On his show last night, Stephen Colbert introduced a new hash tag, #preparethem. The hash tag was in response to Mitt Romney claiming that the negativity in the Republican primary was good, because it will prepare the winning candidate for the general election. Colbert decided the candidates needed some help in this area, and posted two tweets “live” during his show, and others since:
Since introducing the hash tag on last night’s show, Twitter using have been posting their own creative lines throughout the entire day. Some are pretty well thought out and entertaining. You check them out here.
With so many social networks, sometimes it can be difficult to figure out where to post content and information. It’s important to remember that each social network has a different audience, and they want and expect (and react to) different types of content. How do you figure out which social network to post different types of content on? Let this amazing flow chart guide you…
Click on the chart to expand.
But in all seriousness, it is crucial to treat each social network differently, because your connections will vary on each, and so will the information your connections are interested in receiving from you. So unlink your Twitter handle to the other networks (except perhaps LinkedIn) and give each social network some personalized attention, so show them they you know who they are, and want to engage with them.
First and foremost: Amanda Knox has been acquitted. The live-stream of the verdict was scheduled for 3:45 p.m. EDT today. All (or most all) of us at Racepoint Group were wired into our computers eager to witness history. Being perhaps a little unhealthily addicted to Twitter, I went a step further and plugged “Knox” into a search column on Tweetdeck: For comparison, I searched “Bieber” shortly thereafter. While that column also updated continuously, the Knox updates were even faster and furious…-er. It’s no surprise that Twitter explodes with breaking national and global news. However, I’d never tried doing a live search on such a hot topic. As you can see, anyone who wanted to read the tweets of the masses couldn’t possibly hope to catch them all without having supersonic reading abilities. It’s become so easy to publish content that for events of this magnitude, you have to know what you’re looking for – be it via a more specific search term, or a more limited pool or resources (just folks you follow, for instance). As more and more content becomes more readily accessible at rates that we can’t pace, we need to learn to be way more discriminating of our resources.
I must have said this 100 times, and I’m going to say it again. The total number of Twitter followers that you have isn’t the most important statistic. It’s who they are. Do they engage in conversation, reply to your tweets, and re-tweet your content.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand this concept, Newt Gingrich included. According to some reports, a whopping 92 percent of Newt’s Twitter followers are fake (other reports say the number is closer to 80 percent). In either case, over 1 million of his followers are not real.
If you scroll down Newt’s list of followers, you’ll find that many of them don’t have profile pictures and are essentially inactive users, with less then 10 total tweets, and followers, such as the following handles:
Why does Newt have so many fake followers? Apparently, he decided to purchase followers – that’s why someone on his staff has told reporters. This is not a new concept, but it is certainly the most glaring example of it, and a good reminder that Twitter follower numbers can be very misleading.
This is a guest post by Lisa DeCanio. Follow her on Twitter at @lisa_decanio
Last May, I joined thousands of my classmates as we flooded the Big House for the University of Michigan’s 2010 graduation ceremony. This particular graduation, though, was different than most. We had to stand in line at 6:30am to get patted down by Secret Service Agents before our speaker arrived in style on Marine One. Yep, President Barack Obama was my graduation speaker.
I’m sure his speech was inspiring. I vaguely remember him talking to us about open-mindedness, good citizenship and similar qualities a president would hope to instill in his constituents. However, I don’t remember a single word from his time at the podium. What I do remember though, is that in the middle of his speech, Mr. President updated his Twitter feed.
I was confused. As an animated speaker, his hands definitely weren’t sneakily tweeting from the inside of his academic dress. Being relatively new to Twitter, maybe I was naïve to think every account was operated by the individual’s name it bears. Either way, I was disappointed, and my faith in the transparency of both the presidency and social media took a downward spiral.
Then last weekend, President Obama gave a nod to social media enthusiasts with his announcement that he would begin doing his own tweeting from his handle, @BarackObama. Adopting the commonly used practice of signing his initials “-BO” after his updates, the American public will now get a 140-character glimpse into the president’s thoughts as he begins his re-election campaign.
While I personally am a proponent of transparency, in the wake of the Anthony Weiner scandal, it seems risky for the president to expose himself (no pun intended) to his 8.7 million followers. Can you imagine if that BlackBerry got into the wrong hands? The move practically invites hackers looking to cause a stir under Obama’s alias. Not to mention, haters wanting to publically bash him now have even more of a reason to do so via Twitter.
On the flip side, Obama’s social media campaign proved successful during his 2008 presidential run —why not go for round two? As social networks like Facebook and Twitter continue to gain momentum, tweeting from his personal account proves to be the next logical step for the president to send his message to the masses without it being filtered through mainstream media channels. For the time being, though, the president’s tweets have avoided any political references. His first tweet was a sentimental shout-out to America’s dads: “Being a father is sometimes my hardest but always my most rewarding job. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. –BO”
What do you think of President Obama joining Twitter? Will it help or hurt his 2012 campaign?
This is a guest post from Lauren Ginsberg, an Account Coordinator at Racepoint Group. Follow her on Twitter @LaurenGinsberg.
Ah, the old adage, think before you speak… or shall I say tweet. The Redner Group made a huge faux pas when they angrily tweeted at reviewers for publishing not so rave reviews about 2k’s ‘Duke Nukem Forever’. The tweet, “too many went too far with their reviews. We r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom” left a sour taste that ultimately caused 2k to sack the agency.
Now more than ever, tweeted content is easy to find and just as easy to share. Users must take into account that even if they act on their own accord, like agency founder James Redner did, foul tweets in relation to your client’s product reviews are a direct representation of them as well as the agency.
PR is about getting credible placements for clients, and while we would all love reviews of their products to be positive, we cannot control what someone is going to write. That is the major difference between PR and advertising.
Unfortunately for Redner whose reputation is now tarnished, the lesson was learned the hard way. Moving forward, I bet they will think before they tweet.
This is a guest post by Sarah Willey. Follow her on Twitter @willey774.
For quite some time, police departments have been using social media to push out notifications about missing children. In January, Facebook set up 53 AMBER Alert pages — one for each of the 50 states, along with pages for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands. Interested Facebook users can sign up for alerts pertinent to their individual states. The notifications appear on news feeds as they’re issued, and can also be shared with users’ Facebook friends.
Since going missing last week, friends, family, strangers and even celebrities have taken to Facebook and Twitter to help find Indiana University student Lauren Spierer. Lauren was last seen in the early morning hours of last Friday walking to her apartment. She had reportedly been at a bar Thursday night and then went to a friend’s party. Her keys were found blocks away from where she was last seen, but there’s no other sign of her.
News of the situation was immediately shot out across Facebook: 126,000 people have agreed to attend a Facebook event titled “URGENT! Please help spread the word about Lauren Spierer’s disappearance!” and a Facebook page, find.lauren, has been liked by more than 20,000 people so far.
In addition, 11,000 people have joined a group in her name and a Twitter feed @NewsOnLaurenS which as of right now has more than 12,000 followers. It’s been used to tweet updates, distribute a photo flier, organize search parties and promote a fund set up by the IU Hillel to support search efforts. Several big celebrities have sent out tweets to help the campaign.
I hope it pays for Lauren and her family so this nightmare her family is going can be over.
If you’ve been watching the news lately, I’m sure you’ve seen the Rep. Anthony Weiner Twitter story. In short, he sent a picture of himself to a woman via Twitter. After denying he sent the picture for about a week (he claimed his Twitter account was hacked), Rep. Weiner finally admitted that he did indeed send the picture, but it was meant to be a direct message.
While the details of this story have supplied endless jokes for the late night comedy shows, it also shows that people have a fabricated sense of privacy. How many times have you heard about people mistakenly sending public tweets that were meant to be private, sending photos that weren’t meant to be shared, or posting a Facebook status that was meant to be a private message.
The social media snafus are endless, and a lot of high-profile people have been making them. Politicians, athletes, actors, musicians – everyone has had their fare share of mistakes. And it’s not just limited to people. Companies, such as Chrysler and Red Cross, have been victim of careless Twitter mistakes when employees published their own tweet to the company handle by mistake.
So what does this all mean? I think there are 3 valuable social media lessons we can learn from Rep. Weiner’s Twitter failure:
Learn how to use social media: If you’re not sure how to use the platform correctly, you’ll probably make a mistake.
Don’t be stupid: If you’re sharing something through social media, make sure it’s appropriate. Privacy is an illusion, just because you share something through a private message, doesn’t mean the person receiving that information won’t publicly distribute that content with one click.
Be honest: If you make a mistake just admit it. Rep. Weiner attracted so much more attention to this story by lying about it, which dragged it on for an entire week. If you mess up admit it right away and move it.
This is a guest post from Mandy Miller, an Account Coordinator at Racepoint Group. Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMMiller9.
In our beautiful Racepoint Waltham office, my desk sits next to a window. Even with this scenic ‘advantage’ for weather, I found out about the storms in Massachusetts via WCVB Boston’s Facebook page before the storms even moved into the Boston suburbs.
The tornadoes in western Massachusetts yesterday brought shock to the New England area and nation. The news especially tugs on my heart as I’m a seasoned severe weather vet native of Tornado Alley. Growing up in rural Iowa, we learned of tornadoes from the television or radio (if you still had power), within an hour or even minutes in advance. While I was able to experience the ugly side of Mother Nature first-hand, I was never able to use social media to save lives or connect with others. If your home was still standing, you would see images from across the state and nation hours later on the television or in the papers (yes, the printed ones) the next day. Chances are it was only your small-town community that helped you rebuild your life. Today, with the power of these tools, social media is redefining what our communities are, as well as helping save lives.
During the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, doctors in Japan used Twitter to reach chronically-ill patients, instructing them on where to go to get life-saving treatment after phone networks became inoperable. In the days that followed the tornadoes in Alabama, Facebook & Twitter became an epicenter for people wanting to help, reunions of loved ones, pets and even treasured photos. It also provided public forums to remember those killed in the storms. Today, your community is the world.
Although community and connections are very important in these situations, I’m still baffled at the number of individuals who lose their lives in natural disasters, and have to wonder how many fatalities could be prevented using social media, apps and technology such as weather text alerts available today. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reported 132 deaths and 750 injuries, with 156 unaccounted for in Joplin, Missouri. If more individuals and families were empowered with the simple tools that alert you of natural disasters and severe weather, I can only imagine further heartache that could be avoided from these tragedies.
Have you been affected by severe weather this year or recently and used social media to communicate and connect with others?
During the first two weeks of May I went abroad on vacation, but did much more then change locations. While I was away I turned off my phone shunned myself from all social networks – including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – and took a break from the fast-paced world of social media.
While I did use the Internet for the basic purposes of looking up directions, train schedules, etc., I thought of these two weeks as a cleansing period, where I could be disconnected from the (social) world. At first it was strange not to be constantly updated by friends and online connections, but after a few days my new reality began to feel normal. However, what I noticed most upon returning home, was the different feelings I’ve had towards Facebook and Twitter.
As I left for the airport I forgot about Twitter almost immediately and didn’t think about logging in until I received an email alerting me of a DM after returning home. Even then, it took three days for me to check Twitter. I’ve also found it awkward to begin using Twitter again after a 2 week hiatus, as tweeting (and mostly, reading all those tweets) feels more like a project then a welcome activity.
On the other hand, I went through Facebook detox the first few hours of my trip, wanting to log-in while waiting for my plane at the airport. While that feeling passed once I was in the air, upon returning home one of the first things I did online was check Facebook, and I spent some time on the site checking to see what friends had been up to while I was away.
Reflecting on my vacation and social media hiatus, I’ve come to the conclusion that Facebook is a much more natural fit to human behavior (at least for me). The way it organizes information and enables people to observe and interact is easy and interesting. I felt like I could easily see what I had missed while I had been away. On the other hand, Twitter didn’t pull me in, at all. It organizes information for real-time monitoring and engagement, and in no way was I functioning in real-time. It took me a few days to catch up to that speed (I’m still not there), and at points it feels like I need to re-learn the fast-paced Twitter environment.
I’m curious to hear from others that have taken a social media vacation, and how you’ve adjusted upon returning home. Please share your stories and experiences in the comment section below.
