Marketing by tweet! The future?

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William Eggleton

When I first was told about what it was that twitter does I resisted joining strongly. Until doing COMP3505 and having to join I was very much against the idea of useless updating of “What are you doing?” all the time and just filling up everyone’s head with more pointless rubbish. However after signing up I found myself ‘tweeting’ all the time. There are many mislaid ideas about the productivity potential for micro-blogging sites, in this case twitter. Twitter provides both an individual and commercial communication tool. I’m going to explore a bit about the idea of twitter being used as a commercial communication tool.

For those of you who don’t already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to answer the question “What are you doing?” constantly, within 140 characters. Some people do use twitter to report the uninteresting rubbish that they are actually doing like “doing the dishes” or “walking to the bus” but many others use it for sharing links of interesting things they have found on the web as well as a little bit of personal/business info.

Many commercial applications of Twitter are already evident, including politicians positing updates like Barack Obama did throughout his campaign. The BBC, Apple, online retailer Woot, and many more post regular updates throughout the day. These are just a few of the companies that already use twitter to promote their products. The sort of things businesses can use twitter for are: news items, special offers with coupon codes, business news etc.

Twitter also provides a search function which most certainly is a very useful tool in both personal and commercial instances. For instance today I found out that BMW made a customer unhappy and he Twittered about it. I learned that Weather Underground has some really cool iPhone application and that the chocolate cake at Macaroni Grill is deadly.

As a business, researching if your company is getting any tweets can provide invaluable feedback from actual clients if they like/dislike your products or service. This is just another feature of twitter that can be used highly effectively to research for your commercial gain.

When creating a personal brand, the key is not to see it as an individual post more an overall impression and value that is made over time. Each entry is just the beginning of an idea for the overall picture.

Twitter is the fastest growing member community destination online in the last year as seen below.

Fastest Growing Member Community Destinations in February 2009

RANK	Site	Feb 08	Feb 09	% growth
1	Twitter.com	475,000	7,038,000	1382%
2	Zimbio	809,000	2,752,000	240%
3	Facebook	20,043,000	65,704,000	228%
4	Multiply	821,000	2,394,000	192%
5	Wikia	1,381,000	3,758,000	172%
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work

Seeing these figures clearly shows the potential influence of successful implementation using twitter as a commercial communication tool. The average user goes to the site 14 times a month and spends average seventeen minutes on the site. However as well as this twitter offers another feature, tweet by text! In January 735 000 different users accessed twitter via a mobile phone, this gives twitter a whole new mobility. The text messaging offers another platform for consumers and businesses to utilise to their advantage.

The wide range of users can be seen by the following table:

Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic

Age Group	Unique Audience	Composition %
2-17	250,000	3.6
18 - 24	**	**
25 - 34	1,379,000	19.6
35 - 49	2,935,000	41.7
55+	1,165,000	16.6
65+	477,000	6.8
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work **These demographics have insufficient sample sizes

This shows the variety of users and again illustrates the potential, if used correctly, to connect with a very large audience.

So even though when I started using twitter I thought it was mindless drivel, I have come to understand and see how much influence it can have if you keep in mind the bigger picture that your tweets portray. It can be a very effective marketing tool for connecting with a very wide user base.

You should think of Twitter as a means to get instant public messages out to your audience, whether it is an audience of colleagues or potential customers.

The key focus is the instant messaging, the wide user base and the invaluable research it can give if used to your advantage.

I hope this will all open your eyes to the possibilities of the use of Twitter.

Below I have provided some links I found useful and also some that are just interesting, enjoy!

Additional resources on using Twitter as a networking, PR and communications tool can be found at:

• Rafe Needleman: Newbies Guide to Twitter
• Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
• Jeremiah Owyang - What The Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter
• B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog: How to Write Kickass Twitter Posts
• PR Squared: Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
• WebProNews: Microblogging What’s it Good For?
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
• Red66 - Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool
• Eleven Marketing- Add Twitter to Your Internet Marketing Toolbox

Tools to make your “twittering” more productive:

• Twitter Groups - Allows you to tag your followers into different groups. Then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time.
• TweetVolume - A frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter.
• Twitter Tools - A huge collection of Twitter tools by platform as well as plugins, web services and widgets.
• All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place - Maybe not all, but a very large list of desktop clients, mobile apps, mashups, plugins, tools and widgets.
• Twittown Unofficial Twitter Community which includes Twitter Forge, a listing of Twitter plugins, Ttools, mashups and services.

Reflections

Ryan Smith
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Introduction

Social networking sites are not a new thing, but with the increase in public awareness and advances in mobile computing over the last few years, they are becoming an important part of many people’s day to day life. This blog post will reflect on some of my experiences with using these social applications over the last couple of months, in particular it will focus on last.fm, twitter and facebook.


Background

Last.fm
Last.fm tracks the music that you listen to and provides you with recommendations based on your listening habits. The site also offers more social options like journal entries about your listening habits message boards to discuss music.

Facebook
Facebook is one of the most widely know and used social networking sites of the last few years and is intended to help you keep up to date with people that you don’t see on a regular basis.

Twitter
Twitter is a message system that allows you to announce to anyone who wants to follow your account what you are doing at any given time.


Reflections


I have always been reluctant to use social networking sites and there are two main reasons why, I am not comfortable with sharing information online and I have never seen any real advantages over email, instant messaging or actually talking to my friends in person. It has only because it’s compulsory for this course that I have actually given any of the myriad of social networking sites out there more than a second glance.

I have been using Last.fm for as few years now and I have never thought of it as a social application, I tend to think of it useful application to keep track of what bands I listen to and some of my favorite artists where recommended to me by Last.fm and it is probably my favorite social application because it doesn’t seem to push the need to be constantly posting and checking your profile to get the best use out of it.

After resisting for a long time I signed up to face book at the beginning of this year, as I thought it couldn’t hurt to try and get back in touch with people that I don’t see very often, but I was never able to embrace the idea of online social networking. So after setting up my facebook account with very minimal amounts of information and the privacy settings on their most restrictive levels, it wasn’t long before I realized that there wasn’t much point in using the site if I wasn’t willing to use it properly. The real problem I had with the site was that I don’t want to present the same information to everyone in the same way, so I let my facebook account lapse and went back to using my phone and email to keep in touch with people.

Twitter is an interesting concept and I am still unsure about whether it is something that I want to use. My first impressions of twitter I couldn’t understand why people felt the need to announce everything and anything that they were doing to whoever was willing to listen and while I am still not keen on announcing what I am doing, I think I will find it easier to share small meaningless parts of my day with everyone rather than share more important information with my contacts on facebook.



Conclusion


After using some of these applications for the purpose of this course I have come to understand some of their appeal and while I still don’t see a great deal of benefit to using most of these applications, I can see myself using some of them beyond the end of this course, but I don’t think that I will ever be completely comfortable with sharing personal information online.

Will Negative Impacts of the Technology Stop You Using Social Sites?

By Fatimah Az Zahra, 41910764

Introduction

The rapid change of technology grown over a past decade more or less has shifted the way how human interacts. One of the technologies is the Web 2.0 which has evidence in a history of World Wide Web where the use of the Internet put more focus on the interaction of the user. Inevitably, for the last several years, as one of the effects from that, the number of users of the social networking website has risen considerably as stated in article entitled Social Networking Sites Show Worldwide Growth (author: K. C. Jones, 2008) [0], “The number of new social networking site users has grown by 25% in the last year”.

Background

In order to write this reflection, I have observed some of the social networking site which might support these following paragraphs. The first one is Facebook, a huge social networking site which allows the users to join networks, share what’s on their mind, share multimedia files, create groups, and also send messages. Another one is Blogger, one of the largest online blogging tools owned by Google. It permits users to write their opinions or share their knowledge and then their writing will be published in their personal pages.

Focus

My focus is on showing that the negative influence of social networking sites as the effect of the growth of technology is not that horrible, based from my experience and a bit of observation using them. Because I believe there are a lot of good things by using social software and I think sometimes people over critic the use of social networking sites without comparing it with good things existed.

Reflection

What attracts me is that the number of Internet users in developed country is merely unbelievable. Based on the Internet World Stats [1], the estimated Internet users are approximately 1.600.000.000 for 31 March and those are most occupied by Asia region. According to the article titled ‘The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding (author: Neville Holmes, University of Tasmania, 2008) [2] ,

“China now has more Internet users than the US and Internet use is growing rapidly in many developing countries. At this stage, much Internet usage in poorer parts of the world occurs via mobile phones, often at the level of text messages. This can be beneficial to Third World people who can access such services. Indeed, the development of cheap but powerful mobile phones will mean that within a few years the majority of personal Internet and Web traffic will flow through such devices. However, the significant danger is that once the Internet and Web become so much more widely used through cheap mobile devices, the many more people using them, particularly the young, could become less understanding. In less-developed communities, where personal relationships are more crucial to daily life, lessened understanding could be disproportionately harmful.”

 

China now surpasses U.S. in number of internet use and that occurs mostly through mobile phone since there are a lot of mobile phone providers give services that easily permit us access the Internet. Also, the appearance of the affordable-priced mobile phones but are compatible with that services make the traffic of Internet use in poor area of the world keep raising.

Seeing evidence above, the possibilities for computer scientists to develop that kind of technology or such are widely opened. And also, more scientists dig it deeper as the worldwide market is quite promising. For instances, nowadays we often find mobile phones provide a Wi-Fi service that allows users to access Internet anytime from their mobile phone. Additionally, more and more people use their CDMA phone as a modem for browsing Internet.

Inevitably, the rise of number of Internet users causes the number of users social networking sites booms. This is a phenomenon. However, besides the gutsy computer technology I have mentioned, there are also disadvantages of widespread of the social networking services as there are more and more people criticize the use of social software and such. One of disadvantages is a behavioral degrading and its relation to antisocial behavior as an influence from additivity which stated by the author in that article,

“As a consequence, face-to-face social interaction, when it occurs, tends to be competitive rather than cooperative, based on satisfying individual needs regardless of its effect on other people. Other people are seen as threats and constraints rather than as potential friends.”

Or, for more precise, this is the article whose author trashed out the 7 deadly sins of Facebook [3].

Let’s take a look. Mostly, what they want to stress is the implication of the interaction between humans which has already replaced by the online social networking so there are deviation of the behavior which can cause social disintegration. But is that the case? Then we start minimizing the use of the social networking sites? I don’t think so.

                Facebook

To be honest, I am not such a person who is addicted to Facebook like young people elsewhere. I am not quite enjoying to accept hundreds invitations, reading a lot of junk mails, or actively commenting in friend’s photos just because it can somehow expose myself since there is a notification feature provided by Facebook can be seen in the homepage of our friends. And, yes, it makes Facebook really good in terms of awareness. With that, users will know what happened to their wall, groups, photos, friends, etc. It also supports the users’ conversation through the wall --which allows allow user not only sending a text but also a gift—super wall, or even instant messaging.

 Anyway, I have an experience using one of the features called notes in Facebook. At that time, I had to invite friends (wait, the words invite and friends don’t refer to Facebook term) formally in some events which enforced me to let them know about the details of the event. As usual, I put an invitation in our mailing list and waited the response to that invitation, whether they could or couldn’t be there. Surprisingly, an unusual thing happened, there were no comments after 24 hours waiting. This thing had prompted me to do something different; wrote note in Facebook and tagged them one by one. And it worked! Just after tagging them, most of them replied the notes and the communication happened. What a different!

Another case was still continuing the invitation part which was uploading photos. It was a quite new thing to upload our pictures in the Facebook since my friends and I have already had storage for our pictures which is in our mailing list. As my friend request, I uploaded the photo to that storage and after waiting a couple of day there were no comments on it. Everybody kept silent to that photo, unlike usual, but that was not that surprising as I’ve experienced in inviting them. What I did is exactly the same and the response was also the same. Wow.

Those two things were just examples I want to show you and there are so many good things starts from Facebook.

What I learned from that experience is, this is the time we can’t hide from the gutsy of the technology. It will adjust us and we will also adjust it. Such as Facebook which I think a very superb one as it can do what other social software do, such as, posting the status, creating groups, sharing multimedia files, tagging, and so on. Most of social networking site are intentionally aimed to support certain group in the society so that they can interact comprehensively. The point is, if we already have a community that uses certain social software, it can integrate by itself. And that’s how we live in this era

                Blogger

Blogger is one of the largest online blogging tools, owned by Google. It is free and quite easy to use since it provides some templates that can be used by the beginner users. It permits users to write any topics they like with any ways they want in their personal pages. It also allows other people to put comment in their post since it support the conversation a la blogger.

This blogging idea is raised for some reasons. The first reason is a media for those who love writing. The second reason is some groups of people believe that blog can enhance their life because they not only can share their opinion but also their knowledge which can be useful by others. The third reason is some groups of people, especially the youth, who loves their personal story to be publicized and being read by other people finally find a quite simple media which can do what they want. Another one is blogging is one media for campaigning, or, perhaps, for gaining money as the use of internet has shifted and reached business area.

So, what the negative side of blogging?

When I used Blogger for the very first time, I found it easy to use as it provides some templates which can be easily chosen and directly seen in our pages. With just clicking a wanted template, I have already made my pages look more beautiful and attractive. Blogger also keep the navigation of the blog easy since it has a dashboard containing buttons to manage the blog including create a new post.

As I said above, Blogger also supports comments related to the post which can be managed by the users from the Settings. Unlike blogging tool provided by multiply where only a registered user can give comment to a blog posting, Blogger allows non-Blogger users, people with open-ID, or even anonymous to give comments for certain post. From my experience, I found it quite interesting since I can prevent my blog from unwanted comments addressed to my writing just with a couple simple steps. You will find it more interesting since Blogger also maintain the privacy issue of the writer such as creating comment moderation.

The enjoyable of using blogger suddenly disappeared when my blog was hacked, in other words, my Google account was also stolen. The content of the blog was changed to something irrelevant and tend to humiliate me while I couldn’t access my account and there is no one to ask for help. She or he also changed the registered email address in it which made me didn’t know what to do. This happened for about couple of days until I finally found the form provided by Google which can help me tackle this problem. And yes, it took about ages to find appropriate form.

I realize that this was one of the bad effects of cyber world that might be harmful anytime, anywhere. And as a blogger who already had a community, I can understand how the other bloggers changed their attitude to me. But, there was a time when all the situations came back as usual. Where I am not afraid being a blogger anymore.

Having that experience, I didn’t directly conclude that I didn’t want to use that kind of technology anymore. The most important thing is how we learn from the past. I am still a blogger who has community that communicate each other with responding not only the content of the writing but also the appearance of the page such as widgets and plug-in in it. However, I still consider Blogger as one of a learning media since I found so many tutorials, or even lecture materials.

Conclusion

From those paragraphs above, I can conclude several things. The first one is, we have to realize that we are not living in the past, meaning that the technology has grown so fast and we have to face it. One of the evidence is the growth Web 2.0 which more or less shifts how the people communicate through internet. The second one is, while a group of people may keep talking about the drawback of Internet use, I still believe that the social networking sites have more positive influence on social life since it can support the needs of the group existed in society since we are all social creature. And Yes, I will still using social sites because actually, the drawback of technology can be managed by us.

References:

[0] Jones, K. C. "Social Networking Sites Show Worldwide Growth." 2008. 3 Apr. 2009 .

[1] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

[2] Holmes, Neville. "The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding." The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding (2008): 106-08.

[3] Hoskins, Guy. "The Seven Deadly Sins of Facebook." Helium. 2008. 3 Apr. 2009

[] Viller, Stephen. "Introduction to CSCW."

Stalkers Powered Up via Social Networking Websites

Bill Giang "ImNotAsian" 41078422

Technology today is an ever growing realm of new age gadgets, fancy designs and the race to capitalise on the next big craze. It seems that in earlier years, it was more about power and performance as users who were more up to date with the current technological advances were able to perform tasks more efficiently. However, what happens when that power was no longer needed to perform the tasks people wanted today?

The emphasis has greatly shifted from dependencies on the technology at hand to the users who will interact with it. As great as a high end PC is, that can run the newest games with all the settings set on maximum when you can’t play WoW, which would be completely redundant if there were no users. It would simply defeat the purpose of the MMPORG genre.

If we were to dumb the technology down further and really focus on the users, what type of interactions would occur that would cause what could be seen as a revolution in technology? At this point, the term “social technology” can be introduced, as the middle ground for these interactions with the aid of technology. What we are more interested in are the types of interactions that occur here and how they may differ from real life interactions – the good, the bad and the strange.

In today’s society, most (if not all) people are at least novice users of computers for either work or leisure. It is difficult to move about your regular routines without having been exposed to some of the current fads and internet crazes, one of which being facebook.

Founded in February 2004 [1], Mark Zuckerberg created what was then known as “thefacebook” [2]. It was originally only available to students of Harvard College at the time. After multiple expansions and the purchase of the domain, “facebook.com”, facebook was relaunched in 2005 and made public internationally [3].

With major corporations worldwide offering up to $1 billion for purchase of the social networking application [4], it was clearly confirmed that facebook had become quite revolutionary in its field and far exceeding the creator’s intention.

What exactly does facebook do that can generate this $1 billion interest? Facebook is a social networking website that allows its users to interlink between various networks. With the base functionality of searching and adding friends, messaging, and profile updating, it also offers much more with custom applications custom created by its users, most of which having one thing in common: a method of social interaction.

Even for myself, I originally signed up to facebook just to play tetris (now known as Tetris Friends [5]) and beat all my friends’ scores (which I did by a large margin in the end). I am not the type to sign up to any or all of these social networks but an external application within facebook gave me incentive to… that is, to play a game I liked with friends.

Initially, I had no intention of utilising any other functions that were available but now I find myself somewhat reliant on facebook to keep me up to date with what my friends’ status, activities, and announcements. I use facebook now as a segway between my friends simply because I don’t have the time to see everyone.

Having said that, this then presents the question of what or why do people use facebook? I see my own use of facebook as common and I would fall into the category of the typical user. Many of my friends are what I would describe as facebook addicts who spend much more time mainly for purposes of socialising and to a much lesser extent, exploring other applications.

“Social network sites provide simple, inexpensive ways to organize members, arrange meetings, spread information, and gauge opinion. As more systems emerge, there will be greater capacity for groups to organize and participate in collective action, a hallmark of civil society.” [6]

Since then I have signed up to various other social networking websites sampling what other services may appeal to me. These include Delicious (social bookmarking), Flickr (image sharing), Last.FM (music recommendation), Yahoo! Pipes (combining RSS feeds), FriendFeed (combining other social networking feeds) and Twitter (microblogging).

Of those listed, I found delicious and Yahoo! Pipes to have almost no social activity. Delicious would serve as a more powerful tool within interest groups as a method of sharing online resources. Yahoo! Pipes on the other hand just seemed redundant as FriendFeed offers similar results with less setup time. Perhaps this just deterred me (and possibly other users) to using it.

I could already share images and photos with facebook so Flickr was also made redundant (unless I wanted to share high resolution images – which I never did anyway). Last.FM was interesting as I could share music with users of similar music tastes without having any personal connection to them. It was purely for interest in the music. I did not generate any relationships with anyone nor did I care to. It simply served its purpose and continues to do so with minimal social interactions.

This brings me to the last two in FriendFeed and Twitter. As a social aggregator, FriendFeed was created late 2007 in order to consolidate updates from multiple social networks via RSS feeds.[7] It can already aggregate content from most of the major social networking websites such as facebook, MySpace, twitter, Last.FM, Delicious., just to name a few.

Although having limited experience with FriendFeed, I can see its potential in aggregating content from many sources in an incredibly efficient manner. However, with the amount of (personal) information available, this does present issues of privacy and security.

At first glance, Twitter seems to be facebook’s status function on its own – a smaller tool within a larger one. But at a closer look after sampling its functionality, it brings a whole new dimension of interactivity as updates are now sent to my personal mobile phone.

Founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006, Twitter allows users to send and receive others’ updates known as tweets [8]. These are displayed on their online profile for anyone to see. Users may then elect to receive these updates straight to their mobile phones, thus increasing the level of social interaction. Updates can be made via the Twitter website or through various other applications such as Tweetie, Twitterific, TweetDeck and feedalizr.

With all the other social networking websites, the one thing that kept me from getting too immersed into each world was the fact that it was still being accessed through a computer where the interaction stays. Twitter however forces its way past the realm of a computer terminal and straight to the user wherever they are.

Of course there are other things that do this but since twitter was the first to do it, it had a much bigger impact on me. Was my own personal space being invaded by a random message from someone via twitter? Obviously I am over dramatising the actual events but one can imagine the possibilities.

My first exposure to Twitter saw particular users, not only expressing their stalker-like behaviours, but embracing it as this marvelous tool opened many doors for their “extracurricular” activities.

This issue being raised here is the same for any tool whether it is a physical object or a virtual application: what type of restrictions or control is required or enforced on tools possessing the means to harm others? In reference to a physical object, it is unfair to blame the manufacturers of any vehicle if a motorist was to speed and inadvertedly be the cause of an accident resulting in fatalities. That is why road rules are set in place to control the drivers of the vehicles.

However, what are the implications of enforcing such strict rules for the use of social networking websites like Twitter, FriendFeed and even facebook? Users can raise the level of security of their accounts by not allowing others to follow them without their consent but what happens to those who do not have that setting in place?

In the design of Reno, a location enhance, mobile coordination tool and person finder [9], researchers investigated two security related issues; one of which focused on “the usage of the application within deception and denial practices common to mediated social communication.” [10]

Essentially, the design Reno supported acts of deceit that abused privacy features of the medium in an unauthorised manner. This matter was dealt with by interviewing test users of Reno. These interviews revealed that users would have been able to use Reno within denial and deception practices. With the control that Reno provided, it was sufficient for achieving plausible deniability.

This of course would not hold for misuse of all these social tools given the amount of control imposed on its use and the implications on the users. The only suggestion I can offer, with my limited knowledge of the laws or regulations that govern internet related non-compliant behaviour, is to protect your own interests at hand as information is so readily available at your finger tips.

References

1. "Executive Bios", Facebook.

2. Seward, Zachary M. (2007-07-25). "Judge Expresses Skepticism About Facebook Lawsuit". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539991204578084.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Retrieved on 2008-04-30.

3. Williams, Chris (2007-10-01). "Facebook wins Manx battle for face-book.com". The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/01/facebook_domain_dispute/. Retrieved on 2008-06-13. |

4. Delaney, Kevin (2006-09-21). "Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts With a Big-Money Deal". Dow Jones. p. 1.

5. Tetris Friends, http://apps.facebook.com/fbtetris/play.php

6. Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Charles Steinfield, “Social network sites and society: current trends and future possibilities”, ACM, Volume 16 Issue 1, January 2009.

7. “friendfeed.com” , FriendFeed.

8. Strange, Adario (April 20, 2007). "Flickr Document Reveals Origin Of Twitter". Wired News (CondéNet). http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/flickr_document.html. Retrieved on November 5, 2008.

9. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005

10. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005 p.8