A lot of the companies flogging social media services to businesses probably shouldn’t be in the business at all.
A lot of the “advice” they’re giving companies is terrible and yet they charge their clients “top dollar” for it.
(Not all of the companies operating in the space are “evil”, but a lot are)
The Onion’s recent video in the style of “Ted Talks” is brilliant and worth watching if you have any doubts about social media gurus:
Nike Running. Wonderful device (and software) if it works, but one of its key elements (and raison d’etre) is the GPS functionality. Without it there’s not much point in using it.. Or so you’d think:
Am I missing something? Or did they just almost ask him to run with his computer?
No – they’re just going to plough ahead with even more “good” and “helpful” advice:
Twitter’s API changes announced last week upset quite a few people. But what about its relations with other social networks and services?
The Guardian reports that Twitter has blocked Tumblr’s access to its users ie. you won’t be able to search for your Twitter contacts on Tumblr anymore.
As the various social networks buy up services that work with them you can expect to see more and more of this.
Take a look at what’s been happening with Instagram to get an idea.
This year’s Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards features a social media category, as it has done for the last few years. However this year is slightly different. Instead of simply having a “best us of” type award they’ve renamed the category to:
Most Creative Use of Social Media for compelling customer engagement
And they describe it as being for:
The person or company who receives this award will have demonstrably displayed best practice use of social media for driving business growth; Social Commerce, Social media for customer engagement and customer support. They will have displayed expertise in delivering integrated Social Media across a minimum of two social media platforms.
Full details and nominations on their site.
Twitter has been offline for the last 30 minutes.
It’s not even showing the (in)famous “fail whale” at the moment!
So you can expect to see a surge of traffic to Facebook and Google+ 🙂
Image via CrunchBase
Last weekend the news broke that Facebook was acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. Needless to say the tech news circles were buzzing with this announcement all week.
According to an article on TheNextWeb Twitter had also tried to acquire them, but failed.
And others suggest that Google may have been trying to acquire them ..
Image via CrunchBase
With most social networks the users are the product.
In the case of Twitter one of the problems the company has been struggling with is how to actually make money from it all ..
So selling their content ie. their users’ tweets appears to be one of the solutions.
According to an article on RWW Twitter has sold the data to Datasift and has other companies lined up to buy the same data.
So not only is Twitter claiming ownership of the content, but they’re also happily ignoring any privacy concerns users might have..
Expect privacy advocates to get very vocal on this.
Came across this animated image on Google+ earlier today and thought it was amusing enough to share:
No idea where it originated, so if you know the image source please let me know
Image by Gustavo Pimenta via Flickr
CoTweet Standard, which is used by a lot of companies to manage Twitter for teams, is being withdrawn on February 15th
From then on CoTweet will only be offered as a paid service under a new name “SocialEngage”
There aren’t much details about SocialEngage on the CoTweet / Exact Target site unfortunately, nor is there any information on pricing. It looks like they’re adding support for tracking Facebook, but without knowing pricing etc., it’s really hard to see if this is going to end up costing companies a lot more than they’ll gain or not.
Their Enterprise product “Cotweet Enterprise” may have been very powerful, but it also came at a very high price.
So are there any viable alternatives?
TwitSprout recently launched their beta, or at least let me access it, and while the name suggests that it’s a Twitter related service it also works with Facebook.
What does it do?
The basic plan, which is free, gathers a number of metrics related to your social media activities into an easy to use and quite visual dashboard.
With the paid plans you can also get information on your competitors, which is probably the more innovative aspect of the service.
If you’re looking for instant gratification then you’re going to be disappointed, as the service has to work within the limitations of Twitter and Facebook’s respective API limits.
Once its reports are ready they’re pretty impressive, as it gives you pretty much all the data in one place, which is handy. Other services that I’ve tried will give you part of the data but this does it all in one place.
Pretty nifty!
