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Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Let’s go to the video Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Twitter has been getting all the media attention this year, but online video has also taken off in a huge way in 2009. Here are some interesting facts:

  • 62% of U.S. adult Internet users watch videos on YouTube and other video-sharing web sites, up from 33% in late 2006, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center.
  • Also from the report: “Online video watching among young adults is near-universal; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now
    say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day.”
  • Speaking of Twitter, check out how Twitter compares to online video consumption on the chart below:

  • According to a ComScore report, 157 million Americans watched 19.5 billion online videos in June, up from the 16.8 billion in April. The average viewer watched 124 online videos in June, up from 111 million in April. Google (read YouTube) still accounts for 40% of all videos viewed and more than half of videos viewed per user.
  • A report on ClickZ calls online video “the fastest growing medium in history, having gone from zero to mass market globally in three short years.” More good advice from this report: “Create ads that work as content. Create fun or arresting videos that tell a story and seamlessly integrate your brand.”
  • Another report from iMedia UK looks at the myths of online video and explains why it’s not as expensive, boring and unaccountable as you might think.

The link between personal and corporate branding Friday, July 10th, 2009

We’ve just published an article on the HotHouse blog on using social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter and the impact they can have on “brand you” as well as your company. There’s an accompanying podcast interview with Chuck Hester, whose book “Linking In to Paying it Forward” explains his philosophy on using LinkedIn to help others.

HotHouse blog article: http://blog.hothouse.com.au/2009/07/08/the-link-between-personal-and-corporate-branding/

Podcast interview with Chuck Hester: http://blog.hothouse.com.au/2009/07/07/hothouse-podcast-paying-it-forward-through-social-media/


Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Twitter Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Moses Ma, writing on the Psychology Today blog, has posted an easy-to-understand explanation of Twitter and why it has hit the zeitgeist this year. He writes:

“The Twitter system acts to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The unfortunate reality is that we are a culture starved for real community. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have resided in tribes of about 30-70 people. Our brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival.

“However, the tribal context of life was subverted during the Industrial Revolution, when the extended family was torn apart in order to move laborers into the cities. But a deep evolutionary need for community continues to express itself, through feelings of community generated by your workplace, your church, your sports team, and now… the twitterverse. This is why people feel so compelled to tweet, to facebook or even to check their email incessantly. We crave connection.”

Taking me back to my Psychology 101 days at university, he explains where Twitter fits in Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, the pyramid of basic to complex needs. “Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.

“An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter. Twitter allows normal people to feel like celebrities. At its worst, Twitter is an exercise in unconditional narcissism - the idea that others might actually care about the minutiae of our daily lives. I believe that this phenomena of micro-celebrity is driven by existential anxiety. I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggoneit, people like me! “

He writes that, “Twitter is like digital crack that invariably turns you into a tweetker - no matter how much of it you get, you’ll never be satisfied. If you’ve ever woken up at 3 am to check your email or read tweets, you know what I mean. You know the cold clammy fingers of existential anxiety.”

He advocates that, “A more valuable technology tool for humanity might be the opposite of Twitter - an application that removes distractions from life, reconnects you to real relationships and human touch, and helps you find the time to focus on what really matters in life. It’s an old joke, ‘Second Life, heck! I can’t even keep up with my first one!”‘

Here’s to dealing with all the problems caused by social media!


Types of social media distribution Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Here’s a diagram from Peter Kim showing the results of an analysis done showing how popular various types of social media distribution are:

types of social media distribution

Types of social media distribution (click on the image to see it in a larger format)

Note how microblogging (largely Twitter) is the third-largest slice of the pie, behind social networking and blogging. Wonder how this will change in the next 6-12 months?


It’s not just me - no, really, I mean it, it isn’t just me! Friday, March 13th, 2009

Once you start getting involved in the digital or social media business, you tend to lose perspective. You can see all these cool things happening out there, and you’re linking up with all sorts of interesting people via Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, and you get this feeling that, for once in your life, you’re riding the crest of a wave (forgive me if my surfing analogy is a bit skewiff, but I grew up in the land-locked American Midwest) and involved in something with enormous social and business potential.

Meanwhile, your family and friends shake their head when you tell them what you do all day and wonder what on earth is the point of linking up with people you don’t know from a bar of soap and exchanging 140-character missives on Twitter that are largely on the topic of Twitter. It’s a good reality check to engage with the ‘real’ people in your life and see that, just maybe, you’re overestimating the effect and potential, and  that most people couldn’t care less about digital communication.

Well, a new report just published by NetPop Research shows that YOU SEE, I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG - DIGITAL SOCIAL MEDIA IS EXPLODING! Yes, it’s a US report and Australia is further behind this curve, but get a load of these numbers:

  • More than 100 million Americans are regularly posting material to social media sites - that’s one-third of the population
  • Use of social media has doubled in the past two years alone
  • 7 million people, known as ‘power users’, interact with about 250 people a week via digital social networking (yes, that’s more than 30 people a day)

See Mum, I didn’t waste that college tuition by spending my days surfing the Internet!


More adventures in Twitter; or, Twitter - WTF? Thursday, March 12th, 2009

They say a year on the Internet is like seven years in the offline world - think of it as dog years (oh no, now I can’t get this image of my Dalmatian chasing his tail out of my head!). In that case, a year in social media is at least twice as fast.

So 10 weeks is a long time in the life of Twitter - by my complicated reckonings, it’s about a year ago. Now that I’ve completely confused the issue, I’ll get to my point: 10 weeks ago I wrote a post questioning the business value of Twitter (two posts, actually). Since then, Twitter has really entered the zeitgeist, with global users supposedly jumping from 6 million to 8 million just in the past couple of weeks, up from practically nothing 12 months ago.

There have been articles in just about every major newspaper in the Western world trying to explain the appeal and the utility of the service. It’s been used by Australian and American politicians, Rove, my resident breakfast radio announcer Adam Spencer and schoolkids. Most of the coverage has been favourable if somewhat bewildered, though some people are looking at it harshly, such as IT philosopher Jeremy Pettit, who wrote, “Didn’t Nietzsche say, ‘Soon everyone will learn to read and write, and that will be the death of language’? Brilliantly offensive. I’m sure he had Twitter in mind. The morbidly self-obsessed screeching to the morbidly self-obsessed in bite-sized chunks.”

Anyway, after writing those earlier posts I decided to become more pro-active and try to test the business utility of following scores of people and having them follow my 140-character musings (BTW, I’m @raywelling if you would like to follow). I tried to seek out social media experts to follow and sought the advice of more experienced Twitterers about how to monitor what’s going on in the Twittersphere. I’ve watched people of all ages and backgrounds join up, particularly social media geeks, such as the hundreds of people attending ad:tech this week who drove the conference search term up to the #2 trending term on Twitter on Tuesday.

After attempting to manage the growing flood of postings through Tweetdeck (a specialised Twitter browser) and setting up regular searches on terms I’m interested in (contact me via the comments box if you want to know how to do this), I noticed a few trends settling in, such as the fact that an increasing number of posts tend to be links to interesting/useful blog posts, stories, videos, photos etc. (if you’re wondering about the problem of long web addresses in a 140-character environment, there is a widget you can use to shorten addresses to a manageable length).

Anyway, I had my Twitter epiphany this week. After viewing a tweet from a social media PR expert in the US who happened to be in Sydney speaking at a conference, I decided to follow him. Within minutes, I had a direct message from him noting that I was based in Sydney and since he was in town, did I want to catch up for a drink? We did catch up, and even if it doesn’t turn out to result in extra business, I can now clearly see how these connections can prove to be extremely useful. If nothing else, I met an interesting person who I would never have connected with through conventional means.

They don’t call it ’social media’ for nothing!


Twitter buzz in pictures Monday, March 9th, 2009

Aden Hepburn from Ideaworks has just published a couple of charts on the Digital Buzz blog showing how interest in Twitter has mushroomed in the past few weeks - but also keeping it in perspective comparing actual site traffic to the Facebook behemoth:

As Aden writes, “Just in the last 2 weeks (in Aus particularly) it feels like everyone is talking about Twitter like never before - and here is the proof. This chart shows the relative change in daily attention a website receives and you can actually see that it’s even out performing Facebook at almost 2:1, yet unfortunately it doesn’t hide the downward spiral of MySpace! But just to keep everyone in their chairs… the relative comparison on unique visits to show you Twitter doesn’t rule the universe, well, not just yet anyway…!”


Skittles aftermath: nothing to see here, mosey along now Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Following on from yesterday’s post on the Skittles.com saga, the interest in this story in social media circles has been phenomenal, but now that Skittles has yanked the #skittles Twitter Search page from its home page (you can still find it if you go looking deeper on the site) like a spam Twitter account, the post-mortem has begun in earnest. It’s a bit like a digital version of the finger-pointing that goes on after disasters such as the recent Victorian bushfires.

Catherine Taylor writes today in Social Media Insider: “Now, it’s time to drown in social media clichés, like the following: The mere fact I’m writing about this means the campaign achieved some success. Awareness of Skittles on the Web probably hasn’t been this high, ever. The underpinning for the strategy for this campaign is in itself a social media cliché: The consumers own the brand.

“But I’d also like to offer that, in obsessing about this campaign, social media watchers are becoming their own cliché. What stood out to me in looking at the tweets about Skittles this morning wasn’t the naughty stuff, which seems to have run its course, but the whole meta phenomenon where people aren’t talking about Skittles per se, but what the Skittles campaign means for social media. Then there’s all the hand-wringing about the fact that some people said naughty things about Skittles and how that somehow mars the campaign (no pun intended, though Skittles is made by Mars). C’mon. Do you really think the agency and client were so naïve as to not know that would be part of it?

“It’s time to move on to something truly important. Kudos to Skittles and Agency.com for embracing the idea that it’s not the brand home page that defines the brand. That’s a good thing. But we knew that already.”

To quote from a couple of the comments on Catherine’s blog post:

“We have to be very careful about what strong thinkers we are and make sure not to over-intellectualize these new age approaches as marketing professionals. This wasn’t about us. This campaign or experiment thereof was about where we’re going. It wasn’t rocket science, but I’m sure it worked. Skittles displayed a direct interest in finding their consumers where they are likely to be found and used their consumers to communicate the brand however the consumer chose to in their very own language…and the consumers did just that!”

“I’m not sure what you need to know to wake up and be MORE IN TOUCH with your audience. They got trashed on Twitter because Twitters are about REAL, organic, testimonials and truth in real time. Spending the time, and $$$ with an agency that didn’t understand nor grasp that from the get go, shows that someone at the top of this, should have done more homework, or solicited better advice about using Twitter. Every agency in the world wants to jump on the bandwagon and utilize Social Media. If you don’t understand how to properly “engage” consumers using Web 2.0 technology, you need to be careful, for it’ll blow up it you face.”

“The only important question is will this cause people to buy more Skittles? I look forward to learning the answer.”

“I think the real value is less about the execution and more about the philosophy that drove it. If it means anything at all, it’s that this campaign is a recognition of the importance of the role social media plays in brand-building. The game has changed. It’s not 1999 anymore.”

It will be interesting to see how the campaign is viewed in the fullness of time. Brilliant tactic or big mistake? What do you think?


Skittles, Twitter Search and Facebook: a recipe for good publicity Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Skittles has conjured up a storm of controversy over its new un-website. The lolly-maker turned its home page into a glorified Twitter Search page on the weekend, and the company has been praised and pilloried ever since.

David Berkowitz wrote in Mediapost: “Today, when contacting a company, the first place I’d likely turn is its Web site. I’m saying that tentatively, as Skittles makes me wonder if corporate Web sites will be around much longer. The company’s new site seems to herald the fact that the corporate site is nearing its expiration date.

“…. Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.”

He asks: “Why would anyone care about what Skittles has to say? What, pray tell, could Skittles ever say that was so important, unless we woke up one day to find out that eating Skittles is the world’s tastiest cancer cure, or alternatively that Skittles lower men’s sperm count. Then, perhaps, the world will listen.”

On the positive side, Marketing Daily spoke to a range of marketers who thought the move was a great idea, quoting the head of eConsultancy as saying that: “Skittles has essentially turned its site into ‘a massive social media experiment. It is possibly the bravest move I have yet seen, in terms of a global brand getting into bed with social media and social networks … it appears to be an extension of the old adage about there being no such thing as bad PR. Everybody is talking about it.’

Marketing Daily also reported that: “‘Some will question whether it’s wise to give up control on the Web - whether this is a good use of social media,’ says Charlene Li, author of business best-seller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, consultant, speaker and blogger (altimeter.com). ‘But they are controlling content in the most important sense, which is that they’re getting people to talk about and engage with the brand. It’s hard to get people to engage with a candy, but this is generating incredible buzz and PR. This is a big brand pushing the envelope toward what a brand will be in the future.’”

MG Siegler on Venturebeat was bit more sanguine: “In what is either a sign of Twitter’s ongoing transition to the mainstream or of a candy company’s epic laziness, Skittles.com is now simply a Twitter Search result page for the candy.

“I’m a firm believer in the power of Twitter Search as perhaps the most compelling thing about the service, but the candy’s use of the feature just feels gimmicky. It would have been better as a part of the site, not as the homepage. My advice: I know times are tough, but hire a web designer.”

He presciently wrote: “Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles.”

Meanwhile, Berkowitz suggested that Skittles should highlight its Facebook presence rather than Twitter Search, since its Facebook group has an astonishing 587,000 friends. And as of Tuesday US time, after a puerile Twitter campaign, that’s exactly what they did. The Twitter experiment ended, and the Twitter Search page was replaced by the Facebook page. But the debate goes on. Of course the big question is: what effect will it have on the brand and on sales? We’ll let you know.

Follow the story as it developed:

Skittles Converts its Home Page to Twitter Search

Marketers Praise Skittles Gutsy Site Move

Why Skittles Killed its Website

Skittles: tweet the rainbow (or racial slurs)

Skittles switches homepage from twitter to Facebook (what’s next?)

Bad Jokes Force Skittles to Retreat from Twitter Search to Facebook


Beautiful one day, perfect job the next Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Tourism Queensland’s Island Reef Job campaign has struck a chord with economically battered people everywhere. Well-executed across a variety of social media, including Facebook, Twitter and the Web, the campaign, soliciting job applications for an Island Caretaker for the Great Barrier Reef, was expected to generate 400,000 website visits by the end of February. More than 200,000 people visited the first day of the campaign and as of last weekend more than 2.5 million visitors had checked out the site.

The campaign is one of the few Australian initiatives to garner extensive overseas media attention.

As the job description says, the six-month, A$150,000 gig is ”a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer. You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews. On offer is a unique opportunity to help promote the wondrous Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

You have until 22 February to apply, so start working on that application!


But wait, there’s more - predictions and wrap-ups Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

A few interesting links to finish the year:

Feel free to add your own, as well. Happy New Year everybody!


More on Twitter - paradigm-shifter, or flash in the pan? Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Finding Twitter more fascinating the more I explore it.

Have installed TweetDeck to manage the firehose of activity.

Waiting to hear back from Mr Tweet, who will tell me who I should be following (how many of them am I already following?)

Am starting to think in <140 character bursts - am annoying the heck out of my wife!

OK, enough of that, back to proper blogging mode… as the media declares the death of MySpace and the rise of Facebook, has the digerati (or is that twitterati) already moved on to Twitter as the next big thing? Not everyone thinks so. Sean Carton has written a thought-provoking piece on ClickZ comparing Twitter to Second Life (which is so early 2008 (or maybe even 2007)) “and other now-embarrassing fads.”

He quotes stats showing that ‘only’ 200,000 people are using the service, and that 1% are super-users (he uses the word ‘addicts’) who account for 34% of all ‘tweets’.

He writes that, “the people writing most of the glowing reviews about Twitter are probably its most avid users and are therefore part of a hermetically sealed group that lacks perspective. People who write about technology online are paid (well, ‘paid’ might sometimes be a relative term) to write about online technology and to be the first to use it. Pumping a new technology makes them look smarter and raises their street cred because it gets others to use it and makes them (and I’ll even include myself in the ‘them’ here) look like they got the scoop before everyone else.”

Not surprisingly, this has sparked a lot of debate, with strong arguments on both sides. As one commenter writes, “In 12 months, this will look like the most ridiculous thing posted on ClickZ in 2008. Citing Twitter’s April, 2008 usage numbers is absurd in this context. Usage has increased by at least 1000% since then (reported and estimated by several good sources). The examples of real business being done on Twitter, major company heads using Twitter to reach out to their customer base, journalists relying on Twitter for sources… These are not ‘let’s take on a fake identity and chat to other cartoons’ like Second Life. Twitter is becoming the new email, and you miss the boat at your own peril.”

The next comment on the list: “Consider me in peril because Twitter is useless.”

TechCrunch has just published a post which backs up the observation that Carton’s numbers were low, while Denise Zimmerman on iMedia has written a good guide to ‘Becoming a Twitter all-star’. There are many more salient postings, such as the one I heard about on Twitter this morning but which has already been washed away in the flood of postings, where the writer said to treat Twitter like a river - you step into it on occassion, get wet and splash around, and get out again; the point is to not worry about all the water flow you miss when you’re not in the river.

To extend the analogy, I think you also have to make sure you don’t wade too deep that you get in over your head and drown. Here’s to a strong swimming stroke for 2009!


Adventures in Twitter Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Is it just me, or is Twitter exploding in weird ways? I’ve had heaps of new people following me in the past couple of weeks (my handle is raywelling if anyone who reads this is interested), partly due to me following more people, partly due to blog visitors, and the other part due to goodness knows what. Keeping in mind that my profile clearly shows that I am an Internet content worker based in Sydney, Australia, here are some of the people that have started following me:

  • AOL News
  • Bizarro Grundy, who runs a ‘fictional fighting’ blog (don’t ask)
  • A mentor and trainer based in Birmingham, UK
  • Forexreviewscwg
  • The Florida Strawberry Festival (Did you know that at 10.30 a.m. on Feb 26, Jimmy Sturr and his Orchestra will perform free on the Florida Strawberry Festival Soundstage? No, I didn’t think you did.)
  • someone called ‘bouncyti**ies’ (the asterisks are not there because of fear of offending readers, it’s fear of unleashing a stream of spam comments to this blog similar to what I am still receiving for a previous post which used the word ‘p*rn’)

How did these people find me? What moved them to start following me on Twitter? I tried to send a direct message to ‘bouncyti**ies’ earlier today to ask those questions (no really, that was the only reason I was attempting to get into direct contact) and it turns out she (at least I think it’s a she, based on the icon), has had her account suspended due to ’strange activity’. Hmmmm…

Look, I get the principles behind Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. - both parties need to agree there’s a connection before something happens, so only real connections work in those networks. At the same time, I like the fact that I can follow the thought leaders in social media and e-marketing through Twitter without them needing to acknowledge my existence. I think I can even get where miss bouncy was coming from - she was probably preparing to send me a link to an esteemed photographic website. It’s the Florida Strawberry Festival which has me worried. Why me? Why now? And why do I now have this strange hankering for strawberry shortcake?


The social media list Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Are you on the social media ‘rich list’ (apologies to Channel 7 and Andrew O’Keefe)? Probably not, because as with so many things like this, Peter Kim’s Social Media Marketing Examples list is by a North American, for a North American audience. (Kudos to Telstra and the Sydney Writers Centre as apparently the only Australian organisations on the list. If someone has done a list like this for Australia, please let me know and I’ll be happy to promote it.) In the meantime, a look at this list of 324 companies that ‘get’ social media is interesting and constructive. For example:

  • Consulting giant Accenture has nine corporate blogs, five podcast channels and its own social network
  • Adobe has a directory of nearly 200(!) blogs by its employees
  • There are at least 135 Facebook pages, groups or applications mentioned on the list
  • 86 of the companies on the list are using Twitter accounts, many of them with multiple accounts
  • The renowned medical centre The Mayo Clinic has a YouTube channel (prepare to be grossed out at gruesome videos from the operating theatre)
  • Even the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile has its own Twitter account (so you can say franks for the memories!)

Not all the companies on the list are large multinationals - the message here (with a nod to Anthony Johnson, who brought this list to my attention) is that all types of companies need to start getting involved in social media, because that’s where their customers are hanging out. They’re already talking about you without your participation - or worse, they’re talking about your competitors instead of you and you need to get out there and mix it up.