Author: kullin

Widget for Swedes on Twitter

Billy McCormac recently suggested that Swedes on Twitter would use the hashtag #svpt for their tweets so that it would be easier to tap into discussions by fellow Swedes. This morning he posted a question on Twitter about how we can get people to use the tag.

I think there has to be a clear incentive in order to get people to start using a general hashtag. One such incentive could be that other people can find your micro blog posts and thereby users can grow their networks. So if you can publicize the stream of tweets on your blog, you will also reach non-Twitterers, and all users that use the #svpt tag will benefit.

I quickly set up this widget this morning. Maybe this can help promote the Swedes on Twitter channel. Feel free to post it to your blog, link to it, or just leave a comment if you think this is an interesting or lousy idea. You can of course also subscribe to the #svpt RSS feed by copying this URL to your blog reader: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23svpt

You can also visit Widgetbox to get the embed code to post the widget to your MySpace page or Blogger/Wordpress blog.

If you want to follow me on Twitter you can find me at http://www.twitter.com/kullin

Footnote: Other examples of hashtags on Twitter: Mumbai and Motrinmoms.

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What does it take to be Twitter elite?

Success in social media isn’t necessarily measured in number of fans or followers, at least not if you are missing out on other aspects of the social media etiquette. This guy considered his promotion skills so great that he issued a press release in which he boasts about his rocket to Twitter fame.

“What’s better than soaring to the top of a popular social networking site? How about skyrocketing to the summit of two of them? That’s the envious position The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, found himself in last month when he entered the Twitter elite.”

But that didn’t sit well with parts of the online community. Prime reason: he has 1,923 followers on Twitter, but only follows 32 people back.

The press release has now been “dugg” 261 times on Digg (and counting) with the accompanying headline “The. Biggest. Douche. In. Social. Media.”. Comment like these aren’t exactly the reaction you wish for.

“He follows a whopping 32 people. What a conversationalist. He sure does add value to the site. (Please tell me this PR is a joke?)”

“What an ass. This is a perfect example of a spammer on Twitter. A no-name marketer with 1800 followers and he only follows back 32 people. He obviously went on a mass friend adding frenzy and then un-followed people once they began following him. Freakin’ jerk.”

The comments on Twitter aren’t much better:

“seems quite amazing that @mattbacak has so many followers and yet participates in minimal conversations.. all his me me me makes ME sick”

What can I say? Conversation is king. If you’re only participating to add friends, then you’re not in the social media “elite” in my book. And I’d rather have 100 friends in my network that are the right friends, than 1,000 random people I have nothing in common with. But that’s just me.

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Pownce closes – should I backup my social networks?

The crew behind the microblogging site Pownce today announced that they will close the service on Dec 15 and instead join Six Apart. Apparently they are planning to come up with something new and better next year. This raises a lot of questions, for example, what do you do with your content when the site you are using can be gone the next day? With the abundance of social media sites out there, it is inevitable that some will disappear in the near future.

Now, I never really used Pownce on a regular basis, so I don’t care about those messages that I posted. But had it been for example Twitter, I would definitely have to think through if I should do a backup of my messages and all my contacts. I can especially see great value in saving the friends that you are connected to if you wanted to transfer your network to some other place, even if you had to look up people manually.

Pownce have come up with one solution to this problem.

“We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.”

That is a great service, but I think it would be even more valuable if you could export information about your entire network. Fot most of the social networking services I use, the real value is not in the content but in the network.

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Jaiku passes 50 million posts

I use both Twitter and Jaiku, the microblogging tools, and I find them both very useful, but for different reasons. There is a small but very active Jaiku community with Swedish media media and marketing professionals, but I don’t see the same growth in my network on Jaiku as I do on Twitter.

Jaiku unofficially passed 50 million messages a few minutes ago, which is only five percent of the amount of tweets on Twitter, which reached a billion posts on Nov 11, 2008. But bear in mind that comments to each Jaiku post are not counted here. Since conversations on Jaiku are more active, almost like in a forum, in reality the activity level on Jaiku is higher. A very unscientific check of my own community shows that about 50 percent of the posts have comments (between 1 and 20 comments each). The most commented post on Jaiku currently has 533 comments.

Jaiku post #50,000,000 does not appear to be public.

Footnote:
Follow me on Jaiku at: http://kullin.jaiku.com/.
Follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/kullin.

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Build your own Nokia 7310 phone

I recently wrote about how Swedish banks are letting customers design their own credit cards. Now Nokia are also starting to offer mass customization solutions to customers. A new Flash application called Nokia Build is out in a beta version for UK customers and it is also live in France, according to Mashable.

Nokia Build lets users design the cover of a Nokia 7310 Supernova with different drawing tools. You can add your own images or use a variety of available backgrounds, themes and icons. And of course, you can order your customized phone and have it delivered to your door.

How about a Mia Rose phone?

mia rose nokia

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Guns ‘N’ Roses PR stunt backfires for Dr Pepper

In March, soft drink manufacturer Dr Pepper made a promise that if the long-awaited Guns ‘N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy, that had been almost 14 years in the making, came out on the market during 2008, they would give every American a can of Dr Pepper.

When the album eventually was released on November 23, Dr Pepper announced they would keep their promise, which of course was a great PR opportunity. People haven’t been talking like this about Dr Pepper for years. So on the Sunday of the album release, they gave fans 24 hours to go to the web site for a coupon they could exchange for a can of soda. But the site got so many visitors that it crashed. And although the deadline was extended one day, to Monday of this week, fans were angered. Now Guns ‘N’ Roses front man Axl Rose sent his lawyers after Dr Pepper because it didn’t deliver on its promise:

The Washington Post reports:
“The album came out, but the sodamaker’s coupon-offering Web site malfunctioned. And though the promotion was extended, Alan Gutman, the band’s Beverly Hills attorney, demanded a full-page apology in major daily newspapers and “an appropriate payment to our clients for the unauthorized use and abuse of their publicity and intellectual property rights,” according to the AP. No sum was specified.”

Talk about a missed PR opportunity.

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