February 2010
1 post
4 tags
Corporate Social Media Usage / Tools Update
According to Burson-Marsteller’s Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study, 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.
65% are on Twitter
54% have a Facebook fan page,
50% have a YouTube channel
33% have corporate blogs
20% are using all of the above
...
January 2010
1 post
5 tags
Lady Gaga Cancels Show Explains to Fans Real Time...
We hear a lot a about artists and athletes getting into trouble on Twitter. Tweeting at the wrong time or tweeting things they wish they could take back seems to be the new normal. Last night in Indiana was a different story. Lady Gaga followers on Twitter learned real time from Lady Gaga herself why she seemingly inexplicably canceled a show just minutes before she was to go on stage.
Lady GaGa...
November 2009
1 post
Social Media Thanksgiving
Dish up a few pieces of TechCrunch with all the trimmings, some Mashable potatoes with gravy, a side of ReadWriteWeb, some Inquisitr a big piece of Gigaom and of course a sixpack of Scobleizer to wash it all down.
Hmm who sits around the table?
October 2009
1 post
6 tags
Miley Cyrus Twitter Rap
That’s right. Hannah Montana has said so long to Twitter. She canceled her
Twitter account, which fueled speculation as to why. She attempts to clear the air with this rap.
Not sure the air is overly clear. What is more clear is Miley won’t be crossing over into R&B anytime soon. Yes, the rap was made to be fun, but the bigger question is, will other celebs take...
September 2009
5 posts
5 tags
Twitter Visualizations at the MTV VMAs
The Twitter visualizations used on MTV.com during the VMAs were pretty interesting. Design firm Stamen (more on their blog here) and social media monitoring company Radian6, are credited with showing VMA twitter activity around an artist or band growing and shrinking in real time according to the number tweets. The timeline remains live here.
The timeline is not overly easy to use. It tends...
Facebook Now Profitable; Reaches 300 Million Users
briansolis:
Today, Facebook announced that we have hit 300 million users and we are free cash flow positive. Other interesting facts:
More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month More than 14 million videos uploaded each month More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week More than 3 million events...
5 tags
Twitter Usage and Demographics
(UPDATE) Twitter processes approximately 100k tweets per hour. See math below.
Here’s a compilation of recent stats on Twitter’s U.S. traffic growth…
Excerpted from Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology by Penn State Live:
“20 percent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to...
“Facebook is the private party. Twitter is the public square. This line has been...”
– Why Facebook will never be Twitter - BusinessWeek (via betashop)
April 2009
5 posts
3 tags
What Columbine Taught me about Crisis...
Ten years ago, I was living and working in Colorado for Jefferson County Public Schools. I left a startup in the Seattle area for the school district communications department where I was a twenty-something school district administrator primarily responsible for research and “high tech” communications. It was an unbelievably enriching time both personally and professionally. While...
5 tags
Dominos Responds to Brand Crisis Through Social...
Dominos Pizza employees posted a YouTube video of themselves at work at a Conover, N.C. Dominos. One films the other intentionally sneezing on a sandwich, putting the cheese in their nose and doing other unseemly things to the food before delivering it presumably in :30 or less.
According to the New York Times,
“By Wednesday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than a million times on...
1 tag
Generate Word Clouds with Wordle
Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text, sites or blogs. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the provided text. It’s a great visual representation of recent coverage, your company blog, or what you’ve been tweeting about most recently. With a Wordle word cloud, you can create a powerful visualization that gives readers a sense of...
4 tags
Susan Scrupski (ITSinsider) Joins ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb, the Web Technology news blog, announced today:
“Susan Scrupski (a.k.a. “ITSinsider”) has joined ReadWriteWeb as VP Enterprise Content and Programs. Starting today, Susan will assume responsibility for building our editorial and expertise in applying the principals of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. With a focus on how the Web is disrupting traditional business...
7 tags
Twitter's Biz Stone on The Colbert Report
The week during which Twitter has been everywhere culminated in an appearance on The Colbert Report and a rumor that Google and Twitter were in late stage acquisition talks.
Twitter needs to worry about media over-saturation. It seems the company has been everywhere from CNN and FOX to Today to Colbert and the Daily Show.
The social media buzz is all about gauging the probability of...
March 2009
8 posts
6 tags
Celebrities a-Twitter
What is the single biggest driver of the Twitter rocket sled you ask (right after asking what Twitter is)?
Answer: Celebrities twittering.
CelebrityTweet and WeFollow (celebs) are two easy ways follow Twittering celebs.
The NYT is even tracking celebritweeters.
More on Twitter:
Why Twitter Matters
John Stewart Talkes Twitter on the Daily Show
Twitalyzer Shows Twitter Influence
Media on...
5 tags
Biggest Tech / Venture Blogs
Duncan Riley had an interesting post on The Inquisitr tonight, talking about the possibility of Mashable overtaking TechCrunch (and sub-domains) as the leading Web 2.0 blog by Traffic.
Riley included graphs from Compete, Alexa, ComScore and Quantcast to illustrate his point. Of course, what and how you count matter. What is clear: Mashable is a close second and definitely within striking...
4 tags
Sarah Lacy Joins TechCrunch
Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch announced today in a post that Sarah Lacy will join as a permanent member of the tech blog’s editorial staff.
Arrington writes in TechCrunch: ”I’d like to welcome Sarah Lacy to Team TechCrunch as a permanent addition to our editorial and writing team. Lacy, …will continue to write Valley Girl, a biweekly column for BusinessWeek. She will...
4 tags
How To Do Social Media Right In 2009
Marta Strickland of Organic, an interactive agency, posted an interesting deck on SlideShare. She does a nice job of giving specific examples, how-tos, stats and case studies on how brands are diving into social media. This ties in nicely with my post, Social Media How-to Guide: Getting Started. Marta uses terms like Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 that you can disregard, but on balance, this is a quality deck...
5 tags
Facebook Takes Top Spot in Monthly Attention
For the first time, Facebook overtook the top spot in Monthly Attention (time spent as a percentage of total time spent online by U.S. Internet users), commanding nearly 6% of all time spent online by Americans in the month of February.
Google and Facebook continue up and to the right on the graph below, but perhaps more compelling than Facebook overtaking Yahoo! is the trajectory of MySpace. As...
4 tags
Robert Scoble Leaving Fast Company
“Hi, I’m Robert Scoble. Who are you.” Not quite, “now you know the rest of the story,” but very well known in tech circles. Robert Scoble, the highly influential “tech geek” blogger and videographer is leaving FastCompany.tv for parts unknown — at least for now. (UPDATE: Robert will be going to Rackspace and focusing on community building. Read more...
2 tags
John Stewart Talks Twitter on the Daily Show
Twitter seems to finally going a bit more main stream. kind of…
2 tags
Michael Arrington is Back at TechCrunch
Mike Arrington announced in a post on TechCrunch that he is back from Hiatus. An excerpt from his post:
“…In short, I’m back. I’m tanned, rested, and generally grumpy about not being in Hawaii any more, but back I am. And somehow TechCrunch did just fine without me.
More soon on my plans for the future and my thoughts about the events that led me to take a month off in the first...
February 2009
5 posts
3 tags
Twitalyzer Shows Twitter Influence
(UPDATE) Twitalyzer, the new Twitter-influence-measuring site that was down for much of the morning (see below) is now back online.
The site is simple. You input a person’s Twitter user name and Twitalyzer spits out it’s take on that person’s “influence.”
Here’s how Twitalyzer describes influence:
“As Twitter becomes increasingly important to online...
3 tags
Media on Twitter
If your PR people aren’t on Twitter, fire them. The media is flocking to social media sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. (By media of course I mean journalists at traditional print, publications, broadcast journalists and bloggers.)
They are flocking to social media sites to find sources, distribute their content, network and participate in the conversation. Sure Twitter may not continue to...
1 tag
How to Change Your Twitter Username
Rick Butts has a very helpful post on his blog about how to change your Twitter username without impacting your followers or forcing you to re-follow people.
From Rick’s post:
“You will keep ALL your followers - and everyone’s address book will be automatically updated - so you are totally cool.
Everything on Twitter will note the change - you just want to insure that old links go...
5 tags
iPhone 3-Way Calling (Merge Calls)
Have you tried to make a “three-way call” on your iPhone only to have the phone toggle between the two people you have on different lines? We can help.
Apple calls it “merge calls.” This is used when you have a person on the line and you call another person with the hopes of adding them to the call. We bet you can’t do it.
As much as we love our gadgets here at...
11 tags
Why Twitter Matters
Check out #3 on the chart below. That’s Twitter. The most visited social network that’s not Facebook or MySpace.
(UPDATED)
While this graphic shows Twitter as just ahead of Flixter, LinkedIn and the rest, consider how significantly under counted Twitter’s visits actually are. Compete measures web traffic. Consider that only 32 percent of Twitter’s users are actually...
November 2008
5 posts
3 tags
Amazon Crowdsources Holiday PR
The New York Times Bits blog has an interesting post today about how Amazon is tapping several of its regular customer reviews contributors to talk to media about holiday gift advice.
This is a great way to go if you have users / customers that are passionate about your offering and more importantly are getting value from your products. This particular approach can work for Amazon becuase its...
3 tags
Marketing to Millennials
BusinessWeek.com is running an eight-part series of Viewpoints by the author of Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott. Tapscott explains how digital technology has affected the children of the baby boomers, a group he calls the Net Generation.
He talks about how the “Net Generation’s” arrival means that many of marketing’s fundamental tenets must change because of discoveries...
2 tags
Yang to Step Down
Yang’s memo to Yahoo! employees…
To: all yahoos Fr: Jerry Subject: update
yahoos -
i wanted to address all of you on the news we’ve just announced. the board of directors and I have agreed to initiate a succession process for the ceo role of yahoo!. roy bostock, our chairman of the board, is leading the effort to identify and assess potential candidates for consideration by the...
7 tags
Motrin Ad Misses Mark: Social Media Moms Miffed
Motrin launched a new online campaign on www.motrin.com this weekend to kick off International Babywearing Week. The ad, which appears to take jabs at baby-wearing mommies sparked controversy fist on Twitter and then across the web.
from Mashable: “Avid Twitter user and mom, Jessica Gottlieb is the originator of the conversation via her Twitter network. The dialogue (and overwhelming...
3 tags
User-gen Election Day Coverage
Before reading any further, drop what you are doing and vote.
It’s a rainy day in Seattle. Conventional wisdom says that’s good news for the Republicans. Last time we elected a Governor in this state, the outcome was decided after three counts and only a few hundred votes. Local and national media covered the debacle for days. TV and Newspapers did their best to deliver the facts....
October 2008
6 posts
5 tags
socialmedian Aggregates User-Generated Election...
socialmedian launched an election news portal in partnership with The Washington Post on the news streaming site today, http://election.socialmedian.com. The destination is intended to be a hub for tweets, photos, videos, blog posts — all things election ‘08. socialmedian has also created a blog widget (Election Talk) wonks can add to their websites. The Washington Post and The...
5 tags
New Media Influence (Part 3) JupiterResearch,...
Brian Solis over at Bub.blicio.us had a good post today on a new study that found some consumers are more influenced by blogs than web search. Solis writes, “BuzzLogic partnered with Jupiter Research to spotlight evolving consumer behavior and decision making processes and how blogs influence and factor into consumer purchases.”
Read more of Solis’ take on Bub.blicio.us.
The...
Small Brands Teach Big Lessons →
NEW YORK Big company efforts in social media have mostly failed to this point. Facebook’s application platform has become a graveyard of failed attempts to harness the platform, while other brands have suffered embarrassments at their ham-handed attempts to influence the blog world. Yet for some small companies, social media has proven to be a godsend of low-cost, effective brand building....
TwitThis is the New “Share This” for Twitter →
briansolis:
by Brian Solis
TwitThis is a potentially powerful and game-changing service, assuming it gets significant traction.
If you’ve ever visited a site or blog and have seen or used any number…
6 tags
FanSnap Launches Ticket Search Engine
Live event tickets is a $25+ billion industry. Much of the innovation in the space over the last 5-10 years has been in the secondary market ($5 - $10 billion), building “marketplaces” of buyers and sellers and then efficiently monetizing the transactions. Companies like eBay, StubHub, TicketExchange and others have been tremendously successful at this — so much so that the...
4 tags
socialmedian Gains Momentum
Since socialmedian’s public launch in July of this year, the social news site has very rapidly improved on its initial offering. socialmedian continues to offer powerful news filtering tools, but over the summer, CEO Jason Goldberg and his team have added major new features on nearly a weekly basis.
Most recently, socialmedian announced a Facebook application that allows Facebook users to...
September 2008
4 posts
4 tags
RescueTime Secures Series A
RescueTime, the self-dubbed “ridiculously easy time management and analytics software” company, today announced on the company blog and on TechCrunch that it closed $900k series A round of funding. Total funding now $920k. The freemium-based time managent company received $20k seed funding from Y Combinator earlier this year.
True Ventures led the round. True Ventures’ portfolio companies...
6 tags
Veteran Seattle PI Tech Reporters Quit Newspaper...
Will Seattle be getting it’s own version of TechCrunch? Well regarded local reporters John Cook and Todd Bishop of the PI and Eric Engleman of the Puget Sound Business Journal are banding together and launching what promises to be the region’s go-to destination for biz-tech coverage.
While not yet launched, Bishop and Cook are no longer with the PI. They sent an email to contacts with some...
4 tags
SpinSpotter Crowdsources Media Bias Flagging
SpinSpotter launched this week at DEMOfall as a Firefox3 plugin. SpinSpotter’s goal is to tap the wisdom of the crowd to flag media bias in online coverage.
SpinSpotter lets users see, share, and edit spin wherever they go online. To guide users, SpinSpotter lays out what it calls the “Seven Deadly Spins:”
Reporter’s Voice: The reporter employs language (in the form...
2 tags
Sarah Palin Delivers Speech of Her Life at RNC...
Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate, Governor of Alaska and recent mayor of a very small town has been in the crosshairs of the national media and the Obama campaign since John McCain chose her to be his running mate just a few days ago. Some would argue that she absolutely should be under intense scrutiny as candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States.
Regardless of your...
August 2008
4 posts
7 tags
New Microblogging Site Rejaw is Not a Twitter...
Thought it best to address that one right out of the gate. Rejaw is a new microblogging site that sits in the microblog -> lifestream spectrum between Twitter and FriendFeed. Rejaw is probably most similar to Plurk in that it focuses on short form posts by users, but unlike Twitter, it also lets users comment on each other’s posts.
Unlike Plurk, which also offers users the ability to post...
6 tags
Social Media How-to Guide: Diving into FriendFeed
Joining in on social media conversation can daunting — even downright scary. It can be hard to know where to start.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how to get started with with social media. Feedback was good, but several were still in need of a bit more prompting. FriendFeed and Twitter were regular conversation topics. The chats always came back to, “what would I say? Who is good...
8 tags
Walt Mossberg's Influence has Been Quantified
I wrote in June about early numbers from research being conducted at the University of Maimi that attempted to quatify the impact of a Walt Mossberg review on a company’s stock price:
Initial data shows on average, “firms with bad product reviews saw stock losses of $200 million, while those with positive reviews saw gains of $500 million,” proving traditional media influencers still pack...
6 tags
Data Pointing to Social Media Explosion
So, you’ve read my post on How to get started with social media or you follow what Chris Brogan, Sarah Perez, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others have to say on the topic. You’re interested. Social media looks promising to you, but it also seems like a lot of time spent without measurable return and I’m too old to be taking part.
Am I close? If so, check out the research...
July 2008
8 posts
8 tags
Social Media How-to Guide: Getting Started
Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend of mine about the PR his startup had “fallen into.” They actually created a really cool iPhone application and people noticed. He was excited about the coverage, but while his company wants to be engaged with the media and users, he and his fellow entrepreneurs often find storytelling and driving the narrative around their brand takes a backseat to...
3 tags
Ryan Block Stepping Down as Editor of Engadget:...
If you’ve got a hot new gadget you want to pitch and you want Ryan Block to write on it, you’d better act fast. Block will step down as editor of this publication in late August to start a new (undisclosed) company.
In his post today, he said of his new chapter, “I’m extremely excited — but there’s also simply no way I can give up working with Engadget that...
12 tags
socialmedian Emerging from Alpha with Social News...
(UPDATED July 30, 2007) socialmedian, which styles itself as a social news network, is slowly emerging from stealth mode has emered from alpha. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg and backed by notables, Gordon Crovitz (WSJ), Reed Hundt (FCC), Julius Genachowski, (IAC/ LunchBox Digital), Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Allen Morgan (Mayfield Fund); socialmedian’s goal is to help...
11 tags
ContentNext, PaidContent.org Publisher, Acquired...
The acquisition, slated to be announced today was reported early this morning by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. ReadWriteWeb, in post also early this morning, reported confirmation of the story based on a Twitter conversation between the Guardian’s Technology Editor Charles Arthur and travel writer Craig McGinty.
The move so far has been received very positively by new media content providers....