Tag: Twitter

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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Twitter and social media in Mumbai

I followed the events in Mumbai yesterday with one eye on CNN and one eye on Twitter. It was both fascinating and horryfying to follow the stream of short reports from people on the ground in India, complemented by comments from fellow twitterers from around the world. I use a service called TweetDeck to follow Twitter and during most of the day yesterday the program flashed about 20-30 new tweets about Mumbai at a time (posted to the channel #mumbai), several times a minute, and it still does. Some estimated that there were 80 messages posted about the events every five seconds. The graph below shows the huge volume (I counted more than 5,000 tweets during the latter part of yesterday) of tweets about Mumbai during the last days.

mumbai_twitter

Many eyewitness reports also came on for example blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr. Blogs like Mumbai Help aggregated news reports and important phone numbers. And 27-year-old Vinukumar Rangnathan posted more than a hundred photos on Flickr which were viewed hundreds of thousands of times by people around the world. Some of them were even used by media outlets such as CNN.

“I have been getting mails from several news channels and websites who wanted to host my pictures. I agreed,” he said.

A search for photos tagged with “Mumbai” can be found here.

While there are many benefits of this kind of citizen reporting, one should also use them with caution. A lot of rumours are circulating and this morning I noticed two tweets following right after each other were the first said that there were probably no ties to Al-Qaida, the second said the ties to Al-Qaida had now been confirmed. At one point yesterday, many messages on Twitter suddenly reported that the Indian government had asked people to stop tweeting about military operations in the area. The source of these rumours seemed to be a message from Twitter user Mumbaiupdates.

mumbai_stop_tweeting

Blogger Amy Gahran decided to try to track the source of this widely reported rumour and found out that the person behind the twitter account was not actually in Mumbai, but a high school junior based in Boston named Mark Bao. In an email to Garhan he explains the origins of his post.

“The rumour started on via another twitter post that retweeted from another person that was a trusted source IN mumbai. Later, it was confirmed on video that the police wanted live updates of the operations to be stopped, though they did not mention the hashtag #Mumbai, though they asked media outlets to stop reporting live.

The purpose of [the MumbaiUpdates] stream was to disseminate info from the CNN-IBN, NDTV and those twittering from Mumbai. With any news reporting and re-reporting it’s possible errors got in the way. I’m sorry if it caused any confusion.

If anything, even if NDTV and CNN-IBN were still reporting, it is best practice, and I think justified, to stop tweeting and disseminate more information on the operation that could be spread and could be useful to those that we don’t want to let know the info.”

So there is still no evidence that any Indian authorities have demanded that people should stop tweeting about specific stories in Mumbai. Read Amy Gahran’s full post, it is quite interesting.

More about the role of social media in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai can be found here:
– Journalism.co.uk
– India eNews
– Ohsohightech (in Swedish)
– Same Same but Different (in Swedish)

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Moms on Twitter make Motrin rethink

An interesting story has erupted on the microblogging site Twitter. Apparently a large number of moms reacted strongly towards an online ad for the pain killer Motrin that was posted Saturday on the company’s website. The advert discusses the pain supposedly caused by carrying around babies in various types of slings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY

The moms voiced their opinion on the Motrin ad campaign and tweeted their thoughts on Twitter using the tag “#motrinmoms” so that conversations easily could be tracked. Within 24 hours a video was also created, showing tweets and images of moms carrying their children – without pain.

The volume of comments on Twitter is so high that there currently are several tweets per minute about Motrin, which now is the highest ranked term on Twitter, #motrinmoms being in second place.

As is often the case nowadays, bloggers joined in and then traditional media too. This is an extremely interesting case and I am sure we will read more details in the coming days. But it might not be so bad in the end for Motrin. Tonight there is a message on the front page of Motrin.com that states that the company has listened to the negative feedback and pulled the ad. All in all, perhaps there can even be positive effects on Motrin as they get credit for listening to customers?

motrin

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