Twitter Archive

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

This afternoon Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posted a link to a new job opening at electronics retailer Best Buy. The job title is, “Sr. Manager - Emerging Media Marketing”.  The job seems very similar to a former position I held at a Fortune 100 company.

Here’s the general overview of the position (click the link to read the full job description):

“The Emerging Media Marketing Manager is the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists. This leader will create both bolt-on social and mobile marketing initiatives and other new initiatives and identify business opportunities that can be solved wholly or in part by applying or developing social technology, digital and software strategies and technologies .”

If you are interested in a position in Minnesota, this is actually a pretty damn hot job. To be honest if this is the kind of position you would consider, but don’t care much for Minnesota, I’d still recommend considering it. Most large companies only have one of these positions and Best Buy appears to be doing some things right when it comes to online marketing.  Best Buy wants a lot of experience which is required for a position of this level.

Here’s where the job goes south for me…it’s in the “preferred qualifications” section which has two bullet points and they are:
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Last night at the Entrepreneur’s Roundtable, NY-based Voicefield founder Trevor presented his pitch about the service. I’ve posted video of his pitch below which begins with, “if I only had two words in, they would be voice twitter”. Frankly he could have stopped there and we would have known what his service does.

Trevor notes that he wants to affect the way people communicate culturally. Voicefield captures messages left via phone via voicemails. Apparently any phone, every phone is now a megaphone.

Trevor says he is very passionate about the human voice. Fred Wilson commented on the product by saying that he gets his voicemails transcribed as he prefers text. While Trevor was talking, I was thinking that if the video twitter didn’t work, could an audio twitter work?
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Swiss-based Sobees has announced updates to their two client applications: bDule and Sobees. Founder Francois Bochatay explains the difference between the two application by noting that bDule is their starter kit providing a Windows-based client combining Twitter and Facebook support. Sobees is a multi-window application that combines many “bDules” together.

Most of the updates in today’s 0.9.6.5 release are usability and performance enhancements. They have also rewritten the Flickr search. The new functionality is the addition of Digg and the Digg search along with the ability to submit items from others windows to Digg. They have also added new themed content windows for the MLB, soccer, tennis and the NFL.

The Sobees tools compete in the same space as Tweetdeck and the new Seesmic. Currently the Sobees tools are only available for Windows. The company is working on a cross-platform version which they expect to release this summer.

There are a handful of various desktop applications that can be used to track Twitter on your computer. In this article, I will be comparing two of those applications: Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck. For the purposes of this review, I am using TweetDeck 0.6.2 and Seesmic Desktop 0.2.1.

On the surface, both applications are very similar. Listed below are some of the general features you’ll find in both TweetDeck and Seesmic. Read the rest of this entry »

So the big news this week is that Facebook plans on opening their version of a .com auction for names this Friday night. I can just imagine the call that went out from editors at CrunchAbleBeatReadInsiderGigaNet to their writers to cancel all plans and be ready for the launch and the potential for breakage. I am sure somewhere a designer is creating the Facebook version of a whale. I like Anil’s future look at how the night will go.

My take is (and has always been) that you should brand yourself and/or your business and never brand another company in an attempt to backdoor your brand. Whether it’s Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Pages, Geocities, GoDaddy or now Facebook, you need to always do what you can to control the flow. Controlling the flow is very, very easy and here’s how it’s done. And the control I am talking about is from your customer’s perspective.

Buy a domain name and use that as your vehicle.

Does that mean you shouldn’t create a presence on Facebook or MySpace or wherever your customers are? Of course not. And I think it makes sense to grab your brand’s vanity URL if it is available. I agree with Marshall about as he says his domain name is better than any vanity URL will ever be. Chris Messina takes a more technical look at the vanity urls.

This afternoon I watched an interesting video from newly-launched social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk who seems to think the complete opposite. Gary compares Facebook fan pages to Twitter accounts - he’s right that FB FP have more flexibility but he completely leaves out the concept about owning your brand. (side note, somehow he already ”owns” the facebook.com/gary url meaning you won’t be able to get it) The ultimate flexibility for a fan is to be able to find all of a brand’s social interactions.

What happens to the people who aren’t on Facebook or who don’t care to “friend” a brand. If you push to one property, you lose the opportunity to get with users on all of the other properties. I don’t care if all a brand has on their xyz.com/net/uk/de/eu site are links to all of their social network pages, it’s still a much better interaction than allowing your brand to be controlled by one social network. It does add one extra click but the overall value of that click is higher than the alternative.

I have a unique perspective - not just from being in this industry since the beginning and having worked on all sides - but because I process business cards for a living. It’s amazing to see how many brands don’t even have their own domain for email and are using an ISP’s email server. A large percentage of cards outside the tech space have no URL at all. Every business card must have a URL on it and that URL should point to your company or personal website - not one or more networks.

Think about offline social interactions as a transaction. By pointing to one URL it makes the transaction smooth and easy for the customer. You only have seconds to make the transaction - would you rather push the person to one social network or to a site that offers them to connect with you how they want to?

Yesterday I made my way from the WWDC to Kara’s Cupcakes and then to the Twitter HQ. The woman at Kara’s Cupcakes remembered the person who bought cupcakes and then got on the suggested user list (I am told she is no longer on the list).

My video experience is posted below - I left out the piece from inside their office. I spoke with a couple of Twitter employees who told me that you can’t get on the list by delivering cupcakes. Apparently you either get on the list if you are an “editor’s pick” or if you get a big boost in “velocity” which means that you get massive followers in a short time.

Tomorrow I will explain why I think that having default lists on any service is a good thing - except when they are used the way Twitter (and to a big extent Friendfeed) are using the lists. I have put some of my thoughts in the video below.

Thanks to everyone who participated in my fun posts over the past week!
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