How Social Media Changed Comcast

Brian L. Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast discusses how its use of social media, especially twitter, changed its culture as a company.

Social Media Meets Personal Finance with Blippy

Blippy.com is an idea spawned by Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich, and Philip J. Kaplan that is being called “The Twitter of Personal Finance.”  The site posts the purchases you make to a live feed, which other users can then comment on and ask questions about.  Potential applications are limitless, but a few that come to mind are: finding the best deals on consumer electronics, finding out about new wines friends are purchasing, getting movie recommendations based on member’s Netflix activity, and finding new music based on friend’s iTunes purchases.  Critics say that the site exposes too much personal information.  What’s your opinion?

OpenForum.com on Blippy in their article
The 5 Most Innovative New Online Business Models in 2010:

If you don’t live your life in social media, the idea behind Blippy will likely confuse you. It is a social site that lets people automatically share the latest things they have purchased (and how much they paid for them) by linking the site to a single credit card. This level of transparency and sharing may seem crazy to many people, but the site represents a social experiment that points to an interesting opportunity for businesses whose customers may be used to sharing every small detail of their lives. It may be an outlier in this list of business models as they admittedly don’t have a revenue model for the site as yet – but the shift in what people are willing to share online is the real trend worth watching.

20% of Tweets About Brands

From Social Media Today:

20% of tweets about brands is the results of a Penn State study in the States.

Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people ‘asking and providing’ product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

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New Twitter Stats

tf-tweetstatsSysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:

  • 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
  • 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
  • 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
  • 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
  • 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
  • New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
  • More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
  • There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
  • Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

“We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter’s use, growth and demographics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ co-founder and chief executive. “While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter.”

8 Twitter Analytics Tools

twitter-tools1Here are 8 Twitter analytics tools suggested by Social Media Today:

1. Twitalyzer: a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

2. MicroPlaza: a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. MicroPlaza delivers the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It’s a discovery engine and a personal newswire.

3. Twist: a way to see trends of keywords or product names, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. See frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph.

4. Twitturly:  tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

5. TweetStats: shows tweeting behavior of Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs.

6. TwitterFriends: explore the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you, see who among your Twitter friends are online at any moment, read stats about your own Twitter account and identify the Twitterers posting the most links.

7. Quickrate / Thummit: harvests the rich content of the Twittersphere to synthesize opinions on hot topics of the day (recent movies, buzzing memes).

8. TweetEffect: enter your twitter name and analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.

Tracking Twitter

imagesTracking Twitter is a tool created by Electric Artists that lists major brands using Twitter in various business categories, including: brands, media, television, celebrities, and electric artists. For additional information on brands using Twitter, visit the Tracking Twitter blog.

Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools?

704dreamAnna Banks at Organic offers an informative post on social media monitoring tools. Her dream list of features includes:

1. Easy self-service set up of topics and queries.
2. Efficient filtering of topics.
3. Delivery of results in real-time.
4. Sentiment analysis.
5. Trending Data.
6. Comparison to competitive information.
7. Identification of conversation “themes” around a topic.
8. Identification of Influencers or “influential posts.”
9. Demographic Information.
10. Respond to and track engagement.

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