Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Twitter Tweets Per Day Spike

September 27, 2009

This past week, Twitter announced they were receiving a $100 million investment from both existing investors and some new ones.

Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer wrote a post suggesting Twitter’s traffic may have already peaked and leveled out.

Indeed, several online audience measurement services have suggested for a month or longer that Twitter new visitor traffic and existing traffic retention may have already peaked.

However, last week Twitter announced a new partnership with AOL’s AIM instant messaging service that may have impacted Twitter’s daily Tweet volume which appears to more than doubled at least according to GigaTweet.

Tweets Per Day

Tweets Per Day

I commented on the Hitwise blog about the apparent spike in traffic and Hitwise has chosen not to add my comments.

This isn’t the first time analyst Tancer hasn’t posted my comments.

The last time was when MySpace downstream referrals indicated they would be an attractive take over target – which they became when News Corp. bought them.

Regardless of whether a commenter is right or wrong, Hitwise’s Bill Tancer is the only blogger who’s blog I have commented on who won’t post an opionion contrary to his own.

I wonder why?

Advice to Client Regarding Social Media and Online Display Advertising

September 14, 2009

The following is my response to a request from a client regarding my opinion on social media and online display advertising.

There seems to have been an uptick in the number of recommendations suggesting businesses begin or increase their budgets for social media and online display advertising campaigns.

Dear Client,

The efficacy rhetoric of both social network and display advertising  is increasingly on the rise as Microsoft/Yahoo and Facebook/Twitter attempt to attract more display brand advertising dollars from traditional media who are losing the war for the consumer’s attention.

The social / display advertising camps wouldn’t have to be selling their merits – if their results did their speaking for them.

The reason the former don’t is because their product produces inferior results while the latter has yet to yield any results if any results at all.

These are some of the reasons why the Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter market cap / value is 1/8 Google’s $150 Billion.

However, as with everything else – there are exceptions.

I have had a small percentage of deals convert with display while others have not.

Testing is the only way to prove or disprove whether or not display advertising will work for a particular business.

Display ads can be geo-targeted but its not as precise because it relies on other publishers data and it can have placement, targeting and measurement issues.

The first thing to do is to test whether text ads convert in their display network first. If so, then try image / display ads.

Unless of course a testing supports and fulfills a brand’s impression objectives in target markets and isn’t held to the same level of results performance as search.

If a display advertising test meets its objectives, then launch trials with Yahoo / MSN publishing partners.

Twitter Audience: Reaching 1,000 Twitter Followers

September 12, 2009

Today, my Twitter account briefly reached 1,000 Twitter Followers.

1000 Twitter Followers

1000 Twitter Followers

Having reached 1,000 Twitter “audience members” presents an obvious question: which is more valuable – a 1,000 person social media audience or 1,000 person search audience?

Twitter Accounts Being Hacked?

August 18, 2009

Today I received a direct message from my personal trainer that was out of character for two reasons.

1. The direct message was about weight loss – which neither of us are in need of.

2. My personal trainer barely knows how to use Twitter let alone direct message me.

Twitter Direct Message

Twitter Direct Message

Ordinarily, I would have chalked up this type of abnormal behavour as just that – abnormal.

However, my personal trainer is a pretty normal guy.

Once I received his direct message this evening I called him and asked him if he had sent it and he said no -what is it?

His response in turn made me question the series of Tweets his account posted yesterday that were also out of character.

His Tweets were about how much money he was making on Google.

Again totally out of character for my personal trainer.

Twitter Hacked

Twitter Hacked

What was even more revealing about his Tweets was they were each posted via API.

API is a term my personal trainer doesn’t know the meaning of – let alone have access to or use.

I decided to search Twitter for the url embedded in his Twitter Direct Message to see if it was being widely Tweeted by other Twitter users.

Twitter Accounts Being Hacked

Twitter Accounts Being Hacked

Yep – appears to be.

Based on the frequency and number of accounts Tweeting with this particular weight loss domain embedded in each Tweet leads me to conclude: Twitter accounts are being hacked en masse.

A search for “direct message” in Twitter search also reveals Twitter account holders asking their followers whether they sent the “weight loss” direct message or not.

The hacked accounts appear to be mostly lower Tweet volume accounts.

Twitter Down: Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS)

August 6, 2009

Twitter.com is offline and has been for several hours now.

The Twitter blog says the service has been under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.

Twitter DDOS Attack Outage

Twitter DDOS Attack Outage

40+ million people like myself from around the world have come to rely on Twitter.

Recently, I became concerned with Twitter’s ability to preserve let alone archive my Tweets so I set up my on rudimentary ReTweetings backup on my personal blog.

Why?

Because, if Twitter can’t keep their service up – how can I trust they will keep my Tweets preserved?

If Twitter hopes to become the “pulse of the planet” they will first need to figure out how to check and keep their own pulse beating.

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford #AOSS09

July 31, 2009

I virtually attended my first conference this week at Stanford University called the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford.

This year was the seventh addition of the conference and was titled: “Meet the New Captains of Innovation”.

I stumbled onto the conference while doing research and ended up “attending” two days worth of sessions via my laptop even though I was 1,600+ miles from Stanford.

From the Summit at Stanford conference website:

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

On July 28-30, leaders in the global technology industry will gather at the Athens of the Information Age for high-level debates on trends and opportunities.

Who Attends?
Summit at Stanford, features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors, and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. Our goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments.

Indeed.

880 people attended the three day event in person while thousands of visitors like myself virtually attended the conference from 80 countries according to show founder Tony Perkins.

I particulary enjoyed the innovative interactivity of the show.

Web visitors could log on to the Stanford conference via Vivu.TV to view the panel discussions while also asking them questions via chat or Twitter during the Q&A segments.

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

I aggregated conference attendees Tweets via Twitter and then re-tweeted the comments I found most interesting.

I believe my approach to virtually attending this conference, aggregating and then rebroadcasting my findings was innovative in itself.

I enjoyed every panelists contributions particularly the comments about Silicon Valley’s origins from Norm Fogelsong, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners.

The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford has set the standard for how all other conferences should be run.

All my notes from the conference are posted on TimothyCohn.com.

How To Create and Search Your Own Twitter Followers List

July 22, 2009

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to create and search a list of Twitter updates in both WordPress and Google.

Today, I am going to tackle a similar problem: Searching Twitter Followers and Following lists.

Until Twitter makes searching Twitter account followers and following lists part of Twitter search, finding someone who follows you or who is following you isn’t very easy to do.

Creating a searchable list isn’t too dificult it just requires some time.

Go to your Twitter account and click on your followers link and select list view.

This will produce a list of 20 followers per page.

Twitter Followers List

Twitter Followers List

Copy the list of followers from each page.

Depending on how many followers you have will determine how many pages you will have to scroll through and scrape to create your own searchable list.

I have 873 followers at the moment so I had to visit 43 pages to create my list.

Paste the list of followers into a Word document or Excel if you extracted tables and save.

You can now sort either the Word or Excel documents alphabetically to create your first archived list of Followers in a searchable hierarchy.

To archive your Twitter followers list in the cloud, import it into a Google indexed WordPress blog and wallah! – you will have a instant browser searchable WordPress file with a list of all your followers.

After the Googlebot visits your site, your list of followers will also be archived in Google’s search engine results pages.

I have posted my current list of Twitter followers over on TimothyCohn.com

Google Books on Twitter

July 15, 2009

As Joseph Addison put it, “reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”.

And as such, Google Books has joined several other Google accounts already on Twitter to help Twitter users further exercise their minds.

Google Books on Twitter

Google Books on Twitter

According to the Inside Google Books blog, the Google Books team plans to post pithy and popular snippets each day from the Google books index.

Google Books tweets will include a link to the quotes referenced via its Popular Passages book search algorithm.

A First? The Bit.ly, Twitter and WordPress Mashup by Email

July 13, 2009

Today while thinking about posting content in several different places, I thought I would see if I could post to my Twitter, Bit.ly and WordPress accounts simultaneously.

While not exactly simultaneous or simple, the idea shows some promise.

Tim Cohn (tcohn@marketingprinciples.com)
Google Adwords Professional
Google Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/timcohn
Blog: http://www.SearchMarketingCommunications.com
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/timcohn
(866) TimWCohn office
(415) 935-3608 cell

Pirates Pushing Illegal Movie Downloads Via Twitter

July 11, 2009

The Trending Topics feature on Twitter.com still has considerable room for improvement.

Users have gamed Twitter’s search “ranking” system to promote their businesses in Twitter Trending Topics as well as inundate searchers with all sorts of spam from porn to “Get Rich Tweeting” scams.

Now comes illegal movie downloads.

With the recent release of Bruno and the upcoming release of the latest Harry Potter installment, content pirates have taken to setting up Twitter accounts and pushing their pirated movie copies via Trending Topics tweets.

Twitter Trending Topics

Twitter Trending Topics

A Twitter search for Bruno produces the following search results:

Pirates Pushing Illegal Movie Downloads via Twitter

Pirates Pushing Illegal Movie Downloads via Twitter

Spam alone may be the prevailing reason why real time search hasn’t yet become ready for prime time.