Archive for the ‘twitter’ Category
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Tommy Vallier from Kingston, where I lived for almost five months, talks about a great idea of local hashtags to make local tweets even more searchable and relevant:
It’s been hard, though, because while big events have dedicated hashtags, smaller going-ons never do.
Because long hashtags don’t make sense thanks to Twitter’s 140 character limit, and over-general hashtags like #singapore would generate too much noise, Tommy suggested breaking up Kingston the same way Canada Post does, by postal code.
Kingston and Singapore have a lot in common. We’re both very small (although Singapore’s population is something like 45x on the same landmass), and we’re quite easily broken up into zones. The problem with hashtags like #sgtweetup and #smbsg and #openroom is that they can only be found by people who know what they’re looking for. The chance of serendiptous discovery is slim to none.
So what if we added in hyper-local hashtagging? Districts like #amk or #cck are too local (I feel) and too limiting (what’s the hashtag for Simei?). Perhaps the answer is in separating it into 5 parts:
#sgn - north
#sgs - south
#sge - east
#sgw - west
#sgc - central
An extra four characters to keep it short and sweet and easy to add on. Of course this isn’t fullproof (I don’t know where I’d put Sengkang), but if we imagine the rough outline of where the MRT trains go, we could possibly give a close to subjective hashtag to add more relevance to our tweets.
What do the Tweeters in Singapore think? Too troublesome? No one cares about local tweets? Or would it help tell you more about events, traffic, weather, news etc? I want to know what you think.
Tags: #openroom, event hashtags, hyper localisation, hyper localization, kingston ontario, local tweets, mrt trains, singapore #sgtweetup, smbsg, tommy vallier, twitter
Posted in Singapore, community, social media, twitter | 9 Comments »
Friday, June 26th, 2009
Mars & Venus
Ogilvy’s Digital Influence team held another Open Room, titled “Journalism’s from Mars, Social Media’s from Venus” and after tonight, I think it’s clear that the problem they have is the problem everyone (businesses, schools, non-profits, the music industry, etc) is having. They were sitting on a model that was working for the last 50 or so years, have been blind-sided by the sudden tidal wave of social media and not only are they not scrambling to catch up, but they’re actually holding on to the old world for all that it’s worth.
As with panels, I was fully prepared for some of the audience to be un-accepting of some young (and even worse, enemployed) punk telling them what the world is like. And it was no different this time, which is fine with me, it makes life exciting! How awfully boring would it be if everyone just nodded their heads and agreed.
I think it was a really interesting discussion. There was as much uncommon ground as there was common, and it’s painfully obvious both sides have to learn from each other. Monetisation is not a dirty word, but neither is trusting a fellow blogger. I think we have to move away from our normal worldviews that content creating is done for passion (for bloggers) or that the man on the street (or the Tweeter on Tweetdeck) is less reliable and/or credible than the journalist.
Thinking about “journalism” from the point of breaking news and real good opinion pieces is one thing. But I think we need to think about where the money comes from. Thinking about subscription models and what not is fine (even though they won’t work), but as Thomas Crampton brought up, mainstream media has enjoyed the monopoly on reaching people and advertising for a very long time, and companies are just beginning to realise that they can bypass the “middleman” entirely, thus crippling the revenue model. Will it provide them the reach? Probably not. Will it provide them the influence? Barack Obama’s YouTube channel suggests yes (yes yes I know it worked in tandem with traditional media).
As a closing comment: someone said that old habits die hard, referring to the staying power of traditional media and being used to opening that Sunday edition of the paper over a slow and leisurely breakfast. Here’s a thought: my “old” habits from the old world started changing by the time I was thirteen, and many were gone by the time I was seventeen. Radio, once a nightly listen for the dedication show, is an afterthought, so are magazines. TV serves my purposes when I want it to, newspapers have flown out of the window, music exists in the form of mp3s, not cds. The only “old world” habit I maintain is the reading of books.
My point is this: as much as old habits die hard, to the new generation, new habits form at an alarming speed that the world has never seen before. When, if ever, has a generation been influenced so quickly and successively like from the transition to Friendster to Facebook? That’s not just the speed of platform change, but the speed of diffusion from half a world away. When and how fast did we take up texting to replace calling? The speed of change is crazy. Geographical boundaries barely exist anymore. And I would ask people who believe in the “old habits” to take a look at their children, their nephews, their nieces or anyone under 20 and tell me how many of their “old habits” they see replicated in them, and ask how different the world will be in five or ten years, and if now’s the time to think about that change, or cling on to “old habits”.
Tags: advertising, barack obama, Books, credibility, dedication show, digital influence, facebook, friendster, generation y, geographical boundaries, journalism's from mars, magazines, monetisation, monetization, mp3s, music, newspapers, ogilvy, old habits die hard, old world, open room, radio, reliability, social media's from venus, staying power, subscription models, thomas crampton, trusting bloggers, tv, youtube
Posted in Blogs, Events, Gen Y, Media, Singapore, mainstream media, social media, twitter | 9 Comments »
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
A couple of days ago I was particularly bugged by bad communication and tweeted this:
My Tweet
Of course it should read “written and spoken english” instead of just “written and english”. Was totally in my mind, but somehow didn’t get translated to the keyboard. The result?
So the lesson here is really, be careful what you tweet, but if you do make a boo boo, try to see the humour in it! It happens!
Tags: bad communication, go back, pwnage, self pwn, social media, twitter, undo, written and spoken english
Posted in social media, twitter | No Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Michael starts on the beer
I got invited by Mark a few weeks ago for a discussion at Edelman regarding responsible participation and what it means. Also present was Phil Gomes, John Kerr, Michael Netzley, Ben Koe, Preetam Rai and Eastcoastlife.
I’m not going to say too much about the discussion itself, as Michael has written a very comprehensive post detailing the discussion, but I will make two quick comments:
1) No one seems to really know what responsible participation means. Does it mean different things depending on context? For example, does “responsible participation” take on different manifestations in a B2C context as contrasted with a public-sector context?
2) Responsible participation, regardless of the context, needs to be two-way. I’m astounded at the sentiment on one side of the fence that calls for, or demands responsible participation, without even being engaged and participating themselves in the first place. Reciprocity is a global norm, no?
John collecting opinions
As a side note, I had a subsequent class visit to Edelman the following week, and the topic of discussion was “Crisis communication”. Before any of us could bring up the Wal-Mart example, the speaker brought it up first as an example of how they had to deal with it and it’s nice to see them openly acknowledge past mistakes and use them as a learning experience.
All in all, it seems like Edelman is genuinely trying to tap into the community to aid them in their social media efforts and this is only the first of such discussions. I’m looking forward to see what comes next.
Tags: b2c, ben koe, communicate asia, crisis communication, discussion, eastcoastlife, Edelman, john kerr, michael netzley, Phil Gomes, preetam rai, reciprocity, Responsable Participation, roundtable, wal-mart
Posted in Marketing, SMU, Singapore, Tools, case studies, collaboration, community, social media, twitter | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 20th, 2009
I came across this cool app called
Twitter Sheep, which scans your followers’ bios and comes up with a cool little tag cloud. Here’s mine:
Twitter Sheep
What’s yours like! Post your link in the comments!
Tags: bios, blogger, community, digital, flock, followers on twitter, Marketing, pr, Singapore, social media, student, tag cloud, technology, twitter, twitter sheep, web
Posted in Fun, twitter | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Yesterday I gave some qualitative reasons to supplement quantitative numbers by Hitwise to suggest that Plurk has had more traffic than Twitter in Singapore since July, 2008.
One thing that I’m wondering, from what I’m gathering from the data, is how the visits are measured. Plurk is automatically updated, Twitter isn’t. Twitter can also be accessed from desktop applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck and many others. Are these factored in? How about mobile apps for Twitter like Twinkle and Twitterific? Similarly, how about mobile access for Plurk? The Plurk app for iPhones and iPod Touches?
In other words, are there “hidden” traffic sources that we should be looking at?
Secondly, looking at Prof. Michael’s blog post that points to Hubspot releasing a report that lists Singapore as one of the top 30 Twitter cities worldwide, I’m wondering this: If Plurk has more traffic in Singapore than Twitter, and Twitter is in the top 30 Twitter cities, what does that say about any city that is not in the top 30? Are they by default, even less than Singapore’s Plurk traffic?
What are the implications of these statistics on people looking to use microblogging as a communications tool? Is it far from being mainstream if a top 30 city is a small one like Singapore?
Granted, neither of these data points are concrete and conclusive. The Hubspot data uses about 500,000 Twitter users as a sample size. This seems to be the problem most of us are dealing with. It’s not a complete lack of information, but imperfect information. Should we just take what is available and work from there because it’s better than nothing? What are the alternatives? Would love to hear from those struggling to answer these questions just as much as I am.
Tags: hitwise, hubspot, microblogging, microblogging mainstream, plurk traffic, Singapore, tweetdeck, twhiel, twinkle, twitter cities, twitter traffic, twitterific
Posted in Plurk, Research, Singapore, case studies, twitter | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Prof. Michael blogged yesterday about a Hitwise article pointing to much higher (1.5x) more visits to Plurk than Twitter recently in Singapore, and has attracted more traffic since July of 2008.
This data (though I do have some questions about it which I will blog about tomorrow) seems to validate what I’ve been feeling intuitively over the last six months or so. If I had to point to reasons, I have broadly speaking, two:
1) Twitter failed us
Looking back, my very first post on my switch to Plurk was on the 3rd of June, 2008. The blog post even leads with
Twitter’s downtime over the last couple of months has really pissed off a lot of people, most of all me.
With that timeframe in mind, let’s look at Hitwise’s research:
Plurk vs Twitter Visits
The image clearly shows the surge in visits occurs somewhere around the 28th of June. A reasonable enough time for a technology to diffuse down the adoption curve.
2) Localisation and Intimacy
When I first wrote about the switch to Plurk I had four main reasons:
Now that I’ve been using Plurk for awhile, these reasons have compressed into two: intense localisation and intimacy. My theory is Singaporeans don’t need the wide reaches of Twitter. Because of our relatively smaller size as a country, we’re used to smaller interactions, which is perfect for what Plurk achieves. I think most people have less than 100 friends, which makes following easy. This is different from the Twitter “power users” in the US, as following 5,000 friends on Plurk would probably literally send someone insane.
The second theory is that by nature of Plurk consisting of small, threaded, intimate conversations, it lends itself naturally to a very high level of localisation. When you join Plurk and realise the Singaporean users are talking about local places, local weather, the movie releases in Singapore and what’s on television, it has a much more relevant feel than Twitter (were you on Twitter during the recent Superbowl?) and as a result presents a very, very low barrier to entry.
Recently a few people from SMU joined Plurk, and while I would never have imagined them on Twitter, I think Plurk works perfectly, especially when there are friends you know using the service already.
In closing, I think Singaporeans are terribly practical, and have no issues with community migration on a small scale (let’s not talk about migrating 500 friends on Facebook). The first factor, Twitter failing, led to the search for an alternative. What many of us found, is the second factor - a level of relevancy and community that Twitter did not offer. In short, the new application provided a better alternative, and most of us have never looked back.
If you’re a Plurk user in Singapore, do you agree? How about if you’re a die-hard Twitter user? Let’s hear it!
Tags: adoption curve, community migration, facebook, hitwise, intimacy, localisation, michael netzley, organic conversations, Plurk, superbowl, threaded conversations, twitter, twitter fail
Posted in Plurk, Singapore, case studies, community, twitter | 17 Comments »
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
When Prof. Michael and I were discussing what to include into the Digital Media class this term, one thing I thought we should make compulsory is Twitter. Even though it had its downtime in 2008, I think the service definitely has potential, and so this week, it’s almost all about everyone’s favourite (or “favourite”) microblogging tool, Twitter.
If you’re lazy, Steve Spalding has the Essential Twitter Guide ready for you, which is a collection of the best Twitter-related posts and guides around the web.
From the student’s point of view, Studentlinc has a post on Figuring Out The Benefits Of Twitter.
Steven Hodson is doing his Twitter and Friendfeed spring cleaning, and he points to Twitter Karma as a way of discovering who’s a mutual follower, who’s just following you, or if you’re just following them. One sneaky trick that some people use is to follow you, wait a couple of days to see if you follow them, and then unfollow you so that they can artificially inflate their follower number. This helps safeguard against that.
Finally, the one non-Twitter related link for the week, is the question “What’s A Community Worth?” over at Social Voice. It’s a fairly long article, but the real world examples/case studies of how community can be beneficial to an organisation.
I have a whole chunk of Twitter-related posts generated over the last year, (including a small Twitter 101 segment) feel free to check them out!
Tags: benefits of twitter, communicate asia, digital media, essential twitter guide, michael netzley, social voice, steve spalding, studentlinc, twitter, twitter 101, twitter karma, twitter spring cleaning, what's a community worth
Posted in Links, twitter | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 12th, 2008
I’ve been slowly getting back into Twitter, and while searching Twitter for “Queen’s University”, I was surprised to find Queen’s Campus Security on Twitter.
Checking them out, the updates are actually pretty relevant and useful, warnings about fires, theft and other such concerns:
Queen
However, their last update was on the 22nd of November, which is roughly around the time SMS updates got shut off for Canada as well. (The rest of the world got it shut off back in August)
Earlier in the year, in Digital Media class, Andre’s group discussed how Twitter could be used as a real-time crisis tool in campuses and/or work places, exactly in situations like a fire where you can send out one tweet and it hits all students via their cell phones. I suppose now that’s only restricted to the US.
This is not meant to be yet another Twitter-bashing post, but instead I just want to highlight how clear it is to me that Twitter never thought about the implications of including all these bells and whistles early on, and since the Twitter Fail events earlier this year, it looks like things are only getting worse, not better.
At the crux of it, things would have been better if Twitter had never introduced SMS worldwide, but slowly rolled it out if and when they were sure it was financially feasible. Once people are used to a service and you take it away, they feel shortchanged.
Personally, I’m not sure what to feel about Twitter these days. On one hand I’m beginning to feel I’ve missed it after being away for a few months, and I’m beginning to re-discover a sense of community on it.
On the other, Twitter is still by no means stable and news like this that suggests a lack of business sensibility behind them (and recent purchase and shut down of I Want Sandy) just makes me feel unsure in investing time and attention on Twitter.
I want to know if you’re still using Twitter and in what way? If you’re out of the US, has the lack of SMS-capabilities annoyed you, or is it something you can live with?
Tags: digital media, i want sandy, queen's campus security, queen's university, twitter, twitter sms canada, twitter sms singapore, twitter sms US
Posted in Poor Practices, education, twitter | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
I read a post earlier this week explaining why the average person can’t figure out Twitter, narrowing it down to:
- Following people who aren’t interesting enough
- Following people who aren’t creating enough value (as opposed to “individuals that can create the most engaging media”)
- and that “Any individual who isn’t “hyperconnected” is not going to benefit equally and I would argue is much more likely to eventually leave the site.”
I don’t outright disagree with these points (although I feel everyone joins Twitter with little to no followers and is far from “hyperconnected”), but I think if you distill it down to one single thing: they’re people who aren’t willing to invest the time to get the results:
- They don’t bother finding out who’s talking about the topics they’re interested in (or for the companies, who’s talking about their brand)
- They don’t bother finding the niche who is interested about the type of value they create.
- And they certainly don’t spend the time to cultivate enough relationships to be “hyperconnected”.
I cross-reference this to a very important point from Christopher Penn’s video: Building Blocks of Social Media: Social Media Prerequisites: if you’re not used to spending time talking and listening to people (or if your company isn’t), then social media is not for you.
Maybe that’s why it’s okay to hire someone for your social media firm if he’s demonstrating an understanding of Twitter. It’s the right fit as opposed to those wanting instant results, instant relationships and instant ROI.
ps: I’m using Twitter for this post because that’s the context of the post I linked to, but it could easily apply to Plurk, FriendFeed or any other tool that requires a lot of communication and interaction.
Tags: building blocks of social media, christopher penn, friendfeed, hyperconnected on twitter, Plurk, social media prerequisites, why some people don't get twitter
Posted in Plurk, social media, twitter | 3 Comments »
