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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Elon’s iMedia Twitter scholarship

Elon University is taking social media in education to a new place: the application process. The iMedia program at Elon is holding a Twitter contest from December 1 to March 15, in which two winners will receive $3,000 scholarships. The scholarship will be for applicants of the M.A. in Interactive Media program.

The contest asks prospective students to tweet about how the iMedia program will shift their career in new directions. Prospective students have to compose a single tweet answering that question and include mention of the program’s Twitter handle (@elonimedia) and the hashtag #shiftimedia.

The director of Elon’s M.A. in Interactive Media program, David Copeland, told E-Net! News, “This year, through one of the most interactive social media tools, we wanted to offer prospective iMedia students a creative and fun way to realize the value of a master’s degree in Interactive Media.”

Twitter rolling out self-serve advertising platform

Twitter has begun rolling out a self-serve advertising platform that will allow advertisers to buy advertisements directly through Twitter instead of going through a sales rep. The platform is currently being tested with a handful of existing advertisers and is slowly rolling out to everyone else. The rumor mill has been talking about this self-serve ad platform for a while, and the platform finally arrived in November.

The platform allows advertisers to easily buy promoted tweets, trends, or accounts. With the platform, advertisers can choose a product, set a price and duration and pay with a credit card through their web browser. Since it is still in test mode, only tweets and accounts can be purchased right now.

Xeni Jardin live tweets mammogram

It may no longer be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but Xeni Jardin, technology writer and co-editor of Boing Boing, raised awareness last Thursday by live tweeting a mammogram appointment. Since two of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, she went to get a mammogram as a precaution, but has since found out that she has breast cancer.

Jardin’s experience was full of social media influences. She tweeted pictures (or as she called it, “Instagrammed her mammogram”) from the clinic of the equipment and of herself in the robe the center provides that she said “make you feel like its gonna be ok.” She also created the hashtag #myfirstmammo. Finally, she even found the Pink Lotus Breast Center via Yelp and mentioned their Twitter account in her tweets.

Since getting the results of the mammogram and confirming the results that she has breast cancer, the support from the Twitter community has been huge. She continues to tweet about what is to come and is encouraging her followers to go get mammograms.

#Cainwreck

You’ve probably heard that Herman Cain has suspended his bid for presidential nomination. However, you may not know that in his announcement, he quoted lyrics from a song from the Pokemon movie and ironically referred to his new website as “Plan B.” In the Twitterverse, fodder like that doesn’t go unnoticed.

The Twitterverse started talking about the announcement before it even happened, with the hashtag #possibleHermanCainAnnouncements trending. Once Cain’s announcement started, the tweets didn’t slow down. His quoting Pokemon got so many people talking about it that several topics about and characters from Pokemon began trending. The Twitterverse also came up with #Cainwreck to refer to the announcement and the hashtag trended.

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Introduction to Online Marketing for Small Business

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Almost every business should know the importance of online visibility today (hopefully). With search engine marketing, social proof and social media marketing, you can’t help but wonder how  smaller ‘mom and pop shops’ should be tapping their marketing resources online, especially with their heavily word of mouth customer base.

Small business owners quite often dismissively say, “No I don’t need to be online, my company works on foot traffic.” As they may be partially correct, they don’t understand the gravity of an online presence and how it can greatly impact the future of their business.

So let’s talk about that first– the future of small businesses. Eventually orating reviews and recommendations will become almost completely extinct as the Millennial Generation gets older. So even though word of mouth isn’t completely dissipated just yet…chances are you will have to adapt to survive in order to create a legacy, so why not start now by cultivating a community and building brand trust?

Where should a small business venture first? Answer: Search.

Since we are still a society who google’s first to find answers, and uses social networks to interact with friends, family, and colleagues, it only makes sense to market your business on a search engine. Prospective customers need to be able to find your business before they can talk about it.

And that’s the beauty with Pay Per Click–putting your business in front of your target market at the exact time they are actively searching. Another great thing about PPC advertising is the ability to track your ROI down to the penny. You know exactly where your budget is going and where to allocate it at all times. Of course, there’s a little more to it then just ‘advertising on a search engine’  but that’s usually why you hire someone to handle the targeting, budgeting and bidding for you.

Voilà! PPC has allowed you to hone in on your target market and increase your visibility. Your base knows who you are and what you do…so now you must interact! Interaction will help you uncover customer feedback, reviews, recommendation while also allowing you to humanize your business.

Visit out Social Media for Business series where we discuss the 3 Ways to Interact on the major social media channels.

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3 Ways to Interact on Tumblr

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

A social media revolution seems to be happening all around us. But as companies are rushing to embrace social media, they frequently lose focus.

Everyone says that your business needs to utilize social media more, but how many people tell you how? This post is part of a series on different ways you can use social media to interact with your customers.

Tumblr, if you have not heard of it, is a microblogging site that has been said fall somewhere between Facebook and Twitter. Like Facebook, you can ‘Like’ posts.

Like Twitter, you can ‘Follow’ users and ‘Reblog’ their posts. But unlike Twitter, Tumblr does not have a 140 character limit. Actually, Tumblr tries not to limit you in any ways.

The platform has a heavy emphasis on ease of use and multimedia. It also does not limit the type of posts you can create. There are seven types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video:

Tumblr is popular among younger users, looking for humorous pictures and animations. Because of this, Tumblr has been underestimated in business use. But Tumblr has been especially important for the fashion and design industries and it’s time other industries follow. Here, we take a look at how certain activities on Tumblr will help your business.

  1. Supplement or personalize your brand. – You can use your company’s Tumblr blog as an extension of your brand. A presence on yet another social network can just add more depth to your brand’s story. One possible way to do this is to use a Tumblr blog as a “behind-the-scenes” look into your company, similar to Mashable HQ. Mashable uses Tumblr to post pictures of employees, of the office, company news, and anything that can convey what the atmosphere is like at their headquarters.
  2. Emphasize multimedia and utilize tags. – It’s been reported that half of all Tumblr posts are image-based. Take advantage of this and put extra effort into finding excellent pictures or other multimedia for your Tumblr posts. Not only will the great pictures make users want to reblog your posts more, but they will less likely to be passed over by people only paying attention to the pictures on their dashboard.
    Tumblr also has a tag feature that makes it easy to track certain topics. Users can explore and track tags from their dashboard. Unlike Twitter’s hashtags, tags are separated from the rest of the content and at the bottom of the post. Because of this, you don’t need to worry about using too many (as long as ALL of them are actually relevant to the post). It won’t make anything hard to read or put you over a character limit.
  3. Highlight the best of your brand. – Use Tumblr to squeeze more life out of your content from elsewhere. Because of the emphasis on pictures and tags explained earlier, Tumblr can be use to re-purpose posts and use them to bring more people to the original content. For example, you can take your best blog posts, pick out an attention-grabbing picture and the post’s best paragraph or a description, and post that on Tumblr with several relevant tags. Just keep in mind that your audiences are different on all platforms, so only highlight content that your Tumblr audience will be interested in.

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Other posts in this series:

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Kansas teen’s “mean” tweet stirs First Amendment controversy

From the back of the audience of a speech by Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, 18-year-old Emma Sullivan tweeted “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucks, in person #heblowsalot.” As controversy heated up over this situation, the public has showed her support by also using the hashtag #heblowsalot. Since that first tweet, she has amassed more than 14,000 followers (while the Governor only has 3,379!) and tweets about gratitude for her supporters and her disbelief that she is now making headlines.

Governor Brownback’s office spotted Sullivan’s tweet during routine social media monitoring and contacted the Youth in Government program Sullivan was participating in. Sullivan was called into her principal’s office, scolded, and ordered to submit an apology letter to the Governor. Sullivan refused to write such a letter. Later, the Governor was the one issuing an apology, admitting that his staff overreacted to her tweet.

Rihanna reaches 10 million followers

Rihanna is the most recent celebrity to reach 10,000,000 followers on Twitter. She will be the 8th human, 6th woman, and 5th female musical artists to reach this number. The last million followers have all been acquired in the past 27 days. MediaBistro.com reports that the next celebrity to reach this milestone will likely be Taylor Swift, likely right before Christmas.

Ashton Kutcher kicked out of Top 10 Most Followed on Twitter

Following his recent blunder and handing over of his Twitter feed, Ashton Kutcher is no longer one of the top ten most followed users on Twitter. Kutcher is (was?) one of the most famous celebrity personalities on social media and was the first to reach one million followers. But he has been knocked out of the top 10 by Selena Gomez. According to Media Bistro, he’ll have to fight to defend position #11 as it looks like Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres should pass him by the end of the year.

Dallas Cowboys cheerleader gets national attention after tackle

During the fourth quarter of the Dallas Cowboys’ game against the Miami Dolphins on Thanksgiving Day, Cowboys cheerleader Melissa Kellerman (@MelissaRae) was accidentally taken down by tight end Jason Witten. She got right back up and later took to Twitter to let everyone know she was okay, tweeting “I’m not the best at Jason Witten trust falls. ;) ” and “Not hurtin’ today, like some of ya’ll thought I would be. Our TE isn’t as tough as he looks…That or I’m WAY tougher than I look. ;) ”

The controversy started when CNBC’s Darren Rovell reported in a tweet that the team made her delete her account after comments made about the incident.  Then a campaign to bring back Kellerman’s account, @BringBakMelissa, popped up on Twitter and fans began voicing their opinions (mostly angry) on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ official fan page on Facebook. Since wall posts are no longer allowed, fans took to commenting on other posts.

The director of public relations for the Cowboys, Rich Dalrymple, stated that the team has “never gotten involved with individual Twitter accounts or suspended one,” and that Kellerman deleted the account herself because she was “overwhelmed by the number of responses.” After being tackled, her number of followers tripled quickly. Her account has since been put back up, but as private so fans must request to follow her.

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Twitter provides insight on cardiac arrest

Researchers at University of Pennsylvania have performed two recent studies that look at how social media, Twitter in particular, “can be used to help save lives and disseminate information relating to cardiac arrest.” In an article from The Daily Pennsylvanian , one of the researchers explains that they wanted to look at Twitter to “monitor what’s happening or understand what’s happening in non-emergencies, so that when emergencies happen we can be better prepared to use the tool to provide up-to-date accurate information to people.”

One study looked at over 60,000 tweets relating to cardiac arrest, CPR, AEDs, and resuscitation over the span of one month. Only 25% of the tweets had “real information”, such as about real symptoms, locations about events, or articles. These tweets were categorized as either personal, information sharing, or related to news media.

A second study looked at questions being asked on Twitter about cardiac arrest. The researchers found that people tweet questions about  CPR and proper procedures. In the future, they hope to look at what happens when they send information back to the people asking questions.

Another Chris Brown tirade

Last Thursday, Chris Brown had another one of those meltdowns he’s become so famous for. After someone tweeted about his assault on ex-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009 (super touchy subject for him), he went on a profanity-filled tirade ending with a vow for the AMA’s: “I wake up thinking of living my life….. YOU wake up thinking of me! NOW I REALLY CANT WAIT FOR THE AMA’s! u dont have to respect me now… but u will.” After his rant, he deleted his entire timeline, which now only has 2 tweets.

This incident is one in a long list of Twitter fights Brown has gotten himself into. Earlier this year, he got into it with B2K’s Raz B, Tyler the Creator, and Odd Future’s Frank Ocean. The “best of” the most recent episode of this series can be found here.

Simon Cowell has a new medium for insults

That’s right, Simon Cowell is on Twitter, and it didn’t even take 24 hours for him to get into his first Twitter fight. After tweeting “I love being on Twitter. Thank you for allowing me to beat the other three judges in the popularity poll. Paula looked like she’d sucked on a lemon.”

Piers Morgan, who used to work with Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent, responded “Save your breath Simon. Nobody’s watching X Factor. My show’s about to start.” To this, Cowell simply said “Look up the word ‘deluded’ in your dictionary.” At this point, Morgan pointed out that Cowell isn’t as popular as he thinks, with Morgan having over 1 million followers more than Cowell. But Cowell is apparently on a mission to have the highest follower count.

At least another judge from X Factor USA is on Twitter. After all, the show does have a partnership with Twitter.

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Foursquare gets a makeover and levels up

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

In the past few days, Foursquare has made two major changes.

On Monday, Foursquare announced on its blog that expertise badges would now have different levels, allowing users to level up.

Just the next day, Foursquare also had a completely redesigned website.

The badges that now level up are the core 24 category badges, such as the Zoetrope badge for checking into movie theaters, Swimmies for checking into locations near water, and the Bookworm badge for checking into places of knowledge.

On the day level-up badges were released, Foursquare released the new Herbivore, Hot Tamale, and Bento expertise badges and plan to release more. A full list of expertise badges can be found on the About Foursquare blog. To see what expertise badges you have earned and what level they are, there is a new “Expertise” section of your Trophy Case page.

The badges range from level one to level ten. In order to level up, the requirements are the same for every category of expertise. To unlock level one, you can either check-in five times to a place in the category or check-in to three unique places. For all other levels, you will level up by checking in to five more unique places. At the launch of the badges, your existing data was analyzed so users won’t have to start over if they have already checked-in to many places in a category.

In the future there will be more ways to level up, such as having your tips done by many people. The badges are supposed to express who you are, what you know best, and reflect your real-world expertise. Your expertise will be used to help other users checking in to locations in that category. For example, if someone checks-in to a movie theater and you are a level 10 Zoetrope, your tips for the venue will be seen before tips from a level 1 user.

The new website (dubbed #new4sq), has a new focus on discovery and according to Mashable, may give sites like Yelp a run for their money. Your foursquare.com page will now have a large map at the top that shows everything interesting nearby, all color-codes. Your friends will be shown in yellow, places on lists in green, specials in orange, and popular places in blue.

The map is accompanied by other new features, such as recommendations based on the time of day. For example, when you go to foursquare.com at, say, 11:30 a.m., and it will give you suggestions for lunch venues. On a Saturday, it may recommend popular weekend activities. In addition, they have added List discovery and venue pages have gotten a makeover.

I find the new website to be much more attractive, and look forward to leveling up my Bookworm badge! What do you think of the new changes?

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Cyber Criminals Hijacked 4 Million Computers: How to Prevent Click Fraud

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Last Wednsday the FBI released an indictment describing an international conspiracy conceived and carried out by criminals working primarily in Estonia and Russia. The defendants successfully hijacked at least 4 million computers in 100 countries, including over a half a million in the United States which comprised of computers in businesses and government agencies such as NASA.

Taken directly from the FBI press release, the damaged created through this scheme included the following:

  • They victimized legitimate website operators and advertisers who missed out on income through click hijacking and ad replacement fraud.
  • Unwitting customers of the defendants’ sham publisher networks were paying for Internet traffic from computer users who had not intended to view or click their ads.
  • Users involuntarily routed to Internet ads may well have harbored discontent with those businesses, even though the businesses were blameless.
  • And then there is the harm to the users of the hijacked computers. The DNSChanger malware was a virus more akin to an antibiotic-resistant bacterium. It had a built-in defense that blocked anti-virus software updates. And it left infected computers vulnerable to other malware.

How can you stop this from happening to you?

In short…100% click fraud prevention is impossible. Of course the case above is at a larger scale but nonetheless, as more and more businesses begin moving online and creating a more competitive market, the greater the chance of becoming a victim of click fraud.

However, there are precautionary steps to take to protect your marketing budget. As a business owner you can stay above the curve against click fraud attacks. Be alert with your campaign behavior. Establish a baseline so you can compare campaign performance daily. Ads usually have a consistent click through rate, so when you see a sudden spike in traffic it’s something you should pay attention to. Dive deeper and take a look at your conversion rate and where the traffic is coming from.

Tools and analytical reporting only goes so far, especially if you’re not quite sure what to look for, so the next step is to research a network with enough protection tools in place and ensure they are  dedicated in safe guarding your budget. Whether the company has in house technology, use a third party resource or both, the traffic patterns and quality running to your ads must be monitored around the clock. Working with a company who shares the same value in protecting your money is a great start to a clean campaign.

 

 

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Introduction to QR Codes

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

What is a QR code?

A QR code (quick response code) is a two-dimensional matrix barcode. It can be scanned by any camera-enable smartphone that has a QR reader app installed on it. QR codes can link to digital content such as a website, social media profile, or video, or activate phone functions such as email or SMS (text messaging). QR codes can be created on any of the QR generator websites out there, all of which are free.

Where do they go?

They can be placed virtually anywhere. Popular placements for QR codes are on business cards, advertisements, and flyers, but the possibilities are endless. Specific uses and placements for QR codes will depend on your industry, the goal in mind, and your audience.

What can they be used for?

QR codes were originally used for tracking automobile parts by Japanese company and Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave. But they can be used for virtually anything. Since QR codes have spread throughout the world, there has been an informal competition of who can come up with the most creative QR code.

QR codes can be utilized by your business either to reach other business or your customers and the public. Some possible B2B uses include putting them on materials handed out at conferences and events, on business cards, or to supplement press materials. For reaching customers, QR codes can be used in advertisements, on promotional materials, and in storefronts.

 Stay tuned!

Over the next few weeks, we are going to go more into detail about QR codes, highlighting uses for both B2B and B2C and talking about considerations when creating a QR code campaign.

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

Twitter must give up WikiLeaks data

Last Thursday, a federal judge ordered Twitter to give up information about three account holders, Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, under investigation for possible connections to WikiLeaks.

The case began in January, when Twitter was subpoenaed to hand over private messages between founder Julian Assange and other members of the organization to the U.S. government.

This is a monumental case for online privacy, and those involved are taking to Twitter to talk about it. In a blog post that he tweeted a link to, Gonggrijp stated “there’s not a whole lot you can learn from records that Twitter has on me that you can’t learn from reading my blog. There are bigger principles at stake, though, and this is not a good ruling for online privacy.”

Ashton Kutcher hands over Twitter feed

Last Wednesday night, Ashton Kutcher tweeted “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste” before finding out that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was fired for his ties to the sex abuse scandal at Penn State. He deleted the tweet, but not before receiving massive backlash in the form of angry replies.

Kutcher later admitted he had not heard about the scandal and thought Paterno had been fired due to “poor performance as an aging coach.”

He had to quickly backpedal to manage the situation, tweeting “As an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more remorseful for all involved in the Penn St. case.” To add context to the situation, Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore run an anti-sex slavery charity.

He also tweeted “As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed. I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” His feed stayed silent, but on Thursday he published a blog post titled Twitter Management on Posterous offering an explanation of his side of the story. In the blog post, he also explained that he has handed the management of his Twitter feed to his team at Katalyst Media.

Salman Rushdie uses Twitter to solve his Facebook problems

On Monday, world-famous author Salman Rushdie found that his Facebook account had been deleted over the weekend

He sent them a copy of his passport to prove he really was who he said he was, but the passport showed his full name as Ahmed Salman Rushdie. Facebook then reactivated the account under the name Ahmed Rushdie.

After Facebook failed to respond to Rushdie’s requests, so he took to Twitter and his followers to help him. After filling in his followers, he put his faith in them, saying “Am now hoping that ridicule by the Twitterverse will achieve what I can’t.”

He also tweeted lists of other famous and historical figures that go by their middle names rather than first under the hashtag #middlenameusers. Sure enough, within two hours Facebook finally responded and within another hour had apologized to the author. After all was resolved, Rushdie tweeted “Victory! #Facebook has buckled! I’m Salman Rushdie again. I feel SO much better. An identity crisis at my age is no fun. Thank you Twitter!”

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Google+ Brand Pages finally arrive

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Just when you thought you could forget about Google+, there’s been a major feature added that may refresh its relevance. Since day one, a major shortcoming of Google Plus was that there were no pages or support for brand profiles. But on Monday Google finally started rolling out brand pages.

The brand pages are extremely similar in appearance to regular profiles with a lot of the same functionality as a Facebook page. Users add pages to their circles just as they would with other users. But there are differences between a page and a profile.

First of all, a page cannot add a user to its circles unless the user has added it to one of his or her circles already or mentioned it in a post. Secondly, brand pages are public by default. The third major difference is that pages have a +1 button and count, which can be linked to your websites count as well (more on that later!). Pages also can’t use some other Google+ features such as playing games and giving +1 to other pages.

The reason the brand pages may be such a game changer is because of Direct Connect. Direct Connect is a way of finding and following Google+ brand pages through Google Search. All a searcher has to do is type “+” followed by the name of the brand or business. Instead of sorting through a page of results, you will be taken directly to the correct Google+ page. Google+ users can also opt-in to a feature that automatically adds the brand to their circles by searching with Direct Connect. (Side note: Google+ brand pages will also now show up in Google search results.)

Google has also released Google+ badges for brands to promote their presence on Plus. Similar to the Facebook’s Like Box plugin, the widget can be embedded on web sites and lets a user either +1 the page or add it to their circles. The important thing about the Google+ badges is that it will connect your brand page with your website. This will help Google better index the brand’s Google+ page, but will also link together the +1′s from your brand page, search, and display ads. It is also required for your brand to be eligible for Direct Connect.

It’s obvious that the Google+ brand pages will open up a lot of new possibilities for brands, although there are still shortcomings and questions. For example, right now brands cannot run any contests or promotions through their page, and there are no page analytics or insights. Will these things be added in the future? There are also no custom URLs yet, something which seems impractical. Lastly, pages can also only be controlled by the one admin that created the page. Multiple admin support is expected in the future, but when? We’ll need to wait and see!

Connect with eZanga.com on Google Plus!

What are your opinions on the Google+ brand pages? Do you think they will make Plus more popular?

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