Tag Archives: twitter

Activism 2.0

Twitter Trick Fail

Yesterday a friend of mine, whose not into Twitter at all forwarded this mail to me

— On Fri, 5/15/09, Great Offers and Discounts wrote:

From: Great Offers and Discounts
Subject: The Twitter Trick
To: xzy@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, May 15, 2009, 8:29 PM

If You Tweet, This Is For You

Yes TwitterTrick can work for you, and you’ll quickly discover that it’s easy if it’s all lined up for you,
and you have a quick action plan that s simple to follow…

But you don’t have to fear listbuilding anymore, because the new techniques, and the new social media have made it easy for us…

You don’t have to worry about listbuilding anymore!

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Even if…

$ You’ve never built a list before

$ You don’t know what an autoresponder is…

$ You never heard of Twitter…

$ You’ve never sold anything online before…

$ You can just barely answer your email…

And you have nothing to fear, because you are covered by my “no hard feelings” guarantee, because I just wont have any unhappy customers, if you aren’t happy with this book, in 60 days time, and you didn’t grow your list, and you gave it an honest try, I will happily refund you your money, check it out right now…

Bundled with this offer, get

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If You Tweet, This Is For You

There is a lot more to know about it. CLICK HERE

Yes, that’s how(and why) bubbles are created. Twitter Trick’s website

So what do you think about the “Twitter Trick” ?

The Great Twitter Spam Attack

8 Replies

You know something isn’t write when #hiring is a trending topic on Twitter, especially when it’s Recession Time. That’s indeed the case. A quick click on the keyword confirms that, here’s what the search page of #hiring looked like

Out of curiousity I checked out the search page for the next trending topic i.e #tweemyjobs and here’s what I got

and this

Yes, these two trending topics have been compromised/rigged/spammed and apparently there isn’t a genuine reason for them to be popular except for these bots. Also, if you take a closer look at the tweets here you’ll realize that the words contained in the kwip match the trending list, one for one. HOLY SHIT !! The whole trending list has been screwed badly. So as I write this post millions of users will be seeing the list of engineered topics spammed into attention. What this means is that it’s damn easy to turn the trending list upside down.

Thinking about this makes me wonder how come there aren’t any checks in place to catch hold of such things and control them ?

Not only this, there are other(un-related) people who also want to cash in on the eyeballs the trending topics get and to attain that goal they start using trending topics randomly in their posts to earn some extra clicks. For ex: the one’s here

Screenshots of searh results for other trending topics dollhouse, wolverine, imax and giro

Sad but true, the integrity of Twitter’s trending topics has been screwed.
Let’s see how this incident effects the bigger picture.

ps: excuse me for these hatrick posts on twitter, it’s just a coincidence and twitter got lucky

Changes in Twitter’s notification emails

4 Replies

A Twitter Phishing Attempt ? This was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this email in my inbox

Not used to seeing a new twitter follower mail like this ever I was a bit alarmed, to find out more I checked what URL were the hyperlinks pointing to and as it turned out the hyperlinks were all pointing to twitter.com. Then it occured to me that maybe twitter has changed the format of it’s notifcation mails, which as it turns out is the case. Here’s what the older follower notification mail looked like.

The new format of notification definitely looks better and adds value by sharing more information about the “new follower” like their profile picture, number of updates, follower and following count. Also, a small extention to this change could be to also share the one line user bio, that’ll further assist users to know more about their new follower and in turn be helpful in deciding if they should follow them back or not.

Let’s see what the change could mean

1) Reduction in number of clicks/visits to the site: Needless to say, a lot of views which twitter was getting due to new follower notification will go down as the details in many cases would be sufficient for the person being followed to not follow back(not popular, newbie, bot etc)

2) Increase in usage of block feature: Since identifying bot/spam users will become easy and the notification now also has a block button, the usage of block feature will rise and might lead to more cases of spam account deletions.

3) Better Tracking: Since the new notification mails have hyperlinks with analytics tracking code, their usage metrics will be recorded and can be improved

These are some of the possible implications of this change, there would be some more interesting patterns that’ll emerge with time for ex: peope might start to decide if someone is worth following back by just seeing their following/follower ratio(which isn’t always right) or people with beautiful/interesting pics will get more follow backs.

What do you think about these changes ? Do you think the service should notify its users about such changes ?

PS: Did you notice the order of user stats in the mail with their follower count on top ?

Twitter and Activism

2 Replies

One early use of Twitter had El Fattah and a dozen or so of his collegues coordinating movements to surround a car in which their friend Malek was being held by the police, to prevent it and him from being towed away. Knowing they were being monitored, they then sent messages suggesting that many more of them were coming. The police sent reinforcements, surrounding and thus immobilizing the car themselves. This kept Malek in place until the press and the members of parliament arrived. The threat of bad publicity led to Malek’s release, an outcome that would have been hard to coordinate without Twitter – Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky

James Karl Buck, a graduate journalism student from the University of California-Berkeley was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a single word message, “Arrested”, to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. This alerted them and helped secure his release(details not known)
– cnn.com

Mortin Pain Reliever in an effort to pitch to mom who wear their babies released a print and video ad campaign.The campaign didn’t go down well with moms and they started fighting back on their blogs and Twitter. As the campaign picked momentum, the company officials realised their mistake and in order to pacify irrate customers, removed the ad from their website and apologised on their site.
– parentinghelpme.com

A few weeks back amazon users realized that many books about gays, lesbians, bisexual and transsexual issues stopped appearing in relevant searches. Enraged users and authors swung into action and started posting updates on Twitter about this with adding a hashtag #amazonfail. It wasn’t long enough that Twitterverse was abuzz with #amazonfail, this led to a public communication by the company that this incident was inadvertant and soon things were fixed and back to normal.
– bbc.com

Twitter is increasingly being used for activism of sorts. Be it customers protesting against a product/company, or citizens campaigning against their government officials/policies, Twitter is the platform of choice when it comes to raising your voice against an issue or coordinating a protest(online and offline both).

Social media activism has graduated from protests in blogosphere, groups in social networking sites to #hashmobs on Twitter. The reasons for Twitter’s success as a platform for activism are

1) Critical Mass: Twitter has gained enormous mass since last year and is now a force to reckon with. Millions of users from all parts of the world use it to stay connected with their friends and family. It’s not just people like you and me, there are some really big brands that have presence on Twitter.

2) Dense Connectivity: Twitter is one of the most densely connected networks of all. It won’t be wrong to say “On Twitter, everyone is connected to everyone”, which means getting the word out is a lot easier. Chances of people noticing something and sharing it with others is quite high. The ease of sharing content(RT ) is another reason for word to be spread easily.

3) Search: Awesome search functionality, made further useful by trending topics make the discoverability of memes a lot easier. With the latest changes, everyone can see the trending topics on their Twitter page. This without any effort discoverability is really helpful in getting more eyeballs.

4) High visibility outside the platform: What makes a protest on Twitter better from say one of Facebook is that Twitter updates are more shareable(via blog widgets, feeds) than Facebook messages. Also, thanks to dozens of really popular tools, Twitter updates are just not limited to the website, you can get updates on your desktop app, mobile phone and email.

5) Hooked Traditional Media: There’s enough traditional media presence on Twitter which is eager to pick the next big story. So anything of significance in Twitterverse is quite likely to be noticed by them and spread further.

It would be interesting to see how activism on Twitter evolves from this point on. I’d like to end this post by sharing a list of Twitter Activism related protests/campaigns.

1. James Karl Buck: Arrested
2. #MortinMoms
3. StopPikeHike
4. Using Twitter to coordinate war protest
5. G20 summit protestors used Twitter and Facebook
6. Protest against Section92A, New Zealand
7. Inside Maldova’s Twitter revolution
8. Coordinating Malek’s release
9. #AmazonFail
10. Domino’s Social Media Disaster
11. Twittering Forest Fires
12. Twitter Charity(Twestival) raises more than US $250,000

Lastly here’s a nicely writter guide by digiactive to get you started with Twitter Activism

PizzaHut Twintern: Wise or Otherwise ?

3 Replies

Twitterverse is again abuzz with news about another Pizza maker but luckily this time it’s not for some negative news. The brand in question here is PizzaHut and the news is that PizzaHut has posted for an opening on their site for a Twintern(wondering how they came up with that word).

As per the requirements posted by the company, the Twintern would be closely working with PR team and would be responsible for maintaining and growing their social media presence, monitoring social media tools and doing PR outreach for the company. While most people(read Twitterers) are visibly excited about this piece of news there’s more to it than “Oh, somebody’s getting paid for Tweeting and Facebooking, that’s uber cool”.

David Teicher raises some valid concerns while trying to figure out the motive behind this move. This move clearly has to be motivated by the recent Domino’s Debacle but is reacting in this way a wise thing to do ? Few things that immediately come to one’s mind

1) What’s the strategy behind this move ?
Social Media is not just about tools. Jumping straight to a tool without having a clearly formulated strategy is a big NO.

2) Is it really right putting a college student on the drivers seat ?
Making him/her their official SM spokesperson and giving him/her unparalleled access to marketing strategies doesn’t quite sound right.

3) Who will supervise the intern’s work ?
There needs to be someone senior who has to take care of the intern’s work profile and how is he/she handling it. Given the niche nature(at least in PizzaHut) of the job I am not sure if there will be any approriate senior(with social media expertise) to supervise his/her work.

From the looks of it, this seems more like an experimental move, probably driven from the PR department to leverage the situation and get some traction in social media circles. As expected, there has been a rise in the mention of “PizzaHut” in Twitter since the news came out.

Whatever the case maybe, this move will boost confidence of others who were contemplating jumping on the social media bandwagon and also give a tiny ray of hope for those millions of Twitterers, that they too can one day get paid of posting updates on their favorite service.

Domino’s Reacts, Finally !!

Social Media: It’s not just about tools

5 Replies

You know what the problem with Social Media is ? Everyone thinks they know it…

Sad but true, this is the case when it comes to social media. Almost everyone who has accounts on two or more services(especially Twitter & FriendFeed) think they all know Social Media like the back of their hand and it’s evident by the confidence with which they tell you how they think Social Media is the coolest thing ever and that it can do wonders to your company/product without thinking twice . These are the people who will tell you your company needs a blog more than anything, ask them what’s the easiest way to get 10k followers on some microblogging site and they’ll quip “following 20k users”.

While tools are a critical ingredient of the whole Social Media cocktail they are not all that there is to it. What needs to be realized across the board is that tools are just a means to an end(relationships) and knowing how to operate a tool or two doesn’t imply anything. It’s not uncommon to assume that if blogs work for a particular product they should work for any other product too, nor is it uncommon to assume if one needs to spread word on Twitter/Kwippy they need to follow every user they can get my hands on(and put info about their product in the profile background).

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do – Edgar Degas

Anyone can use colors to paint but it take an artist to come up with something that people really admire, same is the case with Social Media, anyone can read a few blogs daily or use some tools regularly but to get what Social Media means and what to do with it, needs an extra social sense(mostly common). A quick test to know if someone gets Social Media would be ask them about how to leverage Social Media without touching any of the commonly available tools or simply by seeing how they score on this checklist(a score of 20 should be a minimum).

Social Media >> Twitter + Kwippy + Plurk + FriendFeed + Facebook + Myspace + (other such sites)

The best part about using Social Media is that there’s no straight formula which one can use for various brands/products. What might work for Pepsi might not work for Coke and it shouldn’t work too for both are different products(though in same category) by different companies and have more dissimilarities than similarity. Also, another thing that I’ve realized is irrespective of the number of hours these people who apparently get social media have spent on the tools, their understanding of the tools as standalone products and their relevance in the bigger picture is pedestrian. I’d like to end this post by saying if you are thinking Social Media, think beyond tools because there’s a lot more to it then tools.

From Replies to Mentions

Re-Tweeting and Echo Chamber

3 Replies

I’ve been an avid Twitter user for more than a year and a half now and love it for various reasons. One of the coolest things or phenomenon that Twitter has ever seen is “Re-Tweeting”. What this essentially means is to re-post someone else’s update with prefixing “RT/Retweet” and the name of the original poster, for example this:

Difference between posting someone’s content from your Twitter stream as it is and re-tweeting that content is akin to the difference between posting someone’s quote and posting someone’s quote with a mention of it’s author. People re-tweet to share nice updates/links with their followers. Someone whom you follow posted something nice/useful, you like it and you think your followers will also like it, so you re-tweet it. The content of a re-tweet could pretty much be anything. From a piece of news, a url, a quote, a question to a call for help or anything else.

The core idea behind a “re-tweet” is to share something that someone else posted, with your followers, i.e to add value. There’s a bit more to it then just that, it’s the underlying assumption that people(or a majority of them) would not be getting the original content in their Twitter stream in the first place. However this isn’t always the case and thus starts the trouble. The trouble of getting the same content again and again. If there’s a huge intersection in the list of people we follow, chances are each re-tweet we do would be a repeat-tweet, which would be plain redundant. More and more instances of such repeat-tweets lead to

Echo Chamber: An echo chamber essentially means that you get to hear the echoes of voices(read content) again and again. If I keep getting more and more re-tweets/copies of something that I got directly from the source, it will spoil my experience. This problem gets really annoying for closely integrated circles. Imagine Robert Scoble tweets something say “You are defined by the people you follow” and slowly people who are following him start re-tweeting this. Even if a mere 0.1 % of his followers(which would be 76) re-tweet this and say Robert himself is following half of them(which would be 38 and is a fair possibility), he will have his time line flooded with 38 instances of something he just said. Now that’s something serious, isn’t it ?

Now consider say Chris Brogan, too likes what Robert just said and re-tweets it, andddd. The same thing happens
(a) Chris’s twitter stream will have multiple copies of what he just said(plus the original copy by Robert)
(b) Some of Robert and Chris’s common followers who missed that tweet in the first round, might pick and re-tweet it. God bless Robert’s twitter stream.

This is just the first order or re-tweet, one can imagine will the inter connectedness what a second order re-tweet wave like this can do

Data duplication is a serious problem for some people and networks. The intensity of the problem is reflected in the way Friendfeed introduced hiding/grouping duplicate content.

Duplicate shares were always the most annoying aspect of FriendFeed. Whenever a story breaks, a large number of your friends are likely to share it through various services, which creates a lot of noise in your main feed. Now, FriendFeed will group these entries together. Your main feed will only show the first share, and then give you the option to click through to see who else shared the same item as well. Hopefully, this will also mean that discussions will now become less fragmented, as users will most likely gravitate towards those items that were shared first.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendfeed_dupe_detection.php

While friendfeed could come up with a fix to make things better by cutting down noise clearly anything of that sort is not going to happen with Twitter. Leave alone it happening I doubt if many Twitter users realize this as a problem in first place. What do you think ?

Please ReTweet it you like it 🙂

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Tag Archives: twitter

Twitter Trick Fail

Changes in Twitter’s notification emails