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Call for banks to use Twitter to communicate

Jenny Sanderson — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:30:00 +0000

New research undertaken into the uptake of social media within the financial sector suggests that banks are slipping behind the times with their communications. A study undertaken by Virgin Media Business suggested that banking firms are failing to utilise social media facilities to optimise their communications practices for customers.

Out of all banks surveyed within the UK, including Royal Bank of Scotland, the Co-operative bank, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and HSBC, only Lloyds TSB regularly used Twitter to keep customers updated. The research showed that most major high street banks are missing out on opportunities to strengthen their relationships with customers through online communication.

On a positive note, banks have, it seems, revolutionised call centre customer service, with waiting time for customers dropping to an average of 74 seconds per call. Despite this, customers have been tweeting banks regularly (up to 180 times a day on average, demonstrating a real appetite for online communications. With social media being a preferred mode of contact for a significant number of people within the UK, it is surprising that so few banks are capitalizing on this popularity.

The customer services director for Virgin Media commented on the survey results: “Whether you like it or not, social networking sites seem to be becoming the new sounding board for complaints about companies. In fact, research by the Institute of Customer Service recently found that nearly one in ten Brits expect businesses to have a presence on Twitter.”

“With the country’s high street banks being tweeted about 180 times a day on average, responding to customers on the web is clearly going to be challenging. But with 55% of people in the UK expecting a response to an online complaint within 24 hours, it’s a challenge that the banks need to take up. Investing in the right technology and training will allow firms to respond to their customers quickly and consistently, regardless of how they choose to get in touch.”

Twitter power unveiled – how tweeting can change the world

Andy Russell — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:36:18 +0000

There is no doubt that social media is a powerful vehicle for airing people’s feelings and swaying opinion. Since the launch of the site, it has been used in a number of controversial ways, including to announce an execution in the US, and to virally spread news, promotions and other information.

This week, however, Twitter has come in to its own, after being used to persuade a negligent company take action following a complaint. Air Canada have been pushed to fix the wheelchair of a terminally ill boy, following a flight with the company where the chair got damaged.

The boy’s aunt, a prolific blogger, tweeted about the situation, and also blogged about it. People around the world took up the tweet and reposted it, making it spread virally to the extent that it could not be ignored by Air Canada officials.

Tanner Bawn, the ten-year-old affected by the incident, was travelling to La Guardia airport in New York with Air Canada to attend a charity event. He was scheduled to take part in a walk-a-thon to help raise money for a live-in carer to support him. The event was organised by his aunt, as Tanner suffers with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He is totally reliant upon his wheelchair for mobility.

The wheelchair, worth almost ten thousand pounds, was damaged in the flight, arriving at La Guardia in pieces. Following the Twitter exposure, Air Canada fixed the chair within twenty-four hours, and promised to undertake a permanent repair upon Tanner’s return home. They have also pledged to send Tanner to Disneyworld to compensate for the damage.

Tanner Bawn’s aunt, Catherine Connors, commented: “I’m impressed with how Air Canada has stepped up. But I’m still distressed that it took the internet shrieking loudly at them for it to happen. If my sister and Tanner had been here on their own with no blogging or without the vast social-media network to help them, it wouldn’t have turned out this way.”

Concerns over lack of privacy on social sites

Jen — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:00:21 +0000

Concerns over a lack of privacy are rising as more and more people post up candid updates to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The media of online networking causes people to lose their inhibitions and post up candid status updates and messages which they may not be prepared to offer up on a different platform.

The quick exchanges and informal setting of the online networking site encourage intimate disclosure of detail that would previously have been reserved for close friends and family. Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s Digital Champion, is a prime example of someone who is candid online, to the extent that she invites open conversation and two-way interaction. On Twitter, Lane Fox will post up messages to ministers in text speak, confirming meeting times and venues. This leaves her open to members of the public who can follow her every move.

There are a number of issues with social media when it comes to people posting up personal details. Comments are circulated globally, and search engines record every single comment which is published online. This includes the libelous, spiteful or downright unprofessional comments which people may wish they could retract at a later stage, when tempers subside.

Celebrities such as Gillian McKeith have found themselves at the centre of a social media row, after a critic of hers made a malicious comment about her work on Twitter. McKeith responded in kind, and the two accounts sent unpleasant comments back and forth until McKeith was accused of libel. At this point, McKeith backtracked and claimed that her Twitter account had been hacked, and the comments had nothing to do with her at all.

While Twitter and other vehicles represent an irresistible opportunity to vent feelings, people with a number of followers need to bear in mind that everything which is said online can be recorded for prosperity, and potentially used in legal battles.

Researchers turn to Twitter to ascertain mood of a nation

Jen — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:06:25 +0000

A study undertaken by researchers at both Harvard and Northwestern University in the States have been studying Twitter updates, in order to discern the overall happiness levels of American citizens.

The project, which has been called ‘Pulse of a Nation’, was set up to establish which areas in the US were most satisfied with their lot, and whether analysis of Twitter status feeds could actually bring insight to the state of a nation.

The research concluded that people in the West were more happy than their East coast counterparts, and overall Hawaii constituted the most happy place for people. Alaska and Mississippi did not fare so well, with residents thought to be the most miserable in these two locations.

The study also discovered that people are more bad-tempered on a Thursday, possible due to the fact that they have worked all week, but are still one day away from the weekend. To gain these insights, scientists examined 300 million Twitter updates, published over a three year period. The tweets were categorized and organised in to keywords. Typical keywords which added to the results included ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Glad’, ‘Love’ and ‘Joy’.

A Northwestern University researcher commented: “This isn’t in any way a mature research project. But it’s a cool project and promises all sorts of possibilities. And while it underlines prejudices people hold about the west coast and the east coast, it is impossible when you see the map not to make that interpretation. But again, we haven’t anchored this data down.”

The project follows on the back of research which uses Twitter to determine public trends and opinions, for example film reviews and receptions, or sports predictions. Future development could see scientists and researchers relying upon Twitter to determine political opinion, financial and economic stability, or cultural shifts.

Promoted Trending Topics launched by Twitter

Andre — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:14:16 +0000

Last April, Twitter launched its first ad campaign facility, in the guise of Promoted Tweets. Tweeters are now accustomed to this facility, which provides advertising revenue in a different way to standard web advertising packages. Rather than flooding their platform with adverts, Twitter instead uses a more subtle method of generating revenue through promotional tweeting.

“Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit. The open exchange of information creates opportunities for individuals, organizations, and businesses alike. We recognized value in this exchange and planned to amplify it in a meaningful and relevant manner,” Twitter states.

In effect, Twitter is acknowledging that their facility is an ideal way of promoting specific products, but there are more effective ways of advertising with the site than simply presenting links to products. This week, Twitter commences the next phase of their advertising strategy, through the use of ‘Promoted Trending Topics’.

Promoting Trending Topics commence with a promotion for Disney Pixar’s latest film, Toy Story 3. The film is being advertised on the right hand toolbar of Twitter, and the ad is highlighted in yellow so it’s obvious that it is a Promoted Trending Topic. Clicking the link takes you to a search results page, which lets you see what people are tweeting about the new film.

Twitter has commented on the new advertising model: “As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time.”

So far, Promoted Trending Topics are not defined by location, but it’s easy to imagine that this will be the next step for Twitter’s advertising campaign – to establish topics of interest based upon the demographics, geography or interests of the Twitter user.

Twitter enhances its functionality for users

Jenny Sanderson — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:46:54 +0000

Twitter has just announced that they have developed an evolved version of their Tweeting service, which enables Twitter users to update their location automatically when they post a tweet to the site.

With the new feature, updates will now reveal the location of the person who posted the status update. It will be enabled for Twitter Web and Twitter’s Mobile Web capability. When a reader wishes to find out where the post was sent from, they simply click on the link in the tweet which points to ‘Twitter Place’.

Twitter has designed the new functionality to provide more context for tweets, and offer more capability for online social networking. Now, if a group of people are all located within the same area (such as at a football match, concert or theatre performance), they will be able to click on the Twitter Place link to see all the most recent tweets being sent from that location. This means that festivals, holidays or events will now have an additional form of media coverage, created by social networking.

The API functionality behind the idea has now been made available to developers, so that it can be integrated in to programmes. With the exception of Firefox and Chrome, all platforms should be supporting the new functionality.
Twitter is becoming one of the most popular ways for people to keep friends and business associates updated, in just a few characters.

The nature of the site means that busy internet users need spend less time on status updates, and have the functionality to ‘tweet’ in a matter of seconds. The new feature allowing Place updates will revolutionise the site to some extent, as it provides geographical background to users and readers. This functionality will make it easier to locate potential new business prospects, target new and existing customers, and enable natural geographical groups to form through online networking.

Twitter Places will be rolled out in 65 countries, next week.

Twitter announce acquisition of traffic data usage startup

James Oliver — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:10:53 +0000

Twitter announced this week that they have acquired a group known as Smallthought Systems, a start up company that are responsible for Trendly, an application that allows web sites to find out more about the usage and traffic data that is collected by Google Analytics.

The popular microblogging web site, which also recently announced it would integrate advertising with searches through its Promoted Tweets, plans to use existing Smallthought employees as part of the web site’s analytics team.

According to a post by Kevin Weil on the official Twitter Blog:

“The new employees have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners,”

The company required extra staff and resources in order to maintain the overflowing amount of information that the Twitter web site handles on a daily basis, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costello. The service currently receives more than 65 million updates every day from its users, whose numbers are nearing 200 million.

“Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” the company said on their blog.

The staff from Smallthought and Trendly will also be working on new tools and products to offer for Twitter partners in the future as well.

Twitter seek to define ‘core Twitter experience’

Andy Russell — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:00:07 +0000

Social networking site Twitter has announced this week that it will no longer be allowing third parties to spam the Twitter stream with annoying messages that advertise their products or services.

The companies chief operating officer Dick Costolo stated in his blog post that Twitter are committed to creating the best possible “user experience”.

“It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem,” he wrote.

“For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third-party to inject paid tweets in to a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

Costolo also stated that the company were going to start charging companies that sell advertising based around Twitter content, “where that Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) for the advertising sale”.

This would mean that companies such as Ad.ly for example, a US site that sells adverts into streams, and Tweetup may need to begin to look elsewhere for revenue.

Costolo also said that companies could continue to sell analytics and other services that are based around Twitter.

Twitter said that they would be issuing a new set of revised terms of service that will outline what will and will not be permitted under the new rules in the clearest way possible.

Google Replay to allow search of old Tweets

Matt Thomas — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:38:33 +0000

Google have announced a brand new feature that will allow users of social networking site Twitter to search a public archive of Tweets efficiently, the service will be named Google Replay.

Service will help greatly to archive the billions of status updates made in Twitter from the millions of users registered with the site.

To date the Twitter search had been struggling a great deal to even show users Tweets from a month ago due to such massive demand and use on the site.

This new search feature created by Google will help archive and search of both Tweets and status updates. Twitter are currently receiving 50 million Tweets every day worldwide, over the course of a month this is incredibly overwhelming in terms of data, Google’s new archiving system will help to rectify this.

At the moment Google Replay can only search through a months worth of Tweets but Google have announced that in the future it will be able to search through all Tweets since the inception of the site in March 2006. This will include Tweets from the specific user or from other users that they may be following.

Google Replay will also offer a timeline which will allow users to choose a specific year, date or time in which they are looking to find a Tweet.

This could prove to be a rather handy service and is another example of co-operation between Google and Twitter after Google ensure that real-time Tweets would be available in their search.

Google’s Android to receive official Twitter app

James Oliver — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:27:29 +0000

Twitter have confirmed that they will finally be releasing the first official Twitter application for a mobile operating system, the beneficiary of this will be Google’s Android.

Co-founder of the Twitter site, Evan Williams, said that they decided to make their own official Twitter application because new users are constantly having trouble finding the right software to access the site on their mobile phones.

The company did not reveal whether the Twitter team would be building the client in-house or whether they would be looking to acquire the technology from a third party that has already built an un-official application that can support Twitter such as Twidroid or Swith.

Twitter have already purchased third party app Tweetie for the iPhone suggesting that they may be releasing an official Twitter app for the Apple operating system soon enough.

In the same announcement Twitter revealed that they would soon be releasing their own official link-shortener to rival companies such as TinyUrl and Bit.ly.

Most Twitter clients already have a built in link-shortener that auto-condenses the URL address in order to help keep the Tweets within the 140 character limit so this does make sense.

As Twitter expands on its 105 million registered users a day it would seem that they are making moves to support the growing popularity of the social networking site.

Twitter to allow advertising on its site

Andre — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:24:33 +0000

Twitter has announced that it will allow advertising on the site for the very first time in the coming weeks. The social networking site had previously not had any form of advertising on the site, but they appear to have developed a way to ‘Twitterfy’ the use of adverts on the site.

Advertisers will be able to purchase “promoted Tweets” that will appear on search result pages on the Twitter site. Twitter seem keen to underline the fact that they will not be regular internet advertisements, they must “resonate with users” and become a part of their conversations according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

As would be expected a few big names have already signed up to be a part of the promoted Tweets service, including Starbucks and Sony.

As not to go from having no adverts to completely overloading the site with them only one Tweet will show up on each search page, but we will see how long that lasts.

This is Twitter’s first move in the direction of profit making, previously the company has not made any money, only now are they starting to do deals to raise revenue.

Promoted Tweets is only the first step in Twitter’s overall advertising plan, in the future they hope to include the promoted Tweets in a users stream of posts rather than just on the search page.

Twitter seem to be following a similar path to Facebook, no adverts at first, then the allowance of just a few, surely it will not be too long until each page is flanked by ads offering bigger muscles, compensation for injuries and strangely high paying jobs.

New look for Twitter homepage

Andre — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:36:46 +0000

In July 2009 Twitter unveiled a major update to its homepage, this revamp ensured that a lot of information was shown on the homepage, much more than had been visible in earlier versions. This was quite a big change, a major overhaul of what Twitter users had come to expect from the homepage, 9 months down the line and Twitter are at it again as they have this week announced another major rework of their homepage.

The new look homepage will focus mainly on ‘real time’ updates as it now features recent trends and popular Tweets in real time. The update will also entail real time search options as well as a feature that Twitter have named ‘Top Tweets’. These are Tweets from users that Twitter considers high profile, so most likely celebrities or anyone else in the public eye.

The main premise behind these updates is to entice more users to join the social networking site by presenting them with Tweets that they may be of interest to them, i.e. posts by a selection of well known names.

Trending topics will remain on the homepage but the way that they are displayed has been changed, they will now scroll across the page rather then being listed, this will increase the amount of space available for content that Twitter deems more important.

A blog from a Twitter representative sums up the reasoning behind the changes well:

“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.”

Facebook and Twitter to be added to BBC site

Jenny Sanderson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:10:10 +0000

The unstoppable rise of social networking shows no signs of slowing down as yet another major corporation has seen the benefit of incorporating the ever-growing medium of communication into its service.

The BBC have this week announced that they have partnered up with Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to make their digital service more social. Why they would want to do that I have no idea, but having some sort of social networking feature on your website does seem to be the latest internet trend.

BBC director of future media and technology, Erik Huggers, explained that partnerships with Twitter, Bebo and Facebook had already been in place for a while, they have just been waiting for the launch of iPlayer 3.0 beta to incorporate it.

“We are close to launching the third version of the iPlayer in beta which will have many more social functions embedded within it,” said Mr Huggers. “People will be able to bring their Facebook friends onto the iPlayer so they can share what they are listening to or watching with each other more easily.”

This seems altogether a fairly unnecessary feature to add to what is fundamentally a means of watching television, do your friends honestly need to know what you are watching? And if they do then surely you could just do things the old fashioned way and tell them?

It seems a fairly long winded procedure too, in order for iPlayer users to integrate their social networking accounts onto the BBC site you first will need a BBC username and password to login. After this is complete you will then have to input the details of your Facebook, Twitter or Bebo account into the iPlayer. Once this is done you will be signed into iPlayer’s social networking tool so that you can see what your friends are sharing and watching in the oddly named “coloured puffs” that will be situated beneath the player.

It seems as though we will soon be living in an online world where we are never not connected to a social network and where our friends can see everything from what we watch to what we’re wearing, scary times ahead.

Twitter announce service that knows exactly where you are

Matt Thomas — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:00:48 +0000

As if it wasn’t enough to know exactly what people are doing at any point during the day, Twitter is now going to ensure that we know exactly where they are doing it as well, but I have absolutely no idea why. The Twitter as we know it simply asks you the question “what are you doing?” to which you type your answer, It will now also ask the question “where are you doing it?” but here’s the thing, you do not even have to type the answer as Twitter will already know.

They have this week announced that they will be making a geo-location service available on the site. The ever creative people at Twitter are continuously innovating and changing what you can input into the strict 140 character tweet limit and geo-location is the latest edition. They have already pushed the use of URL shorteners like bit.ly and TinyURL which allow ridiculously long web links to be shortened so that they can fit in a tweet, and the use of hash tags has also taken off. So they thought that it would be good to add the person’s exact location into the tweet as well, but it is questionable just how popular this will be.

Twitter co-founder Biz stone explained the thinking behind the new feature:

“A recent burst of interest in location-sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets,”

Although this may be true it is difficult to think exactly what benefit this feature has apart from informing people that you are not at home, which may not always be wise. The service can be toggled on and off by the user for privacy however, as default it will show the general neighbourhood location that you are in, but if the user chooses it will show the exact street that you are on in a mini-map that comes up next to each of your tweets, scary.

The service will go live this week for those that wish to tell the world exactly what they are doing and where they are doing it.