Social Media Innovation

Now is the time to innovate, not stick your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass by.
That is the theme of my article on social media innovation in this quarter’s edition of Figaro Digital Magazine.
The takeaway thought from the article was that whilst budgets are being cut left, right and centre, [...]

Twitter killed the blogging star

Has Twitter killed long form blog writing?
Is ‘traditional’ blogging already redundant in this micro-blog world?

Is it convenience that makes us tweet rather than blog or is it lack of something to say?
Has today’s bite sized dumbed down media reduced our attention span to the point we can’t focus beyond 140 characters anymore?
Do you spend more [...]

Twitter statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in year

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ‘08) in the UK to 38th (May ‘09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?

Depending on your Twitter Follow list, you may have already seen the buzz over changes to Google Profiles recently. Whilst the product has been around for a while (in relative obscurity), two recent announcements have fixed the spotlight firmly upon it.

First off was a relatively low key announcement a few weeks ago, revealing that you could personalize your Google Profile URL to include your name (nicely termed a vanity URL). Then followed an announcement that Profiles are to start appearing in the Google search listings.

Cue a whole bunch of savvy people flocking to Google to ensure they could secure their ideal vanity url before someone sharing their name (or a cybersquatter) grabbed it. The news from Danny Sullivan that Google Profiles pass PageRank might just have contributed to the rush.

Since then there has been a lot of speculation regarding Google’s intent with its Profiles. A popular theory is that it is the start of a manoeuvre to take on the social network giants, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are many arguments for and against such theories, but it would certainly be quite a feat to unseat either colossus when you consider their size and integration into their users’ lives.

So what else could Google Profiles become?

10 Signs You’re Addicted To Twitter

“My name is @garyr0binson and I’m a Twitterholic”

Okay, maybe not, but you have to admit, it can get very addictive. Who hasn’t found themselves saying to someone “be with you in a minute, just need to check something first…”?

C’mon, @leeodden, @yoast, @the_gman or @scobleizer or @avinashkaushik might have just tweeted something I need to know right now.

Now obviously I’m not saying the following signs are all from my symptoms, but let’s just say I would score pretty highly if we checked.

Let me know of any others you have experienced, so we can draw up an early warning checklist for those that can still be saved.

Ryanair Cheap Flights and Cheap Service

Oh dear. I guess the folks over at Ryanair, the cheap flights specialist, haven’t been doing much reading on the power of self publishing and social media lately. It’s the only way you could really explain the two-feet-firmly-in-mouth approach to their public relations over the past week.
If you’re not familiar with the story, it appears [...]

Free Advanced Twitter Power Guide

In my quest to understand Twitter, I’ve discovered two things – 1) a great resource in the Marketing Over Coffee podcast by John Wall and Christopher Penn and 2) a revealing – and free – Twitter Power Guide by the aforementioned Mr Penn.
The podcast in itself is great listening and it’s given me something different [...]

What’s the point of Twitter?

That’s the question that started me down the route of this blog.
Prompted by a speaker’s comment at November’s IAB Engage 2008 Conference in London, I scribbled the following note down in my complementary pad…
What’s the point of Twitter?
I had no idea really. For me, it seemed like another social media fad. Something the Facebook generation [...]