are my own’ clause seems to protect the company more than the individual though. In the advent of a controversial status update, the company would still be able to reprimand their employee whether they had applied the disclaimer or not, and perhaps you might say rightly so too.
So what’s to gain from including this statement in a profile? My feeling is not much really, gestural insulation aside it’s still the same person associated with the same company. My own personal rule of thumb is that if you mention your employers on your profile you are signing up to the attendant risks and benefits of doing so, with or without a disclaimer you are creating that association for good or ill. If you want to be free to tweet, update or blog what you want then keep your profile brand neutral and if you want to be associated with your company then you are signing up to their code of conduct, no matter how different it is to yours. No matter how well or poorly defined your company social media strategy may be it is down to you to negotiate the risks of your actions and ultimately, as with anything else in life, it’s about taking responsibility for your own course of action.
As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts.
22
Jul
Information as art? It can’t get more beautiful than this
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend Pilot Theatre’s Shift Happens conference in York which I also covered for the excellent CultureVulture blog. Now, I’m a pretty jaded conference goer and nowadays I like to think I’ve seen it all before. By the end of the conference’s second day I was feeling just that, tired, dehydrated and like I was ready to shoot off home and see my family. In the conference foyer, just prior to the last talk of the day I was speaking to the excellent Abhay Adhikari of Dhyaan Design about planning to shoot off early when he asked “Are you not staying for Jonathan? I think you’ll really like it”. Abhay, bless him, knows me fairly well, he also knows cool. Not the sunglasses, celeb, diamond earring cool but good, honest, geeky “coooooool” cool. In short, based on that, I decided to stay.
So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.
The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.
We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.
The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.
Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.
Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.
09
Apr
Totaal’s Infographics Week: Day Four
Totaal’s rattle through the realms of visual information continues apace with this, the last post in the Infographics Week series. We’ve returned to script somewhat with Social Media one again the main focus, like it or lump it Social Media is a great focus for the infographicists of the world so hopefully after yesterday’s diversion this wont feel too serious and worky for a Friday.
The Social Marketing Compass
This is a lovely graphic from renowned writer, analyst and speaker Brian Solis which sets out a very clear and well thought through vision of the social marketing universe with Brand as the Sun. Like or loathe the Marketing Speak element of the graphic it’s very eloquently put and has some real resonance.
Click for the full graphic
The Story of Twitter
Twitter has finally shed its New Kid on the Block image and is now firmly established as the tool de jour for quick and easy engagement.This graphic charts the journey between its birth and third birthday, see if you can remember a few of those watershed moments. I know I can.
Click for the full graphic
Facebook Growth
This is a lovely snapshot of the exponential (if that’s not too weak a word) growth of Facebook’s users. In six years the site has gone from a college dorm room project to one of the biggest new media companies in the world. To pick a stat out of the ether, 50% of users log-in every day. How amazing is that?
Click for the full graphic
Thanks for making this a fun series to do, as suggested I’ll definitely continue and if you have any requests or spot something you think warrants a mention then let me know.
08
Mar
Google Buzz, what’s all the fuss about?
Fresh on the heels of the release of Google Wave, billed as a panacea to the problems of communicating by email but in reality just a neat little collaborative tool, Google have released their next product, Buzz. As is becoming customary with Google, the hyperbole was again laid on with a trowel, this time they claimed that Buzz would “Kill” Twitter and Facebook. Somebody should really remind these guys that they had the motto “Dont be Evil” for the first ten years of their existence.
Anyway, Google’s unreliable and hyperbolic schpiel apart, will Buzz be the “game changer” guys like Mashable’s Ben Parr say it will? It certainly has the backing, obviously, to make it big and a great plus point – for some anyway – for it is that it’s linked to gmail accounts.
One of the really interesting things about Buzz though, is that it seems to be somewhat of a chameleon network. It seems to change its skin to suit how you access it. Use it from the desktop and it’s a Twitter style aggregator of content from all of your contacts, use it mobile and it’s a location based realtime network generator more like FourSquare or Gowalla.
It’s largely irrelevant to me though, as I’ve never been a fan of gmail it doesn’t really work for me in any real sense. I have no network to contact with. Sure if I want to import one from Windows Live I can but why would I? Everyone I would connect with through Buzz is already on Twitter, my hotmail account only really contains legacy addresses of people I’ve not emailed in the years since I’ve had my own domain.
I’m sure Buzz will be great for some people but not those without gmail accounts and are also not already on Twitter, I’m no fan of ven diagrams but just draw one in your head and see how big the intersection is there.
05
Mar
Twitter plans to finally put squeeze on clients
It’s always been a bit of a puzzler for me quite why twitter let their client ecosystem blossom so enthusiastically, I blogged about it before a couple of times speculating here about whether they were finally making the move against clients with their lists feature.
Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter and head of the API Team no less, put out the following Tweet:
“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”
It might not sound like much but there’s now such a flourishing, healthy industry that has built up around Twitter clients that it has a lot of people fearing for their livelihoods. Twitter’s back house team are rumoured to have all manner of cool tools they use to develop things with and it seems that they might have now reached a point where they are able to integrate these into a more coherent stream, one that’s able to actually be deployed onto the site.
The Tweet was later clarified
“Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.“
and
“I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.”
But it seems as though the genie was well and truly out of the bottle as the rumours spread far and wide across, ironically enough, the Twittersphere. The jungle drums appear to be beating louder and louder when you consider that they have just hired UI Specialist Bryan Haggerty from LinkedIn and API Evangelist Taylor Singletary who all but confirmed his next port of call is but this rather lovely cryptic tweet.
Expect everything to be clarified at Twitter’s Chirp Conference taking place in San Francisco on April 14th. If anybody fancies getting me a plane ticket I’ll be eternally grateful.
02
Feb
Is Twitter’s star finally losing its twinkle?
It’s pretty fair to say that 2009 was “The Year of the Tweet”. There’s hardly a TV or Radio show or media personality that doesnt have a twitter account. In some cases there are several, with excellent spoofing of some ‘slebs too. In 2009 Twitter users went from five to thirty million users and between 2008 and 2009 it grew by a staggering 1300%. With meteoric growth like that it’s only natural there will be a period of normalisation, the real key to enduring as a service – if that’s what Twitter could be called, I think it’s what describes it best but others seem to infuriatingly want to call it a site – is how this slowing of growth is handled. The graph below shows this plateau over the last year.
I’ve been lucky to speak to, and be spoken to by, several Twitter staffers over the course of the past year and what best characterises them is, apart from all being incredibly smart, the way they seemed to be focussed with keeping the service live in the face of such immense growth. They also have a surprisingly small staff in comparison to other Social Media behemoths. Twitter suffered several major outages over the last year where the service fell over due to volume and the concentration seemed to be, more or less, making it more robust.
As the year went on Twitter also began to roll out a selection of new features like lists and a revamped retweet feature which, whilst not placing significant load on the service, certainly improved and matured the user experience. It’s also perhaps a sign of the fact that these incredibly talented people had finally been let loose on improving and developing the service rather than just plain coping with the demands placed on them by this exponential growth.
But that said, are all these reports of Twitter’s growth slowing actually accurate? Neilsen certainly think so, claiming that Twitter is suffering from a deficit of user retention, with 40% of Tweeters coming back the next month after joining, as opposed to 60% with Facebook and MySpace. Twitter, of course, works very differently from anything of its size that has gone before. Facebook and MySpace have also both constructed a product where 99.999% of the interaction takes place on the site. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least advertising where you can serve incredibly well targeted ads to users based on the detailed information held, but the major drawback is that you have to develop software and capacity on a “one size fits all” basis.
The beauty with Twitter of course is that there are a million and one ways to use it over a million and one platforms. None of which are “owned” by Twitter. This multiplicity of platform is a key difference, not only in keeping a smaller more agile development staff, but also to measurement. It’s actually much, much harder to measure Twitter’s usage because of it. See that graph above? Pointless. I’ve done a count of my follower list and – right up to the point where my eyes crossed – I counted about 5% of tweets that actually came “from web”, that is to say directly from the Twitter site itself. The truth is only Twitter know the full story of their usage. But, much like Facebook, reports of Twitter’s demise are way off of the mark.
Anyway, Hubspot’s “State of the Twittersphere Report – January 2010” posits some quite interesting theories about Twitter and its direction of travel. For those of you who are time poor here’s what they had to say, more or less:
- Users are following more, are being followed more and Tweeting more. (Does this look like a drop off to you?)
- Biographical information in profiles stood at 24% in July 2009, up to 53% in January 2010
- Location information in Profiles stod at 31% in July 2009, rose to 65% in January 2010
- URLs in Profiles were around 20% in July 2009, up to 41% in January 2010
- 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside America compared to 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations in January 2010 outside America.
- Top location in July 2009 – London and still No. 1 in 2010
- 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
- 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
- Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in our study
- 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day
19
Oct
Twitter Lists, Twitter’s first strike against clients?
Interesting developments from Twitter with the recent announcement of the release of their Lists beta feature. For those of you with enough of a life not to care about these things, lists is a feature currently only available to “selected users” that allows you to select lists of your favourite Tweeters. So what form will these lists actually take? Early indications from the beta, which in case you are wondering I havent been invited to join yet *hem hem*, seem to have them as an extra tab on your right-side navigation area along with your @ and DMs. It also appears that lists will be publicly available information, much in the same way that your followers/people you follow are. You can also follow whole lists by bulk, which is nice.
Though it may only seem like a little change at this point but throughout their meteoric rise Twitter have been almost wilfully ignorant of the user experience through twitter.com barring some recent small, incremental improvements. Twitter’s main tactic has been one of instead opening their API up early and well and this has allowed a healthy ecosystem of third party apps, among them clients, to flourish instead. Now with lists, something that’s obviously outside the core functionality of Twitter, comes the time to ask whether this move is just a user experience upgrade of if this is a concerted effort to regain some of the territory lost to Twitter clients.
I’ve blogged a couple of times before about Twitter clients and the fact that they are absolutely essential to make using Twitter an enjoyable experience. The latest statistics indicate that roughly only 25% of people actually use twitter.com, it’s an incredible statistic if you pause to think about it for a minute. Three quarters of people using your services dont even touch your webpage actually never visit your site, using an API and third party client app. As someone with a fair bit of background in web1.0 (where traffic is king and driving traffic is an art form) it’s just impossible to fully rationalise that stat, at least without a little shake of my head and a roll of my eyes.
From the traffic side alone it would make sense to improve the “in browser” functionality of Twitter but also, even though Twitter is booming the current state of play isnt exactly ideal. People I know have tried Twitter and been turned off by the basic functionality (or lack thereof) and subsequently have not been enthused enough to bother with downloading a client. Could it therefore be the case that Twitter want to up their conversion rates for sign ups? Are they planning to advertise and want to funnel more traffic through the service? Maybe they just want to mature a bit as a service and taking back a little control helps to do that. Either way, a reliable web based client would be great.
It’ll be interested to see where they go next from here.
Lists Beta Released to More Users 1 day ago
To further test our beta Lists feature, we’ve introduced it to a larger group of users.
26
Sep
How to Tweet – Basic tips on how to get the most from Twitter
I’ve blogged a few times before on some of the wonderful, versatile things Twitter can be used for and happily I’ve had some rather pleasant feedback from people saying I’ve opened their eyes to one or two things about it. One thing that still interests me though, is that people are still using Twitter as just a communication tool and that communication is tending in some cases to be of a very narrow – person to person – style. The real power of Twitter is it’s possibility for much broader communication and generally the barrier to that seems to be not understanding the full breadth of functionalities of the Twitter platform.
With this post what I am specifically looking to do is illustrate the breadth of Twitter so to do that I’m going to briefly run down every absolutely essential core function of Twitter detailing why you should use them, that is if you aren’t already.
@s
OK, this one is basic and fairly simple, @s are the cornerstone of Twitter to the point where they appear in everyone’s user names. They are however massively important as prefacing a user name with an at constitutes a “mention”, these are then automatically picked up in the @yourusername section of that user’s profile (or client) and this lets them know that they are being talked about.
DMs
One of the slightly disconcerting things about Twitter for the newer user is the fact that everything is public, sometimes things just need to be kept private though and, dull as they are, Direct Messages (DMs) are therefore very useful for this. DMs are great for passing users more private messages like meeting times/places, email addresses or mobile numbers.
RTs
Retweets are the lifeblood of Twitter and allow tweets to have a truly viral reach. That is, they allow messages to be rebroadcast to more and more followers. I follow a lot of people who have a lot of very interesting things to say and, knowing that people who follow me would find these things interesting, Retweeting messages to my followers is a great way to share the love. Also, Retweeting is a great way to get more followers as people will identify you as a sharer of useful information and will be more inclined to follow you because of it.
Retweetrank is a useful website where you can see who Retweets what and how often a user RTs content.
#hashtags
Hashtags are also pretty important to Twitter’s functionality. When common topics are being discussed they are usually identified by gaining their own hashtag and this in turn makes the hastag identifyable in Twitter’s “Trending topics” section. When breaking news happens nowadays you can usually see it first there. Hashtags are also great for memes and pun games, a recent favourite of mine being #cheesefilms.
The #Hashtags site is a useful site to see how hashtagging in more detail.
Twitter Clients
So that’s all of Twitter’s functionalities covered but there’s one other vital part of Twitter that’s vital to use in order to get the most from it. Twitter Clients are third party applications that provide a more intuitive user interface for your twitter accounts. Popular desktop clients are Tweetdeck, Destroy Twitter, Twhirl and Seesmic.
Generally they sort functions like your mentions (@yourusername) and DMs into columns alongside tweets from your friends. Clients also do handy things like provide automatic URL shortening – especially handy for posting long urls in tweets whcih have a maximum character count of 140 – and, perhaps most handily of all, automatically upload your photos to Twitter photo sharing services like Mobypicture, Twitpic or Yfrog.
In some, such as Tweetdeck, you can also separate tweets from users into different groups, run real time searches on hashtags and other keywords.
So, with a basic understanding of all of these you should have enough to get yourself set up on, and well into, Twitter. As per usual, if I have missed anything out or you think I have got anything spectacularly wrong then please drop me a comment below.
23
Jul
Top Ten Parliamentary Punch-Ups
Conflict in the Commons? Scuffle in the Senate? Altercation in the Assembly? Conflab in the Council or Fisticuffs spoiling your Filibuster? Hot on the heels of the terminally amusing fracas in the South Korean parliament Totaal is proud to bring you the Top Ten Parliamentary Punch-Ups.
I cant take the credit for this though, this is the brainchild of Totaal buddy, fellow AWIMBer and respected B3tard @igotdamaged and was cooked up over the course of a particularly bizarre Twitter exchange late last night.
10. Taiwanese tear up – Bonus points for the sheer number of people involved in this mass brawl. If this chart was ranked on participants alone it would get a much higher place.
Conflict in the Commons? Scuffle in the Senate? Altercation in the Assembly? Conflab in the Council or Fisticuffs spoiling your Filibuster? Hot on the heels of the terminally amusing fracas in the South Korean parliament Totaal is proud to bring you the Top Ten Parliamentary Punch-Ups.
I cant take the credit for this though, this is the brainchild of Totaal buddy, fellow AWIMBer and respected B3tard @igotdamaged and was cooked up over the course of a particularly bizarre Twitter exchange late last night.
10. Taiwanese tear up – Bonus points for the sheer number of people involved in this mass brawl. If this chart was ranked on participants alone it would get a much higher place.
I cant take the credit for this though, this is the brainchild of Totaal buddy, fellow AWIMBer and respected B3tard @igotdamaged and was cooked up over the course of a particularly bizarre Twitter exchange late last night.
10. Taiwanese tear up – Bonus points for the sheer number of people involved in this mass brawl. If this chart was ranked on participants alone it would get a much higher place.
9. Mexico mêlée - For a moment, it looks as though a chair is going to be thrown, but the chair was simply being moved out of the way to make more room for the fight. There’s also a great guest appearance from Nintendo’s Mario who shows admirable tenacity.
8. Dust up by the Dnieper – Striking a blow for democracy in Ukraine. This one ranks highly, especially given the sheer scale of the proceedings.
7. Assaults aplenty in Abuja – Nigerians, plenty of action, good outfits and virtually no attempts from bystanders to stop the scuffles. The guy in the pink robes really steals the show here.
6. Mix up in Maan – I like the way in this one, the Jordanian parliament appears to have a pre-prepared sumo style area for fights to take place within. The girly style attempt to run away really adds to the piece here.
5. Tiff in Taipei – Taiwan again, second entry for this disputed territory with excellent bitch fight. And lets face it, nothing spices up proceedings like commentary by the legendary Sheriff John Bunnell (Retired). What’s Taiwanese for “Oooh no you di’en’!”
4. Calcutta carnage – Note the TV being throw 30 seconds in as things turn nasty in India. Bonus points also for the appearance late on by the Ghostbusters.
3. La Paz pugilism – Hot-headed South Americans. The Bolivians really go for it, there must be something about fighting at altitude that angries up the blood.
2. Spar in Somalia - This is how Somali politicians negotiate a peace settlement, rounded up beautifully by the momentary look by the newsreader at the end.
1. Fall out in Fukuoka – Presumably, this guy was the “Minister of Judo”. It’s short, sweet and by no means the most violent but the moves shown here make it a clear winner.
20
Jul
Five delightfully pointless but cool twitter uses
Twitter isn’t all serious, powerful and useful y’know.
Apologies for the lack of updates over the last week or two, I have been very busy working on one or two other pressing things. Namely doing some cool AR (Augmented Reality) research for a friend (some of which I hope to share with you all at a later date), going blind in one eye and attending agricultural shows (don’t ask).
In my earlier post Five Twitter tools you’d be mad not to use I mentioned briefly that the thing that makes Twitter a powerful tool is that it is incredibly versatile. As the last post seemed to get the comments page and my in-box going I thought I’d do another follow up post concentrating on some of the more left field applications that it’s possible to produce.
Whilst the tools here aren’t exactly useful they are fun and certainly add a nice bit of contrast from the usual MLM Marketing nonsense that claim to give you squillions of targeted followers. So, without further ado here are Five delightfully pointless but cool twitter tools:
TwistoriI love this tool, twitter has alot of buzz out there but amongst the noise it’s sometimes very easy to completely forget there are beautiful, raw human emotions behind every tweet. Love, Hate, Feel, Wish, Think and Believe are all clickable and whoosh, you are straight into the hopes, dreams yearnings and aspirations of random people throughout the globe. Both heartfelt and pointless, Twistori is just pure genius.
So pointless it’s painful, that’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Especially when the pointlessness is as beautifully done. Essentially this tool just captures the the tweets that contain “zzz” or “zzzz” and renders them in a slightly mesmeric way. Typically, something this cool and unquantifiable can only be French, random quote I saw whilst getting the link: “I cant believe I got out of bed with a hangoverzzz”.
We all know the plot right? Romeo loves Juliet, the Capulets hate the Montagues and everyone dies in the end. Just when you thought Baz Lurid made R&J too modern Twitter steps in to take it one step further, the whole play Tweeted over and over into infinity. It’s not as simple as all that though, which I guess makes it even more pointless, you have to follow the Narrator and all the Narrator’s friends, and then and only then will you see the complete play appear in your feed. You thought it was a ball ache at school didn’t you?
Ever wondered how much your Twitter profile is worth? No, me neither. Confusingly Tweetvalue has and whats more they have gone one step further and quantified it. Currently mine is worth over $500 which could buy me a on litre T-Reg Volkswagen Polo. Google’s on the other hand could fetch them a whopping $20,000, which I’m sure they would spend on a Prius or possibly a night with Christiano Ronaldo.
If, like me, you are a people watcher then I’m sure from time to time you get the odd “whaddayoulookingat?” back, with Pingwire you can be as voyeuristic as you want without fear of reprisals. There’s the odd NSFW as well as the odd WTF but it really is the gift that keeps on giving, especially as I’m not massively against either.
So there you have it, the silly, the pointless and the downright odd. I never said Twitter was entirely useful did I?
24
Jun
Twitter style ads help Facebook buck the market trend
Facebook’s recent buzz has all been about their “Twittification”, reducing the former enjoyable randomness of Facebook to a homogenous Twitter feed. It’s caused all sorts of ructions and mutinies among users with the predictable Facebook groups being set up to demand that the system be scrapped and the norm returned to.
Haha Facebook, now you know people who dont like Wispas feel.
Anyway, under the radar of the awful publicity and frantic petitioning Facebook have been making some very shrewd, very quiet changes to the way it works. I have, for some time now, been telling anyone who will listen (and some that wont) that the value of Facebook’s targeting information is worth it’s weight in gold and that they havent even began to exploit it. It now looks like they have began to actually realise what the potential of the data they hold and they have chosen just about the right time to do it. Online advertising spend is conservatively predicted to fall by around 10% in 2009 and Google has just recorded its first sequential quarterly drop in sales since 2004. Even that’s great when you compare it in the virtual collapse of traditional media ad spend which has tanked and is in the process of taking many a newspaper and TV station with it.
So in the face of all of that what of Facebook’s revenues then? Well, as I said above, theyhave historically been awful at making money so it’s from a fairly low basemark. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO says that their ad revenues “may climb 70 percent this year”. Simply amazing, doubly so in 2009, so how are they doing this?
Firstly there’s the ads which have up to “25 characters in the title and as many as 135 characters in the body of the text”, sound familiar? Yes, it’s Twitter. OK, theres an optional photo but that’s what it is, but while Facebook had egg on its face when it last aped Twitter it seems this time it has paid off. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of product marketing for monetization (ouch, nice title Tim) says the service lets companies target users based on the information they put on their profiles “You basically just have a greater diversity of people using our ad system — lots of businesses, lots of local businesses finding success. It’s really been a steady, successful growth pattern.”
They have also been *ahem* heavily influenced by Google’s adwords system with their new campaign configuration interface. Feedback for this has been pretty patchy and that’s being kind, but as someone who used early incarnations of the AdWords system I can attest to the fact that it has improved immeasurably over time.
They have also, for the first time, emplyed a real, human Sales Team to assist companies with more interactive promotions, rather gloriously called “Engagement Ads.” They can include features such as video and let users do things like become “fans” of a brand. Add that to the fact that that it has 200 million active users and is still growing rapidly, especially among baby boomers, then Facebook’s outlook is pretty rosy.
23
Jun
Five Twitter tools that you’d be mad not to use
Obviously Twitter being news isnt really news any more, strangely though many people I know who have embraced digitality with admirable gusto still dont really get it. Essentially what happens is that Josh or Jade Public sign up to their Twitter account, look up @wossy etc and then wander off bored. Try as I might I have tried to explain the concept of Twitter but often many people want their social experience served up on a plate ala facebook.
Anyway, Twitter is not great in and of itself. What makes Twitter great is the fact that the code and content can be molded and shaped into any number of different things and presented in a myriad of ways. Anyway, what I’ve attempted to do here is bring together my five favorite Twitter apps, there are probably about another 10-15 that I’d reccomend people to use for specific purposes.
Number One
Simply wonderful application that allows me to segregate my pretty large band of followers into manageable groups, I use this on my own account and even though you have to download it it’s pretty robust and easy to use. It also has a lovely search facility and shortens your urls for you quickly and easily. Oh and it also shows your facebook friends status to boot.
Number Two
Mobypic has been around for a fair old while now, essentially it allows mobile phone camera users to upload their photos and videos and tweets a link to your tweeple. It also works with facebook, youtube, blogger, wordpress etc etc. It’s pretty simple to use and a great way of enhancing your tweeting experience.
Number Three
This service lets your friends in Twitter know when you post a new picture on Flickr, similar to MobyPicture but obviously flickr based.
Number Four
If like me you run a blog then you’ll find this absolutely invaluable, TwitterFeed checks the RSS feed to my blog every hour (or whenever you like) and if something new has appeared in the feed it takes the link and tweets it for me. It allows me to customise the tweets so I can add a little message (”new on Totaal:” for example) so followers know what the link is.
Twitterfox is a great little firefox extension that turns your Firefox browser into a twitter client. It isnt in any way obtrusive, in fact it goes out of its way not to be. It notifies you subtly when your friends update their tweets and allows you to tweet directly from your browser. Great for work based twittering with unsympathetic bosses.
So there you have it, like I say it’s by no means an exhaustive list, just a quick run down of the apps which I find most valuable. Before anybody starts, I wouldve added Seesmic but to be honest I prefer tweetdeck and the assumption I made was that early twitterers would have enough on their plate without multiple accounts to juggle.
(Phil, Sue, Dale) This post is for you BTW 
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08Jan
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07JanNew Year, New Offices Just a quick update for all of you guys who we know are hanging on ...
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26OctAn iPad Presentation done a little differently I’m sold, who’s coming to live in Sweden with me?
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25Aug
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13Jun
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25Aug
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07JanNew Year, New Offices Just a quick update for all of you guys who we know are hanging on ...
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26OctAn iPad Presentation done a little differently I’m sold, who’s coming to live in Sweden with me?
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08Jan
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George Flynn: Excellent news, just round the corner from me too....
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