Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

SuperMedia just announced the launch of a new SuperPages initiatives via Twitter. At no cost to the business owner, Superpages.com is distributing thousands of coupons it houses from its local business listings to 72 city-specific accounts on Twitter. This is the third of recent SuperMedia / SuperPages innovations.

“A coupon or discount has always been a super way to drive more consumers to your business and increase customer loyalty,” said Scott W. Klein, CEO of SuperMedia Inc, in the announcement. “We are now taking the distribution of coupons on our site to the next level. By leveraging the social media space on Twitter, we bring more leads to our clients and businesses listed on Superpages.com.”

SuperPages business advertisers log into their account, upload coupons to their business profile page and the coupons are tweeted.  They can create up to three coupons with start and expiration date, disclaimer, promotion code for tracking, and say to which store locations the coupons apply. They can update the coupons as they wish.

So far, 72 U.S. cities are available. The complete list is in the announcement. SuperPages is on Twitter at www.twitter.com/superpages.

After waiting all day for what was reported all over the Web and ironically Twitter itself as the don’t miss SXSW session, at least one reporter said the reality was a yawn. No Web platform announcement here – just something called @anywhere. While it seems an interesting product, it’s a little ho-hum compared to what was expected from the many thousands who crowded the auditorium, and some who couldn’t squeeze in.

Liz Gannes of GigaOm said that three-fourths of the way through the presentation by Twitter CEO Evan Williams she was surrounded by vacant seats.

Twitter’s new @Anywhere “seems to be like Facebook Connect, in that it allows users to log in around the web with their Twitter IDs (something that’s already somewhat possible today), but it’s also more oriented towards consumption and publisher tools,” reported GigaOm. “It will allow content creators to invite readers to follow authors on Twitter directly from the page, and bring in information from Twitter when users hover over a button.”

Williams didn’t announce any launch date, but said its “partners” (whatever partners really means in this case) are Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo and YouTube.

Of course, we’re still waiting for word on the ad platform.

Dick Costolo, former Google product manager and CEO of Feedburner, a Google acquisition,  is Twitter’s new COO, effective next week.  This follows closely on the heels of a VentureBeat announcement by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone that his company is exploring commercial directories and analytics tools as possible money-makers for the text-focused social site. It might also be in response to Facebook nipping at Twitter heels with its own FriendFeed acquisition.

Twitter would seem to be eminently monetizable. According to new research from the Kamaron Institute eight out of ten tweeters are using the product for business purposes. ComScore has reported 44.5 million Twitter users worldwide, with 7 million new tweeters in one month.

Facebook has just announced its acquisition of online sharing service FriendFeed, with all 12 FF employees staying with the firm.  ”Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, in the announcement. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

We use FriendFeed happily as well, primarily as a delivery-assist for Twitter posts, and almost certainly Facebook is taking on Twitter with this acquisition.

Not everyone is enamored with FriendFeed, however, and it really never caught on with the mainstream social public. “If [FriendFeed competitor] Posterous makes micro-blogging quick, easy and useful, FriendFeed is at the complete other end of the spectrum, filling your data stream with lots of noise, data, and in this author’s opinion being completely unusable,” wrote Search Engine Land writer and online marketing speaker Michael Gray. “What FriendFeed does is allow you to aggregate all of your social media information into one stream -  all of your tweets from Twitter, links from StumbleUpon, pictures from Flickr, Facebook updates, Blogger posts, and so on – are now in one nice package to share with your friends. On the surface this sounds like a really great idea, but it quickly turns into an unmanageable fire-hose of information. If you have a small group of friends who are active in social media, it quickly becomes so noisy that it becomes impossible to extract the value.”

While the Facebook announcement does not disclose terms, The Wall Street Journal has said that the price tag was $50 million – $15 mil in cash, and the remainder in Facebook stock. Conjecture by BusinessInsider’s Dan Frommer is that FriendFeed will operate as is for awhile, but “it wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook took the best FriendFeed features it doesn’t have already, stuffs them into Facebook, and shuts down the old FriendFeed.”

UPDATE: Shortly after we posted this announcement Tech Crunch posted information on a limited-access Facebook Lite beta – what someone described as a simplified version of Twitter, with comments enabled. Or, come to think of it, a simplified version of FriendFeed. hmmm….

The Conference Board is an invaluable service for monitoring the economic status of the U.S., particularly in these uncertain times. For AIM Group readers, the organization publishes job information as well as a Consumer Confidence Index.

All that data will now be released immediately via both Facebook and Twitter.

Other Conference Board publications to get the social media treatment:

– Leading Economic Indexes for the United States and nine other countries/regions,
– The Employment Trends Index
– Help-Wanted Online Data Series
– Measure of CEO Confidence

Twitter unique visitors have reached 44.5 million worldwide in June according to new numbers from ComScore. That’s an increase of 7 million new visitors from May, a 19 percent increase. But compare it with June 2008 and you’ll findn increase of 1,460 percent. Yow!

20 million of Twitter’s visitors are coming from the U.S. ComScore now counts Twitter as the No. 52 largest site in the world (that’s bigger than ESPN but smaller than Craigslist).

Remember that these numbers only count visitors to the Twitter.com site and a substantial number of users – more than half by some counts – get to Twitter via third party apps. That could put unique visitors at potentially 90 million worldwide and 40 million in the U.S. Not up to Facebook numbers yet which hit 77 million in June, but who knows,  the way things are going in the social network world, Twitter could soon overtake MySpace’s 68 million (and dropping) unique visitors per month.

We’ve written before about how Twitter users tend to skew older and how conducting business intelligence seems to be the fastest growing use of Twitter. But the data doesn’t back up our anecdotal evidence.

According to the “Consumer Internet Barometer” from TNS and The Conference Board, 41.6 percent of Internet users who used Twitter did so to keep in touch with their friends…just like on more established social networks like Facebook.

Only 25.8 percent, by contrast, use Twitter to find news and stay updated. And a still smaller number – 9.4 percent – use it for research.

Who do Twitterers follow the most? Friends and family as we said before. Next: celebrities, bloggers and TV shows. Just like, um, the rest of the Web.

Twitter users mainly found about the site by word of mouth (not suprising given that Twitter has done no advertising so far). One half of tweeters said a friend or family member introduced them to the site and 33 percent were hooked by a co-worker.

Muck Rack is an interesting Twitter tool that aggregates tweets from journalists in real time and publishes them on its Web site and via the Muck Rack Twitter feed (3,433 followers currently). You can search by journalists, beats and sources.

The company has now added a new feature – and it costs money: the ability to tweet a press release.

A tweeted press release can be up to 130 characters long and can link to the full release. The cost: a buck per character with a $50 minimum (gee, we remember the days when you got paid $1 per word to write an article!)

The nice thing about the service is that it lets journalists follow both the latest news and new press releases from the same place or the same Twitter feed.

Will the service be useful? It all depends on numbers. The more journalists start using Muck Rack, the greater the value will be to PR professionals who want to tap into the newspaper industry’s short attention span.

Which site is more valuable to businesses – LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. 3,600 respondents say Twitter. That’s not necessarily surprising. What is surprising is that the poll was conducted by social media “rival” LinkedIn.

The question asked was simply: “What is the most important new platform for brands to master?” Options were Twitter, Facebook, the iPhone, Digg and LinkedIn.

Key takeaways from the poll:

– Twitter is number 1 with 30 percent choosing the micro-blogging system. Facebook came in at 26 percent and LinkedIn at 22 percent. Almost no one thinks Digg is the most important.

– 26 percent of respondents were managers, 56 percent were non-managers and only 4 percent were business owners.

– Business owners were most likely to put Twitter at the top, non-managers were most likely to favor LinkedIn.

– Women prefer Twitter; men like LinkedIn.

Thinking of tweeting during the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre? Keep your iPhone to yourself. Chinese authorities have stepped up censorship ahead of the sensitive June 4 anniversary.

Twitter has been blocked along with Hotmail, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, Flickr, Blogger, LiveJournal and Huffington Post.

Print media has not been immune either. In recent days, subscribers to The Economist magazine, the Financial Times and South China Morning Post found Tiananmen-related pages ripped out. And on TV, BBC viewers found the screen turned black on any reference to the event.

Google said access to YouTube in China had been restricted for several weeks now.

China has the world’s most intensive system of Internet censorship including automatic filtering plus active scrutiny by real life “cyber-police.”

Another job service via Twitter has launched, joining more established players like Jobing and JobCircle (see our articles here and here). The new site is called HashJobs.com – with hash referring to the tags that help Twitter users more easily search for specific topics and themes. HashJobs.com lets Twitter users simply search for #jobs to receive postings from the company.

The more jobs get posted on Twitter, however, the more potential spam there is. HashJobs’ response is to controlling which accounts get approved or not.

One way or another, Twitter seems to be emerging as the “job boards killer.” We’ll keep covering new Twitter job mashups.

The New York Times has promoted veteran reporter and editor Jennifer Preston to the position of “social media editor.” The announcement was made – wait for it – via Twitter (a formal release was issued afterward).

Preston is charged with ensuring “some consistency about what we consider good uses of [social media] and bad uses of it,” according to Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman. Preston is not a regular social media user…yet, he added. “But I don’t think that’s a terrible handicap here in real ways. Nobody’s an expert.”

The need for a social media honcho at The Times may have been spurred by a mid-May faux pas when details from an internal meeting about Web strategy were broadcast on several reporters’ Twitter feeds.

By the end of Preston’s first day on Twitter, she’d already amassed more than 2,400 followers. Her first tweet: “how should @nytimes be using Twitter?”

Preston previously oversaw The Times’ regional weeklies.

The blogosphere his been all abuzz with the announcement that Twitter will be the basis for a new TV reality series.

The social-networking service said yesterday that it has teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site. The show will apparently harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.

Twitter’s Biz Stone said that “there is no official Twitter TV show” and added that the deal signed is a “lightweight, non-exclusive agreement with the producers which helps them move forward more freely.”

Probably Twitter will be just lending its name and logo to the show and having little to do with the actual production.

Still, could this be yet another way for Twitter to monetize its service?

Stone praised Twitter’s “open approach” and wrote on his blog that the service “might have the power to transform television. We’re very excited to see where these experiments take us.”