kullin – Page 30 – Media Culpa

Amtrak doubles number of Twitter followers with Promoted Accounts

Ever wondered if those sponsored accounts or tweets on Twitter pay off? Well, here are some fresh numbers from Amtrak, the US passenger train service operator which started using Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad placement on April 12. At that time the @Amtrak account had 10,000 followers and added between 20 and 60 new followers per day. With the ad on Promoted Accounts Amtrak started gaining a lot more followers, as you can see by the graph below.

According to the article, Amtrak tracked 8,000 new followers from the Promoted Accounts campaign. The company also tried the Promoted Tweets ad placement and today boasts some 22,000 followers.

It is not clear from the article when Amtrak used Promoted Tweets (it says during last month) or if they ran the two campaigns simultaneously at some point. It would have been interesting to see which type attracted the most followers.

Social media used to identify rioters in Vancouver

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but if I was considering doing something illegal, I’d probably not choose a situation where there were thousands of cameras around. Then again, I’ve never been in a riot. As you’ve probably already heard, there were riots in Vancouver this week after the city’s hockey team Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup title to the Boston Bruins. All over the town, people were taking photos and videos of rioters looting and smashing cars. With a quick search for “Vancouver riots” we can find more than 1,000 videos on YouTube and close to 4,000 photos on Flickr from last week.

Conclusion: social media is a gold mine for those who wish to identify the rioters. And those are for example the Vancouver Police Departement and citizens that want to name and shame to looters. On Facebook, there are several groups and pages with titles like “Vancouver 2011 Rioters Public Humiliation Page” and “Help vancouver: post pics and video of rioters and looters”. Some of them claim to have identified individuals in the photos and reveal it in photos like the one below.

While taking the law into your own hands is not at all recommended, there are other ways to help. VPD, the Vancouver Police Departement uses social media to encourage citizens to help identify suspects in the riots. On the VPD Facebook page, the police have posted instructions for how to submit YouTube videos to VPD. And apparently the response from the public has been very positive:

“The response from the public wanting to help the police identify the individuals involved in criminal activity that occurred after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals on the night of June 15, 2011 has been tremendous”, VPD says in a statement.

VPD is also actively using Flickr and YouTube to communicate, and the VPD Twitter account is used to help solve crime.

Finally, I love this photo that was posted on the VPD Facebook page. The VPD had parked a car in Greenville, to help with the clean up effort. When the policemen returned, the car was covered in post it notes with thank you messages. More photos here.

Flickr Photo by BrittneyBush.

Manchester United vs FC Barcelona – the Social Media Champions League

Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson recently hinted that his players may be banned from using Twitter. Tonight his club will face FC Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League final on Wembley in London. This game between two of the world’s most popular football teams is predicted to be one of the best finals in a long time. Discussions and opinions about the game will be all over social media and it will probably dominate the trending topics on Twitter today.

In spite of Ferguson’s hesitancy towards Twitter, both clubs have managed to gather quite a large following in social media. The question is, how does Man Utd stand in comparison to FC Barcelona, in terms of presence in social media?

Facebook – close win for Barcelona
Both teams are very active and a typical status update can draw as many as 30,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Man Utd has 14,418,000 fans on Facebook, Barcelona has 15,311,000 fans. United is also growing its fanbase slightly faster during the last month.

Twitter – a clear win for Barcelona
The teams are also active on Twitter. Man Utd has 282,900 followers, FC Barcelona has two major Twitter accounts, one in Spanish with 826,200 followers and one in English with 719,200 followers. The Spanish Barca account has been growing more rapidly than the Man Utd account.

YouTube – Barcelona wins on walk over
Manchester United publish videos on MUTV, on its own web page and from what I can find, the club is not active on YouTube. Barcelona on the other hand, has an active YouTube channel with 82,600 subscribers and a total of 42.2 million views. But Man Utd frequently posts videos on Facebook, so the English team has merely chosen a slightly different strategy.

Conclusion: both teams have millions of fans that follow them via social media, but FC Barcelona is slightly more popular. This has probably no impact on tonight’s Champions League final, but be sure that fans will actively cheer for their teams tonight and celebrate (or mourn) the outcome. May the best team win!

Footnote: stats from Wildfire App.

See influence on Twitter with improved Chrome extension from PeerIndex

I use Chrome as my default web browser and I have added two different Chrome extensions that let me determine the influence of a Twitter account directly on Twitter.com. The first one is by Klout and it lets you see the Klout score of a Twitter user, right next to the user’s name.

I have also used a Chrome extension for PeerIndex, but it only displayed the score if you clicked on a person’s profile.

Today I noticed that PeerIndex have upgraded their extension and now when I visit Twitter.com I see this in my feed:

I now see the PeerIndex score next to each account’s Twitter handle, but also all the other accounts that are mentioned in each tweet. If you click on it you are taken directly to the account page on PeerIndex for more details. Also, if I drag the mouse over the score box, it shows a more detailed score of authority, activity and audience, and also some tags that represent the top topics by this Twitter user. This may be used to more quickly get a better picture of different Twitter users and people you may or may not want to follow. If Klout and PeerIndex scores are accurate tools for determining real influence, well that’s an entirely different blog post.

Footnote: My PeerIndex profile is here.

Aftonbladet also shuts down blogs

I had barely posted my latest blog post about how Expressen had decided to stop hosting blogs, before I read on DagensMedia.se that the other Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet is doing the same. Aftonbladet has two types of blogs – blogs by the editorial staff and blogs that readers publish. It is the latter group that is being shut down because they are unprofitable.

Reader blogs will be taken offline on June 30, so bloggers will have to move their content elsewhere if they want to keep it online. As noted in my previous post, Aftonbladet recently added the ability to export the content to WordPress.

In other words, three large Swedish newspapers have either decided to shut down our outsource the hosting of readers blogs, in the last three months. What will that mean for blogging in Sweden? Not much, I guess. There are plenty of good options and I would suspect that many of the active “newspaper bloggers” will continue to blog, either take their content to a new platform or start fresh with a new blog.

Expressen stops hosting blogs

In February, the free Swedish daily Metro said it would shut down all of the thousands of blogs they hade been hosting since 2007. Metro eventually found a solution to keep the blogs running and move them to a new platform (WordPress). Today another Swedish newspaper, the tabloid Expressen, announced they would stop hosting blogs. All blogs except a few reader blogs Expressen considered “worth keeping”, and the blogs of its own journalists, will be shut down.

– Our blogging platform is lacking in functionality, we have been focusing on other things and we are now offering our bloggers to move over to other platforms. We do not have the resources to keep the blogging platform running, says Mattias Carlsson, editor in chief, digital media at Expressen (my translation).

It’s not surprising that newspapers have a hard time competing with other blogging platforms and the question is how long Aftonbladet will continue to host blogs. Since April 2011, bloggers have the ability to export their Aftonbladet blogs to WordPress. Maybe it is a sign of what’s to come?

Footnote: Here’s how Expressen presented the initiative as a success after it launched (in Swedish).