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CEOs are under pressure to appear accessible and authentic, but social media like Twitter, with its demands for quick, unscripted updates that can quickly go viral, poses legal and other risks for the executives and their firms. When General Electric Co. GE -0.94% Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt tweeted for the first time this month, his "Hello Twitter" was greeted with some snarky replies, including this one: "@JeffImmelt how come my grandfather got on twitter before you?" While arguably late to the game, Mr. Immelt's debut on the microblogging site makes him a rarity among chief executives, who have generally steered clear of social media even as their companies have embraced it to commune with customers and pursue new business.... [Give it time and a proper channel. An excellent read from WSJ - JD] [PHOTO: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer]
Last week I was reading one of my industry news sources and an article caught my attention. I wanted to let my friends know about the piece so, as usual, I went to tweet about it. And that’s when I noticed this: There were more people posting the article to LinkedIn than there were people tweeting about it. And that’s when the sledgehammer hit me. Twitter has a huge new competitor with the potential to swamp them, particularly in one critical area. And, it is all of their own making. Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.... [Valuable insight for social media managers - JD]
Three key items to know about Twitter's new Embedded Timeline functionality. Last summer, I wrote that Twitter had become the currency of social discussion. ESPN used Twitter’s Embedded Timeline feature for the US Open. I said: “Twitter is the companion piece to news and culture. It doesn’t REPLACE, it enhances.” Twitter recently launched the next generation of such social discussion and content enhancement with their new embedded timelines feature. Here’s what you need to know about it.... [Useful insight, potential - JD]
Would You Place A 911 Call On Twitter?... The Japanese government is considering taking steps to make Twitter and other social networks an official emergency call system. According to PCWorld, the national Fire and Disaster Management Agency hosted a panel in Tokyo to discuss allowing 911-type emergency calls to be sent via Twitter. Coinciding with this panel, Twitter Japan head James Kondo tweeted that he would like to see Twitter’s use as lifeline during emergencies strengthened, and the company’s Japan blog posted several tips on using Twitter during emergencies and natural disasters....
When deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter, I typically look at the person’s tweets to see if they interest me and if I can learn something from them. Increasingly, I’ve also been looking at whether people’s tweets are well-written. Do they have a distinct writing voice? Is their writing witty? Does their writing pull me in as a reader? If so, I click the “follow” button.... [Tweet vigorously but rigorously - JD]
The debate continues over which model is better for social networks: free and ad-supported or paid for by users? There has been an interesting debate going on over the past week or so that gets to the heart of one of the deep-seated conflicts within the web-startup community: namely, whether apps and services are better when they are free or when users pay for them. Dalton Caldwell, the founder of Imeem, kicked things off by saying he is going to try to create a for-pay version of Twitter, and others cheered him on by saying that an advertising-based approach makes a lot of services less appealing than they could be. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, however, argued that free and ad-supported is actually the best model for consumer services that want to achieve a broad reach. So who is right? That depends.... [Really great debate and discussion - JD]
Do you work in PR or know someone who does? If you read this post, your success rate when pitching stories to journalists will increase tenfold. It would have to if you’re guilty of some of the no-no’s this Twitter highlights. @DearPR is “a journalist letting the public relations industry know how they can do a better job—one tweet at a time,” by soliciting PR-friendly suggestions and angry gripes!...
C-level executives are often apprehensive about diving in to the social media space. For some, it’s a question of the time commitment involved, while others might be unsure of how to balance personal with professional – and of course there is always reluctance when it comes to the elusive ROI question. But Twitter and other social media platforms are ideal for communicating directly with partners, employees and customers in an informal and conversational way, especially when it comes to connecting with individuals located miles or countries away. By sharing personal anecdotes and industry expertise, as well as engaging with followers directly by responding to questions and commentary, executives have the opportunity to improve their perception as an industry expert and ultimately improve perception of their brand. Here are five handy tips for launching or maintaining a C-level Twitter handle...
Just under two weeks ago Twitter revealed a ‘tweaked’ redesign of their iconic bird logo (image 1). They rolled out some brand guidelines that included usage rules that stated that you should not ‘rotate or change the direction of the bird’ (image 2). Some eagle-eyed twitter users noticed that when you rotate the bird anti-clockwise by 90 degrees it looks oddly like Batman (image 3).... [Now this a branding challenge - JD]
A study shows that the more tweets a URL receives, the better its search ranking. PR professionals can (and should) benefit from this revelation. According to a study performed by U.K. digital agency Branded3, there is a strong positive correlation between the number of tweets of a URL, and its corresponding Google ranking. The study suggests that a Web page’s search rankings start to improve when its URL has received 50 tweets, but the real benefits start to accrue after it’s tweeted more than 1,000 times. Public relations teams are often responsible for the content organizations publish. As a result, it’s important to consider how they can build rank and visibility for their organizations’ websites by fine-tuning their Twitter strategy and working more closely with their Web marketing teams....
What do you use as your daily Social Media dashboard every day?Most likely not Twitter.com I am guessing.Yet, in recent months, there were a great number of browser extensions released, specifically for Twitter.com.... So here are my top 5 finds you can use to make Twitter.com a truly powerful Social Media tool for you...
We’ve made the argument before that Twitter is effectively a media entity, distributing news and entertainment and other content to millions of readers in real time — although unlike traditional media entities, Twitter does this with anyone’s content rather than content it creates in-house. So far, the company has shied away describing itself as a media company, or exercising much editorial control over what it distributes, but there are some tantalizing signs that it may be moving in that direction. Could Twitter become a media player in its own right?...
Twitter chat guide: what you need to start a twitter chat event, create a plan, checklist, promotions, analytics and archiving. Hosting a Twitter chat is an amazing way to interact with your fans and followers, to better understand and grow your community quickly, as well as promote your brand and business. I’ve seen the networking and promotional power of the Twitter chat, so I made up my mind to dig deeper. It’s challenging to describe everything I learned in this one article, but I’ll do my best. Here’s the all-in-one guide to prepare for and host your Twitter chat....
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Twitter has put together a set of “best practices” for journalists and newsrooms. Essentially, it boils down to the following four items: 1. Tweet your beat
2. Use hashtags for context -
3. @cite your sources
4. Share what you’re reading Twitter says it analyzed thousands of tweets from over 150 news brands and individual reporters around the world to come up with the first four....
Twitter is starting to roll out revisions to its search functions, long considered by tech cognoscenti as a laggard element of the micro-blogging service. The San Francisco-based company announced several changes in a blog post on Friday, including a long-requested ability to search only within Twitter accounts that a user follows. For example, if Twitter users are looking for messages about the current Tour de France bicycle race, they can click a link to see tweets only from the people they follow, and not drown in tweets from the Twitterverse.... [They've got a long ways to go, but Twitter has made some good first steps to improve Twitter search - JD]
By Amy Gahran
News outlets of all kinds increasingly have been aggregating or curating Twitter content to augment news coverage and liveblogs—but Twitter is changing the rules. As Twitter gets more serious about its search for a long-term business model, it’s started limiting how third parties are able to access and use Twitter content. On Aug. 16 Twitter announced upcoming changes to its application programming interface (API), the “firehose” which supplies Twitter content to third-party tools such as Storify.
In particular, Twitter’s existing guidelines for how Tweets can be displayed will become requirements.
They sound pretty serious about it. According to Twitter: “If your application displays Tweets to users, and it doesn’t adhere to our display requirements, we reserve the right to revoke your [API access].” Yes, they can do that. This would be more likely to directly affect popular Twitter-powered tools (applications) and perhaps large media outlets, but indirectly it would affect any news publisher using these tools.... [Curators, bloggers and content prod take note - JD]
...There’s no better way to find out fast what, if anything, is happening in the world, from your backyard to the other side of the Earth. If you want to go deeper, now or later, Twitter facilitates the process nicely via its mobile and desktop platforms as well as extensions such as TweetDeck. As with any other service of its type, Twitter also entertains. And, if you choose to accept the opportunity, Twitter can help you act in your own self-promoting interest. Twitter will never die. It doesn’t have to evolve — cosmetically, stylistically, etc. — as much as Facebook does because the content that fuels Twitter always changes. In fact, it can and usually does change in an instant.... [Twitter rocks - JD]
Twitter is a social media microblogging platform that encourages interaction in the form of 140 character exchanges. Twitter engagement abbreviates content through the use of links and attachments while expanding the conversation through the use of hashtags. As a result, Twitter enables one-to-many, one-to-one and many-to-many interactions. Yet, despite this ability to communicate, Twitter isn’t a conversation based on recent research by Dan Zarrella of Hubspot. Zarrella analyzed the percentage of Twitter participants who replied to tweets based on their follower counts. He found that the higher a person’s follower base, the less likely they were to reply to a tweet. If you think about this, it intuitively makes sense since people with high levels of Twitter followers tend to be celebrities and influencers. People follow these celebrities since they’ve got interesting commentary to share. Further, these followers will reply or retweet these tweets to attempt to get attention. Based on this analysis, Zarrella concluded that Twitter isn’t a conversation. Twitter is a media platform that helps amplify your voice....
Comparing a traditional news story about a recent shooting with a news report from a Reddit user -- who pulled together Twitter messages from the perpetrators and victims -- provides a glimpse of what a real-time, crowdsourced newsroom of the... ...Mark Little of Storyful, which works with mainstream media outlets to do exactly that kind of thing, has written about how journalists need to stop seeing themselves as gatekeepers of information and start to look at journalism as a collaborative effort involving all kinds of different sources. Twitter is clearly one of these sources, as the Toronto shooting shows — and so is Reddit, which has already proven in the past that it can be a crowdsourced fact-checking engine. And those who learn how to make use of all these tools will wind up producing better journalism.... [Very thought-provoking and worth reading - JD]
Planned upgrades for Twitter's iPhone app have leaked from Apple's i0S 6 App Store. i0S 6, the newest mobile operating system from Apple due out this fall, promises to breathe new life into Apple devices, and will include Facebook integration and a completely revamped maps system. Additionally, a leak in the redesigned i0S 6 App Store, which will house all the iPhone's apps, has revealed details about Twitter's planned iPhone app updates. 9to5mac found leaked release notes for the next version of Twitter for iPhone in the i0S 6 App Store. Twitter for iPhone 4.3 will bring several new features focusing on interactivity, enhanced notifications and searching. PR pros are still likely handling most of their brand's Twitter activity from their computers and not from their phone, but these new features may help in managing their company's handle while on the go. Here are five of the leaked release notes that are most relevant for communicators... [Really valuable social media insight - JD]
According to a ground-breaking study (“Revolutionary study: We prove that tweets do affect rankings”) performed by UK digital agency Branded3, there is a strong positive correlation between the... number of tweets of a URL, and its corresponding Google ranking. The study suggests that a web page’s search rankings start to improve when its URL has received 50 tweets, but the real benefits start to accrue after a web site is tweeted more than 1,000 times. Because much of the content an organization publishes originates with the public relations team, it’s important for communications pros to pause for a minute and consider how they can build rank and visibility for their organizations’ web sites by fine-tuning their Twitter strategy and integrating more strongly with their web marketing teams....
The deal that Twitter announced on Thursday with NASCAR will see an editor employed by the network curating and highlighting tweets and other content, a deal that takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. ...the real-time information network has created a kind of portal for the Pocono 400 race this weekend. The site looks like a fairly normal Twitter feed, with one important difference: in addition to highlighting tweets using an algorithm, an editor hired by Twitter will also be selecting or “curating” the stream. If that sounds like the kind of thing a media company might do, it’s probably because it is the kind of thing a media company would do — the NASCAR deal takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned?
Sainsbury's has this whole Twitter thing down cold. Earlier today, popular U.K. blogger October Jones complained that his chicken sandwich from the grocery chain "tastes like it was beaten to death by Hulk Hogan." The company's official PR account promptly responded: "Really sorry it wasn't up to scratch. We will replace Mr. Hogan with Ultimate Warrior on our production line immediately."... [Way to handle a customer complaint with savvoir faire, Sainsbury's - JD]
Check out this overview of best practices to stand out from the crowd with your Twitter theme and follow the tutorial to create your own profile from scratch. With Twitter quickly becoming the hottest site to be seen on, everyone wants to stand out from the crowd. There has already been a range of quality designs showcased on various sites, which has shown an emergence of trends such as the ‘sidebar’. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices around Twitter background design and get to work creating our own. We all recognise the default blue Twitter background right? It’s not a bad design, it’s clean and trendy but it doesn’t stand out when the majority of Twitter users also have the same look. Furthermore, if you’re keen to achieve more followers, removing this background would probably help out by showing that you’re an active user, or if you’re tweeting on behalf of your company or service, it helps prove that you’re not a spammer. Generally speaking, there are three main approaches when it comes to creating your Twitter background (other than a boring solid colour!): Read more: http://bit.ly/KoEvz4
Via Martin Gysler
Journalists can be their own worst enemies when they try to interact with their audience online. If you think that the online medium somehow fundamentally changes the way that people interact, and that you need to adopt a new set of principles for interviewing and interacting with people online, you're just setting yourself up for failure.... Last week, I decided to get more active on Twitter by hosting an afternoon "Twitter chat" each weekday. (Okay, I hear people freaking out now. "You said this didn't require any special online skills, Robert!" Chill. Stay with me.)...
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