Search results matching tag 'flickr'

Twitter proves major boon for media websites

255762 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:26:00 GMT

Some interesting Twitter data from Hitwise that reveals what a boon the service is for media content sites in terms of driving traffic with newspapers in particular coming out winners.

Hitwise says that Twitter traffic has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months and a result of that increase is a leap in traffic to media websites (with newspaper sites and Twitpic amongst the sites benefiting), but not online retailers.

Last month Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK and accounted for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website.

More interesting is that 56% of that traffic is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.

That's confirmation of what we all know and love about Twitter. It is a great place to break news and share links to good content (okay some of it – like this – might be your OWN content, but really there's nothing wrong with a little self promotion as long as that's all it is).

What isn't happening according to the Hitwise numbers is masses of traffic going to transactional websites. Only 9.5% of Twitter's downstream traffic is sent this way.

That's as it should be. Who wants Twitter to turn into QVC? You can tell people about stuff, but if they want to buy it, well, they're mostly pretty smart and know how to use the internet.

Where there is transactional action going on (like Dell for instance), it is mostly opt-in, where people are signing up to follow Dell Twitter accounts when they are in the market for a new PC.

Hitwise contrasts these figures with other popular sites. Google UK sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook the figure is 14.7%.

The winners: newspapers and Twitpic

Hitwise has Twitpic down as one of the big winners to emerge in terms of traffic whether. It is definitely the site that you hear everyone mention first when talking Twitter and images.

In May Twitpic picked up one in every 13 downstream visits from Twitter with UK visits to the site up 250-fold over the last 12 months. This makes it the third most popular photo website in the UK behind Flickr and Photobucket.

For newspapers, many of which like the Guardian and the Times have multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to news and media - print websites in the UK during May.

The success here is finding the right level to engage with the community and to work that virally, but Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, makes a good point here in identifying that it is the journalists who are often the strongest asset rather than the official feeds.

"Although all of the newspapers have multiple 'official' feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low retweet rates. Journalists tweeting themselves and engaging with the Twitter community typically have more success in creating viral stories,” Goad has said.

More Hitwise Twitter stats

UK Internet traffic to Twitter increased 22-fold over the last 12 months.
May 2009 Twitter was the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network
Vast majority of Twitter's growth (93% of it) occurred during 2009.
May 2008 Twitter was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.

Although on the point of Twitter only being the 5th most popular website Hitwise does not monitor third party apps like Tweetdeck, which many people use to access Twitter, which means Twitter in reality is not the fifth most popular site, but more likely to be the third most popular social networking site in the UK if not higher.

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Social media and the Iranian election

255762 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:07:00 GMT

On Wired.com, Andrew Exum is wondering all about Iran and the explosive use of social media to organise, agitate and protest in Iran. He's wondering how real it all is? And if it is the technological enabled few rather than the digitally deprived masses.

He wrote: "Are we simply finding common cause with a technologically-assisted minority and confusing it for a popular movement? One observer of the Moldova protests noticed the way in which we Westerners get fascinated by 'Twitter revolutions' because, hey! We use Twitter too!"

The Wired piece quotes others who are not convinced, but from the pictures it looks bigger than the technological few. The few might have Twitter accounts, but they are it seems being used to organise and bring others together in massive protests.

There is so much going on and a lot of summaries are already around, but here's some of the multitude of links and posts that are coming out of the protests.

#IranElection is the top search term on Twitter which is being used by Iranians to co-ordinate protests and post photos and messages in the wake of the presidential election on Friday.

The opposition reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is using updates via Twitter and is using it to rally his supporters. One message on Mousavi1388 asks: "Confirmed by BBC Persian, please tell everyone to join them: Mousavi, Karoubi & Khatami will be at the protest. #IranElection"

When it appeared that Twitter was about to shut down for 90 minutes downtime tonight for maintenance, Twitter decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests could go on.

Mousavi's Twitter feed also made a direct appeal to Twitter: "@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down. #IranElection"

Yesterday @Mousavi1388 had 7,000 followers on that particular Twitter feed and today it has nearer 10,000. Another Twitter feed @StopAhmadi has more than 7,000 followers. A third feed, @Persiankiwi, has more than 18,000 followers.

The Twitter feed is being used as an unofficial media channel and one that is becoming indispensible for journalists covering the post election story. A tweet this morning, says: "URGNT@ ALL jornlsts, Tday 15:30 Prss Conf. in Tehran, Sadr MotrWay, Kave Shomali Blvd, Roshanayi St, Bahar Shomali St. Num. 9 #IranElection".

Mousavi's Facebook page has more than 53,000 supporters and many Facebook members have posted video while others are trying to persuade fellow Facebook users to change their personal icons to the colour green to show support for the Iranian opposition.

Users on Twitter are also trying to persuade fellow tweeters to change their location to Tehran to make it harder for agents of the interior ministry to track down protesting Iranians.

Blogs are also playing a major role. Iran has always had a large community of bloggers, not least because the number of young people in the country, and many are writing about the protests and like photoblog Tehranlive.org are posting photo updates hourly.

Others are posting images to Flickr and Google's Picasa and making the albums freely available on the web with hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube.

A real time feed of images being posted from Iran can be found on PicFog and Twitter users are using the likes of Twitpic to upload their images.

The increasing array of Twitter apps are all playing their role in the protests. Twitter search engine Twazzup is tracking all things Iran-related on Twitter.

Saeed Valadbaygi's 'Revolutionary Road' is one that provides a good source for pulling various coverage of the protests together.

As well as Iranian bloggers international news organisations, including the BBC, which with its Persian service has become a focus for Iranians and widely praised although it was being jammed intermittently over the weekend, and blogs like the Huffington Post, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's blog and the New York Times' The Lede blog are covering the aftermath of the elections in detail.

Others such as the National Iranian American Council is live blogging events blog aggregation site Global Voices has a special section and is translating reports from the Iranian blogosphere.

CNN has not had a good protest. It has come in for some heavy criticism for failing to focus on Iran in depth and thousands used the label CNNfail on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Since then CNN has since ramped up its coverage, but it could be too little too late.

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Should big brands make a move into social media?

2292853 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:07:00 GMT

Last night, as a guest speaker at The Future Laboratory's idea networking event, I had the opportunity to chat about who is doing what in social media, and the pros and cons of big brand's moves into the social media space.

Love it or hate it, with Facebook fast approaching 200 million users worldwide and Twitter adding thousands of new members daily, not to mention the popularity already established with platforms such as Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, the social media channel of influence can make or break a brand. Discussed was the fear factor that big brands have now toward the social media monster, and the question of whether to enter the arena, or stay out, for fear of losing control of a brand. As The Future Laboratory's mission is to look ahead and keep ahead of the curve, my counsel last night was that big brands need to define social media strategy now, rather than wait for a point in time when they may have to be re-active rather than pro-active toward the medium.

Whether it is a comprehensive strategic plan to making a brand's presence known among social media channels, or a short-term experiment into the space, such as a contest or other promotional campaign, brand's need be bold and step into this brave new world where consumers are hanging out and, in some cases, stirring their own little revolutions. In considering a few examples we discussed:

Mars recent campaign for its Skittles candy, a courageous approach that saw the website homepage transformed to showcase the brand's live streaming Twitter feed along with its Facebook, Flickr and YouTube pages. Usage triggered was so high for this campaign that at one point Twitter crashed, and the brand discovered that turning things over to consumers opens up to a challenge when not everyone played nice with the Tweets they sent along. In the end, the fantastic publicity received around the experiment, has made Skittles top of mind and won new enthusiasts for the brand, even if there has been a bit of brusing.

Comcast, an American cable and broadband provider, has been using Twitter to supplement customer service responses. They've posted a guy named Frank Eliason to man the Twitter customer service site, positively giving a corporate brand a real human being to interact with in real time. Customers simply Tweet their queries to @Comcastcares and quickly receive response.

Other big brands that are stepping into social media with a variety of approaches include: Dell, Starbucks, JetBlue, TheHomeDepot, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, HRBlock, Best Buy, Popeyes, Forrester Research, Ford, Samsung and Kodak, to name a few.

Here's a few quick tips I shared with folks last night in thinking about approaching social media for a brand:

Be Seen: What do you look like to your social media audience? Are you human, or are you something off a shelf? People want to see other people in the world of social networking so in reaching out to your audiences pay attention to showing them what you and your team look like. Upload images to your Facebook group of your brand in action -- people at events, people using your products, people in your office. Use Flickr to build an image trail of both products and people. Use YouTube to seed videos, integrating several visual tools to showcase the human side of your brand.

Be Real: Don't piss off your audiences by engaging in blatant heavy promotional use of Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites. Show a personality and offer up a variety of information to your audience, pointing them to helpful or quirky items.

Be Brave: This is new territory for brand building, and it takes an adventurous sort to take some risks in approaching social media. Think out common sense approaches to using social networking for your brand, and don't be afraid to experiment out there.

Be On It: Assign a member of your team, or several, to be monitoring and watching for responses that come back via Tweets, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr comments, and blogs. Response to people's comments should be swift and effective, helping those with complaints and thanking those with praise.

Be Interactive: It isn't enough to hang up a billboard in Second Life or set up a Facebook group or Twitter account, unless you think out how your approach should interact with people. Think about what you can offer up to your audience that will be of interest and relevance to your brand. Can you host a virtual conference in Second Life with prominent speakers? Can you run a contest through Twitter? One company called Going.com created one of the most popular Facebook applications called Naughty Gifts, a slightly cheeky way to give adult gifts to your friends, that has produced millions of exchanges. To promote Going.com, they took the popularity offline and held adult-themed parties throughout America, promoting the events through the Naughty Gifts Facebook application.

For more about future branding trends, sign up for The Future Laboratory's Lifestyle News Network (LSN).

Thinking about social media branding,

-Lisa

Brave Brands With Social Media Strategy:

Why blogging is far from dead

255762 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You had better stop reading this as blogging is dead. Seriously, I just read it. Some wag at Wired says there is too much social media, and blogging is, like, so 2004. What rubbish.

According to Paul Boutin, who writes for Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag, writing a blog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago as the blogosphere, "once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge".

Tsunami of paid-for bilge? It was worth reading the piece for that alone. I laughed out loud, as this rant was clearly marked "paid bilge" as someone hit the publish button.

He goes on to say that "cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths" and it is almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers.

His line is why bother? – you are better off expressing yourself on Facebook, Flickr or Twitter.

His argument seems to be those folksy blogs where people wrote about their humdrum day to day lives or, ahem, subjects such as politics or dating have been replaced by impersonal professional sites.

You mean like Valleyway? The site he writes for that is part of Nick Denton's media blog empire Gawker. Do you think he is talking at all about himself when he writes about "cut-rate journalists"? I'm emailing him right now. I'm just going to say this: does the phrase "pot kettle, kettle black" mean nothing to you? Try it out and take it for a spin. I think you might like it.

Swipes aside, on one level he has a point. The world is full of professional blogs in 2008 and marketers have entered the fray. The medium has grown and matured. New players and types of blog have entered the market. In places it has got professional, there are powerful blogs out there like the Huffington Post, and that is to be applauded for what it has brought us.

Newspapers like the Guardian have also thrived with sites like Comment is Free. All good news I say. Who wants to see the blogging wither and die? Not me for one. I enjoy this too much.

A lot of those early bloggers got bored and moved on as the novelty of writing an online came and went. My first blog ran for a few years and virtually all of the links that I had on my blogroll have died, but not all.

Yes social media, micro blogging and multi media sites are all the rage, but there is a place for all here. I use Facebook, Twitter and have flirted with a bunch of other social media sites but not, errr, committed. Blogging offered, and still does, a space to put down a sentence and a link or 500 words. Whatever caught your fancy that day. He complains in the piece that text-based sites aren't where the buzz is anymore, which is true but the buzz moves on and what it leaves behind is the substance.

For B2B sites like Brand Republic, blogging is very important. We've built up, and continue to do so, a network of bloggers with a variety of things to say. Some might post a picture, a piece of video or like me they might type for a good while before stopping.

Blogging is alive and kicking. Okay, I need to let me fellow Twitters know what I've been doing in the long form.

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