Tuesday, September 29, 2009

STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me



by Jennifer Van Grove (re-posted from Mashable)

Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.

After dissecting over 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users’ status updates the professors concluded that 80% of users are “meformers,” or “Me Now” status updaters.

Meformers are “people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts, and emotions.” The rest (20%) are informers who use the channels to share informational updates like links news articles.


The rest of the story and the study can be found here.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Guess Who's Posting On PR Breakfast Club?


If you guessed me, you'd be right. My first post went up yesterday: PR TimeWarp: The Palace. Okay, so the title could be better but I'm just getting warmed up. What I am trying to do is examine the roots of Web 2.0 back from when the Web was just getting launched. There were many early seeds of social networking and interactivity in the initial launch of the Web and commercialization of the Internet. So, if you can come up with a better name for the series, feel free to comment or send me an email.

I am working on more pieces as we speak, so stay tuned.

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Overlooked Side of Social Media

Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management

By The Staff of the Corporate Executive Board

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

Unfortunately, few have thought very hard about managing these initiatives. In a classic case or "ready, fire, aim," companies are committing resources to social media efforts with very little process behind them. The result? A hodgepodge of unrelated initiatives, wheels re-invented and resources wasted.

The Corporate Executive Board has found that the best companies recognize that social media are just another set of promising tools and as such are to be understood, mastered, and used efficiently. Importantly, they also recognize that how they manage their social media efforts depends on where they are in the journey from initial discovery to mainstream use. That journey has three stages:

• Discovery: At this stage, the organization is just finding out about the potential uses (and risks) of social media for its purposes and making initial forays. The goal: understanding ("could this work for us?"). Since few resources are necessary at this point, companies don't need heavy managerial oversight. But they do need downside protection. Clear, well-communicated policies on everything from information sharing to appropriate language is in order.

• Experimentation: As an organization does more with social media, the importance of learning efficiently becomes urgent. At this point, companies need tighter oversight and coordination of efforts. There are a number of ways to create that kind of transparency and sharing, ranging from steering committees to tiger teams" to social media czars. These bodies should develop and steward a learning agenda for the firm's efforts, using each initiative to deliberately increase the institutional knowledge of social media use.

Measurement standards also become more important at this stage. The best companies settle on a consistent set of measures for similar initiatives, using that data to test and learn over time. Metrics like track-backs, for example, can clarify better or worse social media vehicles for a given objective.

• Adoption: While few companies currently find themselves in this stage, those that do loosen their managerial posture, moving away from oversight toward support. Here, the role of any central or dedicated management body should be one of education, coaching and provision of expertise. Some firms are building centers of excellence, repositories of people and knowledge about using social media. Metrics should shift here too, tailored for assessing efficiency and effectiveness of specific initiatives.

The short story: Social media isn't a fad about to fade away; it's a good idea for your organization to learn how to use it to your advantage. The best companies will learn faster and get more out of social media by aggressively managing their efforts.

Friday, September 4, 2009

How To: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business


by Josh Catone
Reprinted from Mashable

If you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (”#”) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a “hashtag,” and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies. In fact, hashtags were first popularized during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.

You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.

How to Utilize Existing Hashtags
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Because hashtags tend to spread so quickly and because Twitter users often search hashtags for content from people they aren’t following, using hashtags can be a great way to extend your reach on Twitter and connect with your current audience in a more meaningful way. There are a wide variety of already established hashtags — and new ones being created daily — that you can join. You need to be careful, however, that your use of hashtags is consistent with both your brand and the tag itself.

Unfortunately, as hashtags have become more popular, they’ve also become a vehicle for spam. You should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, and you should never stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results. Proper etiquette dictates that you should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

So which tags should you participate in? That depends wholly on your business and your purpose for using Twitter. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to participate in the #robotpickuplines hashtag if you own a health club and use your Twitter account to offer customer service to members. But if you own a record shop, you’ll more than likely want to join in the #musicmonday hashtag, in which people tweet about what music they’re listening to and suggest other musically-inclined users to follow every Monday. Or if you own a restaurant, why not tweet out your specials or
some recipes on #tastytuesday.

Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend?, a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business. Also, pay attention to tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. If it makes sense for your business to jump on board, compose tweets that are on topic and compatible with that hashtag.

How to Start Your Own Hashtags
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While you certainly shouldn’t use hashtags to describe all of your tweets, they can be very helpful for small businesses as a way to track social media campaigns or create memes that help establish a sense of community and build your company’s mindshare among your core customers. The first step in creating a hashtag is deciding on the tag word itself. You should pick something memorable, easy to spell, and perhaps more importantly, as short as possible. Remember that Twitter gives everyone just 140 characters per tweet, so no one wants half of it to be taken up by an unwieldy hashtag.

Once you’ve figured out the tag itself, the next step is simple: start using it and promoting it. Make sure your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile and add something of value to the conversation. Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag via other social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter. Tweet out calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals (but don’t overdo it!). For example, let’s say you own a bookstore, and you’re running a Twitter contest to give out a gift card to your store. Your explanatory tweet might be something like, “What’s your favorite summer reading material? Tweet using #beachreads to win a $100 gift certificate to Al’s World of Books!”

How to Keep Track of Hashtags
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Of course, now that you have people using your new hashtag, you need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the easiest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search. You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results. Monitter and TweetGrid are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.

You can also use the built-in search functionality of popular desktop clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, or set up alerts on business-oriented Twitter dashboards such as HootSuite or CoTweet.