Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.
Stone used 1552 characters in his email newsletter to account holders yesterday, offering some insight to the highlights of Twitter’s ‘annus miraculous’
Accounts opened were up 1,500%, Twitter employees rose 500% to 146 – the latest being Aaron, “an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company. We celebrated with a little dance party.”
Stone mentions the new features introduced – Twitter lists, retweets and mobile apps, plus the humanitarian and charitable uses Twitter has been put to, “Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity. Projects like Fledgling and Hope140were inspired by you.”
In a veiled reference to the huge proportion of unused accounts, estimated to be 83% of the 50 million plus opened, Stone says in the opening paragraph “If you haven’t visited in a while, we’d like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com — we’ve been busy!”
According to estimates from blog Inside Facebook, revenue for the pre -eminent social network is expected to exceed $1bn in 2010.
Revenues have typically doubled each year, according to the research carried out amongst industry experts, from $150m in 2007, to $300m in 2008 and so on, with advertising revenue from fan pages believed to be the main driver.
2009 is seen as an important transitionary year for the site which grew to more than 350m monthly active users, from 150m at the beginning of the year. Of those, 100m were in the US and another 100m were in Europe – the two markets where brand advertising brings in the most money.
Brand advertising is estimated at $225m for 2010 and Inside Facebook predicts this stream could eventually grow to $20bn, taking share away from more established sites like Yahoo and MySpace. More »
Social media is proving a valuable crisis communication tool for people affected by the Chile earthquake.
Mashable reports that one woman was able to track down her sister-in-law via Twitter using local hashtags which were picked up by a man in Santiago who was able to confirm her safety. Photos of the aftermath have been uploaded to Twitter and Twitpic, providing a photo log of the destruction.
Google has launched a version of its person finder application for Chile, to aid those looking for or offering information about friends and family.
On Facebook, pages like Chile Earthquake have sprung up, with 8,500 fans creating links, photos, videos and links to Google’s person finder. More »
Microsoft has knocked Google off its top spot in the 2010 Business Superbrands survey.
Google, ranked first in the two previous surveys, changes places with Microsoft who were in fifth spot last year.
New entries to the top ten include BlackBerry, 42nd last year and British Airways, back to eighth from its worst position last year – 36th. Rival Virgin Atlantic however, also appears, above BA, in fourth position.
Revealing the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 biggest fallers includes UBS and Morgan Stanley, with the Royal Bank of Scotland falling out of the top 500 altogether.
Proving that a re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva, More »
It’s been some weekend for reputation management, allegations of bullying at number 10, Tiger Woods’ public self-flagellation, Ashley Cole and Vernon Kay’s errant texts – skeletons not so much falling out of cupboards as walking out of them into a TV studio and making full, boney confessions.
Tiger’s one on Friday was 3 months too late (and comically stage-managed). If he’d done it in December and got back to playing golf, he could have played the Accenture World Match Play this weekend, sponsorship deal intact. Instead he’s disappearing into extended penance – and more sex therapy (blimey, how bad is it) – the image crisis defining him rather than he it.
Somehow it’s not a stretch to believe table thumping Gordon Brown could be difficult to work with, a man who’s bulldozed his way to the top job by hook and by crook, will have chewed up a lot of staff in his wake. It will now take more than a cosy Piers Morgan interview to convince the public he’s a nice guy.
Meanwhile, Vernon Kay must be thanking his family good fortune that Ashley Cole exists. While Kay apparently sent some inappropriate texts to women, in the same week, Cole reportedly sent PICTURES to his.
In reputation management as in life, timing is everything.
For some reason the Winter Olympics has left me cold this time, practically frost bitten in fact but as a sports fan, I worry I’m missing something so the Twitter Tracker from US news channel NBC looked a good bet – you click on a photo of an Olympic star and it shows everything being said about them.
Not knowing who any of them are though, is a drawback and in terms of holding interest, Twitter Tracker goes downhill rapidly from there – like whoever won the skiing.
The main Twitter feed is a better bet. NBC’s has 65K followers – a gold medal winning ski jump ahead of the official Vancover 2010 one which has 13K followers – worldwide, slightly embarrassing, Richard Madeley has more than that.
There’s a volte-face when you compare their Facebook pages though, Vancover 2010 has almost one million fans, while NBC’s Facebook icon directs to my personal Facebook page, at least on my computer – and I have no fans at all.
Furlong PR has a mighty 7 fans though, a very select bunch, I urge you to join and unlike private members club, One Alfred Place, I promise I won’t try and throw you out for overuse.
By the way, does that Evan Lysacek have a look of Robin Cousins about him?
Manchester City has released the third in a series of moody player videos in advance of their clash against Liverpool on Sunday, starring their North West rival’s former player Craig Bellamy.
In a reversal of his established image, Bellamy is depicted in introspective mode, contemplating the game, wearing a…cardigan, before switching to a more familiar image – in football kit, with a wisp of what could be smoke from the mouth of the fire breathing welsh dragon*
City has done well galvanising support with provocative micro-campaigns since they became belligerently wealthy in the summer, the ‘Welcome to Manchester’ posters of Carlos Tevez kicking off a new era of ‘needle marketing’.
Choosing Bellamy to front their Liverpool game campaign is more of the same, both motivating fans and also making a virtue out of Bellamy’s often ‘over-passionate’ nature on the field of play.
The ads have been created by Manchester agency Music, to promote City’s clashes against the Premier League’s ‘Big Four’ – Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.
Dave Simpson, Music’s creative director commented “Our ad conveys Bellamy’s tireless dedication and demanding hunger to play football, and to win. When he plays he gives his all and we wanted to illustrate the passionate change that happens as he crosses the white line.” More »
Bridgestone has stolen a march on its Super Bowl advertising rivals with a viral teaser nearing one million views, putting it at number three in this week’s viral chart, behind Evian’s Roller Babiesand Walmart’s Clown.
Though it was down to one million views this week, Evian’s viral has now clocked up 18 million views since it was released seven months ago, begging the question, if it costs $3 million for a 30 second Super Bowl ad slot reaching 100m TV viewers and $0 for a 60 second viral reaching 18m online, will more marketers do a Pepsi and abandon their Super Bowl slots in the future?
The dramatic rise in new media use by marketers has been captured by Junta 42 in new research that shows social media use up 500 percent since 2008, with blog and video use more than doubling.
Over the same period, use of email newsletters has declined slightly, along with that of whitepapers and cases studies.
The survey of 259 marketers also found that marketers expect to allocate a third of their budgets to creating content in 2010, up from 11% in 2009 and small businesses spend twice as much on content as large ones do.
Two weeks after Toyota announced the recall of an estimated 8 million vehicles worldwide due to a sticky accelerator problem, some rear guard PR work has surfaced in the form a video apology from the company’s US President & COO, Jim Lenz.
Two versions have been created, one on a recall website page, accompanying a formal letter of apology and a longer, stranger version on YouTube that includes promotional clips of Toyota models, zooming photos of the USA HQ and cars being made in the factory, presumably cut from an old corporate video.
Watching Jim Lenz explain that he wouldn’t put his family and friends in a Toyota if they weren’t safe is reminiscent of MP John Gummer feeding that beefburger to his 4 year old daughter at the height of the UK BSE crisis in 1990.
In the US, Toyota’s reaction to the crisis has also been criticised for being too late and too centralised, not allowing local dealers to communicate quickly with their customers or enabling a dialogue online. Toyota’s general Facebook page, which has 70,000 fans, presumably mostly customers, directs enquiries to their static website recall page. More »
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.
According to estimates from blog 
Social media is proving a valuable crisis communication tool for people affected by the Chile earthquake.
It’s been some weekend for reputation management, allegations of bullying at number 10, Tiger Woods’ public self-flagellation, Ashley Cole and Vernon Kay’s errant texts – skeletons not so much falling out of cupboards as walking out of them into a TV studio and making full, boney confessions.
For some reason the Winter Olympics has left me cold this time, practically frost bitten in fact but as a sports fan, I worry I’m missing something so the 
Manchester City has released the third in a series of moody player videos in advance of their clash against Liverpool on Sunday, starring their North West rival’s former player Craig Bellamy.
Two weeks after Toyota announced the recall of an estimated 8 million vehicles worldwide due to a sticky accelerator problem, some rear guard PR work has surfaced in the form a video apology from the company’s US President & COO, Jim Lenz.