I’ve played with it a bit and I still prefer my RSS feeds, but you tell me what you think…
Google, long seen as an enemy by many in the news industry, is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.
On Monday, the company unveiled an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news stories from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as fast as they would the pages of a magazine.
Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, attempts to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: because they often are slow to load, they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, has long argued that if reading news online resembled more closely the experience of perusing physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.
“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”
via Google Releases News-Reading Service - NYTimes.com.
After teaching my seminar on Facebook and Twitter at the We Mean Business Expo last week, somebody emailed me this question:
Hi Seth,
I wanted to thank you for the wonderful workshop! I learned a lot and you made it easy to understand the information, to digest it and, to boot, it was fun.
I have a question for you: Is it possible to open an account with Twitter for a group? We would like to communicate/tweet among ourselves, privately. Can all of us use just one name, the same name together?
Here was my reply:
Thank you for coming to the seminar. I am glad you found it useful.
If you are looking for a tool to use among your co-workers that nobody else can see, I recommend trying Yammer.com. It is specifically designed for business looking to conduct their internal affairs.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a public Twitter stream (for the world to read) that multiple people in your company can post to, I’d suggest setting up a Twitter account and integrating it with CoTweet, which is a great management tool. You can setit up so there are multiple administrators for one Twitter username.
I will be giving a full seminar Friday morning at the RIEDC. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions!
With the restaurant industry facing its worst downturn in decades, dozens of independent and chain eateries are turning to Twitter to generate cheap brand buzz. Short messages, aka Tweets, tease diners with instant freebies, discounted dining events and menu makeovers.
“The Internet is a crowd of people where everyone is yelling, and to be heard is a matter of who has got the biggest megaphone,” said Shah, who recently spoke to the Orange County Restaurant Association about the power of Twitter.
In June, Twitter had 21 million unique visitors, a 1,928 percent jump from the same month last year, according to Nielsen Ratings. Restaurants are also taking advantage of Facebook, which allows businesses to create “fan” pages.
Both social media sites are revolutionizing the way diners consume information — and chains are scurrying to make themselves heard.
“Twitter allows El Pollo Loco to build relationships with consumers through direct two-way conversations, with contests, idea sharing and deal opportunities,” said Julie Weeks, spokeswoman for Costa Mesa-based El Pollo Loco.
Since joining Twitter in late March, El Pollo Loco (@elpollolocoinc) has gained 2,000 followers. Weeks uses Twitter to highlight El Pollo Loco trivia, as well as host contests, where winners get the ultimate reward: free food.
The result: fans closely watch El Pollo Loco’s updates — creating instant brand buzz.
Other local restaurants and chains using Twitter include Taco Bell, Bogart’s in Seal Beach, BJ’s Restaurants, Wienerschnitzel, Kean Coffee, Baja Fresh, Johnny Rockets and Sprinkles Cupcakes in Corona del Mar. (LIST: Rating Restaurants on Twitter)
Like El Pollo Loco, Sprinkles uses Twitter to promote new menu items and freebies. The cupcake chain’s “whisper” Tweets have become especially viral. About twice a week, Sprinkles will post a code word on Twitter such as “raspberry” or “peanut butter.” Customers (typically the first 25 in the door) are instructed to whisper the secret word to get a free cupcake.
Twitter is “very efficient because it provides immediate results. Within a minute of posting, we get people in our store redeeming our promotions,” Sprinkles Cupcakes said in a statement.
via Local eateries Tweet like crazy, but does it work? - Life - OCRegister.com.
From Mashable:
One of Twitter’s (
) strongest features is the @reply, where you can direct a message to someone else on Twitter by typing @ and then their username. Facebook (
), which is trying to emulate some of Twitter’s best features, doesn’t have anything similar in the News Feed. In short, it’s not easy to have a public conversation.
Very soon, that will no longer be the case. Facebook just introduced the ability to tag your friends in status updates. What makes this really interesting though is how you tag people: Using the @ symbol. Facebook has just turned on their own version of Twitter’s @Mentions feature that will be rolled out over the next few weeks.
Here is Facebook engineer Tom Occhino’s explanation of the new feature:
Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.
Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.
via BREAKING: Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates.
Oh, and by the way, don’t do drugs either…
In a pep talk that kept clear of politics, President Barack Obama on Tuesday challenged the nation’s students to take pride in their education - and stick with it even if they don’t like every class or must overcome tough circumstances at home.
“Every single one of you has something that you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer,” Obama told students at Wakefield High School in suburban Arlington, Va., and children watching his speech on television in schools across the country. “And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is.”
Presidents often visit schools, and Obama was not the first one to offer a back-to-school address aimed at millions of students in every grade.
Yet this one was doused with controversy from the beginning, as several conservative organizations and many concerned parents warned Obama was trying to sell his political agenda. That concern was caused in part by an accompanying administration lesson plan encouraging students to “help the president,” which the White House later revised and Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged Tuesday was wrongheaded.
School districts in some areas decided not to provide their students access to his midday speech.
Upon arrival at the school, Obama’s motorcade was greeted by a small band of protesters. One carried a sign exclaiming: “Mr. President, stay away from our kids.”
Obama didn’t mention the uproar.
via My Way News - Obama advises caution in what kids put on Facebook.
He preceded his broad-scale talk by meeting with about 40 Wakefield students in a school library, where at one point he advised them to “be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”
Maytag has just learned a lesson about customer service, the hard way, said Mitch Wagner in InformationWeek. Heather B. Armstrong, who writes the popular parenting blog Dooce, shelled out $1,300 for a high-end washing machine—complete with service plan—and it promptly broke. After frustrating encounters with repairmen and customer service, Armstrong urged her 1-million-plus Twitter followers not to buy Maytag appliances, and Whirlpool, which owns Maytag, dispatched someone to fix the machine within a day.
More here:
Really, Internet? 1 Million+ Twitter Army vs …Maytag?.
I’ve been a fan of Animoto, the super-slideshow web application, for a while now. In fact, many of the videos I’ve made for my own events have been made with Animoto. The program takes your photos and turns them into a slideshow with music and MTV-style transitions. Up until recently, you’ve only been able to use photos. But in an amazing new upgrade, Animoto now allows you to use video as well. To celebrate, they’re giving away a trip to NY to the best film using Animoto:
To celebrate the launch of the new video clip feature, we’re giving away HD camcorders, helmet cams, Animoto All-Access Passes, and an action-packed trip to New York City for the best videos made by our users!
The details Each week, starting September 3rd and continuing until October 1st, we will announce two finalists who will have a chance to win our grand prize.
Finalists will receive a one-year Animoto All-Access Pass and their choice of an Animoto-branded Flip Mino HD camcorder or a VholdR ContourHD wearable camcorders. The grand prize winner will be announced at the end of the five weeks and will receive a trip for two to New York City.
via animoto - The Video Contest: Win a trip to New York City.
I’ve recently been playing with two different web applications that let me manage multiple Twitter accounts for clients: HootSuite and CoTweet. I wanted to offer a comparison between the two. Readers who are interested may also want to check out this comparison by Rafe Needleman of Webware.
Both tools are meant to offer ways for companies to professionally manage their presence on Twitter. They enable you to manage multiple Twitter accounts by scheduling tweets to be posted over time. This is great for the person who wants to post all of their tweets first thing in the morning (or the week!) and let it run on autopilot from there. Both apps also let you see statistics about your tweets.
COTWEET: As Rafe notes, the CoTweet interface is cleaner. The design resembles an email inbox, making it easy and intuitive from the start. CoTweet also offers some powerful tools for sharing Twitter responsibilities among multiple people. It allows you to give multiple users access to a Twitter account and, more importantly, allows you to assign incoming tweets to different people for response. This is a very powerful feature if you’ve been tasked with managing the Twitter account for your company and want to delegate tweet-back responsibilities to people within your organization based on their areas of expertise. Imagine, for example, that you were Entertainment Weekly, and wanted some incoming tweets to be answered by your Film editor, some answered by your Television editor, some answered by your Music editor, etc.
The one major drawback to CoTweet at this point is that it is not integrated with Ping.fm. Ping.fm is a tool that allows me to post updates to all my social media outlets at once - Facebook (and, in the case of businesses, Facebook fan pages) being chief among them. I have found that I often want my Facebook status updates to match my tweets. Unfortunately, Facebook does not make it easy to import your tweets to Facebook as status updates. At the moment, you can export your status updates to Twitter, but not the other way around. There are some workarounds, but they are very convoluted. So while CoTweet is a great tool for professionally managing your Twitter account, it won’t help you with your Facebook.
For me, this is a major limitation, but one I was eventually able to get around using a Facebook application called “Selective Twitter Status.” This allows you to import your tweets as status updates by including “#fb” on the end. Most importantly, it works on both Facebook profiles and Facebook fan pages, and you can use a different Twitter account for each page. I’d still prefer to have CoTweet integrate with Ping.fm so it updates all of my social networks, but from a business standpoint (and this is a business tool), as long as I have Twitter and Facebook covered I’m feeling pretty good. (Note: Facebook has some funky issues when updating the status of profiles and pages with the same tool, so if you don’t grant permissions in the proper order it can cause problems. It took me several attempts to sort this all out.)
HOOTSUITE: Hootsuite shares many of the same features as CoTweet. You can use it to manage multiple accounts and schedule tweets for later delivery. The interface resembles TweetDeck with its multiple columns, rather than an email inbox. This isn’t as clean, but once you grow accustomed to it, it’s still fairly usable. Moreover, HootSuite lets you customize your page with additional columns and tabs.
An additional features I like with HootSuite is the Hootlet, a bookmarklet that let’s me tweet any page with a click of a button. Just drag the Hootlet to the bookmark bar of your browser and you’re ready to go! Another nice advantage of HootSuite is that you can go back and edit and scheduled tweet before its sent. With CoTweet, you need to delete the tweet and start over.
Unlike CoTweet, HootSuite does not have any CRM functions. You cannot assign tweets to other people or track the follow-up.
The big advantage of HootSuite is that it is integrated with Ping.fm, which means you can use it to manage all of your social media outlets, not just Twitter. So I can use it schedule all of my Facebook pages updates in addition to my Twitter updates. Unfortunately, HootSuite is only set up to handle one Ping.fm account, even though it can handle multiple Twitter accounts. So you cannot use it to update multiple Facebook fan pages.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Overall, both applications work great. Given that each has features the other doesn’t, I use CoTweet to handle my incoming Tweets and HootSuite to handle my outgoing tweets. CoTweet is a more powerful tool when your focus is on providing quality replies to incoming tweets, particularly if you are working for a large company where different employees have different areas of expertise. If you can get different people in the building to reply to different tweets, this is the tool for you.
For outbound tweets, however, I would choose HootSuite in conjunction with the Selective Twitter Updates application. First, the Hootlet bookmarklet makes tweeting out a breeze. Second, HootSuite lets you go back and edit scheduled tweets. Most importantly, it integrates with Ping.fm, meaning that my outgoing tweets can also be copied to Facebook and my other social media outlets. Unfortunately, HootSuite can only handle one Ping.fm account (instead of assigning a different Ping.fm account to each Twitter account). As a result, neither HootSuite nor Ping.fm is ideal for a social media consultant or PR agency handling Facebook updates for multiple companies at once, but as long as you’ve got the Selective Twitter Updates application working with your Facebook page, you’re at least covered on the two important networks, Facebook and Twitter. I use the Ping.fm integration for my personal Twitter account, so I can also update to LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc.
Overall, I find HootSuite’s integration with Ping.fm and its bookmarlet to be its only major advantages. CoTweet could easily adopt both of these features - and even build upon it by allowing for multiple Ping.fm accounts - while it would be much more difficult for HootSuite to adopt CoTweet’s CRM functionality and clean interface. If CoTweet were to integrate with Ping.fm and add a bookmarklet, I would probably use it exclusively.
A PR Recruiter points out that social media skills are more important than ever for PR agencies looking to hire:
Attention Public Relations Job Seekers: Social media knowledge and experience is almost as important as traditional media relations skills. Check out these statistics from IPressroom’s Digital Readiness Report.
Some of the key findings I found interesting in this study about the current communications job market:
- 82% of hiring managers said media relations expertise was either important or very important.
- 80% said knowledge of social networks is either important or very important.
- 72% said an understanding of micro-blogging services like Twitter are either important or very important.
- Hiring managers also ranked SEO (62%), email outreach (56%), web content management (52%) and social bookmarking (51%) as important skills and knowledge for PR professionals in today’s job market.
- 18% of hiring managers have no interest in traditional PR skills.
More often our client companies are asking for candidates with social media knowledge and experience (outside of personal use), however, these employers are still expecting to hire a well-rounded communications professional - one who can demonstrate he or she has both the traditional and the digital skills.
The survey further notes that a majority of organizations employing communications professionals are considering hiring dedicated staff that specialize on the social media front.
via Lindsay Olson » Skills for the PR Professional in Today’s Job Market.
A report on the reach of social technologies, published Tuesday by Forrester Research, said that in the last year, young people almost universally used social media. (Only 3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds do not use social tools online.) These people have been using social media for a long time, though, and they are not driving its growth.
More intriguing is a look at what older adults are doing online. According to Forrester, use of social media among those 35 to 54 jumped 60 percent in the last year. Half of online adults in the United States interact on social networks and more than three-fourths used social media in the last month.
Most of the adults online regularly visit sites with user-generated content, like blogs and Google’s YouTube, Forrester found. Only a quarter actually post stories or upload video, though that is growing with easy-to-use online tools. The number of adults who joined social networks last year grew almost 50 percent from the year before. Today, only 18 percent of online adults do not use social tools, down from 25 percent last year.
via Why Adults Have Fed Twitter’s Growth - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com.