Archives for the month of: November, 2009
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Cool stuff – November 30, 2009

November 30, 09 //
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Value + Simplicity = Social Media Success

November 26, 09 //
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Yes, I know this has been all over the web in the last 24 hours, but I wanted to mention it here too as I think it’s a brilliant campaign:

If you haven’t come across it, IKEA in Sweden have launched a competition on Facebook. They set up an account for one of their senior employees and posted up some of the displays from their new Malmo store.

They then asked ‘friends’ to tag the furniture in the images, with the first person to tag an item winning it!

They’ve got over 700 friends on the account already, lots of positive (global) media interest and some good social media buzz.

So why it this such a clever campaign and why has it worked so well:

  1. Simplicity – it’s so simple that you could tell anyone about it in a few sentences
  2. Cheap – it’s hardly cost anything for IKEA to set it up and market it
  3. Technology – it uses social tech tools in a new innovative way
  4. Value – it gives something back to social media participants
  5. Creative – it’s a wonderfully creative and innovative idea

Will integration save Linkedin?

November 24, 09 //
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I was at a PRCA event last week run by Cristina Hoole, European PR and Marketing manager at Linkedin.

The problem with Linkedin

I’ve always been a bit confused by Linkedin. I can see the potential benefits, but just can’t bring myself to make it a major part of my everyday working life. My profile is kept updated. I often add new contacts. And I’ll use it to look people up. But I just don’t use the site on a regular basis.

Having said that, Linkedin isn’t failing – Hoole reported 50 million users worldwide and 3 million here in the UK – but I wonder how many of these actually visit the site every single day, as they would with Twitter or Facebook?

Linkedin is great for linking together your business community, but it doesn’t have that everyday application that other networks have. This is potentially a problem: two of three of its revenue sources – advertising and premium accounts – are mainly focused ‘on-site’ (the third being software packages for recruitment agents).

Linkedin Outlook Integration

But Cristina revealed an interesting new feature for Linkedin – Outlook Integration. And it makes total sense.

Where do most ‘business people’ spend most of their time? In Outlook.

Outlook integration therefore seems like a great idea. I now don’t need to visit the Linkedin site every single day, but I can still harness the usefulness of the tool through Outlook – something I use for long stretches of time every single day. Obviously monetising this will be a challenge, but at least it could begin to make Linkedin an everyday, business critical tool.

Twitter has had unbelievable success with third party applications and increasingly Facebook is entering and finding traction here. As we start using more and more networks, bringing together more and more friends and followers, these third party apps are crucial to helping us keep on top of everything.

And I think this could be the key to future success for Linkedin too.

Footnote…

I actually wrote most of this post last week, but only got round to finishing now. And, by sheer coincidence, Linkedin has today announced a brand new API for third party developers. Tweetdeck is reportedly releasing an integration later this week.

Could there possibly be ray of sunshine round the corner for Linkedin?

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Cool stuff – November 23, 2009

November 23, 09 //
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7 features to expect from Twitter Premium

November 20, 09 //
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Reports are suggesting that Twitter Premium (read: paid for) accounts, might be appearing before the end of the year.

So, in handing over our hard-earned cash, what features might we expect in return?

Here are my thoughts on what I would and would not like to see in a two tiered Twitter world…

GOOD

1. Analytics – This one seems like a dead-cert. Whilst there are numerous analytical tools that have cropped up using the Twitter API, they still all depend on the data that Twitter does or doesn’t not allow them to access. Giving premium accounts access to more data (especially historical data) would have obvious benefits to brands and super-users and would certainly persuade a vast number of these to invest. The ability to track follower behaviour and ROI, for example, would be worth paying for.

2. Verification – It is pretty much guaranteed that there will be some sort of ‘verification’ of premium accounts, so that you know the person/company you are dealing with is who they say they are. This will obviously inspire trust in the account holder(s) and will give brand peace of mind. I can see the benefit of verified accounts and it would certainly persuade some to sign up I’d imagine.

3. Commercial APIs – The data access that clients like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and CoTweet rely on to give users access is limited by Twitter. If advanced analytics are available to premium accounts, then expect this to be fed into these clients also, giving us a new breed of super-charged business-focused tools.

4. Enhanced profiles – This makes a lot of sense. Providing premium users with additional profile real estate, perhaps with more links or even the ability to display images or adverts. This wouldn’t really affect the experience of normal users, but would certainly add further value for businesses.

5. Support – It is highly likely that premium users will get a hotline to the big T, allowing them to get support, help and possibly even advice on how they could improve their use of the service.

BAD

6. More than 140 characters - anything that messes with the fundamental principles of Twitter is bad in my eyes. The idea that premium accounts would have more than 140 characters to play with, strikes me as changing the very fabric of what Twitter is and why we love it.

7. Multiple users – I’m torn on this one. It is possible that premium accounts would permit access by more than one person – a bit like the way companies like Ford tags company tweets written by certain individuals. I fear though that this again plays too much with the fabric of Twitter. This is a tool designed for individual communication (whether brand or person etc.).

What about you? What would you like to see in a Twitter Premium offering?

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Cool stuff – November 16, 2009

November 16, 09 //
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Is the retweet dead? Using the ‘favourite tag’

November 15, 09 //
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Last week I wrote about Twitter’s controversial changes to native retweet functionality. And, today, I’m wondering if there is a better way…

In my blog post on retweets, I suggested that the RT can be used to flag up interesting comments, posts or links. It does this in a very simple way: by putting the tweet in question into the stream of your followers (this happens in both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of the RT).

I think this might be a broken feature however. There are problems with the old RT function – for example, a popular link can crop up time and time again in your feed and some tweeters who RT too often can become irksome.

The new method has its flaws too, with random tweets assigned to people you don’t follow cropping up out of the blue.

What about the favourite feature?

With these questions in mind, I was interested to read a post by Keith from Knowthenetwork.com, flagged to me by Courtney Engle examining the ‘favourite’ feature in Twitter.

I hardly ever favourite tweets. That’s not to say that I don’t have favouite tweets, I just don’t really see the need to ‘favourite’ them – where’s the gain or the value?

If I want to share a tweet, I’ll RT it. If I want to praise a fellow tweeter, rather than favouriting their tweet, I’ll probably just send them a reply or a DM. The only time I really use this feature is to flag something that I want to remember or possibly explore or catch up on at a later date – not how it was intended to be used.

Tagging tweets

Keith’s post looks at the inability to ‘tag’ content in Twitter. He points out that the ‘favourite’ feature is really the only way to do this and mentions how Robert Scoble is now using this feature, which is giving it more prominence.

But for me, the problem with the favourite feature is that it doesn’t allow me to see the favourites from those I follow very easily. If I want to check out Robert’s favourite tweets, I need to visit his page on a regular basis, or subscribe to an RSS feed – but with so many tweets being flagged, this could quickly become overwhelming.

Is following favourites the answer?

Wouldn’t it be useful to have the ability to subscribe or ‘follow’ favourites? Then, when Robert or anyone else you respected favourited a tweet, it would then show up in your feed.

With so much content out there, the problem we all face is keeping on top of it all in a manageable way. Tagging is certainly one way to do this, but the tags themselves have to be accessible in order to be useful.

So what about it Twitter…?

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Is Twitter opening a can of worms with the RT change?

November 11, 09 //
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Phil Sheard has written a post examining the impact to brands of the changes to retweets that Twitter is gradually introducing (there is no need for me to repeat what he says here as he puts it very eloquently).

I’m a big retweeter. And I use the ‘traditional’ RT for a variety of different reasons:

  • To show my ‘support’ or agreement with a tweet/idea/post or cause
  • To flag up interesting ideas/links to my followers
  • To credit the original author (or RTer) of the tweet

As I’ve suggested in the comments on Phil’s post, I think Twitter may be about to experience some backlash with this change. And to my mind, much of this comes down to the ‘if it’s not broken…’ argument. Personally, I don’t see a problem with the system as it exists at the moment.

Perhaps I am just afflicted by that very human condition, whereby we automatically shy away from ‘change’ – the ‘Facebook effect’. When something (like a social network) that we have a close attachment to undergoes a change, our automatic inclination is to resist it.

There is precedent here. In May 2009, Twitter made a subtle change to the way replies show up in your Twitter stream. There was a huge backlash initially to the move, but this soon abated and today, we still quite happily use Twitter.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter will experience the same backlash with the RT change, as it will fly under the radar for many users.

But, I do think Twitter has to be careful.

I love the fact that Twitter is a very simple, open platform that allows users to communicate and interact in whatever way they please. Yes, there are certain ‘conventions’ that crop up, but these aren’t really imposed from on high, rather, they are moderated by the community as a whole.

This is in stark contrast to other networks like Facebook, where the way you use the service is dictated by the network itself.

Is Twitter potentially in danger of pushing its agenda too much on its users? Or is a bit of organisation and order important and useful as popularity in the network continues to grow and user numbers increase?

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5 ways Twitter Lists could be used in the future

November 10, 09 //
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Twitter Lists are the latest Twitterati obsession. [If you don't know what they are, then this might help.]

Lists have obvious benefits. They give users another metric by which to measure their relative popularity and are (in all seriousness) a good way to discover new recommendations by trusted peers (or celebrities…).

But, I don’t think we are yet to see the full power of lists. In a widely unreported move a few days after the official roll-out, Twitter announced the introduction of a Twitter Lists widget (see above), allowing you to embed (on a website or blog) tweets from people on a particular Twitter List – this strikes me as nice additional functionality.

So what else could Twitter Lists bring? Here are my top five crystal-ball-gazing predictions:

  1. Yammer-like closed loop messaging – Lists are a great way to create subsections of followers. This has been possible for a while on Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, but lists could take this mainstream.
  2. Better conference backchannels – Using Twitter at conferences is a lot of fun. With lists, it would be possible to have a separate group of all conference delegates, making the feedback more focused. Maybe you would also be able to create lists based on GPS location to narrow it to particular conference rooms or even football stadiums for example.
  3. Segmenting of personal v. business tweeters – For the two years or so I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve used it 99% of the time for business. This has been mainly because my non-business friends weren’t using the service. That is starting to change dramatically and it would actually be quite useful to segment the two – both in terms of who I follow, but also in terms of what I say to different segments.
  4. Personalised news channels – Media organisations have been flocking to Twitter since it launched. But finding and following different outlets can be tedious and is not always perfectly suited to your interests or needs. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use Twitter Lists to create a tailored feed for particular subject areas – e.g. PR or the environment – taking sources from around the Twittersphere.
  5. Advanced eCRM – This would, like most of these ideas, clearly require extra functionality, but it would be great for companies to use lists (or allow their customers to use lists) to segment different user bases and send certain messages to different segments of people rather than using different Twitter accounts. Obviously to do this, you would need to be able to send to a list, rather than just using it to view tweets from certain people.

So there you go, some more likely than others. How do you think lists could be used in the future?

You can follow me on Twitter here!

Cool stuff – November 9, 2009

November 9, 09 //
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