From the horse's mouth...

I am really really hoping that a) this is genuine and b) it's continued for a while, because this is consumer insight gold.  And even if a+b turn out not to be true my morning has been improved no end by finding this Tweetfeed  highlighting the things this guy's Dad is using Google for:  I recommend clicking over and scrolling a while. I love the honesty.

2010 in search, tweets, apps & trends

Google just released their search trend year in review video (note the not very subtle plugs for many of their services along the way) It is worth watching but be warned it's not going to leave you bouncing with joy about 2010.  It seems like it's been a lousy year for many people. Bring on 2011.  They also published the top searches per category. I'm sure Robert Pattinson will be delighted to have scraped in at #10 of the most searched for people, with Justin Bieber taking the #1 slot. 



Meanwhile, Twitter reported that the world sent 25 billion tweets this year (so far),and on average 95 million tweets are sent everyday.  Twitter also published charts of top topics tweeted about in 2010:  Unsurprisingly there's a strong correlation between the Google search rankings and the Tweet charts: iPad dominates in technology and yet again Justin Bieber tops the people charts. (Click here to read how they compiled the charts).

Apple also recently published their top apps of the year. You can check who is downloading what (music, films, podcasts apps) & where (by market) on iTunes charts. Well worth a play, if only for curiosity.

For 2010, Facebook dominates the free download charts and Angry Birds (game) the paid chart.

Crazy but true, this bonkers addictive game tops the paid app charts in UK, US, France, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal & Sweden and is in the top 5 in a further 7 countries: Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Ireland and Germany. In Greece it's number 6, and the only place it doesn't make the Top10 from the published charts is Japan.

 
You can bet that the Angry Birds soft toys that Rovio are releasing in January will give a welcome boost to the usually quiet January toy market too.

And whilst I'm having a round-up morning, here's the ever brilliant Contagious round up of top trends of 2010.

Misconception: No-one tweets outside the heart of big cities?

Wrong!

Sure there'll always be a concentration of people at the front end of technology in places where geeks like me tend to work : every big city tends to have areas with lots of creative / strategy shops, but lots of people commute a long way to work and if they are enthusiastic about what they are doing will advocate / influence those around them when they are not in the office.

Just found this fab, fab infographic that maps Tweets like contours on a map.

Have a play (they've added some amusing tweaks of place names), or go and see a selection of other images from the creator over on Flickr... Clever stuff. 

Promoted Tweets debut with Toy Story 3 / Disney Pixar

 The first "promoted tweets" went live today for Disney/Pixars forthcoming release of Toy Story 3. 

However they are only visible to people using Twitter via Twitter.com where they are showing up as a trending topic:

 For the vast majority of us who use another more user-friendly Twitter client e.g Tweetdeck, Seismic or HootSuite, no can see (yet, at any rate!).

Digital Treasure Ahoy! Utterly mad but fabulous Twitter visualisation mash up

Thanks to my friend Mark, I've just found this wonderful, hilarious, Twitter visualisation experience from some crazily creative dude in Japan. LOVING it.

A musically accompanied parade of people you follow or who follow you and their Tweets! It takes a while to load, and after a while the backing track gets a tad annoying but have a play with either your Twitter handle or a keyword. Digital treasure. Delight!

And there was me only earlier today having a debate with someone over original innovation v creative mashing! Scraping Twitter isn't new, but as Hollywood script writer and storytelling guru Robert McKee once told me, there are only 7 stories in the movies, just a million different ways to tell them. ;-)

Still not get Twitter & why it's useful in so many ways?

Then I encourage you to go and visit this handy "great examples" round up site for inspiration.

TwitBird Review

Ever since I started a Twitter account, I have been battling myself over which iPhone client I favor. As you know by now, the App Store has no shortage of them either. As time goes by, developers must find ways to stand out in the ever-growing sea if they want to survive. Not many people are willing to settle for bland graphics and narrow scope. Just as with everything else we shop for, we want the most for our money. Why should our iPhone apps be any different?

For me there are three main factors I judge by: Features, Visual Style, and Reliability. Even some of the big name clients fail at scoring high in all areas, usually ranking well in one and falling short at another. After a few weeks of serious use, I think I can say TwitBird [iTunes link] has surpassed the others and ranked highest in all three of these categories.

Have a look at that! Very sleek, yet functional, and easy to read. The above showcases main timeline with the Dark theme found in version 2.2. This is my personal favorite theme, but its good to know there are two others that you could choose from, Movie and iChat Bubble, both of which mimic the look and feel of a typical chat window. Another cool feature of those themes was the ability to pick and choose your background image. I really favor apps that give ample customization to the user.

Now take another look at the above picture, look closely at the top tweet (mine lol). Notice anything cool? How about that "in reference to" box just below my @reply? SUPER COOL! That really helps recall what you were replying to, and it does so in style! Thats a huge bonus in functionality plus it tips the visual count too!

Here is a glance at a typical user profile, accessed when tapping on an avatar in the timeline. Not so much of a reinvention, but it just feels right with well chosen fonts and color schemes.

For this review, I purchased TwitBird Premium, which supports up to 2 twitter accounts, and inter-TwitBird push notifications. This is basically invoked if another TwitBird user sends you a Direct Message or a Mention. I didn't get many of these in my testing, which is a shame and something I hope to change with this review! As you can see from the above photo, each account will show a small badge of unread tweets/mentions/DM's and so forth.

After selecting an account, you are brought to the "Home" view which contains a break down of "Messages" and "Tools." MEssages further breaks down your messages in an mailbox style view, each box with it's respective badge as well. A quick scroll down will reveal many more "Tools" such as Drafts, Search, Nearby Tweets, Trends, and Saved Links. Other features include now playing tweets with link to iTunes and voice recordings. Being a musician, I like sharing music, however, I was hoping that TwitBird would also include the cover art in my now playing tweets. Perhaps this will be implemented in a future update. These are all major features that help push TwitBird to the top of my list, most notably the "Saved Links" feature. While there is support for Read It Later and Instapaper, a built in feature is a super nice touch.

Also under the hood, tucked away until needed, is two more features: in-line picture viewing and map link. When a user posts a picture, the picture is included in the tweet view screen (just tap a tweet to expand its contents), along with a small snapshot of the users geo-location! Very neat! Have a look...

When you click on "Nearby Tweets," a map loads with a nice fancy radar type graphic. As users are found, there avatars are loaded and placed on the map. Again, such a cool feature! Just brings a nice feel to the whole UI. This is a great way to find new "tweople" (people who tweet...) and even your own friends!

In my testing, I did have a few hiccups, such as double posts. However, I was able to pin this down to the fact that my iPhone is Jailbroken with a backgrounding/multi-tasking app running. Removing that app cured the double posts right away. Since then, I have not experienced any problems at all.

At the time of this writing, Boxcar [iTune Link] announced they now support all of the TwitBird versions (the free, Premium, and Pro versions). Coupled with Boxcar, TwitBird is my ultimate Twitter client.

Twitter Advertising in Malaysia

Whilst I was hanging out with my ASEAN buddies last week someone told me that you could advertise on Twitter in Malaysia.  Curiosity aroused, I dug a bit deeper to find that Churp Churp  have basically taken an existing blog seeding model and applied it to Twitter.

Interesting stuff and well worth clicking on that link above if only for the nice graphics of how WOM works.  I wonder how long it will be before we see this rolling out in the UK / elsewhere.

Be useful, bask in the halo of positive sentiment

I just read about a FAB example of a brand using Twitter & social media to provide a really useful service,  not being overly heavy handed with the branding upfront  but  therefore being able to bask in the glow of "thank you useful brand for providing the service" .  So whilst you could mosey on over and follow that link I thought it merited a post from me too.  Good ideas deserve mentions :-)

So smiley faces and gold stars awarded to Lufthansa this morning for providing a very cool flight status automated Tweet service called MySkyStatus, which irrespective of the airline you are travelling with (apparently) will send out a Tweet on your behalf updating those following you of your progress in your journey.

(image via Mashable)

Clicking on the link takes you straight through to Lufthansa MySkyStatus page with a Google Map of the flight’s position. No more waiting around un-necessarily at Heathrow.

Flight trackers aren't new but personal ones are a great idea. Why wouldn't you? This one is super easy to set up and is useful.  Stop your Mum worrying about whether you got there safely.

Beware shortened links from dubious sources

Those of us using Twitter more and more will no doubt have used a URL link shortening tool in an effort to eek out those 140 characters as far as possible.  Since it released it's latest version, Tweetdeck even now has an automatic link-shortening option so you don't even have to choose whether you want any links you paste in to be squashed into bit.ly format

It's a dilemma, to shorten or not to shorten?

In search (whether natural or pay per click (PPC)) smart link strategy (i.e what the URL string says) can make a big difference to your click through rate (CTR). In Twitter, link shorteners are great for saving characters but when presented with a tiny url, a bit.ly or an owl.ly url you don't get much clue as to where you are being taken, which requires a degree of trust in the person's tweet you are about to click on, unless they are good enough to squeeze into their message some indication of the type of content it leads to so you can form your own judgement. I am increasingly seeing [video] or [blog] styles evolving into good twettiquette. But that frequently defies the object of character squeezing your URL in the first place. Hmmmm.

The decision is muddled further with re-tweets. (RT). Should you click on a shortened link from someone you possibly don't know because it must have been considered sufficiently interesting for the person you do "know" to have been retweeted it in the first place? (Relationships being a relative concept in the twittersphere). It's a tricky one.

Via TechCrunch I found this Symantec video warning of the perils of dodgy links & I think it's worth sharing. Shame they couldn't run as far as a voice over because it left me jabbing at volume buttons on two laptops to check I wasn't going deaf.



Thanks to a great service from Topify I am able to manage the Twitter spammers much more effectively, and make much smarter decisions about who I agree to let follow me or decide to follow, because the service gives me more detail at a glance in the XXXX wants to follow you email notifications I get, so for now at least in so far as the ways I am using Twitter, I am erring on the side of trusting links within most of the tweets I am likely to click on.

Mutual value exchange & smart word of mouth campaigns

Flying around the web and the Twittersphere today has been a great example of the power of the people / word of mouth marketing.

Musician Jack Johnson has a new album out on the 27th October. He's started off a seemingly pretty effective word of mouth campaign via Twitter.

Smart thinking has gone into this too.  Word of mouth relies on people voluntarily passing on something that's interesting, fun or relevant. However, you can encourage word of mouth with incentive.  Like all good relationships it's about mutual value exchange:  Do this for me and I'll do this for you.

Which is exactly how, and quite probably why there have been so many people obligingly tweeting out to their own networks about the forthcoming album release. Why? Because by visiting his site & sending a pre-set tweet (but allowing for 20 characters of personalisation on the front, nice touch) in return you can get a free mp3 download of a track from said album. Everyone likes free stuff. Or sort-of free stuff 'cos you have to make a little bit of an effort to get it, but the value exchange stacks up enough to bother.

It would have been churlish of me not to oblige, so of course I did. Judging by the number of tweets I've seen personally on the subject today, so did many others and the whole campaign would appear to be working rather well, an opinion ratified by a quick Twitter search:

There's also a fair few people tweeting about articles they've blogged on the topic (like this one), so double whammy and well done to Mr. Johnson. He's successfully harnessed the power of the people (people being the best new media vehicle out), by creating OTT (opportunities to talk), and thereby propelling his sample & message (at very low cost, i.e bandwidth & releasing the track free, no media costs in a traditional sense) to audiences that might never otherwise have been reached by traditional advertising whether on or offline.

Good stuff.

Making a song and a dance this week...

Hurrah! Apple approved the Spotify iPhone app. To be available soon (date tbc) for Spotify Premium users but you'll be able to cache music / playlists to listen to when you are not online/connected. Scratch the new iPod from the Amazon wish list then.

Spotify have also started to create a PAYG retail model for Spotify Premium in Sweden so it's bound to be in a newsagent near you before too long.

On the subject of PAYG, T-Mobile announced the launch of the 1st PAYG Android phone, (to be called the Pulse) with release date set for October. A princely £180 of the Queen's finest pounds to you. Dear Father Christmas.....

YouTube and the PRS kissed and made up (although there was purportedly a cash lump sum involved too) so all your favourite music videos will be back online again soon.

YouTube also LovesFilm (or thinks it might): YouTube are trialling a full length film rental subscription service amongst 10, 000 Google employees after securing deals with a number of major studios.

Whilst we're on the subject of movies, here's a nice film showing the evolution of visual effects in film over time. Once you've worked in animation you can't but help like these things!



Web based catch-up tv services will no longer be confined to viewing on your laptop after Sony announced that you'll be able to connect your Sony Bravia TV, Blu-ray player or Home Cinema to your broadband, and did a deal with Channel 5 for their Bravia Internet Video Service, so you won't have to ever miss Neighbours or have to watch it hunched over a laptop.

But conversely the need to be connected but not weighed down by a huge laptop has seen Netbooks take 22% of worldwide portable computer sales in Q2 this year.

And finally.... There are now 104 Twitter-ers who have more than a million followers. Amazon celebrated recruiting their millionth follower by giving away a free mp3. E-Crm - it's all about value exchange.

Dealing with Pesky Twitter Spam

I do like Twitter. It's a useful tool fulfilling several communications needs for me. However, I have found that the number of pesky spammers wanting to follow me and then requiring me to actively go and block them has grown in recent weeks. Grrr.

So applause and cheers for the people behind Tweet Blocker that are aiming to do something about it. Fair play to them for having blocked 73k spammers so far.

Smiles to Twitter themselves too for having a sense of humour. I clicked on an email alert link from someone I believed to be Tweetspam this morning in order to check whether it was or not, and found that the Twitter spam blockers had got there first (hurrah, one less click for me to have to make) and instead were displaying this nicely worded message:


I do like smart use of error messages. 404's should be banned. I recall Digg being down at one point and instead of a boring 404 error they'd smartly stuck up a page saying oops, problem, we're trying to fix it ASAP, but whilst we do, here's a handful of sites we'd recommend you look at instead. What a great example of turning around what could have been a moment of negativity and frustration into something more positive. I was looking for an image to share with you on that one but along the way found this link to an assortment of other interesting examples , so I'll share that instead. Enjoy.

Move over bumper stickers here's Twibbon

Thanks to my squirrelling around the web (see last post), I just found Twibbon.

Twibbon effectively allows you to add a badge to your Twitter Photo icon, allowing all the people following you to see that you are happy to be associated with whatever your Twibbon says/shows. There are loads to choose from already, ranging from that pesky photo-crashing squirrel to all manner of charities and causes whether it's I love Firefox to Breast Cancer's pink ribbon.

It's easy to add to your profile, easy to remove, and not hard to create one either (you just need a gif / png file), as I learned playing around. I'm too short of time right now to go and create a new one just for me but to evidence the point here's one I just adopted.

I can think of so many ways this could be used by brands, even if you only choose to sport a particular twibbon for a short while. What a fantastic way of amplifying your message via your brand advocates. Better go and mention it to some clients!

Twitter - are you sure it's not for you??

I meet lots of people who've heard of Twitter because of all the media exposure it's had, but still haven't figured out what they could use it for. Or they signed up, got confused and gave up. As I mentioned in a recent post it's uses are growing and changing all the time, as more and people explore and use it in more and more creative ways.

I have a very good friend who's a serious, serious tri/quadrathlete and he tweets (@xterramac) about his training schedule as it's easier for him to update via his phone when he's on the move than it is for him to blog (well worth a read if you think getting off your sofa to grab a beer from the fridge is hard work, or that a work out is legging it 10 metres down the platform to jump on the tube as the doors are closing).

I use Twitter as an information filter, frequently swapping links and things of interest with my fellow digerati buddies. There are people tweeting about all manner of things both general and niche, so with a little exploring you are guaranteed to find something that's of interest to your work or your hobbies.

If you need some inspiration check out the many many Top 10 Twitterers to follow lists that are posted here after Twittip.com laid down a challenge. You'll find everything from writers tojazz artists, wine lovers to Mummy bloggers, cigar lovers to designers, foodies to photographers. Proof of the power of the micro-community! You'll risk RSI from scrolling, because there are lots of contributions but it's fascinating stuff. I also discovered Twitter Grader today which gives a Twitter-rating pertaining to your sphere of influence.

Go explore.

Help! Twitter fell over today

Oh no, Twitter was down for a bit a few hours ago. I've seen many tweets / posts / status updates about it, which for me just ratifies the point that Twitter is increasingly becoming an important communications tool that some of us rely on in one way or another.

Here's a few from my contacts:

"arghh Twitter is down? I work on my own, it's my 'watercooler'! Make it work!!"

" twitter is down - hello facebook"

"is everyone surviving with twitter down???"

"#tweetdeck firing on all cylinders again... welcome back fellow tweeters"

Using Twitter...

Twitter have realised that there's a lot of people and businesses out there that still haven't really grasped what they can do with it & so have published this handy guide to help.

I still love the fact that there are businesses everywhere using it in creative ways - can't remember where I got this from but I know it was taken somewhere in America. Tweet in your order for a quattro stagione pizza :-)

Just one of many examples out there, some that reach many people, some that reach just a few in a local area, but all valuable as we all increasingly use a broad range of tools to communicate. I also like Evan William's TED speech to help explain simply what Twitter is all about (or at least was in February 2009 when it was published, as it's evolving all the time).

Enjoy.

If you are going to dive in and join the Twitterati though, I'd recommend that you download Tweetdeck or a similar app (there are many) to make using it more user friendly than tweeting / reading tweets via the Twitter.com website. I also discovered this potentially interesting tool for seeing who is following who in the inter-connected twittersphere.

Tweetfeel also does an interesting if less sophisticated mash-up of Twistori, to show you positive or negative sentiment tweets about your chosen brand or topic.

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.