Category: Twitter

Twitter launches Verified Accounts to put an end to Twitter-jacking

Now and again we hear about celebrities and brands that have found their names hijacked on Twitter. Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, recently threatened to take Twitter to court over a person who portrayed himself as La Russa on Twitter. Another example of a fake account is the Swedish writer and journalist Jan Guillou who’s Twitter account has been hijacked (although he doesn’t seem to mind).

But now Twitter may have found a solution to the problems with identity theft on the microblogging site. Twitter is launching Verified Accounts which means that celebrities and users with a large following may apply to get their accounts approved to show that it is in fact the real person behind the tweets.

“With this feature, you can easily see which accounts we know are ‘real’ and authentic. That means we’ve been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved. (This does not mean we have verified who, exactly, is writing the tweets.)”

An example of a verified account is http://twitter.com/iamdiddy

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Track tweets about the EU election on TweetElect09.eu

TweetElect09: Watch in real time what people say on Twitter about the European Elections!

With less than two weeks left until the election to the EU Parliament, Burson-Marsteller (where I work) launched TweetElect09.eu, a website that tracks and analyses discussions about the upcoming European Elections on Twitter in 14 languages.

Tweets are filtered by country, political party and by number of times different candidates are mentioned. News will also be streamed on election night by for example France24, alongside the Twitter stream.

TweetElect09 has already analyzed more than 11,000 tweets referring to the election and France is the most active country followed by Sweden in second place and Germany in third. Anyone can join the discussion and have tweets appear on TweetElect09 by using the #eu09 hashtag when tweeting. The site also tracks tweets with the tag #euval which is frequently used in Sweden.

More information in English and in Swedish.

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80 Swedish businesses on Twitter

I started a wiki a long time ago with the ambition to build a repository for Nordic businesses and their use of social media. Now I have finally started to fill it with information and I would be very glad if more people would consider adding links to good cases from corporate use of social media in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. To edit the Social Media Wiki you just sign up for an account at Wikidot.com and then join my wiki with the password “mediaculpa”.

Among the pages that I have started to build, the most extensive list is Swedish businesses on Twitter. It already contains 80 companies (or to be more precise, 80 Twitter accounts, since some companies run multiple accounts).

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Twitter etiquette for businesses

Swedish businesses are starting to explore Twitter with varying degree of success. SMS loan company Folkia recently launched its Twitter account and quickly added several hundred users to follow, something that was discussed on Jaiku. It also published only promotional information about their own services and a few days later the account got suspended.

folkia

The same strategy was used by Myspace Nordic which added some 2,000 people in a few days. This procedure is called “aggressive following” (a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time) and is one reason (update: new link) a Twitter account may get suspended.

With these incidents in mind, here’s 10 advice for businesses that are about to engage on Twitter (parts of this is also published in Dagens Industri today).

  • Be clear about who the sender is. Is this the official Twitter channel then make that clear. If you can specify who is doing the tweeting it will be easier to get a more personal relationship with the company and it will also set the right expectations.
  • Twitter is a great tool for listening to customers and for dialogue in general. Answer direct questions and comments that are directed to the company on Twitter.
  • Give your followers something of value for following you. Share your knowledge, both from your own company but also from other sources. Excessive linking to your own site might be considered spam.
  • Retweet good tips from others. It shows your are willing to give cred to others and that you are up to date on things within your line of work.
  • Use common sense. All information (apart from Direct Messages) are public so normal confidentiality rules still apply.
  • Respect the privacy of others. Just because you have heard that transparency is the new black, that doesn’t mean it is ok to tweet about colleagues without their approval.
  • Add other sources of information to your Twitter feed if you think they are of value to your followers. It might be press releases, Flick photos, YouTube videos or promotional offers. But be careful, a feed with just press releases is extremely boring.
  • Don’t ask for retweets, unless you are posting a question you want many to see. That’s something you deserv by posting interesting information.
  • Don’t start following hundreds of people at once. It is called aggressive following and is one reason your account may be suspended by Twitter. But adding a small number of interesting people may be a good way to start building your network.
  • Avoid ghost twittering if you can. You can support the person in many ways but in the end the words should be his/her own.

Here are some examples of Swedish businesses on Twitter (many taken from a list on Webbsverige).

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Acne
Björn Borg
Boxer
Dustin
Electrolux
Lantmännen
Pyramid
Rebtel
Scania Group
Skanska Group
Spotify
Tele2
Telia Sonera Services
Ving
Vulkan
Ängavallen

Blogging still more popular than Twitter

The most prestigious Swedish advertising awards Guldägget (the Golden Egg) were handed out last evening and several prizes were given to campaigns that involved social media.

“If I should mention one trend then it has to be that the winning campaigns used a lot more of social media and PR than before”, said Digge Zetterberg, responsible for Guldägget at the Advertising Association of Sweden.

Among the different social media tools, there is little doubt that Twitter has been the one that has gotten the most attention lately. Politicians, opinion leaders and now even businesses in Sweden have joined Twitter in hope of influencing key people in their target audience.

But micro blogging is still lagging conventional blogging, at least according to the results from my fourth annual Swedish blog survey BlogSweden 4/BloggSverige 4. I surveyed 1,500 blog readers in Feburary this year and more than 8 out of 10 do not use micro blogs. Twitter is the most popular of the ones mentioned in the survey and the local Swedish micro blog Bloggy has in a short period of time become more popular than Jaiku.

21 blog readers

Several also mentioned the status bar in Facebook as a micro blog tool they use. More results from the survey will be published here in the next few days.

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