Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Another reason for brands to embrace Twitter – SEO

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

The number of brands using the world’s favourite micro blogging service is growing each week. It seems incredible but just six months back it was difficult to think of any brand that was using the service effectively, now there are many companies using Twitter for everything from customer engagement through to press liaison.

As of this week there’s yet another reason for brands to embrace the micro blogging service to communicate its core messages and that is because it Twitter is now good for SEO (search engine optimisation)

Google has just added real time searches adding updates from Twitter and Facebook groups (though not personal Facebook accounts) to its results. It hasn’t yet been rolled out in this part of the UK but is likely to go live in the next few days. There’s a more detailed explanation of the technical elements of the service here and on this video

It’ll be interesting to see how highly Twitter Updates feature on Google searches for brands, but given Google’s commitment to offering near live information I think they could be quite prominent. This makes it essential that brands have a presence on Twitter. If they don’t they might find that searchers are first presented with Twitter users who may have a very different view of the brand.

On a more positive note this also means that Twitter can also be used for SEO in this instance to deliver traffic to a blog or news post on a website. The idea being that the tweets feature links back to the parent site. This is a real opportunity for brands to improve their search engine rankings organically.

Tags: Google, live searches, SEO, twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Twitter list of top UK fashion bloggers

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

If you are a regular Twitter user you’ll know that the last couple of weeks has been all about lists. Thanks to a tweak to the Twitter website users can now make lists of users and shares them with others. There’s a good post on how this works here.

So will lists transform the way that people use Twitter? It is too early to say at the moment. So many people now user third party software to access their Twitter account and only a handful of these apps have added list functionality to their offering. For the record lists are available now on Seesmic, but not on my favourite Twitter system Tweetdeck or the many mobile versions of Twitter.

One of the most interesting things about the lists is that its shows how people perceive/categorise you. One Shiny Redder is in ‘awesome music related list.’ ‘top London folk’ as well as other social media types. I am waiting to be included in a Scott Walker obsessives list

Anyhow in a spirit of generosity and sharing I worked with the editor of Shiny Style, Andrea Petrou, to produce a list of UK fashion bloggers on Twitter. It is by no means comprehensive, but includes most of the main bloggers who update their websites more than once a day.

While doing the research I was struck by how vibrant the UK fashion blog scene is. There are lots of very professional looking sites that have great content that are constantly updated. Along with the equally vibrant mummy blogging sectors the fashion bloggers put two metaphorical fingers up to the notion that blogging in the UK is on the wane.

It is also interesting to note that most of the successful bloggers have hooked up with one of the major blog networks. So in fashion the key players are Handpicked Media (which has a huge selection of titles including the excellent Queens of Vintage), Aigua Media (which has several ex Shiny titles like Catwalk Queen) and Shiny Media itself which boasts Shiny Style and Brandish.

The list is here

Tags: Fashion bloggers, seesmic, Shiny Style, tweetdeck, twitter, Twitter Lists
Posted in Blogging, Microblogging | No Comments »

What the Twitter Bing/Google deals mean for brands

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Yesterday was something of a roller coaster ride for tech journalists as they attempted to keep up with the latest news from Silicon Valley. In late afternoon UK time Microsoft announced what appeared to be a massive coup by stating that it had agreed a deal with Twitter to enable real time micro blogging searches on its Bing website.

Yet later that night just as the many – has Microsoft finally stole a march on its rivals? – features were being published Google announced that it too had agreed a deal with Twitter.

The main differences between the two deals are that the Microsoft will also include Facebook updates in its searches and more importantly it has a beta site in place already. It is excepted to be weeks or even months before the Google Twitter site is live.

In the short term at least it is fantastic shot in the arm for the Bing search engine which, since its launch three months ago, has clawed its way to now boasting around 15% of US search engine traffic. It is a lot less in the Google-obsessed UK.

The bad news for Brits is that while they can see the Bing site at the moment they can’t actually use it to search Twitter. The site has a tag cloud which shows trending topics in the UK – last night’s football means that Manchester United and Chelsea get a place as does Windows 7 and the latest Blackberry smartphone – but when users try and click on the words or search for another topic they get a message saying that ‘results are currently unavailable.’

The deals have huge implications for all three companies, though as Duncan Reilly in the popular US tech blog Inquisitr points out this morning – the real winner is us. Twitter will get a much needed injection of cash but Microsoft and Google will be able to offer much more advanced real time searches.

We will have to wait and see how Google powers the searches but the Bing site works in a very interesting way. In presenting search results it bears a couple of core things in mind, such as the length and quality of the tweet (‘I’m asleep’ won’t rate very highly, but a statement about a brand is likely to pop up much higher). More importantly tweeters with a large number of followers will appear higher up the list just as more popular news sites and blogs do in traditional searches.

So how will this impact on brands

1 The Bing and Google sites will be a hugely useful tool for brands who want to track online discussions of their launches and events. Marketeers can of course track tweets using searches on the Twitter home page. There are also other Twitter search and evaluation tools like Monitter which are available. What the Bing and Google deals do is to make it easy and simple for people working for brands to search using sites and technology they are comfortable with. So for example if a brand has a launch event it can watch in real time how its product is being tweeted about via Twitter but also keep an eye on what influential Twitter users are staying via Bing and Google.

2 It will lead to a renewed interest in brands engaging with Twitter. Put simply brands really can’t afford not to get involved with micro blogging now. Or else they could find that the main source of information on their brand is a person with many followers who has a negative view of the brand. I do think we will continue to see the rise of Twitter experts, kind of like SEO gurus, who offer brands instant ways of creating large Twitter empires. If Bing rates tweets on the popularity of the tweeters rather than the calibre of their followers (they could all be spam Twitter accounts for example) then this could be an option less savvy brands could follow. Far better though for brands to have some serious engagement with their audience via Twitter by using the micro blogging format to track what users are saying and then to engage too.

3 It will change how mainstream media companies approach Twitter. It will be imperative for companies to maintain huge Twitter audiences to ensure that they get as much traffic as possible via links from the new search engine sites. The Twitter sites could emerge as a serious rival to Google News as media companies vie to be at top of the Twitter search tree and get the their news out to the world fastest.

Of course Google may take a completely different approach to ranking tweets and tweeters which again could have a very interesting influence. The next few months are going to be fascinating.

Tags: Bing, Google, real time searches, twitter
Posted in Microblogging | No Comments »

The most popular Britons on Twitter – not Wossy or Fry

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

So who is the most popular Briton on Twitter? Stephen Fry with his old pal Wossy close behind? Well no, there are some new, interesting and controversial names at the top now.

If you check the figures on Twitterholic you’ll see Coldplay are the most popular micro blogging Brits by some distance. Last time I looked they were homing in on two million followers and had the likes of Miley Cyrus and Lance Armstrong in their sights. Coldplay’s Twitter feed is an excellent example of how a brand can use social media to engage with their fans but as Coldplay are a band not an individual they don’t count in my list.

Those rules also mean the next Briton on the list, Pete Cashmore, is out of the running too. The Scottish fella, who spends much of his time in San Francisco at the moment, is the brains behind Mashable, which these days is quite possibly the world’s most influential tech blog.

So the first genuine Briton is none other than Lily Rose Allen who today will probably become the first Brit to pass 1.5 million followers on Twitter. She is currently in a mini spat with Chris Moyles, who in spite of thinking himself a big noise in the micro blogging world has only around 300,000 followers.

So Lily has top spot but who is bubbling under? Well the surprise package is singer songwriter Imogen Heap, who shot up over the summer while tweeting about her new album Ellipse. Unlike a lot of celebs she quite often follows back – and at the time of looking was logging 35,000 other tweeters as opposed to the 56 people that Lily Allen follows.

The other one to watch is a BBC presenter who has a Twitter following that Moyles can only dream about.

Richard P Bacon’s rise to the top of Twitter tree hasn’t been as meteoric as say Wossy, but he is steadily on his way to becoming the most popular Briton on twitter.

Self proclaimed minor celebrity Bacon hosts Radio Five Live’s late night programme where for the last nine months he has mercilessly plugged Twitter and his own feed. To his credit Bacon was one of the first BBC radio presenters to realise that Tweeting is a fantastic way of interacting with an audience. So he will often use his feed to ask his listeners questions, plug the guests on the show and encourage fellow tweeters to express their opinions.

Bacon recently passed the one million followers mark, which ironically means that he now has more followers than listeners to his show. He is also well clear of other BBC celebs like Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross.

There’s an interesting question mark over who actually owns Bacon’s Twitter feed. In amassing over a million followers Bacon has become very influential on Twitter and is a gatekeeper to a huge and very receptive audience. Now just suppose he were to leave the BBC, he could be in a position to endorse brands etc on his feed for which he could potentially charge an awful lot of money. There has been a lot of noise recently about how much a Twitter follower is worth and so far no one has come up with a convincing formula. However an audience that large, that engaged and that accessible is a an ad person’s dream.

It would be interesting to see if the corporation’a relaxed attitude towards Twitter started to chnage if the micro blogging service started to place ads on the site

Tags: Coldplay, micro blogging, most UK Twitter followers, Richard Bacon, stephen fry, twitter, Wossy
Posted in Microblogging | No Comments »

Social media and second chances

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but the emergence of social media, and brands and consumers engaging in online dialogue is challenging this turn of phrase for a number of simple reasons.

1. People want to engage with brands online

In a recent story by eMarketer, over half of social networking users have become a fan or follower of a brand online. In addition, it seems that on average, users are more to show the love towards brands rather than unleash streams of negativity. “52% of social network users had become a fan or follower of a company or brand, while 46% had said something good about a brand or company on a social networking Website—double the percentage who had said something negative (23%).” Users are looking for and connecting with their favourite brands, and will interact with them through the same sites as the ones they use to chat with friends and family members. I follow my brother on Twitter, but I also follow LoveFilm; the relationship is very different, but the medium and the way the conversation takes place is the same. Extending this comparison, we’re far more likely to give a second chance to a brand that’s engaging with social media than a silent faceless corporation

2. Social media is always evolving

Every week, a new online community or platform is launched which may provide a channel for brands and consumers to interact. While the universal principles of new marketing (transparency, dialogue) will always apply, some of the more nuanced rules and practices come over a period of time as users get to grips with what’s the right and wrong way to use a given site or community. Even taking one particular medium – like message boards or forums – you’ll find a whole subset of practices for any given group of users. This disparity of rules has prompted some to go even further and assert that “there are no rules”

3. The Internet is the natural habitat for second chances

What do the following have in common: Dell, Wispa, MC Hammer, Woolworths? They’ve all made a comeback using the web. Most notably Dell’s transformation from the brand that could do no right, into one of the most switched on and consumer friendly companies is constantly held up as an example for social media marketers worldwide. Initiatives like Ideastorm say to the user “We’re not perfect, we make mistakes, but we’re listening to you”. The same could be said for Starbucks and its recent My Starbucks Idea community, “We know you’ve got ideas” says the site, so let us know what you think.

With this in mind, today, we’re excited to be working with Habitat to relaunch the @HabitatUK twitter feed. The team there are keen to listen and learn more from the engaging with the community in the future, so we’re sharing our experience of what works well on Twitter, as well as responding to the thoughts and questions of followers. We believe it’s better to go for a second chance than to simply avoid social media altogether, so it would be great to hear your comments.

Tags: dell, habitat, second chances, social media, twitter, wispa, woolworths
Posted in Client News | 1 Comment »

Silentale – so now you can archive every mesage you create

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

These days I am becoming quite serious about lifestreaming. By that I mean recording the things I do during my week online – well the interesting bits anyhow. The lifestreaming software I use is Posterous which lets me create blog posts quickly and easily and then automatically updates my Twitter and Facebook accounts with the headline of what I have just written along with the link. It also feeds the images on to my Facebook page.

It is a great way of keeping tabs of images I have taken, videos I have watched and blog posts I have written not just on Posterous but in other places too.

As lifestreaming continues to grow in popularity so people will create a huge amount of online content. And wouldn’t it be good to have all that data sitting in one place so it easily storable and searchable?

Well that’s the aim of a new French start up called Silentale which went into beta testing this week. It aims to keep all you digital conversations in one place, and I mean all of them. Once you sign up it aggregates everything you write from your email messages, Facebook updates, Twitter posts and even your text messages.

So why would you want this? Well you have probably had at least one occasion when you have been searching for an email from someone and not found it. Then later on you realised that you actually sent them a message via Twitter or even text from your mobile. Well the really smart thing that Silentale does is that it creates profiles for your contacts in an address book and then aggregates all the messages you sent them together. In other words you will be able to see at a glance all the different ways in which you have had a conversation with them.

The information will also be displayed in a timeline too so you will be able to search for a specific day and read the conversations you had then, or just see how busy you had been today.

The bit that has me most excited though is the service’s Firefox extension. So when you are looking at social networking sites this automatically it detects who you are looking at and voila all your recent correspondence, as well as contact details of the person, pops up on the page. The extension currently works while browsing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Hi5, Gmail, Hotmail/Live Mail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail.

The service will launch for free to begin with, but the catch is that you’ll only be able to see two months archive at a time. If like me you want to go further back expect to pay a yearly subscription of around £30.

Silentale is still in beta and invites are hard to come by, though you could always email them. There’s a load more on TechCrunch Europe.

Tags: Facebook, lifestreaming, Posterous, silentale, twitter
Posted in Microblogging | No Comments »

How much promotion is OK in social media?

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Spambots are all the rage on twitter at the moment, with people accumulating hundreds of followers posing as naked ladies who are actually just trying to promote their product. This isn’t appreciated among the twittersphere (and nor should it!) but the question is when is the line crossed when it comes to promotion of a product or person on Twitter?

One example was a competition Moonfruit posted on twitter. This campaign gave away a MacBook pro every day for 7 days to people who twittered the hashtag #moonfruit, which resulted in the brand name Moonfruit being one of the most talked about brands in the twittersphere at the time. This technique wasn’t appreciated by all and was eventually removed by twitter with some marketers seeing this as spam.

Another equally contentious use of promotion was the publicity that Voltz drinks gained recently about a blog post promotion. The blog post talks about the blogger meeting a celebrity whereupon she told him that he should be drinking Voltz to help him keep a ’slinky waistline’. The endorsement of the brand in a blog post by someone who didn’t visibly represent Voltz drinks in a blatant use of promotion wasn’t welcomed by all.

However, the brand has been talked about online, which is ultimately what Voltz will have been aiming for. They have their name out there and people who have read the article will remember this brand name over another drinks brand which will have been their primary aim I should imagine. This doesn’t mean that people who recognise the brand name will necessarily buy the drink over another brand because of it but (some) people will now recognise it and might even buy it should they see it in the shops. And this is the same with Moonfruit too, they wanted to promote the brand name ‘Moonfruit’ and it was ultimately talked about in the social media world.

The question is where the line is drawn between promotion and spam on twitter, and who gets to decide this. Ultimately, in the two examples above, the decision lay with the twittersphere.

Tags: Blogging, brand, promotion, social media, twitter
Posted in Microblogging | 1 Comment »

Twitter – surviving the backlash

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

The last few weeks have seen naysayers becoming increasingly vocal in denying the usefulness of Twitter and asking whether it will ever become a viable revenue generator. For example recent articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph deny the impact of Twitter on building real communities and providing a useful tool for businesses.

Proving that strong communities can be formed online, and that Twitter does indeed mobilise the masses, one loyal Twitter user comedy writer Graham Linehan, responded to these accusations by asking his 26,973 followers what Twitter has done for them. The community responded in force with stories of how Twitter has impacted on their lives, both in business and by creating a network. A selection of these are:

…I saved time on research, hassle-free customer services, connection to interesting people, and a free book. All last week (via @somerandomnerd)

… I now write for a film news website. I’ve attended premieres and press conferences also I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a huge range of people whose work I enjoy, and thank them for it. (via @montimer)

Twitter…gave me a direct line to my local council, who got planners to review the traffic sitch outside my kid’s school (@sladey66)

On Twitter, I ask and answer questions related to my work – saving me having to read up on things not central to my job (@brenstrong)

I have been housebound thru illness for ages. Twitter has made me feel part of the world and not so isolated (via @Ita99)

Developments at Twitter are also putting to rest the fear that it will not be able to make money. The company has announced plans to start rolling out commercial accounts by the end of this year. This added service is expected to offer methods of measuring impact of Twitter feeds for businesses, such as detailed analytics of activity that is generated by tweets. (Before Twitter users panic, the service will remain as normal for all users but a ‘commercial layer’ will be added for those who wish to subscribe.)

Tags: micro blogging, social media, twitter
Posted in Microblogging | No Comments »

A warm Shiny welcome to Adam Lewis

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Our latest recruit joined the Shiny Red team this week.

Adam Lewis has just graduated from the University of York where he studied advertising and communications, and caught our eye with his blog Flawless Buzz. After spending a couple of weeks with us around Easter and showing his flair for social media, we offered him a full-time role.

With perfect timing, Adam joins us a few days before our summer party!

You can follow Adam on Twitter here

Tags: adam lewis, flawless buzz, shiny red, twitter
Posted in General | 1 Comment »