Krishna De: Insights From Ireland On Digital Marketing, Social Media And Entrepreneurship

Do you follow any of these women on Twitter? Many people do.

From left to right: social strategist Julia Roy (http://twitter.com/juliaRoy 31,000 followers), publicist Sarah Evans (http://twitter.com/prsarahEvans 33,000 followers), travel journalist Stefanie Michaels (http://twitter.com/ADVENTUREGIRL 1.4 million followers), actress Felicia Day (http://twitter.com/feliciaday 1.6 million followers), lifecaster Sarah Austin (http://twitter.com/Pop17 24,000 followers), and marketer Amy Jo Martin (http://twitter.com/digitalRoyalty 1.2 million followers). Photograph by Michael Halsband.

vanity Fair calls these women twilebrities. To be fair they must be saying something worth listening to online to have amassed that number of followers and I am sure that featuring in Vanity Fair will have encouraged more people to follow them.

Though why the mac and the high shoes with the 'suggestion' these women are wearing little underneath?

Is this just a sensationalist story? Were these women selected not for just their number of followers but also for looking great?

Is there an equivalent picture of male twelebrities that you know of?

How about Tweeting the first part of your postcode, the rate of snow fall and then along with fellow Tweeple create a realtime map of the snow fall?

That is what developer Ben Marsh has done in the UK.

I could imagine that the travel industry could put this to work - such staying with the idea of snow - what about Tweeting about the snow conditions for Skiing?

We'd have to take a different approach in Ireland though as most of us don't have postcodes!

What ideas does this give you for crowd sourcing information over Twitter.

Is it just me? Or is it that Twitter seems to have been down a lot this last week?

Today I have not just seen over capacity messages but also a message that there is something technically wrong.

It's a good reminder of why we should not be over reliant on Twitter for our digital marketing and social media communications.

It is frustrating isn't it?!

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students tonight at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July.

Obama was asked by a student, "Do you know about the great firewall and should we be able to use Twitter?" His reply: "I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access." (via Breaking News Online)

This is an article that is bound to get a lot of coverage in the Twittersphere today given that Barak Obama's presidential campaign included Facebook, Twitter and many other social media platforms.

But perhaps he should have said 'I have never personally used Twitter'. No one expects him to personally Tweet, but he must know it was it is used by his communications team?

This week LinkedIn.com announced that you can now integrate LinkedIn staus updates and your Tweets without having to use a third party service.

Historically I posted all my Tweets on my LinkedIn profile by adding my Twitter profile to the website links area and using the Six Apart application on LinkedIn - this pulled my Tweets and blog posts into my profile on LinkedIn. However there were sometimes Tweets that were not so relevant to my community on LinkedIn.

You will notice under the status update area on your home page that there is a Twitter icon - just click on that and it will ask you to confirm that you want to connect your Twitter account with your LinkedIn account status updates.

On LinkedIn, adding your twitter account will mean that under the area where your website is listed it will reference your Twitter account.

Then when you post to Twitter if you decide that you want to share a Tweet on LinkedIn, you can decide if you want to share all your Tweets to LinkedIn or selective tweets to update your LinkedIn status. If you pick the latter, you need to add the #li or #in hashtag to every relevant tweet you’d like to send back to LinkedIn.

Have you started posting your Tweets to LinkedIn yet?

Research released today by Morse, the IT services and technology company, has shown that use of Twitter and other social networks by employees at work is costing UK businesses £1.38 billion* each year in lost productivity. 

From the 1,460 office workers surveyed over half (57%) said that they used social networking sites during the working day for personal use.

On average those people were spending 40 minutes on these sites each week, equating to just under a full working week being wasted each year by employees using social networking sites at work.

The survey of 1,460 office workers was commissioned by Morse and conducted by independent research company TNS. Further details of the survey are available from Spark Communications on 020 7436 0420.

Portsmouth City Council was reported to be banning Facebook on its computers after it was revealed staff spent on average 400 hours on the site every month. Portsmouth City Council said it had decided to change its policy and block access to the social networking site along side use of Bebo, Twitter and eBay (YouTube had already been banned) in September 2009. You can read about this case at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/8231234.stm

The report also indicated that 76% of the respondents stated their employer had not issued them with specific guidelines with regards to using Twitter.

The press release from Morse.com also commented that there have been several high-profile incidents recently, involving the likes of Curry’s, PC World, BA and Virgin Atlantic, where employees have abused customers on social networks and other public-facing sites therefore damaging the reputation of the company.

The research also states that a third of office workers stated that they had seen sensitive information posted on social networks, overall 84% felt that it should be up to them as to what they post online.

Of the office workers surveyed 81% admitted that they were worried they might be clicking on a link to an unsecure website when for example they clicked on shortened URL's especially prevalent in Tweets.

Interestingly, I am working with a non-profit organisation who have taken the opposite approach. It is important for them to allow their employees access many different sites in the course of their work so instead they have put in place systems that check for viruses at the network level and at an individual PC's level and they are developing codes of practice for their employees and other stakeholder groups.

Does your organisation have an IT or communications policy that addresses employee access to social media sites?

When do you Tweet? When driving, at work or on vacation?

A recent Gadgetology study by consumer electronics shopping site, Retrevo.com found that most people check Facebook and Twitter a couple of times a day.

27% of respondents to the survey who are under 35 years of age however are checking Facebook more than 10 times a day.

The survey also found that that 36% of people under the age of 35 often use Facebook or Twitter after sex - men being more likely to do this than women - and iPhone users are three times more likely to do so than Blackberry owners.

The Retrevo.com Gadgetology study indicates that only 19% of the over 35 year olds use a phone as the preferred device for social media services with 81% preferring instead a desktop or laptop computer. However 46% of the under 35 year old survey respondents prefer to use a mobile devise to engage with social media..

Among the survey respondents under age 35, 27% of Facebook users check it more than 10 times a day compared to 39% of Twitter users checking in on Twitter more than 10 times a day.

When do you Tweet? And how addicted to Facebook and Twitter are you?

ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The Retrevo Gadgetology Report is an ongoing study of people and electronics from Retrevo, the consumer electronics shopping site.

The survey was an online study of individuals (non-Retrevo customers) conducted by an independent panel. The sample size was 771 distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States.

Rumor: Twitter's worth $1B(3:27)Sep 25

The microblogging site reportedly is planning to raise $100 million this year based on that valuation.

There has been lots of speculation about whether Twitter is worth the valuation of U$1 billion.The microblogging site reportedly is planning to raise $100 million this year based on that valuation. In this video published on 25 September 2009 discusses the speculations.

Filesocial.com offers us the opportunity to post files online to be then shared on Twitter. From there I syndicate content to LinkedIn, Facebook and my main blog.

I love Posterous for sharing photo's when on the move but I do look forward to there being a facility to upload my photo's or other files. Yes I could use Utterli, but Posterous is a firm favourite of mine.

Of course I could add my photo to Flickr but that takes time.

So I decided to try out Filesocial.com - they say you can share mp3, jpg, avi, doc, ppt, zip files.

A couple of thoughts on the service:

- make sure that you give your file a good title before uploading - I did not title my photo so it came up with the reference file from the camera

- unlike Flickr there is no copyright attribution, so if you don't want anyone to use it, don't post your files to Filesocial.com.

All the same it's a great tool - but please Posterous, will you create a way for me to upload my photo's to you? You are one of my favourite homes online!

Follow Filesocial on Twitter @filesocial

What file sharing tool do you like when posting to Twitter?