Tag Archives: Twitter

2010 Trends

Google, YouTube, and Twitter have all released their 2010 trend pieces. What do they have in common? Justin Bieber.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the top 10 trends on Twitter.

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

The fastest rising Google searches.

1. Chatroulette
2. iPad
3. Justin Bieber
4. Nicki Minaj
5. Friv
6. Myxer
7. Katy Perry
8. Twitter
9. Gamezer
10. Facebook

And if you have a minute 86 seconds you can find out what the top YouTube videos were.

There, now you know what happened in 2010.

71% of tweets ignored

Let’s add this to the stat-that-will-be-bandied-about-all-day file (or we can also call it the Wired article that launched a thousand self-righteous posts from social media experts). According to Wired who is reporting on a study from a social analytics firm:

• 71% of tweets get no response
• 6% of tweets are retweeted (and 92% of that happens within the first hour)
• 23% of tweets are @ replied

Is measuring retweets and replies an accurate measurement of engagement? I’d wager there are millions of tweets with links that get clicked or that are read without any actual response from the clicker/reader. That’s hardly ignored, right?

Friday Links: You’re stealing it wrong

• Why the revolution will not be tweeted, a thought-provoking piece by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker.
• Can experience be designed.
• George Lucas stole Chewbacca, but that’s okay.
• Doc Searls says let’s kill interruptive ads. Yes, let’s do that, shall we?
• 8-bit wood, I’m pretty sure The Nerdery needs these woodcraft Mario characters.
• How to detect a Photoshopped image.
• 10 best jobs of the future.
• How advertising reinforces Mommy and Daddy roles.
• You’re stealing it wrong, 30 years of inter-pirate battles.

32 flavors and then some RFID chips

Chocolate chip ice cream is a nice enough, but it’s no RFID chip – that delectable morsel that tells fans of Izzy’s Ice Cream that their favorite flavor is in.

Izzy’s hired us to build a site that updates every three minutes based on interchangeable buckets of ice cream so flavor watchers can see exactly which 32 varieties are available, right then and there. RFID chips attached to nameplates of each bucket of each flavor (Izzy’s has more than 200 and counting) direct site content as flavors rotate in and out, and customers know what’s what (and when) via Facebook and Twitter.

Find your flavor in a timely manner at http://flavorup.izzysicecream.com/flavor-grid, and read all about it at MinnoV8 and St. Paul Pioneer Press (yeah, they scooped us on this story – pun well intended).

How do we know Izzy’s admires our work as much as we admire theirs? Because the ice cream man was generous to Nerdery staff when we debuted this project at last Friday’s BottleCap Talk.

Friday Links: Google’s drop shadow, poetics of coding, and pancakes

• The Poetics of Coding.
• From the not surprised at all file: 92% of Super Bowl ad creators were white men (also Jezebel has something to say about that).
• Layar makes finding augmented reality content easier.
• Brand New goes after the new Google drop shadow.
• If Mario was designed in 2010.
• Mmmm pancakes.
• Our VP of Marketing sent Anatomy of a Website to our sales staff as a nice review or overview of how some of this stuff works. Perhaps it’d be good for your staff too.
• It took Apple twenty-eight days to sell a million iPads. Wow.
• Cupidtino a dating site for Apple fanboys and girls.
• Less than half of Twitter users post anything.
• A review of the Feltron annual report.

It’s 2010 and we’re still talking about Twitter

Really? REALLY? You might asking yourself. Are we really still talking about Twitter? Yes, we are, and I promise this is worth your time. Like you the daily influx of hundreds of blog posts yammering about social media makes me want to hurl, so you gotta trust me when I say these two articles about Twitter are good, interesting reads.

First up with Anil Dash writing about his experience being on Twitter’s controversial Suggested Users List (which also features the likes of John McCain, Bill Cosby, and Lenny Kravitz). [confession, I looked all that up because aside from Anil, I had no idea who was on the list]

What interesting about this post is that since getting on the list Dash is averaging something like 3,000+ new followers a day, and yet the number of re-tweets, replies, and clicks he’s gotten is the same as before his inclusion on the list.

Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don’t form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like “normal” followers do. If I’d have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I’d have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I’d have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn’t changed at all.

And for me, that’s a little off-putting. I feel very much like I’ve earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they’ve read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it’s still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it’s hard for me to tell whether someone’s made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.

And this dovetails nicely into David Carr’s article in The New York Times, “Why Twitter will Endure.”

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

Really? What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?

Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

Though Carr’s premise, about the value of Twitter being in rigorously maintaining who you follow, on its surface seems diametrically opposed to what Dash is writing about, I think both men make excellent points about the impact Twitter has on how we interact with each other and the Internet.

Friday Links: 50 things killed by the Internet plus Star Trek cologne

• 50 things that are being killed by the Internet. Includes: polite discourse, photo albums, our memories, and solitaire among others.
• Probably the most amazing collection of Star Wars junk you’ll ever see.
• The Tracy Awards are the cream of the crap of advertising.
• Facebook’s Twitter-like tagging, useful or tiring?
• Hack2Work: Essential Tips for the design professional
• Star Trek Cologne, for the nerd who doesn’t shower nearly enough?
• Negative space illustrations
• Cheese or font? Go ahead, click it, it’s just a game.
• 5 grammar mistakes that make you look like a chimp.

We know where you are, but what are you doing?

Photo: Dustin Diaz

What are you doing? It’s the question Twitter has been asking users to answer (in 140 characters or less) for the past 3.5 years. Starting in the near future, Twitter is going to be including more than what you type.

Twitter announced Thursday that tweets will be carrying location meta data automatically generated by the user’s device, assuming that user has opted-in. Uh, what? If I’m on my GPS-enabled smartphone, my Twitter client will be able to attach the current GPS location to my tweet.

Ok, but wait. There’s a considerable population in the “Twitter is absolutely useless” party, so adding location data is the metaphorical screen door on the solar powered submarine, right? Well, maybe. There’s been a noticeable increase in location-aware services, from Google Latitude to Brightkite to Foursquare to Acrossair’s “Nearest Subway.” Additionally, there’s a dramatic increase in the number of GSM/WCDMA (GPS-enabled) phones coming into the market (PDF), and we all know how iPhone users like using their data plan.

So where’s any of this headed? That’s a great question, and one someone far more creative (you, maybe?) will hopefully answer. Here’s what Biz @ Twitter had to say:

It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake. There will likely be many use cases we haven’t even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting.

Now before we get all bleeding edge and leverage the open door, let’s look at the bottom line (buzzword bingo!). Twitter is a microcosm. Best guesses put the active user base anywhere between 2-8 million, +/- 95%. It’s not Facebook with their 250 million active users, but if you’ve been keeping score at home, you know that Facebook considers Twitter a formidable opponent. Said another way, if Twitter is adding location aware services, I’d be willing to bet a pack of Ramen noodles that Facebook will be soon, too.

So now, independent of Twitter, let’s start thinking about the ways we can create a better user experience with this new piece of  context-rich information. Build a unique and dynamic experience based on where that user is at that moment. It’s not just on the web, it’s not just at your desk, it’s going mobile, but apparently it’s starting with Twitter.

What compelling ways do you think your clients and their customers could interact and drive value for both parties? Here’s a freebie, here’s 5 more from Mashable, and for good measure, some other cool ways Twitter is being integrated (sans location aware) into marketing, communications, and of course, politics.

If you’re the creative marketing type and would ever like to bang heads and see what we can both strategerize for your clients (eg, you think it, we’ll build it, we all high 5 afterward), contact me. Via Twitter.

cheers,
@malbiniak

Top 20 Minnesota Social Media Innovators

Over at Communications Conversations, Arik Hanson took nominees and came up with a list of the Top 20 Minnesota Social Media Innovators. It’s a great list filled with some of our favorites, who I was going to name but thought better of it.

Anyway, we would like to say and, really mean it not in some sort of schmoozy just lost an Oscar kind of way, it really was an honor that @the_nerdery was nominated.

Speaking of Twitter and all that good stuff, you should check out The Guardian’s story about being inside Twitter HQ.

A company update in 11 tweets