Copyright © 2010 I-COM International 2010-09-06T17:13:10+0100 2010-09-06T17:13:10+0100 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net I-COM International I-COM International en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/is-twitter-the-new-myspace-388/ You know that Twitter has crossed over into the mainstream when instead of bands telling people to check them out on MySpace, they instead ask the audience (several times) to follow them on Twitter.Last night, in front of a packed crowd in Holmfirth, Wedding Present and Cinerama front man David Gedge, asked the crowd to follow him on Twitter (he's @weddingpresent) and assured us all that it is, indeed, him doing the tweeting and that he is in fact extremely interesting and he does reply to people.It's the first time I've seen anyone tout for more Twitter followers at a gig and if you're really bored, try checking on how many new accounts referencing the Wedding Present have been set up since last night.... Social Media Marketing 2010-08-27 10:37:27 http://www.i-com.net/blog/is-twitter-the-new-myspace-388/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/new-twitter-feature-suggestions-for-you-377/ Twitter has been rolling out the new features in the past few months, with sponsored trending topics, improvements to the 'Find Friends' feature, Twitter Places and now the brand spanking new 'Who To Follow' feature... nothing seems to get rid of that fail whale though :(What's it all about?Simply put, the 'Who to Follow' feature helps you to find others who have similar interests to you. These suggestions are based on several factors, most notably on the people you follow as well as the people they follow... not rocket science :)Why are they doing it? Twitter are very conscious we are using their service to speak to friends and family, and they recently wrote a blog post on following your friends and colleagues. In it, they said that they were making improvements so that we can find our friends easier. So all in all the use of the 'Suggestions For You' feature is intended to make the job of finding friends and finding people who have similar interests, easier. It can be difficult to keep in touch with everyone when you join a new social network. For example, I am a big fan of Foursquare, so I had a look at similar social networks and found Gowalla. I am just getting into it but can't find anyone I know on it, even though I do know people are there. Shouldn't it be easier for us to find then initially? For Gowalla, I guess I just wait for them to roll out something like this... hopefully.Where is it?Well if you're an avid Twitter user and like to twet (my new word for tweet) often, then you will have probably caught a sneaky peek of the feature between Friday and Monday. If you go and click on the 'Find People' link at the top of the page 'Suggestions For You' will be fitted in snugly between 'Browse Interests' and 'Find Friends'.When is it back online?On the Twitter Status they have said that the 'Suggestions For You' feature has been temporarily disabled but will be back up in the next 24 hours.What else can I use to find people?Working in SEO and social media I look at a lot of different tools and websites that help me find followers for clients. There are a lot of websites out there that have categories like fashion, furniture and legal, plus a lot more that can help agencies and individuals find people who share their interests. These include WeFollow and Twellow. Social Media Marketing 2010-08-04 17:08:56 http://www.i-com.net/blog/new-twitter-feature-suggestions-for-you-377/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-employees-social-media-accounts-376/ There are plenty of examples of employees speaking out of turn on Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, and subsequently having to face the consequences. It's become such a big issue that many businesses have been forced to ban the use of social media during work hours, and feel the need to monitor employee's accounts outside of them. But what happens when, as a business, you want your employees on social media? Perhaps you're a recruitment consultant, and you're encouraging your employees to create LinkedIn accounts in order to make connections with new clients and job seekers? Or perhaps you're a charity with a Facebook fan page, and you'd like all your employees to 'Like' your page, bulking up your internet community and distributing your content online? I-COM happens to be the kind of business that encourages its employees to set up social media accounts; it's important that, as a business, we have a strong online presence, and our employees' social media accounts are one way of improving that presence. However, we make sure we follow a few simple rules to avoid the pitfalls so often experienced when employees' social media accounts come into contact with their working lives: Keep your working life and social life separate: if you're going to ask your employees to 'Like' and distribute your content online, ask them to set up work-specific social media accounts. This ensures your content doesn't come into contact with any of their social activities (do you want your latest business event popping up on someone's wall next to pictures of drunken debauchery?). It's better for them, and it's better for your business. Make sure your employees are aware of your company's branding: if your employees are going to be acting as online ambassadors for your company, make sure they're fully aware of how you want your business to be portrayed. Give them some brand guidelines to follow, and make sure they stick to them. Trust your employees, but don't neglect them: by asking your employees to promote your brand online via social media, you're placing a certain amount of trust in them; you're trusting them to do the right thing for your business, and to give your brand a positive image online. Just make sure you don't neglect them - check in periodically on how their social media activity is going, and act on their recommendations. Make sure they have plenty of quality content to distribute: if your employees are going to promote your brand using social media, they're going to need content - at the very least a regularly updated blog and online press releases. Think video, photos, online competitions, polls, even mini-games. Encouraging your employees to use social media to promote your brand online can be hugely rewarding, improving your brand profile, expanding your potential customer base and improving your website's ranking - just make sure you lay down a few ground rules at the start in order to avoid a social media catastrophe. Social Media Marketing 2010-08-03 13:28:52 http://www.i-com.net/blog/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-employees-social-media-accounts-376/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/who-is-the-biggest-fartt-on-twitter-372/ I'm not the most prolific twitterer in the world, I often wonder like many people whether I'm a good twitterer and if my thoughts have any value to anyone. We were talking about this in the office the other day and being someone who's fond of playing with numbers I came up with a very smple metric I like to call the FARTT (Followers As Related To Tweets) index. Simply speaking the index counts how many followers you've obtained per tweet you've made, there is only one criteria and that's that the tweeter must have made at least 100 tweets. Not having a lower limit means that the results can be somewhat skewed.FARTT = No. of Followers/No. of Tweets madeI know that there could be lots of interpretations of this index but as a bit of fun it's quite interesting. Using it I've already identified two distinct groups of people - celebrity tweeters stand out from regular people using the index as they tend to have higher FARTT scores. @stephenfry is the biggest FARTT I've found so far with a score of 266 when I last looked.Regular twitterers scores seem to generally sit in a range between 0 and 2.I'm pleased to say that amongst I-COM's twitterers I'm the biggest FARTT, various scores are detailed in the table below.  @tykemike: 1.75 @timothyjroberts: 0.53 @thenarrowescape: 0.42 @jamesroome: 0.41 @pgreenhalgh: 0.40 @annagruber1: 0.37 @keirgibson: 0.12 @justhipper: 0.10 I'd be really interested to find the biggest FARTT amongst our readers, if you have a score higher than ours let us know. We'll send a prize of a whoopee cushion to the person with the highest score that contacts us by the end of August. Social Media Marketing 2010-07-17 18:19:55 http://www.i-com.net/blog/who-is-the-biggest-fartt-on-twitter-372/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/twitter-introduces-name-results-371/ It seems that somewhere in the night theTwitter fairy stole in and introduced a new feature: Name results.While we're not seeing this sort of result for all name searches, on selected searches Twitter is returning results for potential Twitter users that match the searcher's query.We assume this is just another way of making the search feature more useful as Twitter's own variation on blended search results. As it stands it can be quite difficult to find other people on Twitter without knowing their exact username, so this looks like a step in the right direction to us. Social Media Marketing 2010-07-15 08:39:18 http://www.i-com.net/blog/twitter-introduces-name-results-371/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/dont-listen-to-the-social-media-gurus-368/ I am scheduled to give a presentation next week entitled 'Social Media and Business', at the offices of Mathys & Squire LLP. During the talk, which is set to take place on Wednesday 7th July at 3pm, I'll be letting businesses in on the wonderful secret that is social media, outlining how they can use it to generate new business, advertise offers and incentives, create a buzz about their company and connect with customers.I'll also be debunking a lot of the rubbish peddled by these so-called Social Media Gurus, focusing instead on how you can use social media to generate real results for your business.Over the past few years social media has become an extremely powerful force in the world of online marketing - a force businesses hoping to succeed online cannot afford to ignore! If you would like to attend the event contact Tarik: tarik@businessskillsforum.co.uk I-COM News 2010-07-02 12:54:57 http://www.i-com.net/blog/dont-listen-to-the-social-media-gurus-368/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-hashtag-355/ Following days of speculation, U2 have announced that due to an injury sustained by the bands frontman Bono, they will no longer be able to perform their planned headline set at this years Glastonbury festival.  Devastated, delighted or frankly ambivalent, the announcement itself is not the subject of this post (sorry U2 fans) but the emergence of a debate on Twitter about who should replace the band in this prestigious slot all through the use of the hashtag #shouldheadlineglastonbury.  To utilise Twitters own definition "A hashtag is similar to other web tags- it helps add tweets to a category.  Hashtags have the 'hash' or 'pound' symbol (#) preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday, #hashtag."The creation of the #shouldheadlineglastonbury hashtag traces to Lauren Lavernes Twitter account @laverneshow for her BBC 6 Music radio show. Following an announcement on the official Glastonbury website, and subsequent Twitter announcement from festival organiser Emily Eavis at around 12 noon, Laverne tweeted Ok Twitter. U2 are out. Who #shouldheadlineglastonbury ?Within an hour, I spotted the hashtag on Twitters UK trending listings. Whilst the creation of a hashtag is nothing remarkable in itself, whats interesting here is how quickly this particular tag gathered momentum. For a Twitter account with only a relatively modest following of c. 15,000 followers (were not exactly talking Stephen Fry or Ashton Kutcher proportions here), the speed at which the Glastonbury hashtag propagated and starting trending is quite impressive.Even Laverne herself seemed surprised at how quickly the hashtag had caught on: Also, unlike the majority of popular hashtags, this is a real-time example of creation and propagation. We dont always get to trace back the origins of hashtags usually only cottoning on to them when the people we follow use them or we see them in the trending topics.  What appears to have made this particular hashtag popular is that whether youre a Glastonbury regular or have never been to the festival, you can have an opinion on this topic. Consider #NoLongerWantTicketToGlastonbury or #SellingGlastoTicketNowNoU2 as alternatives and the vastly narrowed responses these might have evoked. Also interesting and slightly disappointing is that this is an opportunity for generating a conversation with their audience that Glastonbury themselves clearly missed. At the time of submitting this post, the #shouldheadlineglastonbury is trending at number 2 for UK tweets. Track the progress of the hashtag over the coming days here Social Media Marketing 2010-05-25 14:50:11 http://www.i-com.net/blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-hashtag-355/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/a-condem-nation-of-twitter-promoted-tweets-352/ When Twitter promoted tweets was launched recently, there can be few people at the grass roots level who welcomed the news. Of course, on the other hand it's a great boon for online marketers - imagine, being able to target your tweets by trending topic, ensuring your tweet stays at the top of the tweet-list promoting a great new offer/your brand to people who are tweeting about related concepts. Or is it? When searching in Twitter trending topics today I came across this (click the image to open in a new window): My trending is set to London, I'm searching on a UK-specific topic (for those of you who haven't heard, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have formed a coalition and Cameron is the new PM. Joy), 'Con/Dem Nation', however who do I see promoting their tweets at the top of the list? Why it's only @VirginAmerica, telling me that, should I happen to be in Washington DC today I can send them a picture of my favourite monument. Apparently they're showing up purely based on the fact that their tweet includes the word 'nation'. Are @VirginAmerica getting value for money and generating new business and followers with their promoted tweet? No. Am I pleased to see this promoted tweet hogging the space at the top of a totally irrelevant trending topic? No. I'm not dead against promoted tweets, but poor keyword targeting is not only annoying for users, it's bad for the business who's tweet it is. In the words of the Daily Star, 'SORT IT OUT YOU CLOWNS'. Social Media Marketing 2010-05-12 09:46:31 http://www.i-com.net/blog/a-condem-nation-of-twitter-promoted-tweets-352/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/my-name-is-anna-and-i-am-a-twitter-virgin-343/ When I joined I-COM 6 weeks ago I thought Twitter was for weird people who wanted to know what celebrities were having for breakfast and such, or egotistical people who thought the world was interested in what they were having for breakfast and such. About 2 weeks into my new job, I was led by the hand into the world of Twitter by Keir Gibson. He explained the whole idea and purpose of this strange social networking world of 140 characters and said "Off you go...tweet". What about? I am usually so opinionated, have lots to say on a subject or make humorous quips but I was stumped. So my first (and really quite lame) tweet simply thanked Keir. For the next 10 days I was silent on Twitter until again Keir nudged me and told me to, "Tweet girl, tweet". So my next (and even lamer than the first) tweet told the people following me that I was writing Meta tags! How interesting I hear you scream. I was disappointed and unsure as to how I would make this work for me. After this shockingly bad start I started to get the hang of it. I replied to people who had messaged me or wrote a sentence or two when I saw something of interest and even found links I found relatively interesting on BBC News and other websites that I thought wouldn't be terribly pathetic to tweet about. And sure enough I started to 'get' the whole point of it. My far more experienced colleagues tweeted about SEO and social media articles, new stories and anything they are interested in. Despite my fear of this unknown world I learnt the benefits it can have for businesses, not only to post information (such as promoting blog entries the I-COM team have written) and special offers, but you only need to see how companies such as Dell have used it to understand just how powerful a tool this is to have. I have learnt how commanding Twitter is, not only for businesses, but how much it can influence things. Box office hits were predicted based on the amount of Tweets about a certain film and were scarily accurate. Now, the Library of Congress is going to archive every single tweet since Twitter started in 2006. This will allow anyone, anywhere to search, by category, for a tweet they are interested in. It is being done predominantly to document historical events such as Barak Obama's tweet just after he was elected, and all of those soon after the earthquake in Haiti and of course Anna Gruber's tweet on writing meta tags! I wondered how this social networking phenomenon made money. The answer is, it doesn't. Until now...Twitter is now going to have its very own keyword ads called Promoted Tweets, letting companies purchase adverts and these results will then show up on search results pages. Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone has said that these Promoted Tweets will not show anywhere else until they have had feedback from users at which point, if feedback is positive, they will start to roll these out  to appear on your homepage. He has insisted that if the ad is of no interest to the user, who simply ignores it, it will disappear. Bill Gross, founder of GoTo.com has created his own 'Adwords' for Twitter called Tweet Up which will allow businesses and users to bid on keywords which will then appear in sponsored listings. However, this is not officially tied with Twitter and these results will appear on partner sites.I haven't explored TweetDeck, I have never re-tweeted and I haven't entered the realm of Twitter widgets...all in good time. So far, in my brief relationship with Twitter, I have concluded that if used correctly it can do wonders for your business, or irritate your customers (as shown by Rentokil and Habitat), but it is also a bit of fun and shouldn't be taken too seriously. So follow me on Twitter and watch me grow and Tweet my little heart out. Social Media Marketing 2010-04-27 11:58:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/my-name-is-anna-and-i-am-a-twitter-virgin-343/