Category Twitter
Online ad boosts Twitter followers 69%: 4 Steps
SUMMARY: Twitter is fast rising in public awareness — but is the public aware of your Twitter feed?
Find out how Intuit’s TurboTax lifted their number of Twitter followers 69% with an ad that incorporated their “tweets.” Includes tips on audience targeting and creative samples of the ads.
CHALLENGE
Toward the end of 2008, Seth Greenberg, Director, Online Advertising and Internet Media, Inuit, and his team established Twitter feeds for several of Intuit’s brands. Intuit provides business and financial management software that include the brands Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax, and others.
Since Twitter attracts a range of consumers, the team saw the channel as a good fit for their consumer-focused tax preparation product, TurboTax. They wanted TurboTax to capture some attention during Twitter’s recent surge in traffic. Twitter’s unique visitor counts went from less than 5 million in January to more than 15 million in April, according to comScore. Although its meteoric growth has slowed (see links below), the site’s traffic is still growing.
“We’re working so hard on Twitter as a channel that we want as many people as possible to know that we’re here for them,” says Greenberg.
Greenberg and his team needed to lift their number of followers to make sure they were reaching consumers who were visiting the social network.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Twitter on June 29th, 2009
Twitter 1, Iranian censors 0: Why it’s still working
By Bob Sullivan, The Red Tape Chronicles
Why does Twitter work inside Iran even after other Internet services have been disrupted? The key feature enabling it to evade government censorship, some observers say, is something that might otherwise be considered Twitter’s Achilles’ heel.
Unlike Facebook, and most other social networking sites, Twitter users don’t need to visit Twitter.com to use the service. In the business world, that’s a terrible idea. Twitter has no way to promise potential advertisers that its enormous audience will ever see ads placed on the site.
Instead, Twitter has a completely open architecture that allows users to both send and receive messages on a variety of platforms — cell phones, Blackberries and, of course, other Web sites. This openness is proving to be particularly effective at avoiding government interference.
“You can connect to Twitter without going through Twitter’s front door,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law school professor who runs Herdict.org, which tracks censorship efforts worldwide. “These services run interference between you and Twitter.”
Posted by Tom Polanski in Twitter on June 18th, 2009
Why phishers love Facebook (and Twitter)
By Bob Sullivan, The Red Tape Chronicles
Facebook is the new playground for phishers. Why? The social networking site has made things relatively easy for computer criminals. So far, the consequences have been relatively mild — mostly, some annoying emails. But if Facebook and other social networking sites don’t get a handle on security issues soon, a serious outbreak could occur.
Behind every successful criminal computer hack a simple two-step process: gain trust, then exploit that trust with an attack. Computer criminals will tell you that gaining trust is the hard part. Consider a real-world parallel: Breaking into a bank is difficult. But if you befriend a guard, he’ll eventually let you walk right in through the front door.
That’s why Facebook attacks are so easy, says Mary Landesman, senior researcher at computer security firm ScanSafe.
“Facebook users assume a level of trust they just should not assume when using the site,” she said.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Facebook, Social Media, Twitter on June 2nd, 2009
The problem with planning social media (no problem)
By Cory Treffiletti
If you were engaged with digital media planning early in the continuum, say from 1995-2000, you regularly heard the phrase, “building the plane while flying it.” That cliché was used commonly to describe the exhilaration and similarly the frustration of media planning in an environment that was un-tested, un-standardized and extremely fluid when compared to its traditional brethren.
The same thing can be said for social media planning right now, because social media is somewhat tested, infinitely un-standardized and extremely fluid. What adds even more difficulty is, it is more about the platform than any of the individual players — which adds a level of complexity that can easily overwhelm an unseasoned planner.
When planning display in digital media, it’s easy to focus on the publisher as the location for placement, and each publisher has a forecasted, finite volume of inventory that can be planned. In social media, publishers are increasingly shifting their focus away from their sites and more to a distributed model that relies on third-party programmer development to create access points.
In a recent article in the Sunday New York Times, Facebook proclaimed its desire for a third party to developers to create new interfaces for accessing the social network rather than driving users to the host .com site. They are not as concerned with site traffic as they are with accessibility to the platform. Twitter is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack when it comes to this concept, with most people accessing Twitter through mobile apps such as Twitterific or desktop apps like TweetDeck.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter on May 22nd, 2009
Will extreme narcissism eventually kill the best of Twitter?
By Helen A.S. Popkin
Micro-famous art blogger Paddy Johnson recently hepped her readers to a social networking application that actually makes Twitter seem relevant and interesting — at least to me. It’s Cursebird, a “real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter,” and it is awesome.
Not only does it relay (or “retweet” as the kids say) profane Twitter posts, the Cursebird home page features the top five bad words currently ranking on the social network along with percentage points, the cursing stats of random foul-fingered tweeters, and a search feature to check just how nasty your Twitter pals can be.
Beyond this and a couple of other independently developed Twitter apps that cater to my outer juvenile, I don’t much care for Twitter. Also, I’m really sick of hearing about it. Suddenly Twitter is the Snuggie of social networking. Everyone’s yammering about it endlessly and busting out his or her own Twitter feed as awkwardly as wearing a blanket with sleeves.
Seriously. If you’re not Shaq, I don’t want to read it. Alas, I am forced to acknowledge the “perfect storm” (two more words I’d greatly appreciate never hearing again) that led to Twitter’s current critical mass, as well as its myriad usefulness — even if most people haven’t yet figured out how to use it right.
In 2007 I wrote about Twitter in a column titled “Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you’re doing.” Since then, a plethora of events helped reveal the microblogging site as a powerful tool, though its full potential is yet to be harnessed.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Advertising, Twitter on April 16th, 2009