Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Tweeting Toyota to the Top

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Surely you’ve heard about Toyota’s troubles of late.  As the L.A. Times technology blog tells us , “If ever there were a company in need of positive spin it’s Toyota. With the relentless grind of safety recalls and suffering sales, the Japanese automaker has tapped Twitter to help repair its image.”

With the help of Federated Media, they’ve launched a channel called Toyota Conversations, on TweetMeme.  The channel features news stories, videos and also shares tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and its own AdTweets.

As TechCrunch points out, the Twitter sentiment application Tweetfeel suggests that the Twitter universe trends more negative, as does the press. But TweetMeme can be programmed to share news from only certain sources, so it’s chosen the positive ones.

Now more than ever, brands are flocking to Twitter to not only monitor and track what’s being said about their company on Twitter but to participate in the conversation and influence it ASAP with internet speed. Now Twitter has become a valuable tool for crisis communications folks.

A good example of how Twitter and other forms of new-media mass communication are shaping public relations is when film director Kevin Smith Tweeted that Southwest Airlines asked him to leave the plane for being too overweight to fly. As a man with more than 1.5 million Twitter followers, the story was eventually picked up by celebrity gossip show TMZ. Though Southwest posted an apology, the PR nightmare may not be over yet.

Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang said, “In the social sphere, it’s often best to be proactive during a crisis, to let the market know you’re listening, and centralize the discussion around your brand, giving the brand more opportunity to guide the conversation.”

ConanOBrien Wins in Cyberspace

Friday, February 26th, 2010

So Conan O’Brien was not the chosen one in the NBC boardroom, but on the internet, he has overtaken Jay Leno’s popularity with internet speed.

The “I’m with COCO” fan page on Facebook (run by Mike Mitchell and friends) is listed as a religious organization and has 960,283 followers as of the writing of this post. There are a few imitators with followers that come to about 90,000. Another 67,000 are fans of either Conan’s page or the Late Night with Conan page. In comparison to Conan’s million plus, Jay Leno’s one and only fan page has 45,871 fans.

On Weds, the L.A. Time Technology blog reported that Conan O’Brien began tweeting on Wednesday and in just over an hour “surpassed “The Jay Leno Show’s” official Twitter profile, which has been around since April 2009. In just a couple of hours, he doubled Leno’s 30,000 or so followers.”

Conan’s first tweet:
Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me.

All of this popularity seems to support the idea that he should take his show online. Sure there are challenges, but  The New York Times BITS blog used Seth MacFarlane as an example of what’s already being done and said “There would also be lots of opportunities to try new financing models and break some of the traditional rules of television, something Mr. O’Brien has always done well in the past.” 

Revision3, an internet television site, issued an open letter to the late-night talk show host, promising him the opportunity to create a brand new show that could generate significant revenue, if not the same level of revenue, under their broadcast model.

So just wait and watch for Conan online!

The Internet in Space

Monday, January 25th, 2010

It’s true! There’s at least one internet connection in space, and it’s one that’s been created by us humans. The first tweet from space was sent from the International Space Station (or I.S.S.) on Friday, January 22nd, 2010-–a good, futuristic way to start off the new decade. Wouldn’t you agree?

Timothy Creamer, the Astronaut whose Twitter name is Astro_TJ, wrote:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s.”

The New York Times Bits Blog spoke to CNET last year to find out how it was done:

The I.S.S.’s IT staff explained the logistics and hardware involved in connecting to the Internet 250 miles above the earth, while traveling at 17,300 mph. (Still not too fast for internet speed to catch!)

The space station is equipped with 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops and 32 Lenovo ThinkPad T61p devices. The laptops are all connected via Wi-Fi access points, and there’s also a dedicated IP phone for phone calls and some limited video-conferencing abilities if astronauts need to see their families.

The Internet connection is also relatively speedy. The Astronauts have connections speeds as high as 3Mbps up and 10Mbps down, which is comparable to most home DSL connections.

But if you’re still thinking about the Twitter aspect of the tale, you can search check out the conversation on Twitter by typing  “@Astro_TJ” into the Twitter search box.

Now that we know there’s an internet connection out there, the rest of us may be a bit more willing to make our own forays into space!

Watching What You Tweet

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

You’ve heard that you shouldn’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, right?  We’ve found what may be the Twitter equivalent—threatening to blow up an airport via Twitter in an age of internet speed and terrorist threats. 

The Internet Innovation Alliance pointed us to this story from the UK in which a frustrated traveler tweeted to his friends, “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat.

After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life.

While it has happened in the United States, Mr Chambers is thought to be the first person in the United Kingdom to be arrested for comments posted on Twitter.

On 13 January, after apparently receiving a tip-off from a member of the public, police arrived at Mr Chambers’ office. “I had to explain Twitter to them in its entirety because they’d never heard of it,” he said. “Then they asked all about my home life, and how work was going, and other personal things. The lead investigator kept asking, ‘Do you understand why this is happening?’ and saying, ‘It is the world we live in’.”

He has been bailed until 11 February, when he will be told whether or not he will be charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax. In the interim, detectives have confiscated his iPhone, laptop and home computer.

The Old Guard Bows to the New

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web, according to Read Write Web.

They say it’s a matter of identity.  “Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. Increasingly, you take that Identity from site to site, leveraging on the next site what you did on the last one. If a particular company provides that Identity for you, it sets the rules, regulations, “interest rates” (eg. use of your info for advertising) and determines things like what parts of your identity you can use on different sites and what parts you can’t.

“Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. At this point they have an interest in doing so, because they want you to share what you do on Yahoo and Google sites with your big link-clicking network of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Google didn’t add Facebook Connect, just Twitter, because Facebook is now Google’s leading challenger.”

While it makes it convenient for the users, RWW feels that, “The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run.”

And once again, the world changes with internet speed.

Entertainment for a New Era

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

We’ve got another great example of how entertainment is changing with internet speed– it’s called The Bob Bendick Podcast. A podcast, as defined by Researchers at the Center for Journalism and Communication Research at the University of Texas at Austin, is a digital audio or video file that is episodic; downloadable; program-driven, mainly with a host and/or theme; and convenient, usually via an automated feed with computer software.

Bob Bendick, in case you don’t already know, is the comic host of a weekly one-hour interview chat show. Recorded in front of a live audience at ACME Comedy Theatre in Hollywood, their focus is mainly comedic actors, but Bob interviews all types of entertainment professionals about their journey to achieving the level of success they’ve enjoyed so far.

It’s interactive too—by keeping up with the show via the website, Facebook or Twitter, you can see which guests are coming up and ask them your own questions. The Q&A portion of the show includes questions from the live audience members as well as listeners from all over the world who can be part of the recording via Skype, Twitter or Email. Once recorded, the show is posted on iTunes for download, and photos are posted to the web.

Right now on iTunes you can download any or all of five past shows with guests like Adam Carolla and Robert Forster. Check the website for info on upcoming guests. 

It’s a great hybrid of live theater, worldwide participation and the convenience of listening whenever the heck you want. It’s also a wonderful resource for comedians around the world to learn how they might build a career upon their comic wit!

You Too Can Watch U2 on YouTube

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

It’s hard to resist borrowing this play on words from the title of a TechCrunch article, but it’s true!  The mega-band U2 played live in Los Angeles on October 25th, simultaneously broadcasting on YouTube.  In fact, it was promoted as the first global concert webcast on “U2ube”.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t available live to the *entire* globe—out of the over 190 countries in the world only 16 countries saw it live: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., and of course, the U.S., where the concert took place.

During the show, YouTube also featured a Twitter widget below the video player that displayed tweets from people who used the #U2webcast hashtag.

“U2 and technology have long gone hand in hand,” writes MG Siegler of TechCruch. “Their ZooTV tour famously featured a massive amount of television monitors and live streaming video from all around the world.” Later, U2 got chummy with Apple, releasing their own branded iPod. Then after U2 lead singer Bono became a partner in a firm that purchased a huge stake in Palm, U2’s recent tour has been sponsored by Palm and BlackBerry.

10 million people viewed the live stream on YouTube that night, according to Variety—and it went impressively smoothly. Though 10 million is nothing compared to some of the most popular television shows, but we’re starting to see audience of comparable sizes from all over the world.

And, as our title declares, the recorded version of the full 2-1/2 hour concert is now officially being shown on YouTube, and it had over a million views in the first 3 days. A little over a week later, it has had 1,932,240 views.

It’s a brave, new, rockin’ world, made possible with internet speed.

Facebook Makes You Smarter than Twitter Does

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Or so says Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland.  She’s an expert in working memory– the ability both to remember information and to use it—and believes it to be far more important to success and happiness than IQ.

For example, at a job interview, a candidate will employ working memory to match answers to questions in the most impressive way.

In an article in The Telegraph UK she explains that using Facebook employs and strengthens these skills…with internet speed, as does playing video war games and solving Sudoku. But text messaging, micro-blogging on Twitter and watching YouTube are all considered likely to weaken one’s working memory.

The reasoning is that video games that involve planning and strategy, and may also train working memory, Dr Alloway believes. ”I’m not saying they’re good for your socialization skills, but they do make you use your working memory,” she said. ”You’re keeping track of past actions and mapping the actions you’re going to take.” But the “instant” nature of texting, Twitter and YouTube was not healthy for working memory.

”On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct,” said Dr Alloway. ”You don’t have to process that information.

”Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.”

She said there was evidence linking TV viewing with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) while extensive texting was associated with lower IQ scores.

Ben Patterson, a Yahoo Tech Blogger said, “Of course, that’s just Alloway’s theory; there’s no evidence in the Telegraph article of any studies proving that Facebook users are brainiacs compared to Twitter fanatics.”  Plus, he says, if you’re actively engaging other users, or just passively reading, this may make more of a difference than what service you use.

The Twitpocalypse May Have Come

Monday, August 10th, 2009

A few months ago, we ran a story about the Twitpocalypse, the end of the Twitter world as we knew it.  It didn’t occur when expected, but this week’s series of Twitter attacks has made it feel close. 

The New York Times BITS blog reported, “Twitter, the popular microblogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack. The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.” They went on to explain that a denial-of-service attack involves thousands of malware-infected home PCs that are directed to flood a targeted site with junk traffic. Once the site is overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.

Later posts to the BITS blog explain that the Twitter attack came in two waves. It seemed the point was to silence a blogger’s criticism on the behavior of Russia in the conflict over the South Ossetia region in Georgia, which began a year ago on Friday. The technique they used was intended to discredit the blogger by making it appear as though he was the source of a large amount of junk e-mails, causing all of his messages to be filtered out.

Saturday’s BITS blog gave more information as the attacks continued to keep people from Tweeting.

Only time will tell if we’ve become so attached to our real-time messaging that a few days without service will cause us problems. While Twitter was the only service that could get news out from Iran after their election a few months ago, it seems cyber-bad-guys have found ways to silence other dissenters with internet speed.

Twittering Away at the White House

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Last week, cyberspace was all a-Twitter about the idea that Twitter, the real-time short messaging service, was banned at the White House.  Read Write Web said that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs casually mentioned on CNN that Twitter was blocked on official White House computers and that “[s]ome cynics will say this is great news, that taxpayer money isn’t being wasted on using Twitter on White House time.” But they also argued for the  importance of social networking in this day and age of internet speed, especially to the Obama administration, whose presence in the White House can be largely attributed to their shrewd use of new media. 

But a few days later, TechCrunch explained that there isn’t actually a blanket ban on Twitter from the White House. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton told the press that for reasons of security and record keeping, Twitter is blocked from some computers, but posts can be made via HootSuite and staff members are allowed to tweet from their own devices. Official White House tweets are handled by the new media team, while President Obama’s account is apparently handled by the Democratic National Committee.

Then TechCrunch divulged that the White House wants us to know that it likes Twitter, and that the Deputy Press Secretary has a good sense of humor and seems to have a good grasp on the medium, having said “I have an account that I follow on my personal blackberry but I don’t actually twitter myself. It’s more to keep track of what Diddy and Perez Hilton are up to all day.”