Sneaky people are trying to spread malware and spam on Facebook and Twitter. The newest worm that is infecting Facebook is via direct wall posts. The language is as follows:
If you see this do not click on it, it will affect your computer because it is malware. If your computer is currently infected, change your password and delete all the posts in question.
John Botch
www.Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
Many celebrities how have over one million followers on Twitter. Kevin Smith (@ThatKevinSmith), the famous movie director, actor, and comic book writer, is one of them. However, unlike most of the One Million Follower Club, Mr. Smith actually routinely interacts with many of his followers. What’s more, Kevin Smith has also began using Twitter as a sort of stage, performing marathon Tweet sessions where he responds to questions posed by his followers. Unlike many other celebrities, Kevin Smith isn’t just on Twitter. He is actually using Twitter to build his brand and he is doing an incredibly effective job at it.
One of the most powerful benefits of Twitter is its versatility. Tweets can be sent and received in any number of ways. Twitter allows people from all over the globe, with all levels and types of communication technologies, to interact in a seemless conversation. A person can choose if she wants to talk with one other person or one million other people. This represents an incredibly powerful tool with almost limitless potential. However, sadly, many Twitter users think that a successful Twitter campaign means having lots of Twitter followers. That’s a myth. A successfull Twitter campaign uses Twitter to build, grow, and communicate with an audience.
Kevin Smith understands this. He uses Twitter on a regular basis to <gasp!> actually interact with his followers. This results in Mr. Smith building a relationship with his followers. He responds to what they Tweet. He answers their questions. He offers up his Twitter account as a way for his fans and followers to “speak” directly to him. Even better, because of this relationship, his 1,000,000+ followers actually pay attention to what he Tweets. Because Smith has built a relationship with his followers, his Tweets matter more to them than most of the others they follow. Kevin Smith has found a way to use Twitter to get his audience to pay attention to what he Tweets. How many Social Media Managers working for big corporations have yet to achieve something like that?
One of the ways Kevin Smith has been so effective at using Twitter is the way in which he responds to his followers. He doesn’t simply obide by the typical @UserName <insert response here> format. What he does is this…
See the difference? In his response Smith includes the question along with the Twitter user name of the person who posed it. This may seem like some stupid little detail, but it’s not. Because all of his followers can now see, in the same Tweet, the question and the response, the Tweet has more meaning. Had he used the typical @UserName <reponse> format, the only one would understand the response in its propper context would be @UserName. Most of his other followers would have no clue as to what Smith was responding to, and without context, it would have no meaning to them. As a result, they would simply tune it out.
Kevin Smith is using Twitter more effectively than most. He has used it to grow his audience, build a relationship with that ever-increasing audience, and found a way to add value to his Tweets in the minds of his followers. He talks with them, not at them. Anyone, or any organization, seeking to do the same would be well advised to pay very close attention to Kevin Smith and his Twitter account. He’s showing how it’s done.
-Dan Cheek
www.LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Many more companies are starting to get on the social media band wagon. It is a subtle way to sell things on a social media site. It is not your typical sales style that these companies are used to. Every company want to be advertising in these social media sites. It is really word of mouth marketing in the end. Someone is usually spreading the word about the company at all times of the day and in all the contries that your brand has a presence in.
Multinational corporations, such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co., are beginning to use social media to increase positive sentiment, build customer rapport and correct misinformation, says Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based director of social media.
“Having the world’s most-recognized brand, we feel like there’s an obligation or a responsibility when people are talking about us; we have a duty to respond,” Mr. Brown says.
Best Buy Co. Inc. riled up the social-media world earlier this summer with a job posting for a senior manager of emerging media marketing. One of the job requirements, as originally posted, called for applicants to have more than 250 followers on Twitter. (When that caused an online backlash, the electronics retailer opened the process of crafting a job description to the public.)
The larger companies are starting to catch on to this free advertising source. Why wouldn’t a company use social media? Social media is so important and moves at such a rapid pace that it can become overwhelming for one person to handle. Most of the complaints that people post on Twitter or Facebook want a fast response. So it is not just word of mouth marketing it is also part customer service.
The lightning-fast pace of social media, and Twitter in particular, has forced businesses to act in a whole new way, says Mr. Brown of Coca-Cola.
“If you don’t respond within three or four hours, you might as well not respond at all,” he says.
For example, a man on Twitter recently expressed annoyance at his difficulty in claiming an all-expenses-paid trip he’d won through the My Coke Rewards program. He Tweeted, “Coca-Cola, bring down your drawbridge,” Mr. Brown recalls. Within half an hour, Mr. Brown had engaged the customer on Twitter, got on the phone with him and resolved the problem.
Not long after, the man changed his Twitter avatar to a can of Coke Zero.
It is so important to have a one-to –one conversation with your followers even if the post is positive. Keep your followers engaged in the conversation public square that we call social media.
-John Botch
www.Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
Kutano is the name of the new competitor of AddATweet. Kutano runs as a browser plug-in. The basic part of this plug in is that you can leave a comment on the website you are visiting. There is another tab to this plug-in that lets you talk to community members that are on the same site as you.
When AddATweet launched we were immediately intrigued by the idea of using a Twitter () app to create a web commenting system. The idea is certainly a sound one, which is why we’re not surprised to see a competitor already emerge on the scene.
Kutano, which launches today, is also a browser add-on for adding comments to web pages, but this one functions as a Twitter client, a là TwitterFox (), with an intelligent automatic link-aggregating component, and a way to add instant conversation threads and tweets to a web page. It’s a web browsing Twitter utility you never knew you wanted.
Kutano is pretty darn impressive. After installing the plug-in, and creating a Kutano account (a step AddATweet doesn’t require), the app loads in a left-hand frame within your browser. You can use it like any other basic Twitter app to keep up with your Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, and followers. But the beauty of the tool is that you can use it while you browse to create, or add to, a comment thread on a web page, view the tweets that link to a particular page, follow people from within the app, retweet, and tweet your replies and comments to Twitter.
For example, for any public page that you browse, you’ll notice two applicable Kutano tabs you can use to engage with page or website content. The first tab is like a conversation hub. Click the bubble icon to display page and site discussions created by other Kutano members. Click a conversation to view comments, add your own, reply to a user, follow a user, and optionally select to tweet your response or receive notifications of new activity for the discussion thread.
Should you want to start a new topic for discussion via Kutano, simply hit the plus sign at the top (in the discussion panel), name your discussion topic, and choose whether or not you want to tweet the topic.
The other tab with page related content offers up tweets penned by Twitterers related to site content, and it functions by pulling in tweets with the specific URLs from the page or website as shared on Twitter. Here you can view page or site-wide tweets, reply or retweet those tweets, click to follow the Twitterers in question, or add your own tweet.
This is the newest type of add on that lets you leave a comment to webpage and business owners. This concept is great on paper, but the question is will people take to Kutano like they have embraced Twitter? I think that Kutano will not have a problem with that at all.
John Botch
Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
This all goes back to the topic that has run through some of my previous blog posts. Word of mouth marketing runs throughout all types of marketing. Just think about how you use twitter and facebook. They both are relationship sites whether you like it or not.
Do Facebook & Twitter have any intrinsic value. Is it possible the value is between people and profiles and not the site? Take out the people, leave the content. Is there’s value and power to influence?
Twitter is a bit easier to look at this way. I tweet around 4 to 5 times a day on average. I probably read dozens of tweets a day. I rarely go to Twitter.com. My relationship with Twitter.com is nonexistent. For me, Twitter is actually more of a relationship API than a website.
Now this is something for marketers pause and consider. Twitter.com is as relevant as the concrete poured in the foundation of my neighbors house. The site is a construct where relationships happen but it does not create, foster or enable the relationships, therefore measuring the value of the concrete is erroneous.
Now can we take this even further and consider if ANY website holds value? Is it possible that nearly all traffic on the web is some form or relationship media, where the value and influence is between personas and not between the site and the visitor.
I recently tweeted on this and got a response claiming that even with social media, it is not always about relationships. The example given was a user recieved needed technical answers he was seeking from people he did not know, who had tweeted out into the ether.
From my perspective this person trusts the collective intelligence and personas of the Twitterverse. He is using the Twitter API as a channel to connect with people he doesn’t otherwise have access to. I believe that IS relationship media at work. He has definitely moved past finding value in a site or destination in exchange for connecting with expert personas.
Even beyond social interaction I think we can see the web has shifted primarily to relationship media. Consider the 90/9/1 rule where 90% of engagements on any social site are people consuming but not participating in the conversation. I see a relationship here. The 90% has a relationship with the 10% of content producers. And that relationship is often more sought after because it is deeper and more trusted than most institutional sources.
So for marketers what does this mean? I can’t help but wonder if we have moved to relationship media while not fully aware, and not comprehending what it means. Are we continuing to build sites while focused on the value of these destinations, meanwhile ignoring the value of personas & relationship fostering, that may truly be at the core to building relevance and influence on the web?
As long as you keep the conversation brand related when you find new customers, you should have success. It takes five minutes to set up both types of accounts. Twitter makes this next part easier. All you have to do is search for your brand, or you could search for people where you live. Most likely you know some of your customers by name already. You could also make a list of customer’s names or have a signup sheet or contest. If they want to sign up to become your friend on facebook or give you their twitter name so that you can follow them on twitter, and hope that they return the favor. This can all become time consuming especially if you have a store front with an online presence. Social media is relationship management for businesses. It allows businesses to protect their brand and gain new customers in the process.
John Botch
Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
I don’t know if you heard or not, but there is a new retweeting site that just opened up today. Retweet.com is the website. They want to overtake tweetmeme.com and are not shy about it. Retweet.com is offering a chance for their first million users to win $10,000.
We’d like to take this opportunity to announce the public release of Retweet.com and give you a brief overview of what makes it special. When retweet.com goes live tomorrow [ 8/19/09 ] at around [ 12pm EST ] you will find we are running a competition to entice early adopters of tweetmeme.com to try retweet.com. The competition page, that will be found here ( http://retweet.com/win10k ) tomorrow will be announcing our $10,000 reward that will go to one lucky blogger who implements our retweet button, rewarded once we reach 1 million visitors. We believe that users should have the opportunity to be rewarded for helping a website succeed.
…
Retweet is the official place to find real-time news on popular stories, images, and videos. We provide this service by scanning thousands of updates on the worlds most popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.com and with the help of the future users whom have added our retweet button to their blog. The word retweet has now become one of the most popular terms online and thus makes the retweet.com brand name very powerful. We now live in a world where for the first time in history real-time news is possible thanks to modern web technologies and crowd sourced content creation, retweet is here to leverage this modern way of announcing and discovering news. We pride ourselves in providing “news for the people, by the people”.. meaning we do not decide what news finds it’s way to the home page of our site.”
It’s interesting that they publicly claim that they’re directly targeting Tweetmeme users. It’s also interesting that the $10k prize requires a million visitors. What standard will they use to measure that?
They have the original retweet button because they are retweet.com. The page looks appeasing when reviewing the front page. They seem to want to be your new news source for bloggers. A lot of people have already signed up, so you better make sure that you get in before their 1 millionth customer to be eligible for the contest.
John Botch
Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
Pear analytics has done a study on Twitter. They found out that 40% of tweets on Twitter are useless babble.
Twitter followers are more likely to hear about what people are having for their lunch than read anything actually interesting or worthwhile, according to Pear Analytics.
Less than one in ten tweets have any real “pass-along value” and more than 40 percent of tweets are “pointless babble,” a study by the research firm showed.
The research carried out by Pear Analytics was designed to take a snapshot of what people actually used the booming social networking site for.
They delved into the endless steam of tweets every 30 minutes between 11 am and 5 pm Central Standard time on weekdays over two weeks to collect a total of 2,000 messages.
They then grouped the messages into one of six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value.
Messages classed as babble included such gems as “I’m having a sandwich,” Pear Analytics said.
Only 8.7 percent of messages were found to have pass-along value. Pointless babble was the largest category with 40.5 percent. Conversational tweets were 37.5 percent, but self promotion and spam only grabbed 5.9 percent and 3.8 percent respectively.
Fears that the site was becoming overrun with spam and self-promotion from companies getting on the Twitter bandwagon were refuted by the findings, Pear Analytics said.
“With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else,” Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, said of the findings.
Most people are just using Twitter to post anything, even if it is pointless. I guess people like seeing their own posts on their Twitter page. Will this change in the coming years? I think that as more businesses join Twitter much more of the tweets will be self promotion or even spam. Twitter was meant to be there for people to tell their friends what they are doing. We have to also look at conversational tweets. These are the best tweets for businesses because word of mouth is still king.
John Botch
laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
What is behind these short url’s that social media site Twitter is using? There is a new company out there now that specializes in URL mapping. They will redirect the short url to website that you post.
With a vested interest in making sure that people can use short URLs confidently, many of the leading short URL providers have signed up for 301works, an independent URL mapping directory service (you can think of it like archive.org but for URL mapping). The venture will be managed by GNIP, Inc. The announcement reads:
Leading Internet software companies have joined together to launch an independent URL mapping directory service. The new service will allow all participating short URL providers the ability to make their mappings available as regular updates or as a historical archive through the directory. The service is planned to launch in the next few weeks after participating companies individually inform their respective user communities of their planned participation. Once launched the service will be available at 301works.org and will be managed and run by Gnip, Inc. while the participating companies work to identify an appropriate non-profit organization to manage the directory long-term.
It is with these shared goals for improved permanence and transparency that Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, bit.ly, Cligs, Gnip, URLizer, and urlShort have joined to launch this new organization.
In plain English: the URL shorteners want to establish some sense of permanence to the mappings they provide, making users more confident that their links won’t just break at some point in the future. It’s a good first step towards addressing concerns about the dangers of short URLs.
So if this non-profit that they want to come up with might give users more certainty that their short link will be redirected or even stolen. Twitter uses these short urls for their users. More companies are on board to use short url’s. It looks like short url’s will start becoming a thing of the future. The one thing that I really want to know is why Twitter uses these short url’s? Is it because they didn’t want people to keep on tweeting about their business? Is it because they want people to see as many tweets as they can fit on a page?
John Botch
Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
As if you don’t know and are living under a rock somewhere social media is taking the world by storm. Marketers are jumping on the bandwagon at a rapid pace. Marketers are actually realizing the power of social media. It gives them an added advantage to target the customers that use or are more likely to use their product. Direct marketing works especially if it is targeted to a select group of people.
Earlier this year, we reported that 63 percent of companies planned to increase their spending on social media in 2009. Thus, it’s not too surprising that a recent study from the Association of National Advertisers reveal that 66 percent of marketers have now used social media in some capacity in 2009.
Also not surprising, the top platforms being utilized: Facebook () (74%), YouTube () (65%), Twitter () (63%), LinkedIn () (60%). Combined, this usage represents significant growth from 2007, when the same survey indicated that just 20 percent of marketers were using social media.
Although social media marketing is clearly on the rise, it remains a relatively small part of most marketing budgets. ANA reports that the bulk of spending will still go to maintaining a company website, search marketing, and online display ads.
That said, social media (including blogs) remains the quickest growing marketing segment, and as we recently reported, it’s expected to grow to a $3.1 billion industry by 2014. In all, it looks like social media marketing still has a healthy amount of growth in front of it.
Advertisers are more willing to use social media but seem to not give it a large part of their budget. Why would they if you know that you are marketing to a certain group of people? It is cheaper to advertise on social media websites and websites themselves than to use mass media like TV or radio. With social media you do not have to advertise to a large group of people and hope that you get a handful of new customers. You can advertise or friend a customer or potential customer and be able to turn that lead or friend into a new customer at a better rate.
Companies and marketing companies will realize that it doesn’t cost that much for social media than any other type of mass media. Who wouldn’t want a better return on their advertising investment? Every company is always looking for new customers right? Social media marketing might be labor intensive but it cost less compared to mass media.
John Botch
Laserburnmedia.com
john@laserburnmedia.com
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