Archives for the month of: January, 2010

Just a bit of fun – I’ve done at least 3/4 of these today alone. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments – I’ll add to the list…!

The fan-boy – probably best to avoid this person today

Likely tweet: “only 8 hours to go….”

The greater-than-thou – feels they are above all the Apple talk”

Likely tweet: “Apparently there is some sort of product launch going on today”

The I-like-all-gadgets-except-Apple – goes out of their way to buy anything but Apple”

Likely tweet: “If the iSlate ran Android it would be so much faster”

The journalist – riding the Apple buzz wave

Likely tweet: “We’ll be live tweeting blow-by-blow coverage from 6pm today”

The denier – will talk about anything apart from Apple all day

Likely tweet: “Nokia just launched the N756483647 everyone”

The PR analyst – will be consumed by the brilliant way Apple manages the PR around the launch

Likely tweet: “Love the way Apple leaked the news to the Walt Mossberg in advance”

The social media guru – will go on incessantly about how the buzz is being picked up on social media

Likely tweet: “Expect to see a fail whale very soon”

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The Twittersphere has been awash with users trying desperately to follow former Microsoft supremo Bill Gates, who joined the microblogging platform this week. So far he has about a quarter of a million followers – not bad for a few days.

He hasn’t really said anything particular interesting, though did manage a few words to Ashton Kutcher!

Part of me wonders how you can be who he is in technology without having tried Twitter before now. The other, more sceptical side of my being remembers that this is the week he launches his new blog for his foundation…

Far be it for me to utter the words “publicity stunt” or “ghost-tweeting”!

If this is all just PR, then it has to be commended as it is doing the job

Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have today released a revised version of their Social Technographics research – an analysis of the different profiles of social technology users.

If you haven’t come across them before, Social Technographics allow you to identify how certain users or segments of users participate in social technologies. As Bernoff explains:

“Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

The main update that we see today, compared to three years ago, is the addition of the conversationalists ‘rung’. Bernoff explains that this is in direct response to the growth of micro-blogging and, specifically, Twitter.

“Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.”

The Forrester analysis shows that conversationalists are 56% female (this is more than any other profile) and 70% are aged 30 and up.

Social Technographics are a great way to really understand audiences and Forrester has a great free tool on its website that allows visitors to construct Technograhics for specific demographics and audiences (e.g. by country, age etc.). At the moment it seems as though the tool hasn’t been updated with the new data, but I’d expect this to come shortly.

Everyone that knows me well, knows that I am slightly addicted to my iPhone. And, Nexus One withstanding (it’s not a game changer), I’m looking forward to upgrading to the iPhone 4G when it likely comes out later this year.

With Apple set to announce the iSlate next Wednesday, combined possibly with an upgrade to the iPhone’s OS, it’s set to be an exciting year for Apple fanboys.

So I was intrigued to see this little infographic yesterday from French website Nowhere Else – it’s enough to whet my appetite…!

Social networks have become a solid part of any marketer’s thinking over the last few years and more and more members of the general public are spending more and more of their online time there too.

I’ve spoken before about the ‘information overload’ problem that increasingly exists as more and more networks appear, with more and more users.

Analyst Charlene Li from Altimeter has put together a great little presentation that casts a crystal ball on future trends in social networking. It’s well worth a look:

Hat tip to Michael Litman

If there was any doubt about whether social media would play a big part in the forthcoming general election then mydavidcameron.com is proof.

Last week some spoof images of the Tory’s latest campaign posters started appearing on the Go Fourth Labour blog. This led to Clifford Singer – a creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency and creator of the Other TaxPayer’s Alliance website – to build mydavidcameron.com (itself a play on the myconservatives.com site) to encourage grassroots supporters to create and upload their own spoof posters.

And today, the Labour party has officially adopted some of the posters as part of their election campaigning by posting them on their website.

This move has got some Tory bloggers up in arms, but as Gordon Macmillan points out, they are all largely missing the point!

What this demonstrates is good engagement with the grassroots of the party and driving engagement from the bottom up – a strategy that is very effective in all forms of social media marketing, but in particular in political campaigning as a certain Mr Obama clearly demonstrated.

Yes, it’s pretty negative, but unfortunately that is UK politics for you and at the moment you feel the Labour party has to play hard to even stand any chance of changing the polls…

Over at the always interesting Econsultancy, Chris Lake has a great post looking at how Google is ranking real-time results in its search pages – i.e. what tweets does it feature and why.

I’ve been thinking a lot about real-time search recently so this post really stood out; this is a huge development and will grow in importance throughout 2010.

Chris references a post by David Talbot which quotes Google’s Amit Singhal, who says about real-time rankings:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers. One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation. As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well”

Chris has put also together a comprehenisve list of possible ranking factors that Google might be using for real-time search results.

But I’ve got another question which I think is potentially very significant – what if Google started attributing reputation to sites linked in real-times social networks and using this to influence positions of normal search engine rankings?

What’s to say if your blog post is retweeted by a ton of people why it should not gain some sort of reputation increase despite not being ‘linked to’ by another website?

I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, but I think there are some really interesting potential developments here for those of us that work with social media and search engine marketing.

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