The Federal Trade Commission is seeking your input regarding future of news media in advance of its upcoming workshops. The FTC seeks to explore the digital impact on consumption behavior and its correlating effects on the the business of publishing and journalism. The workshop will be held on December 1-2, 2009 and will consider a wide range of issues, such as Internet-related changes in advertising and the way people receive news, ideas for reducing costs and restructuring news organizations, potential…
At Your Service: Twitter Data and Sentiment Analysis
Source: Shutterstock For the last year, I’ve served as a strategic advisor to PeopleBrowsr. While many of you may know PeopleBrowsr as a Web-based client for Twitter and other social networks, the real story is that over the past several months, we’ve quietly built a comprehensive foundation and supporting infrastructure for capturing, organizing, and analyzing data, sentiment, and corresponding activity to reveal the indicators, hotspots, opportunities and trends that define the Twitterverse and ultimately, business. As such, I’ve spent a…
Revealing the People Defining Social Networks
Source: Shutterstock Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share. As these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yelp, and other online communities transformed the regimen and practice of marketing “at” people into…
Group Mentality: Twitter to Debut Lists
Long available using third-party Twitter tools such as PeopleBrowsr or TweetDeck, Twitter is readying the release of lists, or otherwise known in other networks (FriendFeed) as groups. This is welcome, albeit overdue, feature that allows users to categorize and organize information based on themes, interests, action items, locales, and friends/peers for future reference, followup and sharing. The Twitter blog goes into greater detail (note the fact that lists are public by default): The idea is to allow people to curate…
Blogger Relations is a Two-Way Street
Guest Post by Tamar Weinberg: Read her blog | Follow her on Twitter Source: Shutterstock As bloggers, we’ve all experienced it: the completely off topic pitch. After pouring blood, sweat, and tears into our blog that clearly is known for addressing a specific subject matter, we get an email from a public relations agency that takes us for someone completely different. Where do they come off doing that? A few months ago, Brian talked about an off-topic pitch about a…
What if Twitter Had an App Store? Now It Does.
In October 2008, I documented months of research and analysis into a full directory of Twitter applications for communications and marketing professionals. In May 2009, I categorized the most applicable and qualified applications, and with the help of JESS3, we published The Twitterverse, a beta map of the Twitter universe that arranged relevant applications in a way that allowed us to see and navigate the landscape more efficiently and effectively. While working on the official release of the Twitterverse, I…
The Conversation Prism: The Landscape for International Social Networking
As Web 2.0 and Social Media became globally pervasive, the landscape proved expansive, overwhelming, and bewildering. It required a social cartographer in order to visualize its grandeur. Thus, in August 2008, the original Conversation Prism was born with the help of Jesse Thomas of JESS3. The Conversation Prism continues to rapidly evolve as social networks emerge, merge, and vanish. In fact, Jesse Thomas and I are already hard at work mapping version 3.0. One thing that we cannot overlook is…
One in Five Tweets are Related to Products
According to a recent study, 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro interaction as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. The results were…
The Wisdom of the Crowds?
Credit More often than not, we’re reminded through simple human behavior and interaction that Twitter isn’t always the TNN (Twitter News Network) we expect it to be. And, when the collective of people “being themselves” amasses concentration and velocity, we learn that sometimes the wisdom that manifests within the crowds isn’t very wise at all. The Trending Topics on Twitter, for example, offer a looking glass into the consumption and sharing patterns by general users. And at any given moment,…
Stop Talking About Social Media and Go Do It Already
Guest post by Louis Gray, @louisgray Credit: ShutterStock Social media can be an incredible tool, both for producing and consuming incredible amounts of information. Over the last few years, there is no question that an unprecedented change has taken place, putting tools for publication and discovery in the hands of everyone – from simple text to photos and video. Social media tools are changing businesses in terms of how they can connect with customers, partners, peers and even the competition….
