TweetChat Shutting Down. TweetChat Opens Again

tweetchat

Since the day an ominous message appeared across the top of TweetChat.com — “Twitter is changing the way services like @TweetChat deliver data to users. In the very near future, TweetChat will most likely be unable to continue to provide our service.” — IML has been in talks with Brooks Bennett, the creator of the beloved platform, to acquire it and make sure the site lives on.

Make no mistake — Brooks didn’t set out to sell the site. It was a labor of love, but the continuous changes to Twitter’s API meant continuous platform updates. And the sunsetting of the existing Twitter API meant the site as it is now would cease to work on June 11.

“There have always been requests to take the concept to the next level, and I am excited for the role OneQube’s SmartStream will play in filling this gap,” said Brooks, who agreed to sell the site to Internet Media Labs with the understanding that the application would be shut down and community migrated to oneQube #SmartStream. Brooks also is joining Internet Media Labs’ advisory board.

TweetChat was born four and a half years ago, after Brooks spoke at a public relations boot camp.

“I noticed many people at the camp getting excited about Twitter and social tools in general,” he told me. “Most people were creating their accounts and then would sit and stare at the screen thinking, ‘Now what?’ These folks were interested first and foremost in topics, not necessarily in specific people.”

Hashtags had come into use on Twitter in 2007 and while they had caught on, they were still rather niche.

“The hashtag was a new tool that folks were using, so I thought it would be cool to connect people in real-time around hashtags,” Brooks said. “The conference was on a Friday, so I spent the weekend putting a prototype together and presented it early the next week to my friends at Dorkbot Austin.”

It was love at first sight for many. I recall seeing Sarah Evans’ #journchat zipping through my TweetDeck in 2008 and wondering how the heck all these people participating were able to follow the conversation so easily. I asked a friend and he said, “Go to TweetChat.com and put in the hashtag.

See full story on internetmedialabs.com

Image courtesy of internetmedialabs.com

“Twitter Revolution” Thrust Back Into the Political Spotlight as Turkish Protesters Take to Social Media

When we wrote “Twitter Revolution” we were talking about marketing and business. We knew the world was changing, but had no idea we were coining a term that would be used for political uprisings around the world.

I vote to use the term “Arab Spring” 🙂

Another Twitter Revolution?

Over two years after the Arab Spring began, Turkey is in the midst of its own interpretation as a weekend of anti-government demonstrations spread across the country, ignited by opposition to construction of a shopping mall in a popular Istanbul park and exacerbated by traditional Turkish media’s lack of coverage.Protests spread to half of Turkey’s 81 provinces by Sunday with the Turkish Doctors’ Association reporting at least 1,700 people injured in Istanbul and Ankara.

Much like the movement that swept across Egypt, Libya, Syria and dozens of other countries in the region, social media, especially Twitter, has played an integral role in the organization of demonstrations and the spread of ideals.Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan called the protesters an “extremist fringe” even as 10,000 demonstrators called on his government to resign. The increasingly authoritarian PM singled out Twitter saying, “the best examples of lies can be found there,” and called social media “the worst menace to society.”

Erdogan’s harsh crackdowns on press freedom in Turkey and his desire for a more tightly-controlled Internet are now fueling the very communication tools he had hoped to quell. “Erdogan does not listen to anyone any more,” said Koray Caliskan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University, The Guardian reports. Similar occurences feuled the Arab Spring, which saught out to conquer widespread censorship of the mass media and the internet, especially social media. Recently, Jordan’s prime minister spoke out about the changes that have came about since the uprising that began in late 2010. “The past few years have been very crucial to our region, because the Arab Spring has opened new horizons and created more demands” for wider freedoms of expression and the press, reports the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Gas masks appear to be standard issue for photographers in #Turkey. bit.ly/18HBrLN twitter.com/nycjim/status/…

In a clear example of media censorship, the state-controlled TV stations and newspapers ignored coverage of the protests, which are the largest and most violent protests the country has seen in years. “The Turkish media have embarrassed themselves,” Caliskan said. “While the whole world was oadcasting from Taksim Square, Turkish television stations were showing cooking shows. It is now very clear that we do not have press freedom in Turkey.”

See full story on brandchannel.com

The Next Generation of Data Analysis

In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it’s months away, not years.

Today is the start of IBM’s SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the event. Last night, I spent some time chatting with Sandra Zoratti, author of Precision Marketing, Stratigent‘s Bill Bruno and Triberr‘s Dino Dogan.

I shared with them how I was first exposed to real data driven marketing online in the early 1990s. I was managing banner ad placement ads on sites like Yahoo!, Excite and AltaVista for a consumer focused software company.  We could measure by each ad creative and placement how much usage and revenue they generated from their software download. From the start we developed hooks into the software to marry up the acquisition data. We could then ask the analysts to run queries for us and send us Excel spreadsheets. We used them to decide where to keep investing in banner ads.

So, of course, when Jeffrey and I started focusing more of our time on online businesses we expected people to do similar things.  Where we ever surprised!

Excel became the de-facto tool for analysts. Do you remember the days of running web logs files in excel to analyze them? This was before tools like WebTrends log analyzer became popular and of course well before any of the javascript based web analytics tools even launched. Excel is still a great tool for analysts as Chief Evangelist for Bing Ads, John Gagnon has shown in his last couple of columns. It is not however, the best tool to share data  and collaborate with the entire organization. How many times have you seen Excel spreadsheets and charts go straight from the inbox to some digital black hole, never to be used again?

This past week, we saw data visualization platform Tableau, enjoy a  successful IPO. I love what you can do with their platform, but  it still doesn’t pack the punch it needs to in order to get an organization to act on the data. As Robbie Allen, the CEO of Automated Insights points out ”most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results.”

See full story on bryaneisenberg.com

5 As of Social Media Measurement

There are literally gigabytes of people fighting about the ROI of social media. The truth is, there are certainly outcomes that we should all be measuring to ensure that we are using social media measurement in the most effective way possible.

I think of social media measurement as a continuum of measures. Consider using one or more of these in your measurement strategy.

Activity: This measure is all about what YOU do. Do track your activities and benchmark them against results but don’t stop there. Many agencies tend to focus their reports on activities they completed for a client, but they should not be considered results measurement.

Attention. This measure is all about reach or “opportunities to see.” They say that any publicity is good publicity, but as we all know in this 24/7 news-hungry world not ALL attention is good attention. The easiest thing to measure in social media is attention. You can see how many visits your page has, how many were unique and how many were repeat or new visitors. Attention looks at volume, number of friends and reach.

Awareness. This measure is all about engagement with you. It means that people are starting to become aware that you exist in social channels. It doesn’t mean they will take any action beyond this, or that there will be any appreciable business results.  Awareness measures include Likes, mentions, share of voice, referrals and % of followers engaged.

Attitudes. This measure is all about conversation about you. You can measure online sentiment to get a crude idea of where you stand with the community over time, mostly positive, mostly negative and mostly neutral. However, sentiment doesn’t give a full view and can be significantly skewed if you use automated sentiment tools. You can look also at customer satisfaction surveys and cross tab with their involvement with social media sources, loyalty over time, and repeat visits to get an idea of attitudes. The gold standard is conducting a relationships survey.

See full story on zoeticamedia.com

Stop Building Websites by Building a Smart Site

A Smart Site Takes The Drudgery Out of Your Visitors Experience

The mission of digital-telepathy is to make great design..  a smart site accessible to anyone by creating new standards that improve how people interact with and create digital design. From websites to mobile apps, TVs and beyond, we’re committed to making experiences that define the future of the screen interface. Though there is plenty of ground to cover to accomplish our mission, the higher we push the standards for publishers and designers, the better the experience becomes for all web users.

We’re starting our mission with a focus on websites. Still based on print paradigms with archaic, link-driven tables of contents and page structures, today’s websites don’t capitalize on the native opportunities of the digital medium they live in. They are disjointed and kludgy, hampering the user’s ability to accomplish his or her goals. And yet, we don’t need to look any further than our handheld devices to see that user experiences don’t have to be this way. Fluid and guided, mobile apps are intuitive, providing visceral feedback that satisfies and keeps us coming back. They are the antithesis of most web experiences.

So what’s preventing the website from becoming as enjoyable and effective as mobile apps? Thanks to app-like interactions made possible by JavaScript and CSS3, faster connection speeds, and responsive design, there is no technical reason that websites can’t evolve. The only remaining barrier to a great experience is exceptional web design. Why? Because it’s historically been incredibly expensive. But if we think in terms of the experience and forget what we know about traditional web design, we can free ourselves of the expensive corporate site design time sink, and find a way to ing intuitive design to website owners everywhere.

As designers of the Web, we need to rally around a common cause of democratizing web-based experiences as seamless, story-driven, goal-based, intuitive and viscerally satisfying as their mobile ethren.

Think of the last landing page you encountered. Like the car salesman that wanders over when you just want to owse, landing pages relentlessly hound you to turn over your information. When and is traded completely for conversion, there is no positive or lasting experience to be found.

See full story on dtelepathy.com