Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

I didn’t notice this until about halfway through the Super Bowl when Gary Vaynerchuk pointed it out. It seemed despite the millions of dollars big brands spent on Super Bowl ads this year, not one (at least that I saw) specifically directed people to their Facebook pages. Maybe it’s because my “day job” is now mostly consumed by social media, but this strikes me as incredibly obtuse. And possibly downright irresponsible on the part of their agencies.

At some point someone should’ve mentioned to Dennys, “Hey, you know you could probably spike your fan count by a couple MILLION in one night. Sound good?” That they didn’t either means a) nobody brought it up, or b) it was shot down by someone with no appreciation of the impact of such things. Or maybe they just don’t care about Facebook. I think a big factor in this is that “traditional” agencies still haven’t the first clue how to advise their clients on social media. This even includes a lot of digital agencies that only want to sell a client a website.

Throughout the game, I was reminded of when I first got into this gig. Around 1998 I built a website for a prominent local real estate agency in my town of Marietta, Ohio. At the time, I wasn’t doing anything very advanced, and the realty listings were powered by a third-party Perl script. I think I got a couple grand from the whole shebang, but it was 10 times better than what I was replacing.

Once the site launched, I made a lot of recommendations to them about how to promote the site. I pitched the usual stuff, but what I really hammered on was that they were insane if they didn’t put their web address on every single “for sale” sign on every property they had listed. They’d nod and acknowledge it was a good idea, but they never ever did it. I left Ohio in 2006, but my gut says they probably still haven’t taken my advice.

And here we are in 2010, the future, for pete’s sake, and clients are still compartmentalizing their media. This is our website and this is our broadcast ad, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Stunning.

It should be pointed out (as was pointed out to me), a couple spots included Facebook and/or Twitter logos. That’s great, but they were small and in the last tenth of a second of the commercial. Notice all Sears ads now have social media logos? WTF? Do you expect people to touch their television screen and go to your Facebook page?

What Denny’s (and others) should have done was had a clear social media call to action. Yes, we’re doing free breakfasts, but you have to become a fan on Facebook to get it. Or, tack on something extra, like become a fan and get a free cappuccino to go with that free breakfast. As of this writing, the Denny’s Facebook fan page only has 25,000 fans. In my experience with Facebook-based promotions (where Engauge helped take a brand from 900 fans to 100,000+), I’m sure they could’ve multiplied that by a factor of ten or more tonight, easy.

Not sure when these agencies (or brands) will get with the program. As much as Facebook makes me roll my eyes sometimes, I cannot deny it’s become a force to be reckoned with. And it won’t be long before no brand can afford to leave it out of their strategy.

That said, as long as there are agencies bungling through this, firms like Engauge will continue to show them up.

According to a breaking-news Mashable article, Twitter will launch location-based trending topics. All I can say is, about time! This new feature will allow you to set your specific location, so that you can see what’s trending around you. It looks as though it will be limited to a few counties and cities, specifically 15 U.S. cities and Atlanta is one them.  I think this is a really cool feature and a good move for Twitter. It will be interesting for users to see what’s trending in their home city and it will be beneficial for local businesses/brands to see what’s going on around them.

Twitter will be rolling this feature out to 1% of Twitter users today. Unfortunately, I’m not in the lucky 1%, but Mashable was able to get some screenshots of the new feature. Check them out below.

UPDATE: I recently spoke with Joel @Rapleaf and he clarified that the data that Rapleaf collects is not used to deny individuals credit. Instead the information is used by the marketing departments to target potential customers (source).

While Twitter is free social media tool, there’s a price that one pays for tweeting. For example, there are plenty of good incidents caused by an embarrassing celebrity tweet (source). Aside from Hollywood celebrities, we’ve also had a local incident where a VP at the Atlanta PR firm Ketchum mistakenly used Twitter to exclaim that he “would die” if he had to live in Memphis while visiting his client, FedEx (source). This was a problem since Memphis is where FedEx is headquartered. Talk about a real Homer Simpson “Doh!” moment.

Until now, the price of tweeting was simply facing temporary ridicule and a small boo-boo to your online reputation. But that’s all changed now that data-mining firm Rapleaf announced that they are using data from Twitter to determine if you’re credit worthy collect demographics data in the public domain that’s exposed through social networking sites. According to an article in Fortune Magazine (source), the people that you “hang out” with can be used to determine if you’ll pay your bill on time (THE STRICKEN SENTENCE IS NOT TRUE!). As a technologist, I recognize that some analytics tools can also provide this extra level of information. For example, Pinch Media/Flurry can send demographics information from the Facebook application to your iPhone application. This simply add an extra dimension to data that you’re already collecting about the behavior of your mobile app users. Of course, this feels both cool and a bit creepy.

As a regular user of Twitter and Facebook, I’m less worried about what I say because I’m well aware that my statements are in the public domain. But, I’m reconsidering who I’m planning to follow or be-friend online. As a social networking contributor, you should consider whether you’re willing to allow a social networking site to expose that information to a search engine, like Google.

I guess that the quip “Be slow in choosing your friends” rings true.

It looks like Twitter is planning to release usernames that are either inactive or have been deleted. If you were a late adopter to Twitter, you may have had trouble trying to lock down a particular username (even if it was abandoned by other users) and there was no way to reach out to previously owned Twitter names. Twitter’s current policy states that “An account is considered inactive if it hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months. Inactive accounts may be automatically removed from Twitter. To keep your account active, be sure to log in and post an update within 6 months of your last update.”

So it looks as though all of those innactive accounts will be recycled and released back to the public. There is no official date of the release, but Mashable is already predicting a username land grab similar to the Facebook’s vanity URL rush back in 2009. Remember that day? When you got up at 7 am to get your customized Facebook URL … you know you did!

So, the question of the day is, are you happy with your Twitter username or will you go hunting for a new one?

Is Facebook becoming Twitter-ized?

Last September, Facebook introduced their own version of Twitter’s @mentions feature the ability to include other users in messages using the “@” symbol. The feature includes an auto-suggest, so as you type Facebook lets you select your friends from a drop-down menu. After you’ve tagged someone in an update, they get a notification and it gets posted on their wall. I thought this was a nice feature, but I haven’t found myself using it all that much.

New this week, Facebook has tweaked the “Share” feature. Now when you click to “Share” a link or a YouTube video from one of your Facebook friends or Fan Pages, you’ll now see a line of text that says “via [your friend's name].” However, it looks like you do have the option of removing their name (but you wouldn’t want to take credit for your friends cool viral video, would you?). Content that you share will appear on your wall as well as in your friends’ News Feeds.

This feature is essentially Facebook’s version of Twitter’s retweet. I’m not a huge fan of Twitter’s new version of the retweet (and other Twitter users feel the same way), but I think this feature could take off in Facebook. And I do agree with Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith in that this feature provides incentives for Fan Pages and Apps to encourage users to “reshare” feed content on their profiles.

What do you think of these “Twitter-like” features on Facebook? Like/dislike? Will you use them?