Gate One: VML's Strategy and Innovation Group » Twitter

The New Twitter

amygoodnow — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:21:50 +0000

Twitter revealed a re-engineered version of its website today at a press conference. According to Twitter’s blog, the new and improved interface features:

New design:
The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.

Media:
Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.

Related content:
When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.

Mini profiles:
Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

These changes will roll out as a preview over the next several weeks starting with a very small percentage of registered accounts today. During the preview, users will be able to switch back and forth so they have time to grow accustomed to the way things work. Eventually, everyone will have the updated version of Twitter.com.

Get a Handle on It: Dealing with Negative Feedback on Twitter

ljamis — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:15:11 +0000

One of the scariest things about social media is opening your brand up to negative comments. They happen. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to have your fans come to your rescue and settle the dispute for you. Other times, you have to deal with the issues yourself. And, that can be difficult to do in 140 characters or less. If you’re dealing with complaints on Twitter, check out these suggestions from Mashable’s “5 Tips for Dealing with Complaints on Twitter.”

A quick response can go a long way
You may have to respond as you, not your company
Give yourself more than 140 characters to respond
Let someone else respond for you (your fans for instance)
Know when to let it go

This Week in Social 4/23

Paul Miser — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:17:08 +0000

Another crazy week in the emerging media world. Facebook had their f8 conference with some big announcements, Twitter finally released their member numbers showing their true size, and Mobile technologies are becoming and increasingly important platform for engagement. Below are some articles that I’ve run across this week to highlight these stories and more.

Social Platforms

Meebo’s Enhanced Social Play
“Meebo — which facilitates the integration of multiple services like Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger in one interface — has launched XAuth (Extended Authentication), which automatically recognizes active social platforms and lets users connect with ease on participating publishers’ sites.”

The idea is to increase engagement while diminishing user confusion.

Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8
The “Become a Fan” button has become a “Like” button. Based on Facebook’s research, they found that users are two times more likely to press a “Like” button than a “Become a Fan” button, increasing engagement with brands.

Facebook also announced the development of the Open Graph API that will allow the “Like” button to be implemented almost anywhere on the web, increasing the reach of Facebook. The Open Graph API also allows people and brands to pull fans from Facebook to other web properties.

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all

How Big is Twitter
Twitter announced this week for the first time, the actual size of its registered members. According to Twitter they have over 105 million worldwide registered users with 180 million unique visitors every month.

Twitter Stays Strong as Growth Slows
Traffic on Twitter has begun to plateau according to Comscore, Nielsen, and Compete. However, engagement on the platform continues to grow.

Mobile Technologies

Use of cell phone for pictures and video popular across age groups
Here is a great visualization of the rise of the use of mobile technologies across the “Teen” demographic for multimedia (photos and videos).

Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Who’s Winning the Geolocation War? [INFOGRAPHIC]
A great infographic of the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla, both geolocation platforms for mobile technologies. Users “check in” to locations they visit to score points and update their friends.

Decreased Media Usage Hurts Ad Market
Ad spending was down in 2009 as was the amount of time users spent with media (12 hours/day down from 14 hours/day). Every media witnessed a decrease in activities except one; mobile, which was up 39%.

Talk time on mobile was up 12%, while average daily mobile Web use rose 36% to 11 minutes. Texting was also up, by 55%, to take up 27 minutes a day in 2009.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/22/foursquare-gowalla-infographi/

This Week in Social

Paul Miser — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:07:24 +0000

With all the information flying around on the interwebs about emerging technologies, best practices, and awesome case studies, it can get a little confusing on what to read. This week was even more crazy with the announcement of Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Facebook jumping into virtual currency, and shifts in consumer behavior on social platforms. Below is a selection of articles that I found extremely useful to wade through all the content out there.

Online Video Viewers Hungry for New Tech
With YouTube turning 5 this week, we still see it reign king in online video ranking way above other video platforms. However, we’re beginning to see a shift from strictly user generated content and more towards network programming and news.

How do the Most Successful Companies use Social Media?
The social media tools studied are diverse and serve many purposes. Companies reported using these tools for several reasons. They reported that the tools provide the following:

Another way to communicate
Added value to customers
Product/brand awareness
Ability to keep up with trends and competitors
Demonstration of product
A more cost effective and productive form of marketing

Portals Vital for Users and Marketers

“eMarketer estimates more than 57% of all US online ad revenues will go to the four major portals in 2010. By 2011, nearly 9% of total media ad spending in the US will go to these four sites.” An amazing display of the continued power of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.

Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets
I’m sure you’ve probably heard about the Promoted Tweets on Twitter. It’s a long-awaited ad platform that will be pretty exciting to see it play out. There was a lot of buzz this week around the new launch, so here are a few other articles with different opinions.

Businesses Split on Paying for Twitter

First Take Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem

Facebook May Be About To Jump Into The Virtual Currency Offers Game
Virtual currency is becoming a huge hit online… So big in fact, behemoth Facebook is getting into the mix. With no real details about what offers they will provide, it’s a great mystery to see how this virtual currency will work in Facebook’s favor. Then to see how brands can tap into the predicted $2 billion/year industry.

Consumers Follow Social Brand Referrals
68% of consumers said they would be likely to buy a product or visit a retailer fan page based on a positive referral from a friend. By engaging our online community in a positive, “shareable” manner, we can tap into their social network and begin to build new, positive relationships.
What is a Facebook Fan Worth?
$3.60 each… According to AdWeek, “On average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year. The company’s findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users’ networks.”

Social networking up 82%

Paul Miser — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:00:52 +0000

In a recently released report by Nielson, social media usage has grown at a mindboggling rate. Globally, the amount of time spent on social networking channels has risen from 3 hours/month to 5.5 hours/month over the past year. That’s an amazing 82% increase in social media usage. What an outstanding growth. Coexisting with this growth of time spent on social sites is the amount of people engaging on these sites, up 27% over the same time period from 242,000,000 to 307,000,000.

“This Nielsen report establishes social media as a trend that is not only here to stay, but one that is growing at a mind-boggling magnitude,” stated Bloggerwave Director Ulrik Thomsen.

What does this mean for brands?

Everything! As more people are not only flocking to the social platforms, but also spending more time on these platforms, we see a more robust, engaged audience. Sites like Facebook and Twitter (both of which were key components in the expounding growth) are becoming an intimate, personal place for users to visit and build relationships with friends, family, and affinity organizations/causes. Creating a strategy to not only get permission to participate into that online personal life, but also build two way conversations and engagements will create an amazing mutual relationship (marketing) channel with your consumers. Imagine having these personal, relevant relationships with your consumers… What could that do for brand loyalty, advocacy, and passion?

Tweet for Your Country

mikeycramer — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:37:32 +0000

The President of the United States is looking for a social mouthpiece. That means YOU could be @BarackObama. The Democratic National Committee is accepting resumes for a Social Networks Manager, responsible for managing all of Barack’s social media accounts. The job was posted over the weekend and they are looking for someone to start immediately. Evidently Mia Cambronero, his current twitterer is leaving at the end of the month! Hurry up and apply! Requirements seem pretty standard, but my favorite part is: “Be ready to work hard; this isn’t a 9-5 sort of job.” Really?

Photo credit: C4Chaos

Twitter Shrink

mikeycramer — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:32:11 +0000

Why pay a lot of money for a psychologist when TweetPysch can do it for you? TweetPysch provides psychological profiling by looking at your last 1,000 tweets and running them through two different linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC.) Obviously, this tool works best on accounts that have a high volume of tweets and are executed by a single user. Results show the user’s average propensity (compared to other users) to tweet about topics such as money, media, control, sex etc. and what this might mean, psychologically speaking. For example, those who tweet about control, restraint and moral imperatives more than the average user may indicate that this person has a strong desire to impose order. Tweeting about sex more than the average user may indicate a preoccupation with sex, and so on… And though this tool is actually just comparing your results based on the results of other TweetPysch users (making it less about real psychology and more about your linguistic lexicon), it is one of the most interesting Twitter tool releases to date, in my opinion.

You can view my results here.

Marching towards the mainstream – UFC & Twitter

Devin Cheevers — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:46:40 +0000

by Devin Cheevers

The UFC and Twitter are both brands who are marching exponentially towards the mainstream.

In the last week, the UFC at UFC107 (where Diego “Nightmare” Sanchez got badly beaten by a Marv Marinovich built BJ Penn) up’ed their use of twitter as a channel by displaying live tweets during sections of the event. In parallel real time tweets began appearing in Google results, Twitter with a similar deal with Bing as well now has a dependable revenue stream. Twitter takes one more step towards the mainstream.

The UFC and in particular their President Dana White has focused on connecting to current and potential UFC fans through social media. Dana and UFC fighters are featured in video diaries before big events on the UFC’s youtube channel. These provide a raw, behind the scenes view of the UFC. It also means fans are connecting to the brand – and perhaps more importantly to individual fighters. Now the UFC is encouraging their fighters to use Twitter even more. The UFC recently ran a three day workshop (fighter summit) to help their fighters understand the opportunity social media offers their individual brands and equip them with skills to use the different platforms.

By empowering their fighters to build their own brands and connect with fans through social media, the UFC will benefit.

“I want you to twitter your as*es off.” – Dana White

See: Digital Royalty (Powering UFC’s Social Strategy)

The Death of Twitter?

Joe Grigsby — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:54:38 +0000

by Joe Grigsby

We have become conditioned to look for the next big thing and than to start to question its validity once it has been discovered. This is no surprise given the rise and fall of new media hopefuls such as MySpace and Second Life. Much of the concern comes from place of being cynical over hype for brands that create a lot of buzz but not enough revenue. Many of us still remember the Dot Com era of 2000.

It is in this context that there is often question about the future of Twitter. TechCruch recently reported that it appears that visits to Twitter.com declined by 8% month-over-month in the US in October. While some may argue that this does not take into account that many Twitter users use applications to stay connected to the service, this fact should normalize over time and still reflect a growth in website traffic as it relates to new users.

It may be that we are just caught in a transition point while legacy users are discovering and migrating to applications and that eventually we will see traffic to the website bottom out and than begin to show a growth trend again. Or it may be that new users get excited about Twitter early on and than get bored (as reports have shown), leaving only a handful a twitter users to talk amongst themselves. Only time will tell.

Whatever the future of Twitter as a brand is, it is undeniable that the concept of micro-blogging will not go away. This is only the natural evolution of the Internet as it allows users to stay connected at scale. From it’s roots of blogging and instant messaging to the impact on Facebook and Google Wave, Twitter has driven the expectation of the user’s ability to connect to a broad but define audience in as simple terms as possible.

Image Source: TechCrunch / ComScore