Twittering for a living

I have spent the day back at my old stomping ground at Uclan taking part in a seminar organised by Francois Nel on twittering for a living.

It's part of three workshops aimed at getting students from both the media and business faculties to enter the entrepreneurial world of work.

This,the second of the three was aimed at showing how social media can be used to build a brand both a personal one and a business one and how social media can help to build a network.

I used by experiences at Innovation Manchester as a case study in point whilst my co presenter Simon Harrow looked at the theory behind networks.

One of the questions that came up was the time factor and we both made it clear that creating a social media brand was not something you could do overnight.In fact we both agreed that the strategy could easily take six to twelve months.

It was interesting to note how few of the assembled audience used social media tools other than facebook and as I pointed out in the question and answer session,converting some of that facebook time to social media sources could well benefit them.

We were joined on webcam by Joanna Geary from the Times who told the audience that she had always been more comfortable using social media as a medium for communicating with her audience and emphised how building a brand is so important now especially in the world of journalism.

Locally search twitter themes

I have yet to experiment with it but the latest in Geo twitter has been rolled out.

It is called Local Trends on January 26,and is advertised as a way for users to find out more about news events and local topics that are relevant to their locality.

To access the service head to your personal Twitter page and change the Worldwide Trending topics list to match your location preferences.

So far you can put only the UK in but twitter are working on adding cities to the feature.

I-SPY an MP

The latest twitter phenonoma to hit Westminster is @eyespymp.

It encourages its followers to email in when they see an MP and ley them know what he or she is doing at the time.

It has only been going a couple of days but has 1500 followers as I write this.

This is its latest tweet

After lunch: Kate Hoey on Number 87 bus wearing furry coat. Got off at Whitehall. Fur didn't look real.

Twitter mob rules OK

Great piece from Sunny Handal over at Comment is Free who writes of being

castigated along with others, for being part of a mob that had taken exception to the prospect of Rod Liddle being appointed editor of the Independent

(well I am with him with that)

What those protesting about the mob don't understand

is that these are real people, their own readers, trying to do something about the world around them. They join Facebook groups, retweet about court injunctions or state #welovetheNHS because, occasionally, they have the opportunity to be part of an spontaneous movement that can have a big impact. Not all lead somewhere, of course, but some do. And the more people realise the power of the collective the more they'll join in.

The top of the curve for twitter?

Growth in twitter is flatlining according to this report from Mashable.

According to web analytics firm Compete, Twitter’s (Twitter) U.S. traffic grew by 1.45%, from 22.48 million in November to 22.81 million unique visitors in December,

says the tech site and its thoughts on why?

1.Twitter’s growth isn’t stalling. Rather, these stats aren’t capturing Twitter users utilizing apps, a growing chunk of the Twitterverse.

2.Twitter itself has a limited appeal. Only a small amount of people “have something to say” on a consistent basis.

3.Twitter’s user retention rate is famously weak. The issue became public in April 2009, but has yet to be solved.

4.or many, Twitter hasn’t hit critical mass. Part of why people are on Facebook is because everybody else is on it. We may still be far away from that inflection point for the common Internet user.

So you’re drowning in a sea of information. Perhaps the answer is more information.

The New York Times' David Carr reflects on a year of twitter

In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting

and on its professionalism

the best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.

Breeding like rabbits

What exactly is a social media expert?

According to this report at current rates twitter will be entirely over run by them in 3 years

In May 09 when we first used Tweepsearch to count of the Twitter bios of self-proclaimed social media gurus, experts, superstars and ninjas there were 4,487. A mere seven months later, we were shocked to see that there are now nearly 16.000. They are multiplying like rabbits.
She goes on to break out the 15,740 they found in the chart above.
This represents a 3.5x increase every 6 months. Projecting this growth forward means that there will be nearly 30m Social Media Experts etc on Twitter by this time in 2012, to add to the other disasters in that year (and 100m by mid 2013).

I have seen some tweets saying that if you weren't on twitter in 2007 then you are not a social media expert,the early adapters no doubt.However I fancy that this is simply an outbreak of social media snobbery.

But I am interested in what a social media expert is and what exactly qualifies somebody to say that(quickly checks twitter bio and no mention of socail media-good)

But

Twitter releases its first premium product

So Twitter keeps to its world and begins the roll out of its "premium products".

The first is a device that allows companies to have multiple contributors to communicate from a single account.

Called quite simply contributor,this means that although the messages would still come from the company profile name, the author’s profile name would also feature in the byline.

Whether this is the way that revenue streams will arise is anybody's guess but I am certain that there will be a few companies that will want to experiment with this new tool.

This from twitter's development team

This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we'll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!

Twitter asks did the earth move?

Twitter is being used by the US Geological Survey (USGS) to get instant public reaction to earthquakes.

This report from the BBC says that

The agency is trawling the messages to find out what people felt during a tremor - whether there was a lot of shaking in their area or not.
There are big spikes in Twitter traffic immediately following a quake and the USGS believes emergency responders might find the information useful.
It could help them assess very quickly the severity of a particular event.

However,

the survey stressed that the social networking tool would only ever supplement the existing scientific reporting systems which determine shake effects.

Twitter on the turn

This chart which is Business Insider's chart of the week asks whether the social media company may have turned the corner.

Interesting? Possibly as it shows that November sees a fall in newly registered users but one swallow doesn't bring a summer

That JFK moment

The Fry affair was Twitter's first JFK moment,well at least according to Matthew Norman in the Independent this morning

Or what we were doing when news of his subsequent un-resignation gave those of us too young to remember the flavour of the joyous relief when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper? Pray God Stephen's return doesn't prove another false dawn, but regardless of that fear the episode constitutes Twitter's first JFK moment.

writes Norman

Fry blogger critic revealed

So it appears that the blogger who nearly sent Stephen Fry into twitter oblivion runs a an adult site in Birmingham.

The Birmingham Mail has tracked him down and reports that

The 47-year-old translator from Handsworth, who uses the false name Richard Plum, has become the subject of a hate campaign since making the comments against the television presenter

Why the East German's didn't need twitter

We might think that twitter and modern technology is the tool of spreading revolution but as the Globe and Mail reports

In 1989, there was no text messaging or Twitter. But that didn't stop resistance members from quickly spreading the word

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, and the communist government in neighbouring Czechoslovakia joined its neighbours in giving up power six weeks later, the activists involved are struck by the fact they were able to communicate with a speed and efficiency that would be difficult today - even though they lacked the cellphones, e-mail networks, Twitter accounts and websites used nowadays by anti-government movements in places such as Iran.

Survey claims twitter costs the economy £1.4b

In its latest swipe at social media,the Telegraph is reporting this morning that twitter costs the economy nearly £1.4b.

According to a survey by Morse, the IT services and technology company,

More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.

Twitter-the great excuse of Western media in Iran

I’ve never really quoted anyone that I’ve never met,’ he said. The same could not be said for much of the Western press, who, faced with the alternative of reporting nothing, often relied on broadcasting messages and videos before investigating their provenance.

This is the view of Iason Athanasiadis who was detaines in Iran during the protests over the summer election.He writes over on the Dart Centre Blog that

It was one such video, of Neda Agha Soltan dying after being shot in the chest, that became the most powerful and recognizable symbol of the protests.
“The video turned out to be authentic, but social media also helped spread false images of Neda, inflated protest tallies, and rumors; the multitude of non-Iranian Twitter users who changed their stated location to Tehran made parsing the authentic from the inauthentic all the more difficult.”

Ht-Judith Townend

Twitter continues to grow as the young flock to it

The latest Pew Report on Twitter came out yesterday,and it show that the medium continues to grow.

Compared to last December 19 per cent of people now use it to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others compared to 11 per cent.

The survey also finds that

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

Interestingly the report also says that

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

One definition of social media

I just love this tweet from Paul Wiggins that has just come through on my feed

Newspaper journalism is a first draft of history. Social media is what used to be the unverified pub gossip. Useful but problematic.

Discuss

Tweet it or sleep on it?

We have all been guilty of it,perhaps me more than many but is it right to live blog or live tweet at events.

The advantageous are all there in giving an audience instantaneous access to what is going on

But here is the downside

Suddenly there is no concept of news values. Only just how many tools can we use to spread the thin story just about as thinly as possible? There is never any thought of "what is this worth?" or "is this a story?"Just keep on spreading.

I would add to that the context and the time out aspect where it is often good as a journalist to reflect on what has been heard or viewed.

It is a battle that journalism has to contend with in this 24 glare that we live under.Getting the balance right is important and maybe it is up to journalists to set the parameters.

Welcome to Twitterville

No surprise that a new book about twitter and business is out and no doubt there will be a gushing of others in the next few months and business embrace social media.

This one by Shel Israel is called Twitterville and the FT's David Gelles does a good review in today's paper

Twitterville manages to be an engaging read, full of meaningful anecdotes and useful analysis. It makes a convincing case that Twitter's worth is not just the ability to broadcast short messages, but the ongoing and transformative conversations that these tweets ignite.

he writes

The book comes with a warning though as twitter is

quickly transforming from a quaint community into an unruly megalopolis. "As it grows it suffers from an ongoing assault of a steadily increasing flock of spammers, scammers, stalkers, phishers and plain old-fashioned flimflam artists,

Newspaper twitter followers up 17%

Malcolm Coles has come up with some twitter stats which say that National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 .

You can check out all the figures Here

The top 20 are dominated by the Guardian,the FT and the Times with technology,news,finanacial,travel and media prolific.