Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

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 Hope140 were 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!”

Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.

Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.

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?

While the twenty year old USA today focus group ‘ad meter’ judged Snickers to be the favourite Super Bowl ad this year, Doritos has emerged as the favourite ad measured online, according to several different buzz monitors.

Colle & McVoy’s Squawq registered 35,000 tweets about the brand sent during the game, two thirds after its ‘house rules‘ ad (below).

Doritos also generated the most talk and highest sentiment according to BrandBowl2010 plus the most positive tone online, according to Zeta Interactive - 96 percent positive, 13 percent up from before the game.

YouTube’s Ad Blitz verdict is still to come in but on rival video sharing site Hulu, Doritos was once again the most liked ad though Motorola’s ‘Megan Fox Photo’ was the most viewed.

Measured over a longer period, from December, Alterion SM2 found that Focus on the family, with its controversial pro-life content, generated the highest volume of activity.

Although 75 million people had signed up for a Twitter account by the end of 2009, only 17 percent sent even a single Tweet in December ‘09, an all-time low for the micro-blogging service, research from RJMetrics has found.

Overall, in the three years since it began, 40% of Twitter account holders have never sent one Tweet and 80% have sent less than ten.

Despite the high percentage of inactive users, Robert Moore of RJMetrics observed that 17 percent of 75 million people still translates to a large number and the study found “tremendous loyalty and engagement from those Twitter users who stay on the system after their first week.”

Among the study’s other findings: Twitter is currently signing up about 6.2 million new members a month, down from a July 2009 peak of 7.8 million a month and the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009.

With all this X Factor/Rage against the machine rivalry, some Christmas mood is being lost I feel, so here’s the best Christmas song ever, dedicated to our clients, thank you and happy holidays.

To join the festive poll, tweet your favourite to #BestXmasSongEver

It’s that time of year again when hundreds of thousands of children will be tracking Santa’s progress across the world courtesy of NORAD (North American Air Defence Command), a tradition that began in 1955 when calls to a misprinted telephone number in an advertisement for a Colorado store, from children invited to call Santa’s hotline, came through to Colonel Harry Shoup, NORAD’s Director of Operations.

Realising what was afoot, Colonel Shoup had his staff check the radar to see if Santa had started his journey South from the North Pole. Santa was located and a legend born, NORAD using the heat from Rudolph’s nose to track the sleigh.

For 2009, you can track Santa on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Google Earth as well as visit his elf-staffed manufacturing facility at the North Pole www.noradsanta.org.

On Christmas Eve, Santa’s journey around the world will be revealed on the site. Here’s footage of the route he took last year QG55UH7B4WVA

A few weeks ago I fell off my chair at a comment one magazine editor posted on Twitter, speculating that members of a certain London club suffered from, shall we say, onanistic tendencies.

Such scope for personal expression may not last long. The LA Times has issued updated  social media content guidelines for their staff emphasising that just about anything they post online both personal and work related, reflects on the reputation and credibility of the newspaper.

“Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job,” says the first guideline.

It goes on, “Your professional life and your personal life are intertwined in the online world, just as they are offline, attempts, for instance, to distinguish your high school friends from your professional associates are fine, but in all spaces one should adhere to the principle that as an editorial employee you are responsible for maintaining The Times’ credibility.” Read the rest of this entry »

A new US study has found  that  29% of chief marketing officers have a working social media policy in place.

26% say they have one, but it’s not followed within the company while a further 31% say they are still developing a policy.

The research from peer networking group, the CMO Club, suggests companies are struggling to create social media marketing policies internally.

Budgets for social media are also scarce with nearly 85% of top marketers spending less than 10% of their budgets on social media, and non-traditional communication channels.

Pete Krainik, from the CMO Club, says online marketing is now brand critical, as push marketing gives way to pull. Read the rest of this entry »

A new survey from Weber Shandwick reveals that while 73% of Fortune 100 companies have registered an average of 5.5 Twitter accounts, three quarters are not used very often, which in Twitter terms is as good as saying, they’re not being used at all.

The Twitter accounts had a variety of purposes, newsfeed 26%, brand awareness 24%, sales 16%, thought leadership 11% and customer service 9%.

More than half are described as having ‘no personality’ meaning they are faceless corporate accounts rather than ones with human advocates and 11% were placeholder accounts designed to prevent brand jacking.

If, as WS suggest,  Twitter should be viewed as ‘an uber corporate cocktail party’ it would seem these businesses are all dressed up with literally no idea where to go. Even if they found the party, possessed of  ’no personality’ they wouldn’t be very popular anyway. Read the rest of this entry »