Twitter – Page 9 – Media Culpa

Twitter is the Top Word 2009

Maybe people on Twitter are “not normal”, as TechCrunch writes, but the site has already had a huge impact. In an annual survey by the Global Language Monitor of the top words among 1.58 billion English-language speakers, Twitter came out on top in 2009. Twitter was followed by Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, Vampire, the suffix 2.0, Deficit, Hadron, Healthcare, and Transparency.

“In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words. Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor.

I don’t know what it says about the world, but this year’s winner is quite different from several of the previous top words.

2008: Change
2007: Hybrid (representing all things green)
2006: Sustainable
2005: Refugee
2004: Incivility (for inCivil War)
2003: Embedded
2002: Misunderestimate
2001: GroundZero
2000: Chad

Tags: twitter, top words, language, ord, twitter. Ping.

A majority of tweets positive to Obama’s Peace Prize

The unexpected decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committe to award U.S. President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 caused a flood of reactions on Twitter. Several people in my Twitter stream were highly critical and for example Simon Sundén noted that the deadline for the Peace Prize nomination was only 12 days after the inauguration of Barack Obama. Simon also posted this photo of the front page of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet today. Headline “What a joke!”.

Then again, you might only see what you want to see, so it’s interesting to read this fresh study from a company called Attensity. They analyzed some 25,000 tweets about the Prize and found that a majority, or 62%, of tweets were positive.

According to the analysis, 54% of the tweets felt Obama deserved the Peace Prize.

I don’t know whether the results from the analysis are accurate or if they include several languages or not. But either way, it is a good example of how you can use the Twittersphere as a giant focus group. If you have the right tools, it’s possible to quite quickly take the temperature on how people react to a news story. Sure, Twitter users are not representative of the entire population but they are the ones who are vocal and influence others so it might be good to know their reactions.

Update: On the other hand, Mashable also looked at what people tweeted and found that a majority of those tweets “didn’t get it”. It is however not disclosed what methodology Mashable used. Did they just analyse those four phrases, or what? (hat tip to @Daria)

The conclusion is that there is a vast amount of data on Twitter to be analyzed, but you need to know what you’re doing, or you might just as well turn to palm reading.

Tags: twitter, barack obama, nobel peace prize, barack obama, fredspriset, nobelpriset, twitter. Ping.

Think before you retweet

It has become a standard practice to promote new cool online services by sending out invites to a lucky few users. They in turn get to invite some more and soon you’ve created a buzz online with people who are desperate to be on the bleeding edge, doing whatever it takes to get an invite. The latest craze concerns Google Wave (no, I have not been invited yet). Everyone in my Twitter stream seems to be screaming after invites to the degree that they’ve lost all sense of judgement.

On Oct 1st I tweeted “I’m just waiting for someone to use this invite craze for spam purposes #invitefatigue” and I didn’t have to wait long. There are hundreds of people currently retweeting this information:

“RT @waveinvite Just requested my Google Wave Invite! Get yours at http://waveinvite.co.cc”

The problem is that the site contains adult material and does not hand out Google Wave invites at all. In fact, the site states that it has 293 invites to give out, but that has been the case all day.

It’s amazing how many people that let themselves be fooled by this (and I admit I retweeted a similar post earlier, not this one however). The link to waveinvite.co.cc is currently the most retweeted link on Twitter. According to Tweetmeme, the item has been retweeted as many as 2789 times, and counting.

How did you suppose that you would be sent these invites in the first place when you did not supply any email address? As users of sites like Twitter, we need to be a little more suspicious to schemes like this or we run the risk of actually spreading some seriously bad stuff. The next time you see some get rich quick scheme on Twitter, please take a moment to check it out before you retweet. Do a Google search on the story, check how many others that are tweeting. Maybe you will save yourself the embarrasement of tweeting links to adult sites.

Tags: twitter, google wave invite, sociala medier, google wave, spam, twitter. Ping.

10 most popular Swedish businesses on Twitter

More and more Swedish businesses are joining Twitter. In a recent study (in Swedish), I checked the corporate accounts with most followers and came up with this top ten list. The graph above was updated today and the company with most followers is Spotify, followed by H&M;.

Although it’s good to have a large following, of course the number of followers is not everything. Equally important is how the accounts are managed and if companies are engaging in conversations with others.

In the study I found that the active companies are actually quite good at maintaing a dialogue with followers. Roughly speaking, 80% of the tweeting companies post updates about news or announcements. Almost as many, 74% use Twitter to respond to feedback, answers questions or handle customer complaints. 32% use it for promotions and 6% use Twitter for rectruiting/HR purposes. This is quite a contrast to the notion that a large portion of tweets are pointless babble. At least businesses are trying to add meaningful information to Twitter.

Footnote: Stardoll and Ericsson Labs were not included in the initial analysis, but were added today. Hat tip to @beantin for the pointer to Ericsson Labs.

Update: A list of more than 160 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts can be found here. Feel free to add to the wiki.

Update Oct 8: Added Adland to the top list. Thanks @dabitch.

Tags: twitter, business, sociala medier, statistik, spotify, twitter. Ping.

The Nobel Prize 2009 announced on Twitter and Facebook

Social media makes Swedish companies frustrated, according to an article in Computer Sweden this week. The companies that CS talked to all know that you can do a lot of smart things with social media, but few know where to start or have had time to come up with any specific plans. One company says it can’t afford to lead the way and “it expects more things to happen in 2010 anyway”.

I’d say that those excuses aren’t valid any longer. Blogs and other forms of social media have been around for many years now and there are plenty of examples of businesses that have used these digital channels to their advantage. It really doesn’t have to be very complicated. I like this example. The Nobel Foundation is the Swedish foundation that manages the Nobel Prize. It knows it has stories that many people around the world are interested in. That’s not new. But they are modern enough to realize that media consumers today may want that information directly from the source, through new channels like social media. Today, many get breaking news via for example micro blogs.

So as a complement to traditional reporting, consumers this year can choose to get the news about the Nobel Prizes through Twitter, Facebook, RSS or a number of other ways, including a widget that you can post to your blog.

The first announcement will be tomorrow, when it will be official who wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (Monday, October 5, 11:30 a.m. CET at the earliest). Just follow http://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org and you will get the news right into your Twitter stream.

Not all businesses have news of the magnitude that the Nobel Foundation has, but almost all companies have stories to tell that are of interest to a number of stakeholders. Social media can be one channel to use. So businesses need to stop hiding behind arguments like “we haven’t got time to engage in social media”. Start experimenting now. A curious and learning organization will always be better at managing change. If you always wait to next year, you will never get off the ground.

Tags: twitter, nobel prize, sociala medier, facebook, nobelpriset, twitter. Ping.

Is TweetDeck the first victim of Twitpocalypse Redux?

An incident labelled the Twitpocalypse (see TechCrunch for explanation) occurred this summer, when the unique identifier for a tweet on Twitter hit the number 2,147,483,647. It caused problems for several Twitter applications, among them Twitterrific, TweetDeck and Destroy Twitter. A similar incident occured today when the second Twitpocalypse, or Twitpocalypse Redux happend at 18.34 GMT. That’s the time when the unique identifier reached the number 4,294,967,295. At first, everything seemed ok, but when I looked at TweetDeck I noticed something strange. At 19.45 GMT and as far back as I could go in my list of friends (only a few minutes), TweetDeck seemed to repeat all tweets 11 times. See screen shots below.

Could it possibly be an effect of the Twitpocalypse Redux?

I have not the latest version of TweetDeck installed (it won’t install the latest version). My version is 0.25.1b.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Footnote: Twhirl 0.9.2 seems ok.

Tags: twitpocalypse, tweetdeck, tweetdeck, twitpocalypse, twitter. Ping.