February 2012 – Media Culpa

Lawyers use Facebook to serve court claim

People move, but their Facebook profiles stay the same. So if you are a lawyer that need to serve a court claim to an individual, Facebook may just be a good alternative to sending a letter. A lawyer at the law firm Stephenson Harwood has convinced the High Court in the UK to let him serve a court claim via Facebook to an individual that they could not locate the postal address of.

Jenni Jenkins, an associate at the law firm Memery Crystal, commented:

“The courts recognise the increasing power of social networking sites like Facebook. It’s all very well serving proceedings at a last known residential address, but people move house all the time. Your email or Facebook account moves with you.

“If a claimant can identify the defendant from their photo and establish that the Facebook account is active, this is a perfectly sensible way of serving a claim and giving the defendant an opportunity to respond.”

There are two key elements that make this practice possible. First, that you are able to convince the court that you have found the right Facebook profile and that it is active. Second, that this person lets anyone send him or her messages on Facebook (this is something that you manage in your security settings on Facebook).

Facebook is really becoming the number one means of connecting people with each other.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is finally on Twitter

International top media outlets like Gazetta dello Sport, Sky Italia, AP and Al Jazeera have been fooled by people pretending to be Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter. Even his own club AC Milan has been fooled by a Twitter impersonator. His agent Mino Raiola told Sky Sports back in October 2010 that Ibra is not on Twitter. But finally it seems that the Swedish striker has launched an official Twitter account at @Ibra_official. In a post on Facebook on Feb 14 he states that we now can follow him on Twitter as well.

The first tweet was on Jan 15th.

Tonight we’ll see who rules this city, like this if you support us.

— Zlatan Ibrahimović (@Ibra_official) januari 15, 2012

Tweets are automatically posted via the official Facebook page, which currently has 2.5 million fans. How can we be sure this time it is the official account? Well, it has been confirmed by the Danish PR agency The Perfect Brands that they represent Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The agency is posting the updates so Ibra himself is not tweeting. Not yet, at least.

Via Ajour.

Infographic of 10,000 tweets

Not only have I been blogging for 8 years today. I reached another milestone just now. Since November 2007 I have tweeted 10,000 times and to celebrate this occasion I have produced this little infographic of my Twitter history. It was partially created with the service visual.ly, but about half of the content has been included manually by me.

Happy 10,000 tweets to me! You can find me on Twitter as @kullin.

8 year blog anniversary

Today, I have been blogging for eight years. That’s an incredibly long time and I have published more than 1,500 posts here on Media Culpa, or almost 200 blog posts per year. The first posts were nothing more than short notes, but the posts soon developed more inte longer articles.

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

80% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden (up from 72% previous 12 months). During the last year, the blog has gotten visitors from 174 different countries/territories (up from 162), including Greenland, Kiribati and Turkmenistan. Sweden is no longer the top country, instead USA is first (26%), followed by Sweden (20%) and UK (7.8%).
56% of all visits came from search engines, up from 50% previous 12 month period.
Top referring search key words: “zlatan ibrahimovic twitter” and “twitter handle”. Top word previous year was “twitter handle”.
Top referral sources: 1) Twitter, 2) Facebook
Busiest day, Dec 21, 2011
Media attention worth mentioning are for example that I was on the front page of Swedish Internetworld and that The Next Web picked up my piece about Instagram growing faster than Flickr.

It is interesting that only one of the top five posts (most visits) has actually been published during the period. All the other four are older posts that still attract a lot of visitors:

Strategies for choosing Twitter handle – Jan 2009
Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter – June 2009
GM’s Facebook page attacked by angry Saab fans – Dec 2011
Top 20 countries on Twitter – Jan 2010
BP Oil Spill and Social Media – May 2010

If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.

Photo from Flickr.

Whitney Houston is dead – Twitter user beats media with the scoop

So I wake up to hear the tragic news that the fantastic singer Whitney Houston is dead. As often happens these days, I found out via social media, this time via comments on Facebook. When the story broke, the news spread on Twitter at the speed of over 1,000 tweets per second. The first hour there were almost 2.5 million tweets about her death, according to Topsy.com.

And once again we find an example of how Twitter beat traditional media with the scoop. Twitter user @chilemasgrande tweeted this 27 minutes before the first news outlet tweeted.

Here is the first confirmed tweet from AP about the death of Whitney Houston, a tweet that has been retweeted more than 11,000 times.

But Twitter and Facebook are not the only social media channels that become outlets for grieving fans. On Instagram, there are thousands of images posted with the tag #whitneyhouston and hundreds more are being added as I post this.

And on Pinterest, photos of Houston are being commented, pinned and repinned. This photo has currently been repinned 900 times and has more than 100 comments.

Source: google.com via Marenda on Pinterest

Social media is becoming the place where we both discover news and share our thoughts. This story is just one more example of that.

Facebook is driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new social media darling Pinterest. The online pinboard is growing quickly and according to a new report from Compete, Pinterest is also driving a lot of traffic to other social networks. People are sharing images and videos on Pinterest which in turn drive traffic to sites like Facebook. According to the State of Social Media report from Compete, Pinterest delivered 1.7 million visits to Facebook in November 2011, an increase by 62%. As a comparison, that is almost double the amount of referrals from an established site like Yellowpages.com.

In this social ecosystem, social networks in turn drive traffic back to Pinterest. It is quite interesting to see that Facebook is already driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram (0.16% share vs 0.06%). And this was before it was announced in January that Pinterest was among the sites that could start auto-update to the Facebook timeline, which possibly means that more images are now shared on Facebook than in November.

Twitter on the other hand is still driving more referrals to Instagram than to Pinterest.

The difference between how Facebook and Twitter drive referrals to Pinterest and Instagram is interesting. I don’t have an explanation to why this is, but one theory could be that the demographics of Pinterest users better match Facebook users while Instagram users are more like Twitter users. Says TechCrunch:

“Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.”

According to TechCrunch, a large portion of Pinterest users in the US are 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which may explain why some of the more popular categories on Pinterest are food, pets, hair & beauty and travel.

Another explanation can of course be that Instagram mainly is an app and that its web presence is not very good. When you click on an Instagram photo there’s hardly no way to get that user to keep on browsing on the site. You can’t even click on my name and explore more of my photos, so visits to www.instagr.am is not at all encouraged. On Twitter, Instagram photos are viewable within the site and in for example TweetDeck (but I don’t know if that counts as a “visit”).

Also, a tiny but important detail. When you tweet a photo from Pinterest, it doesn’t include the caption in the tweet, which might reduce the willingness to push the send button. Fix that, and I am sure more people will share pinned images on Twitter.

Note: Swedish readers may want to read this story about how Pinterest is driving millions of visits to a blogger.