Posts Tagged ‘Twitter Tuesday’

[Older Posts]

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Twitter launches Certified Products Program

As Twitter continues to tighten the belt concerning the use of its API, it wants to strike down traditional Twitter clients and lift up innovative tools, especially for business use. As a part of this plan, Twitter launched a Certified Products Program to endorse products that can help businesses grow.

The program will identify the right tools “to help them engage with customers, understand what people are saying about them on Twitter, and learn more about their followers so they can share more valuable, timely content.”

The Certified Products Program has broken down tools into three verticals:

  • Engagement: “Products and services which bring businesses closer to their customers, and help Twitter scale to the needs of larger organizations.”
  • Analytics: “Tools that help businesses learn from what their customers are saying on Twitter.”
  • Data Resellers: “Platforms for innovation where businesses can build atop large volumes of Twitter’s public Tweets.”

The program launched with twelve partners, including HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, and Topsy, but is accepting applications for more certified products and services. In order to become part of the Certified Products Program, a product must be unique, solve a market need, have potential for large impact, and meet the requirements for one or more vertical.

Increased targeting for Twitter Advertisers

Twitter is also finding more ways to get businesses to use their Promoted Products, such as teaming up with HootSuite. Last Thursday, Twitter announced that advertisers could now target their Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns by interest to reach Twitter users that will be more likely to engage with the ad.

The first way to use interest targeting is to choose any of the more than 350 interests that are grouped into broader categories such as ‘Law, Government, and Politics,’  ’Life Stages,’ ‘Music and Television,’ or ‘Sports.’ The Twitter Advertising Blog explains that using this tactic should be used for a broader reach.

For an even more targeted approach, you can create custom segments using @usernames relevant to your campaign. This does not allow you to specifically target the followers of a certain Twitter user, but rather Twitter users with similar interests as the followers of that @username. The blog post gives the example of promoting a band’s tour, you could add the @usernames of similar bands so that you are reaching users with the same taste in music.

Twitter is also lowering the minimum bid for all auctions to one cent.

Twitter’s looking to hire a storyteller

Twitter already does a great job on its blog of showing how people use Twitter and demonstrating its value, through posts such as their frequent #OnlyOnTwitter blog posts and recaps of events like Euro 2012. But Twitter is looking to amp up their storytelling by hiring a Data Editor.

Twitter is not the first company to have such a position, as TechCrunch points out, but right now very few companies have data comparable to Twitter’s. The position will be responsible for executing a data-driven marketing strategy, define and document best practices, and basically show everyone (especially partners and advertisers) how Twitter is changing the world.

Look forward to this position being filled, because once it is we’ll surely see even more interesting case studies and stories.

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

Twitter Tuesday is a weekly wrap-up of significant and interesting news relating to Twitter.

No more finding friends on Tumblr

Shortly after pulling its follow graph data from Instagram, Twitter has done the same to Tumblr. Just like you can no longer find Instagram users you already followed on Twitter, the “Find Friends” feature on Tumblr was cut off by Twitter last week.

Seeing as how they have also recently cut a few ties with LinkedIn and tightened their API restrictions, users are beginning to worry that the Twitter ecosystem is in danger, despite Twitter saying its what they are trying to preserve.

Twitter and Tumblr have always been tightly integrated, so Tumblr expressed their deep disappointment over the disconnection to The Next Web:

“Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting. Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter’s first partners.”

Twitter stops showing how tweets are posted

In another interesting move by Twitter, they have removed the “via” stamp on tweets that notified viewers of which app the Twitter account was using when that tweet was posted, such as Twitterific or Hootsuite. This stamp was removed from the Twitter for iPhone app back in July, followed by the Twitter website yesterday.

This is just one more way Twitter is clamping down and discouraging the use of third-party Twitter clients. Some say that this is a good thing for privacy, since users will not see that you’re tweeting from a mobile app and probably not at your home. However, others are saying this is another way for Twitter to pretend that those apps don’t exist.

It’s definitely bad news for the apps themselves, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about with the new API “guidelines.” Those stamps at the bottom of tweets was like free advertising. If an influential user was using a certain app, his or her followers would probably check it out and see if they liked it.

Twitter teams up with HootSuite to sell ads

While Twitter is trying to phase out the use of traditional Twitter clients, it seems to be okay with emphasizing enterprise clients such as HootSuite. In the blog post announcing the API changes, HootSuite even got a shout-out. Now Twitter is teaming up with HootSuite to sell advertising on Twitter.

The promotion has been offered to 30,000 HootSuite Pro premium clients in the U.S. and is aimed at small and medium sized businesses who have never advertised on Twitter before. Redeemable through the HootSuite dashboard,  the offer is for $100 in Twitter advertising credits that can be used on the Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts products.

This is only the latest of many efforts to bring more small and medium businesses into advertising on Twitter. In December, Twitter announced their self-serve advertising platform. When it rolled out in February, Twitter teamed up with American Express to offer a $100 to the first 10,000 businesses to register that either accepted American Express cards or was a cardholder.

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

How many fake followers do you have?

As social media becomes more important in business and for pleasure, many people worry about the number of followers they have. For those who think that their number of followers is more important than who those followers are, there’s the option of buying fake followers. But a service launched this summer to spot fake followers, and with the attention that it’s been getting, it’s going to be hard to hide your fake followers much longer.

Fake Follower Check by StatusPeople looks at a sample of your Twitter followers to figure out how many are inactive or likely to be spam. Spam accounts are identified as those with few or no followers or tweets. It’s hard to be active on Twitter without attracting a few spammers, especially if you tweet about trending topics or certain topics spammers love (free iPad, anyone?). But if an account randomly gains thousands of spammy followers in a short time period or has an unusually high percentage of fake followers, it probably wasn’t all that random.

Twitter’s strict API plans

The Twitter Developers Blog published a post last Thursday outlining some of the changes coming to Twitter’s API in version 1.1. Guidelines for using the API, known as their Developer Rules of the Road, are much stricter, with display guidelines turning into display requirements. Authentication will be required for every request to access the API and the API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint.

Along with talking about these and other changes, the blog post talks about the Twitter ecosystem. Twitter tends to group apps that use the Twitter API into four quadrants. One of these quadrants is mostly inhabited by “traditional” Twitter clients. A while back, Twitter began discouraging developers from building clients “that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” It looks like Twitter is going to begin doing more to prevent developers from building those sort of apps.

Developers have already started protesting this new API, with the CEO of Bottlenose.com starting an online petition. The Change.org petition urges Twitter to keep their previous promise to developers to be an open platform, to clarify their intentions for the developer community, to respect and appreciate the ecosystem more, and to remain to let Twitter users choose how they access the Twitter network (i.e. through Twitter.com, Twitter apps, or the clients Twitter wants to see go away).

The live-tweeted “Xtreme Dream”

Diana Nyad first attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida when she was 29, which was over three decades ago. Had she done it then, she would have written letters and made long-distance phone calls to tell people about her journey, and only once it was completed. But now, it’s 2012 and the 62-year-old swimmer has more instantaneous ways of updating people on the progress of her swim, which she calls the “Xtreme Dream.”

This time, her support team is live-tweeting updates from the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, writing blog posts, and updating a map on her website showing her position. Trending topics about her journey have popped up and will be sure to continue as we receive more updates about hitting unexpected weather and the fear of running into sharks and jellyfish.

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, August 14th, 2012

Twitter Tuesday is a weekly wrap-up of significant and interesting news relating to Twitter.

Clutch.io joins the Twitter Flock

Twitter has acquired (or aqui-hired) Clutch.io, a company that makes A/B testing tools for mobile app developers. Yesterday, Clutch.io announced in a blog post that Twitter had acquired the intellectual property of the company and it was the teams’ first day as part of Twitter’s ‘Growth and International’ team.

The blog post explains that Clutch.io plans to leave their hosted service active until November 1, 2012 but in the coming weeks will make available everything a developer will need to run Clutch.io on their own servers. Many sources, such as The Next Web, speculate that Twitter’s acquisition of a mobile A/B testing company is a sign that Twitter is thinking seriously about improving their mobile products.

Paul Ryan’s new Twitter Handle

Following the announcement that Paul Ryan is going to be Mitt Romeny’s running mate, he’s (temporarily?) retired his @RepPaulRyan Twitter handle in favor of @PaulRyanVP, which first tweeted on Saturday. His new account has only tweeted four times: three about joining what the account is calling “America’s Comeback Team,” and one @MittRomney retweet. However, the account already follows 200 other Twitter users, which is 200 times as many as his old account follows. His @RepPaulRyan account only follows one account: the official National Debt Twitter account. The gap in the number of followers each account has is quickly closing.

Olympic Records

With the London 2012 Summer Olympics now over, a lot of records have been set…on social media as well as by athletes. The official Twitter blog has written a post outlining the significance of Twitter in the Olympics. Here are a few of the interesting numbers:

  • The past 16 days saw over 150 million tweets about the Olympics
  • The most tweeted about moment was when Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold in the 200m sprint, with over 80,000 tweets per minute
  • Usain Bolt was also the most discussed athlete on Twitter
  • 10 athletes garnered more than 1 million tweets each: Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei, and Lebron James
  • Soccer was the sport with the most conversation surrounding it
  • The most tweeted about musical guest in the Closing Ceremonies was the Spice Girls with more than 116,000 tweets per minute

App.net – A paid alternative to Twitter

A crowdfunded project led by Dalton Caldwell tried and succeeded to raise $700,000 for App.net, which will be a paid alternative to Twitter. In the wake of Twitter restricting its API and cutting off two major social networks, Instagram and LinkedIn, Caldwell believes Twitter is selling out. His alternative will cost $50/year for users and $100/year for developers.

In a video on the App.net website, Caldwell explains: “The reason why I’m so optimistic about a paid opportunity is that it aligns our incentives economically with users and developers.” Caldwell maintains that free, ad-supported social networks like Facebook and Twitter have poor user experiences. If the service’s customers are the users and developers instead of advertisers, it has more incentive to give the users and developers what they want.

Would you pay for Facebook or Twitter if it meant no advertisements?

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Twitter now available in three new languages

Twitter’s approach to making the social network available in more languages is unique: it crowdsources the translation process out to the users through the Twitter Translation Center. Well, it looks like this approach is paying off. Only a few months after becoming available in right-t0-left languages, Twitter has announced it’s now also available in Greek, Czech, and Basque.

To change the language of your personal Twitter experience, just go to your account settings. To help with the translation process for any language, you simply sign-in to the Translation Center with your Twitter account.

Jason Mraz fan-sources ideas for new music video

Singer-songwriter Jason Mraz is making a music video for his song, “The Woman I Love,” and is looking to his followers for help in the creative process. For one week from July 30 to August 6, Mraz asked fans to tweet him at @Jason_Mraz with possible plotlines using the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo.

A director will create a storyboard based on the best ideas. The music video will premiere this fall on Twitter and those who’s ideas were chosen will be credited by their Twitter handles appearing at the end of the video.

The first tweets from Mars

NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars at 1:39 am EST on Monday morning, and the Internet is going crazy for it. In addition to a livestream of the landing via Ustream, the experience is also being documented on Twitter. The story is being told firsthand by NASA employees as well as the Rover’s own Twitter account, @MarsCuriosity.

As complex and hard to understand as the actual process of a Mars landing is, the Twitter account maintains a playful voice. The account announced the landing by tweeting, “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL“ Along with amazing color photographs, the account is continuing to tweet amusing exclamations such as “Look out below!”, “Now the adventure begins,” and captioning a photo “No @Instagram required.”

Twitter suspends, un-suspends, and apologizes to Guy Adams

On July 27, Guy Adams, a Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent, started tweeting criticisms of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. One tweet contained the email address of the President of NBC Olympics, Gary Zenkel. In the tweet, Adam urged his followers to email Zenkel to express how they felt about NBC’s Olympics coverage. On July 30, he found his account suspended. In an email, Twitter stated that his account was suspended because he posted an “individual’s private information such as private email address, physical address, telephone number, or financial documents.” Adams maintained that because it was a corporate email, it should not have been considered private.

Most of the outrage over this incident was that Twitter claims not to monitor private accounts. However, Twitter has explained in a blog post that they did “proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation.” The account was reinstated when NBC withdrew the request for account suspension.

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

The Social Media Olympics

The 2012 Summer Olympics are finally underway, and social media is playing a big part in it. Whether that is a good thing or not can be debated. NBC is being continually criticized on social media for their coverage, most notably about their choice to tape delay events to show in prime time. In the age of social media, anyone on a computer can accidentally find out the results of an event before it has aired on NBC. For example, viewers were disappointed to see tweets about who appeared in the Opening Ceremony, ruining the surprise.

But athletes are also seeing the negative side of social media during the games. Multiple athletes have made headlines and gotten into hot water because of tweets. Two were even taken out of the games: Greek Olympian Voula Papachristou was banned from competing in the Olympics after posting a racial joke on Twitter last week, and Swiss soccer player Michel Morganella was banned after tweeting offensive remarks about South Korea after a loss to the country’s team.

The popularity of social media also makes it easier for viewers to talk to athletes, which can also have negative consequences. British diver Tom Daley received hateful tweets about his dead father after coming in fourth place. Tweets from the user continued and became more hateful, even threatening to drown Daley, and a 17-year-old has been arrested on suspicion of “malicious communication.”

“Cashtags” let you search for money talk on Twitter

Twitter has introduced a new symbol to join the ranks of the @reply and #hashtag: the $cashtag. A cashtag followed by a company’s stock symbol (for example, $FB or $GOOG) will turn into a clickable link to a search stream the same way a hashtag does. In the stream, you will be able to read tweets and conversations about a company’s finances and stocks. The announcement was made via a tweet Monday night.

While users seem welcoming to this new feature, not everyone is happy. The CEO of StockTwits claims that Twitter is ripping off one of his company’s innovations. In a blog post, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon claims that his company has been doing this for over four years. Not only that, but he states that as recently as a few months ago, Twitter told him via email that the company wasn’t interested in making its own cashtags.

Is Twitter beginning to cut out Instagram?

The days of finding friends from Twitter to follow on Instagram are over. Twitter has removed its follow graph data from the photo sharing app, although it seems some users who don’t have the latest update of the app may still be able to do so. This follows a similar move made earlier this month, when Twitter stopped partnering with LinkedIn to allow users to sync updates from the two sites. Twitter’s dropping of LinkedIn and Instagram could both be part of a larger plan, but there’s also talk that this could have something to do with Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram earlier this year.

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Twitter Tuesday – Weekly Wrap Up

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

This week’s Twitter Tuesday takes brands global!

#CannesLions

The esteemed Cannes Lions 59th International Festival of Creativity was held in Cannes, France last week.  The six day festival showcases the renowned Lion Awards, stylish networking events and seminars led by famous industry leaders. Intended to ignite inspiration and reward creativity excellence, the conference brings together over 11,000 advertising professionals from 90 countries. Among the ideal audience, the event hashtag made a valuable impression:

  • 11,000 Creative Professionals + #CannesLion Event Hashtag = 61 Million Impressions
  • 103,389  #CannesLion mentions
  • 17,232 tweets per day
  • 3,000 tweets per hour
  • 5,000 pictures were tweeted

Promoted Tweets Expanding to 50 Countries

The #CannesLion festival was the perfect platform to present the expansion of Twitter’s Promoted Products.  Brands have had overwhelming success increasing customer engagement with Promoted Tweet campaigns in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan that other countries are enthusiastic about the Promoted Products. Executives announced that Promoted Products would soon be available to advertisers in 50 countries. Key markets include Latin America, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

At Twitter, our goal is to reach every person on the planet. We are also working to serve advertising needs around the world.  @TwitterAds

Promoted Tweets are ideal for brands that want to engage with customers in real-time.  They are not part of a separate advertising platform. The tweets are organic; they start as regular tweets, surface with appropriate search results and appear with relevant Trending Topics. Brands have the ability to pin Promoted Tweets on the top of their profile page or selected search results.

Marketers can measure click through rates in the form of “retweets” or “favorited tweets”.  Promoted Tweets are beneficial when building brands, running campaigns, launching a product or holding an event.  The immediate interaction is what keeps brands intrigued. Burberry had phenomenal success at a fashion show by tweeting pictures of the models before they entered the runway. H&M added #beckhamforhm to their Superbowl commercials. Procter and Gamble took advantage of a Daytona 500 crash and fire – Tide was used to clean up the wreck so they tweeted photos of the process and asked fans to think of captions. Burberry, H&M and Procter and Gamble were able to capture fans attention instantaneously and sustain interest by extending the conversation.

Twitter Launches 2nd Hashtag Page: twitter.com/#Euro2012

Twitter introduced the first Hashtag page earlier this month, twitter.com/#NASCAR. The objective of the Hashtag page is

Visit Twitter’s 2nd Official Hashtag Page here: twitter.com/#Euro2012to focus on content curation with a blend of set algorithms and manual editing. Twitter stated that fans would be able to tune into the “best and most relevant tweets from commentators, broadcasters, journalists, players, former players and others”. The #NASCAR page has been a success. Twitter opted to roll out the second Hashtag Page for EURO 2012, the European Championship for national football (or soccer) teams organized by the UEFA. Fans will be able to tune into the Hashtag Page this Friday for the first quarterfinal match between Germany and Greece.

Do you use Twitter for your small business? Would you consider using a Hashtag Page or Promoted Tweet for a product launch or event?

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap Up – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Twitter Tuesday this week has a M.V.P – #Sports

Sports fans are flocking to Twitter for real time updates by sponsors, players, fans, brands and sports enthusiasts. These recent events scored high this week.

#Sports Stories: Highest Scores

Twitter aired it’s first television commercial Sunday, June 10th at the 2012 Pocono 400 NASCAR race. In a 15 second spot, driver Brad Keselowski (@Keselowski) is track side in his car taking a photo with his iPhone.

See what he sees.

@Keselowski is an avid Twitter user, often tweeting during the races. In February, he tweeted updates and videos following an explosion and fire during a race. He gained over 100,000 followers in less than 2 hours. Six additional NASCAR themed commercials were played on Sunday. The 15 second commercials promoted Twitter’s new hashtag pages.

Twitter.com/#NASCAR

Consumers can visit hashtag pages to get real-time updates in one location. Twitter’s official blog tells readers that the “combination of algorithms and curation will surface the most interesting tweets to bring you closer to all of the action”

Hashtag Battle: #VoteReds vs #VoteTigers

While players were competing on the baseball field, fans were battling on Twitter. The Cincinnati Reds and the Oklahoma Tigers showed their sportsmanship on and off the field this past weekend. The contest began Noon on Friday and tags were to be counted Sunday following the game. The losing team’s fans agreed to support the winning team during the All Star Voting, starting Monday, June 11th. This included changing their avatar and re-tweeting messages to support the opposing team.  The MLB supported this venture, promoting voting for the 83rd All Star Game in Kansas City on July 10th.

The winner on the field? The Oklahoma Tigers. The hashtag winner? #VoteReds

#Sports Assists

2012 NBA Finals: @KingJames vs @KDTrey

Have you been watching the play offs? What about the activity between Miami Heat’s Lebron James (@KingJames) and Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant (@KDTrey) on Twitter?  The NBA has made social media a major communication channel with fans. A good move, the NBA was the first sports league to reach 5 million followers on Twitter. The NBA playoffs have been proof that Twitter is an effective platform to interact with consumers.   PeopleBrowser created a NBA Finals Twitter match up based on mentions and followers during the playoffs. The official Twitter blog  compiles an all star roster called Courtside Tweets for each game. The starting lineup includes ex-players, coaches, athletes, celebrities and super-fans and should be followed for real-time updates and the best Twitter commentary.

US Open: June 2012

Golfer Peter Jacobsen (@JakeTrout) teams up with Lexus (@Lexus) to answer fan questions via the #LexusGolf hashtag. Live tweeting with event hashtags is on the rise. Brian Smith, Lexus Vice President of Marketing says ” The hashtag creates a virtual meeting place for our golf enthusiasts to share their love of the game while giving them the chance to interact with one of golf’s most dynamic players.”

That wraps up our Twitter Tuesday for this week! We want to hear from you! Which athlete would you give the MVP for Twitter updates to? Which teams do you follow for real-time updates?

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This weeks’ Twitter Tuesday has a theme: entertainment! It wasn’t even intentional, but the past week saw three great uses of social media, specifically Twitter, involving music, movies, and television. We hope you enjoy it!

Pepsi’s “Live for Now” offers exclusives to followers

Pepsi’s latest campaign, “Live for Now,” has a huge social component, bringing exclusive content and deals to those following the @pepsi Twitter account and the #LiveforNow hashtag.

Throughout the week, Pepsi will tweet about new music and upcoming music festivals using the hashtag. Each week, the account will also tweet out codes for free music credits through Amazon’s MP3 store.

But Pepsi will also be offering unique content on their enhanced brand page. Pepsi will be creating a weekly video series called “Live for Now Music” which will be based off of the top trending artists and music from throughout the week. Twitter’s Advertising Blog states that it’s the first time a partner will be using real-time data to develop original programming.

Lastly, Pepsi will be holding pop-up concerts throughout the summer with Twitter at the center of the action. The concerts will feature artists with large Twitter followings, will be first announced on Twitter, and streamed live on their brand page.

MTV introduces new Movie Awards category with Twitter-only voting

Last Sunday night the MTV Movie Awards aired, an award ceremony based on voting. Usually, voting for all the categories is conducted on MTV’s website. But this year, one category winner was decided completely based on tweets.

While going from category to category on the page for the awards, the Best Hero category had a landing page different from the rest.

Each nominee (Harry Potter from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Captain America from Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor from Thor, and Jenko from 21 Jump Street) was given their own voting hashtag.

The landing page also had the “MTV Tweet Tracker” keeping track of how many votes each nominee had. That way, voters could see if they needed to send out a few more tweets for their favorite hero. The winner of the golden popcorn trophy was Harry Potter.

Miss USA goes social

The MTV Movie Awards weren’t the only competition to get social on Sunday night. The Miss USA pageant doesn’t have a huge online component, but fans can vote for their favorite contestant and the winner automatically gets a spot in the semifinals. But even without voting via Twitter they have incorporated the social network in a large way.

Leading up to the competition, fans could submit questions for the interview portion of the competition via the hashtag #AskMissUSA. The producers will select one of the questions to  be one of the five questions asked to the five semifinalists during the interview portion of the competition. NBC will also show real-time tweets on the screen during the swimsuit and evening gown portions of the show.

That wraps up this week’s Twitter Tuesday! Did you tweet about the MTV Movie Awards or Miss USA? Are you following @pepsi for great music this summer? Let us know!

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

MBTA transit officer caught napping on the job

Greg Adrien was on his way to a friend’s house via the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) when he noticed an MBTA police office sound asleep on the job at the Mattapin T station. Since he worked in security himself and knows the importance of being completely alert while on the job, he felt that officials needed to know about the incident, and sent them a picture via Twitter. He didn’t necessarily want the officer to get fired, but wanted to stress that this sort of thing cannot happen.

As soon as officials saw the picture, they dispatched a supervisor to check on the officer. The officer, who has been on the job for 29 years, was awake when the supervisor arrived but did not deny dozing off. He will be facing disciplinary action.

Metta World Peace’s latest mistake

Yesterday was Memorial Day, although it took Lakers star Metta World Peace (aka Ron Artest) awhile to figure that out. Around 1pm ET yesterday, he tweeted “Happy Labor Day… Enjoy it.” He’s known for living in his own little world, so this tweet just added fuel to the fire. ‘Happy Labor Day’ became a national trending topic as the Twitterverse discussed his latest gaffe.

To make up for angering a lot of veterans and those who love veterans, he later deleted the tweet and sent several tweets apologizing and explaining his mistake. Some of the excuses were that he “was still sleep” because he “partied like three rockstars” the night before, and he mentions several times that he frequently gets holidays mixed up.

He must’ve realized those sort of tweets were not helping him redeem himself, so he also retweeted his followers’ tweets about what Memorial Day means to them, veterans’ personal memories from serving, and what it was like having loved ones overseas fighting in wars. He also invited people to call in to his podcast show to talk freely and openly about his mistake.

Jennifer Egan writes fiction for Twitter

Pulitzer Prize winning author Jennifer Egan is trying something new. Her latest short story for The New Yorker was specifically composed with Twitter in mind, in paragraphs of 140 characters or less. Egan explains on The New Yorker blog that she had “been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.”

The story, titled ‘Black Box,’ will be published on the @NYerFiction Twitter account tweet by tweet for in ten nightly installments from 8-9 p.m. ET. Only after the entire story has been tweeted will it appear in The New Yorker‘s Science Fiction Issue. Each installment will also be collated on the Page Turner blog.

Would you read a 8,500-word story tweet by tweet? Is this a cool idea?

Like what you’ve read? Click here to subscribe to this blog!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles | No Comments »

« Older Entries