About Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. He blogs mostly over on michele.blog

Elizabeth Warren Tests Facebook Advertising Rules

Facebook and other social media platforms have been coming under scrutiny from governments and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. While there are concerns about content being shared on the various platforms that can impact political campaigns what is probably more concerning is how social networks handle political ads.

Elizabeth Warren is currently a candidate for the US Presidential elections in 2020. She posted recently on Twitter about an experiment she and her team conducted to see how Facebook would handle clearly false ads. The results are quite disturbing:

Trump’s campaign is apparently spending $1 million a week on Facebook ads:

There have been calls from several governments, including some voices in the US one, to regulate Facebook and other social media platforms a lot more heavily, though it is unlikely to happen in the short term.

The upcoming US Presidential campaign will be fought, at least partially, via the social media networks and platforms.

Make Twitter Great Again With This Donald Trump Chrome Plugin

The US President Donald Trump has a tendency to issue quite contentious statements via Twitter. Some of those statements might appear to be a little lacking in gravitas. This plugin for Chrome will give them the gravitas they deserve by converting them all to Comic Sans.

You can see it “in action” on one of President Trump’s recent tweets in the screenshot below:

Want it? You can grab it here.

FIFA Cracking Down on Twitter Users

FIFA has sent takedown notices to Twitter in relation to Twitter users “abusing” the FIFA trademarks.

More details here

Irish Social Media Awards 2014 Open Nominations

socialmedia-awards-2014 The Irish Social Media Awards are being held in June in Dublin and nominations opened today.

As with other years nominations are 100% free.

This year’s categories are:

Facebook categories:

Facebook Page for a Business (Non Campaign)
Facebook Page for a Non-Profit/Organisation
Facebook Page for a Business (owner managed)
Integrated Facebook Campaign: Page, App, Ads

Twitter categories

Best Business Twitter account – marketing, sales
Best Business Twitter account – support, CRM
Best Business Twitter Campaign

Mobile categories

Best Mobile App (Marketing)
Best Mobile App (Events)
Best Mobile Campaign Using Social Media

SME Categories

Best Use of Social Media by an SME (new)
Best Blog of an SME

Other Categories

Best Experimental Format (Vine, Instagram, Snapchat)
Best Social Media Only Campaign (not linked to any other media)
Most Innovative Use of Social Media
Best Use of Social Media by State Body
Customer Care using Social Media (Integrated)
Best Video/Video Campaign (non broadcast)
Best Online PR Campaign
Best Use of Social Media for a Sponsorship Campaign
Social Media Effectiveness – conversions, metrics etc
Best Integrated Social Media Campaign

Full details on the event site.

Attention Seekers On Twitter

The original VayniacGary Vaynerchuk posted this deck yesterday.

It’s well worth reviewing and sharing, as it highlights one of the worst things that people and businesses do on Twitter:

I’ve seen a LOT of businesses abusing Twitter this way. Sure, if someone pays you or your business a compliment you might want to share it. But if the bulk of your tweets and retweets are just this kind of junk then it’s really quite pathetic

Ryanair Finally Joins Twitter

Economy carrier Ryanair has finally joined twitter

Their first tweet was sent nearly two weeks ago and shares the “tongue in cheek” style you’d expect from the brand:

So far their account hasn’t got that many followers, but it does have the “verified” symbol:

Ryanair's twitter a/c September 2013What’s a little “odd” is that so far the account is not following anyone back, though following a far lower number of accounts back than follow them is fairly normal for brands on social networks.