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Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Another Twitter Toy For Marketers: Twitter Grader and Twitter Elite

Deep down most marketers are stats junkies at heart. Even though we realize that your Alexa ranking may not mean a whole lot, especially since a number of Facebook games and applications have muscled their way into the top 50,000, we still look at our Alexa rankings every now and then.

So with micro-blogging platform Twitter providing API (application programming interface) access to developers, it was only a matter of time before a slew of twitter “stats” and “analytics” services made their way onto the market.

Do they really mean anything?

Is it statistically significant?

There’s still a big question mark in that area.

What has happened though is that these services have turned out to be great linkbait, and they seem pretty viral too, with various twitter users announcing/bragging about their “Twitter Elite” status (even if you are the top Twitter dawg in your village of 500….)

The Twittersphere has been abuzz with various users announcing their “Twitter Elite” status.

twitter grader

Are you a member of the elite? Check out the twitter grader and find out.

The service seems simple and (more…)

Social Media Menace: A Guide To How To Irritate Friends and Make Enemies

If you use social traffic channels and social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, it’s not uncommon to receive junky marketing message from strangers promoting acaiberry, dating offers, viagra, gaming and adult offers.

But what happens when friends send you these messages?

irritation

Granted, it won’t be as overt as a “Hi, I’m Natasha, I would like to chat with you

Talk to me now at: [Adult friend finder affiliate link]”

But still, some of the things that rankle my (more…)

Survivor, Big Brother And The Social Dynamics Of Twitter

I’d been talking to Software Project’s Mike Peters about the value of social media tools like Twitter and how much value they add to your internet business, and he came up with some interesting analogies.

In the “chatterspace” of micro-blogging platforms like twitter, it’s not uncommon to see posts like “Feeling hungry. Going to get a burger” or “Just picked a bunch of lint from my belly button. Yuck!”. The question is, does this help or hurt your brand?

Mike alluded platforms like Twitter to the reality show “Big Brother” where “voting is done by people at home, people at home typically vote out all those who don’t say much, don’t swear, don’t take enemies etc. Those type of people typically end up being the first to leave”

As the current situation stands, the rabble rousers sometimes do end up with the most number of twitter followers by virtue of (more…)

Twitter Metrics Are A Complete Waste Of Time

I had a twitter conversation with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews’ new Twitter directory/indexing service Twellow.com.

twellow

Great things about Twellow:

  • Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
  • Groups related twitterers together

It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.

The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.

The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.

But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.

Could social networks be (more…)

Will John Reese’s Marketing Tactics Break Twitter?

There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.

And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.

So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?

Is he “gaming” twitter?

I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.

And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?

But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.

Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.

Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.

On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.

Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.

At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.

I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.

The Broken Twitter Web

The Twitter team has been working overtime with fixes intended to resolve the growing pains associated with the microblogging service, with regular updates at the Twitter blog and the Twitter status blog.

I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.

The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?

Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:

blackinkproject

The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.

If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.

[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]

So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.

I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?

Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.

Take a look at the left (more…)