Buy Buy Birdie: Seven Charities To Help Test Twitter ‘Buy’ Button | The NonProfit TimesThe NonProfit Times. News & Articles>Buy Buy Birdie: Seven Charities To Help Test Twitter ‘Buy’ Button Seven charities will help pilot a program on Twitter later this year that will test a “Buy” button on the site. The social media platform site announced the test this week that a test will start with some 30 brands, artists and nonprofit organizations, including Eminem, Brad Paisley and Pharrell as well as companies like The Home Depot and Burberry.
Among the nonprofits chosen for the test are: DonorsChooseGLAADGlideGlobal CitizenThe Nature Conservancy(RED)9/11 Day Some Tweets from test partners will feature a “Buy” button for a small percentage of U.S. users, letting people buy directly from the Tweet. Twitter called the pilot program an “early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun. Ian Cleary: How Brands Can Build Engagement on Twitter, According to NASA's Social Media Stars. What does it take for a brand to engage with its audience on Twitter? NASA was recently named one of the most engaged brands on Twitter, from among the 100 most followed. I recently caught up with NASA's Social Media Manager John Yembrick and Deputy Social Media Manager Jason Townsend to find out what exactly they are doing to engage their audience, and what other brands can do to reach the same level of engagement.
The @NASA Twitter account was created towards the end of 2008 and has grown to close to 4 million followers. Remarkably, their goal has never been about gathering a certain number of followers. In that context, four million Twitter followers merely sounds like a "good start. " "We've always had this amazing content," continued John. What NASA found is that visitors wanted to share their experience by taking pictures and sending these and general updates to their fans and followers. The way NASA shares their story has now fundamentally changed. Why Twitter Removed Favorites And Lists From The Twitter.com Sidebar (And Why Almost Nobody Cares)
On Friday Twitter made some design tweaks to Twitter.com, which included the removal of the Favorites and Lists links from the home page. Both of these used to sit in the right sidebar below the data about who you were following and who was following you. Not no more. They’ve been whacked. Fear not – they’ve not been completely erased. You can still access your lists from the menu in your main panel, and all of the sidebar information is now housed on your profile page. Visit that and you get one-click access to favorites and lists, plus that all-important list tally at the top-right of the sidebar.
And if you want to add a user to a list, simply visit their profile page – this option is now controlled by the same dropdown button that lets you block somebody. But, here’s the thing: most people won’t have picked up on this change. Twitter casually announced the change via their @support profile. Here’s the new-look homepage sidebar. And on your profile. So why has Twitter done this? Twitter Tweaks Emails Again, Highlights Connections. If you still receive e-mail notifications every time a new Twitter user follows you, you might have seen a change in the messages, starting between 10 and 11 am Pacific time today. The new messages do a better job matching Twitter's new corporate color scheme and global approach, while eliminating some joint follower information common in the previous round of notices.
This puts more emphasis on the individual and how they describe themselves, and reverses the social endorsement to those you already follow, more than their paying attention to you. Until this morning, new notifications highlighted the user's avatar, biography and simple service usage stats, like total tweets, as well as the following and follower metrics. Below this, updates displayed up to three users who they follow who follow you, as well as up to three users who you both follow. The top bar was the original Twitter blue, featuring only the corporate logo and mascot. NY Times Editor Claims Twitter Killing Conversation, While His Tweets Spawn Conversation. There's been some buzz about NYTimes Editor Bill Keller's recent column, in which -- in true curmudgeon fashion -- he posits that Twitter and such are a problem because they are killing deep conversation: As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted "#TwitterMakesYouStupid.
Discuss. " It produced a few flashes of wit ("Give a little credit to our public schools! "); a couple of earnestly obvious points ("Depends who you follow"); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife ("I don't know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it's making you late for dinner. Come home! "); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah ("Um, wrong. " "Nuh-uh!! "). He then compares this to claims heard in yesteryear about how calculators meant people weren't good at doing math in their head any more, and how future generations with their brains and retinal displays jacked directly into the network would make people bad at remembering stuff.
Twitter for Marketing & PR Webinar. A 2010 Edison research study showed that 42% of respondents hear about products and services through Twitter. In response to this dynamic businesses are increasingly using Twitter to engage with customers, reach the media directly, and further establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. You can even use Twitter for lead management or marketing automation. Listen to our free webinar with Laura Fitton, HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Evangelist, as she reveals the basics of Twitter and how you can use the channel for marketing and PR.
Laura shares some established Twitter marketing processes, best practices, and examples of successful case studies. In this 50-minute webinar, you will learn: What is Twitter and why is it importantHow to use Twitter to monitor your brand and engage customers and prospects directlyHow to reach media and bloggers directly to get PR coverage for your businessHow to measure your performance on Twitter Webinar Details Speaker: Laura Fitton (pistachio) Amid deadly storms, Alabama Power kept customers informed through Twitter. Entrepreneur’s tweet sparks fight with angels | Entrepreneurial.
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. – Last month, entrepreneur Matt Mireles published a tweet, asking: “Why is TechStars NYC run by a non-entrepreneur?” The “non-entrepreneur” in question is 29-year-old David Tisch, whose grandfather built Loews into a Fortune 100 company that operates hotel chains, and whose family’s largess has helped bankroll numerous institutions, including the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Since 2007, the young Tisch has been seed-funding startups with his brothers.
Surely, Mireles isn’t the first to wonder whether someone with Tisch’s background can fully appreciate the challenges that struggling entrepreneurs face. Other comments were milder although somewhat defensive. That something legitimate should cause so much consternation and trash-talking is concerning. It’s no longer a West Coast problem alone. Twitpic changes its terms of service. Update: That was fast – after a bit of a Twitter outcry, the terms and conditions have been changed (again) to remove the offending paragraph about being barred from selling your own photos to media agencies, although they are still retaining their rights to do the same. They have posted an update on their blog. People who use Twitpic to display photos they have taken and uploaded to the Twitter website might want to rethink their use of the website, especially if you are the sort of person who tends to be at newsworthy locations.
The company has recently updated its terms and conditions and a short paragraph has turned into a lengthy series of rules and regs. However, most significantly, if you upload a photo to Twitpic you are seemingly barred from reselling the photo to anyone – unless (I think) you have a copy of the photo elsewhere which can then be sold to newspapers etc. Hattip @flashboy Old (caught by Archive.org) Copyright All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners.
Google Rumored Preparing $10/Month Chrome OS Laptop Rentals. As soon as this summer, Google could announce a program to rent Chrome OS portable computers for $10 to $20 per month. According to a report on the generally reputable tech blog Neowin, this plan, part of an effort to get more people using its services and viewing its ads online, was confirmed by an unnamed source. In response to our request for comment, Google told us the same thing it told the U.K. Register yesterday: "We don't have anything to share at this time. " This, then, is just a rumor; but I think it's a very thought-provoking one. Neowin says: "Google will be selling the devices as part of a subscription based model with Gmail to customers...According to our source, Google... will provide hardware refreshes as they are released as part of the package, and will replace faulty hardware for the life of the subscription. Would such a move democratize access to Web-based computing all the more?
July will mark two years since Chrome OS was first announced. TweetDeck and the Holy Grail - Twitter Acquisition Puts an End to That. TweetDeck, the leading third party Twitter client, has been acquired by Twitter - according to Techcrunch. As of writing, neither Twitter or TweetDeck have confirmed the deal. If it does go through, it will spell the end of TweetDeck's grand plan to become the central hub for social networks.
In other words, the Holy Grail of the social Web. While it started out as just a third party Twitter client, for most of its nearly 3 year existence TweetDeck has been building itself up to be a "a new browser for the real-time Web. " Since it added Facebook support in March 2009, TweetDeck has aimed to be a central app from which people can interact with all of their social networks. That's a potentially massive commercial opportunity for a startup. Imagine being able to control your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social services using the one interface. 2008: Multi-Columns For Twitter ReadWriteWeb reviewed TweetDeck when it launched.
TweetDeck's Search for The Holy Grail. Company Blog - Breaking Bin Laden: visualizing the power of a single tweet. A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden’s death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White House announcement. Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network.
Why did this happen? Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn’s online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow. While politicos “in the know” certainly knew him or of him, his previous interactions and size and nature of his social graph did little to reflect his potential to generate thousands of people’s willingness to trust within a matter of minutes. At SocialFlow we’ve analyzed the effects of timing and topicality within social streams. Gilad & Devin. Penn Jillette explains the fake Martin Luther King Jr.: "I made a mistake" - Twitter. Does Posting Things to Twitter Make You a Journalist?: Tech News and Analysis « There’s been a lot of discussion about what the U.S. military strike on Osama bin Laden’s compound says about the state of the media today, and the latest debate is whether Sohaib Athar — the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid — is a journalist or not.
SF Weekly blogger Dan Mitchell is pretty convinced that he is not, but there are some pretty powerful arguments to be made that he is — that Athar represents a new kind of quasi-journalist, or what some call a “citizen journalist.” The bottom line is that journalism as we know it has been unbundled into its component parts, and virtually anyone has the ability to perform some or all of those functions now. We are still grappling with what that means, but it’s happening. Mitchell seems particularly incensed that Steve Myers from the Poynter Institute refers to Athar — a computer programmer living in Abbottabad, whose Twitter handle is @ReallyVirtual — as a citizen journalist.
Twitter Hires Fired Facebook Corp Dev Guy Mike Brown | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD. 25 Interesting Things You Can Tweet (Besides Blog Posts and Retweets) The Case for a LinkedIn-Twitter Merger. Let’s be honest about Twitter. The bad press isn’t just bad press. Loyal Twitter users have grown accustomed to buggy features, promises unfulfilled, a rise in noise, and a decline in innovation. If you don’t already use Twitter, there’s no reason to start. Twitter is stuck. And that’s a bummer for those who find it valuable—like us writers. There is one path out of this quagmire: Twitter and LinkedIn should merge.
Twitter does a few things very well. That’s all still humming along. By contrast, Twitter seems apathetic toward anything that might stimulate commerce. Enter LinkedIn. Profit. Twitter’s revenues are a secret, but an educated guess is that their main source of income is data licensing to Google and Microsoft. Talent. Messaging. Integration. LinkedIn’s biggest problem is that it isn’t sexy. Which is why this friendship could be beautiful. Need more reasons this is a good idea? Top 3 Tips to be a Kickass Social Media Speaker. When you’re scheduled to speak at an event like Ignite, WordCamp, BarCamp, or more general audience public speaking events, you need to do your homework. The best speakers make it look conversational and easy and you can do that too if you’re willing to follow some very easy steps. Take a Deep Breath and Do You You don’t have to know everything and you don’t have to be “better” than anyone else.
You need to know your subject matter and then relax and let it flow. There’s a reason why you were asked to speak – somebody thought you would be good to hear. Even if that someone is you, so be it. Just tell yourself you’re smart enough, you’re good enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. Accept that you will probably make a mistake and that’s ok. And, lastly keep breathing! Get Clear about Your Goals and Know Your Audience Be sure to understand your target audience. Unless it’s allowed and culturally accepted, don’t include pitch in your talk.
Be Social and Don’t Go Powerpoint Crazy. Twitter Introduces Text Ads. Twitter Confirms It Has Passed 200 Million Accounts, 70% of Traffic Now International. Www.seomoz.org/blog/exactly-how-powerful-are-tweets-retweets. Over the last few months we've heard a lot of talk about how social signals are starting to influence rankings, but how powerful are those tweets really? Today I wanted to explore what we know so far, take a look at some examples, then push the envelope a bit with another test. Who's with me? Ok, let's do this. Tweets Affect on Rankings As you may have read previously, we've had a couple case studies which have shown that tweets can help with organic rankings. The second case study was quite unexpected. Last week at SMX West, Matt Cutts was specifically asked about these tests (it's unclear as to which one was actually asked about) and Vanessa Fox wrote up the conversation with Matt over at Search Engine Land.
Someone asked about the recent SEOmoz post that concluded that retweets alone could boost rankings. This seems to be the exact opposite of what Google said previously on the subject: Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. Is It Possible to Rank for "Jennifer Lopez"? Current Tweets.