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Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Murder Victim’s Family Find Out About Death Via Facebook

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

In the early hours of Boxing Day 2011 Anuj Bidve was with a group of friends visiting Manchester when he was murdered. The identity of Mr Bidve was not announced until his next of kin back in his homeland of India had been informed by the police. Unfortunately the family did not find out about Mr Bidve’s death via the police but through Facebook.

At first sight this fact is shocking, my thought was that the police must have been very slow at tracing Mr Bidve’s relatives. In reality it would be very difficult to beat the speed of the Internet in general and social media sites in particular. The key here is that Mr Bidve was out with friends. Those friends are almost certainly on Facebook and it will probably have been via a message posted by one of them that the victim’s family discovered the awful truth. The police would have been trying to track down the exact location of Mr Bidve’s next of kin, then contacting the local police who in turn would have to dispatch somebody to tell the family of what has unfolded in Manchester. Meanwhile any of his friends could have posted a status update on Facebook that would have been visible to his family in a matter of seconds.

This is just another example of how social media is changing the world. Those of you on social media sites are probably already aware of the speed at which information is shared and that information can be transmitted far more quickly via social media than through TV, radio or newspapers.

Just today I learnt about the death of former Liverpool and Everton footballer, Gary Ablett, through Facebook rather than through traditional media outlets. The Arab Spring has been documented on Facebook and even more so on Twitter. Social media sites allow us access to information that at one time we would never have known existed. You Tube is alive with video clips of repression from many countries. It is little wonder that many of the more repressive regimes in the world look to censor the internet. During the riots in the UK during 2011 social media was blamed as being part of the cause of the riots, allowing people to communicate and organise themselves. However, it was also responsible for organising some of the clean up operations that took place in the shattered city centres.

Many technology journalists now see Twitter as a legitimate news source. I wonder how many news organisations use social media as a way of discovering news stories? By this I do not mean having a Twitter account and asking people to contact them with news. Rather I am talking about journalists scouring Twitter for news that is breaking. Twitter provides a virtual timeline of world events as they happen. In the US Andy Carvin of NPR (@acarvin) does just this. He is collating the Arab Spring and his Twitter feed can be very moving. I saw him interviewed on TWiG with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani during which he revealed that he searches Twitter for words and phrases that people might use in a Tweet about a particular type of event. So he might search for the word “explosion” and then see what results he gets.

The world is changing at a phenomenal pace and we are all being swept along with it whether we like it or not. Our more inter-connected world provides us with opportunities to make new contacts and maintain old contacts in a way that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. Along with the benefits there will be drawbacks such as the Bidve family have discovered this week. My condolences go out to them in this most painful of moments.

Tags: Anej Bidve, Arab Spring, Facebook, Gary Ablett, Social Media, Twitter, UK Riots
Posted in Internet News, Social Media | No Comments »

Do the London Riots Show a Dark Side To Social Media? Yes and No.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Riot Police can only look on as a building burns in London

As I am typing this article Britain is wondering what has happened. There have been riots in a number of major cities, including the capital, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Nottingham. The initial riot was sparked by the death of Mark Duggan who was shot by police last Thursday. Since then there have been numerous incidents across London and in other cities around the nation.

It is now emerging that those taking part in the riots are often using social media services such as Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to co-ordinate their activities. Usually this involves users simply letting friends know about vulnerable businesses that can be attacked. Many of the incidents do not seem to be politically motivated but are simply the acts of a mob element within society.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has cut short his holiday in Tuscany to chair a special meeting of COBRA to try to find a way to deal with the unrest that is sweeping many of our cities and the British Parliament has been recalled from its summer recess to discuss the matter. Britain has seen riots before, they were an annual event in the first half of the 1980’s but these are perhaps different in a number of ways. During the 80’s it tended to be just deprived inner city areas that were affected. Last night we have seen disturbances in the relatively affluent area of Ealing. We are also living in an era of 24 hour news coverage and smartphone usage. This means that there is much more material available to convey the magnitude of the events. Not only are journalists reporting the news but so are the people. I have just carried out a search for “London Riots” on You Tube and have returned 7930 results. Trending topics on Twitter in the UK right now include #riotcleanup, #prayforlondon, #pias (The organisation who had a warehouse burnt down), #Cobra and Teresa May (The British home secretary).

I have watched many comments about the riots on both Facebook and Twitter over the last 24 hours and find that the vast majority are against what has happened. One of those trending topics, #riotcleanup, is a way that people are collaborating on Twitter to organise clean up efforts. One Tweet I have just read is from @kayaburgess and reads “Almost everyone getting off the train at Clapham Junction is carrying a broom.” There is now a website www.riotcleanup.co.uk that has been created again to help co-ordinate the clean-up operation, not by the authorities but by ordinary Londoners who are appalled by the activities of a minority.

The press have been quick to say how the rioters have been using social media but I think it is worthwhile mentioning the good ways that social media has been utilised. The first hand video clips that are currently being broadcast and are available all over the net give us a real sense of what is happening, far more than any journalist can in a news report. The anger that has been felt by the majority of the British population has a way to express itself in a way that simply would not have been possible 10 years ago. There are numerous groups that have been created on Facebook including “Supporting the Met Police against the London rioters” that at the time of writing has just short of half a million members.

This year we have seen Facebook and Twitter both used during the so-called Arab Spring to help organise resistance in many Arab countries. We in The West have looked on and even felt a greater affinity to our brethren in their struggle for freedom. Now we have seen these same technologies used to harm our own communities and there are calls for services such as Twitter and BBM to be closed down until the riots have stopped. I would urge that this does not happen, to do so would start to turn Britain into a totalitarian state. When would the next time be that social media services would be turned off? The next time a big anti-government march is planned? Let the people have their say, let the people use social media to co-ordinate their efforts to stop this violence.

I currently have a poll running on my Facebook business page asking whether people think that BBM should be turned off, you can access it at http://trymy.info/mRuXHZ. I would love to hear your views on this.

Over the last few days we have seen social media used first in a negative way but now in a more positive way. Social media is not going to go away to try and control or censor social media is ultimately pointless as people always find a way to circumnavigate controls and censorship. Let us embrace social media. Let us use it to give people a voice that can be heard not just in our communities but across the globe. Let us use it to show what is great about Britain, the people, our tolerance and the fact that we are prepared to go out not armed with a broom handle to do damage but a broom to clean up the mess.

I love you Great Britain!

Tags: BBM, BlackBerry Messenger, Censorship, Cobra, David Cameron, Facebook, London Riots, riotcleanup.co.uk, Teresa May, Twitter
Posted in Internet News, Social Media | 3 Comments »

Yellow Pages, Search Engines or Social Media, Who Do You Trust?

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Yell, Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter

Who do you trust when searching for local businesses?

I read an interesting article today that claims that people trust The Yellow Pages more than they do search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. It is a US based survey but it claims that 84% of those who took part in the survey used The Yellow Pages to find a local business in the last year against 76% who used a search engine. Only 32% said that they used a social network such as Facebook and Twitter.

So why would this be? I think a lot of it might come down to The Yellow Pages being a longer established brand. If we are honest if you were looking for something back in the mid nineties then pretty much your only option was to use The Yellow Pages. Search engines were still a relatively new idea and it was relatively easy to manipulate their results. Add to that many local businesses did not have a web presence in those days so you had little option but to go for The Yellow Pages.

As time has passed then search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated and so their results are more relevant. Local businesses are all waking up to the fact that having a website, even in its most basic form, is a requirement nowadays. The Yellow Pages have not been idle though and they now have a strong online presence through yell.com.

The statistics quoted earlier are for both online and print versions of The Yellow Pages so that perhaps skews the figures slightly as you cannot get a paper version of Google or Bing. I think that it is a valid figure though as I have to confess that last year I needed a tree surgeon and I had already picked up The Yellow Pages and was thumbing through it before I thought to myself “Why am I not looking for this online?”

I should hang my head in shame at the reason I did not go online initially to conduct my search. My thought pattern was that I probably wouldn’t find a small business online and a quicker option would probably be to use The Yellow Pages. The point I am trying to make is that even though I work in new media and deal with local businesses every day, help to promote their businesses online every day I still thought I would have a greater choice out of The Yellow Pages. Oh, and it was the paper copy of The Yellow Pages, not the website that I was using. I did put my copy down and start to search online instead, with a good result I might add.

This shows how much we are creatures of habit. I used the paper copy because that is what I have always done. I had never even thought about searching on line for a local company prior to that. I do now always search online when looking for goods and services, but if it has taken me this long to get round to using the web how long will it take more casual internet users?

One other thought I had on these figures was that of trust. Figures are constantly being bandied about that only about a third of users will click on the paid for ads on a search engine result page (SERP). Yet The Yellow Pages is full of nothing but ads. The Yellow Pages do not do anything to check or endorse companies it is simply a directory and the company pays for their ad and chooses which section they want to be listed in. We all know that when we use The Yellow Pages we tend to choose the companies whose ads stand out the most. This is no objective way of choosing a company, Company A have a more eye catching ad than Company B and therefore Company A must be better than Company B. I wonder if over time people will start to trust paid for ads on SERP’s? One comment I heard a few weeks ago was from somebody who only clicks on the ads and their rationale was that if a company is prepared to pay for me to click on their link then they must be serious about wanting to do business with me.

Perhaps this sort of view is going to become more prevalent in the coming years and it may very well be worth local businesses start to consider using services like Google Adwords or Microsoft adCenter for Bing. The advantage for advertisers is that you can choose which search terms you want your ad to appear under, meaning really targeted advertising.

Only 32% said that they used social media to search for a local company. I believe that this is primarily because social media is where search engines where ten years ago. People know that they exist, they use them, but they do not yet trust their search results enough to go to these sites first when looking for goods and services. People are still more interested in being sociable with their friends rather than with brands or businesses. It will be up to businesses to offer something in return for liking their Facebook page or following their Twitter account. It is also fait to say that while most household names are on one or both of the major social networks many smaller businesses have not yet moved into the social space.

The growth of mobile may spur the development of local searches on line. Often when you are searching for a local product you are searching for a telephone number to speak to somebody and so it follows that having your telephone number in a clickable format on your ad or webpage is likely to help contact rates from prospective customers. They can find your business via a search engine and then being able to click on the telephone number will be easier than keying it in. Of course yell.com can also provide this functionality via their website too.

I have been so intrigued by the results of this survey that I have set up my own on my home page. You will find it half way down the page, please do answer the single question and let’s see if our results are the same here in the UK.

Tags: AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Google, Microsoft adCenter, Social Media, Twitter, Yahoo, yell.com, Yellow Pages
Posted in Internet News, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | No Comments »

Internet World (Day 1) Round Up

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Today was the first day of Internet World the annual expo for all things web related held at Earls Court, London. There were two things that seemed to be most in evidence one was cloud computing with plenty of suppliers of cloud based services, all of whom gave slightly different versions of what cloud computing entailed and the other thing that was in evidence was queueing!

I did not attend any of the talks that I had originally planned on going to, but that was not necessarily a bad thing as I ended up attending five extremely interesting talks. The day was a little fatiguing due to the amount of queuing, on one occasion I queued for an hour to listen to a talk that lasted 20 minutes.

OK, enough of the moaning let me tell you about the good stuff. My first talk was “The Unsocial Web” by Siddharth Jhunjhunwala of Web Spiders. The crux of Sids talk was that individuals and brands can expend too much effort in chasing friends/followers on various social media networks thinking that high numbers must mean that they are doing something right. What Sid argued was that as numbers increase so engagement decreases. He claimed that as numbers increase so the value of the individual decreases. To emphasise the point he used the analogy that when in a city people will walk past each other and say nothing, but if in a jungle if one of those person came across another person they would start to talk. I think this was a great way to get the point across. Too many brands are talking and too few are actually listening, which in my opinion is very conceited of them.

My next session was Graham Wilkinson’s from Just Search. This was quite a short session and looked at ways that organisations can harness some of the free tools that are available on the web to help build up a content management strategy in social media. This was not a talk about using Facebook and Twitter. Rather it was how you can use tools such as Social Mention and Double Click Ad Planner to work out what people are saying about your brand or product and where your target audience hangs out on the web.

After a spot of lunch I headed to a talk given by Dave Edmundson-Bird from Manchester Metropolitan University. It was quite apparent that Dave is a lecturer as heis talk was the most interesting, not necessarily in the sense that the content was any better than the other but more in the way that it was delivered. Dave talked Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing. One of the main points that he made was that there is a convergence in design, search and social. That organisations need to get their advisors on these three disciplines together at the start of a project rather than following on from each other. This will enable the organisation to develop a co-ordinated strategy for their online activity and will also reduce costs and friction.

Webcredible gave a talk on designing mobile friendly sites. The talk was more than just using a browser detection script to present your site content in a narrower column than ususal. That you need to look at trying to minimise user input as mobile devices are not really designed for anything other than very light keyboard use. In case you were wondering I can confirm now that this article is being written in a hotel room but that the input device is a laptop and not a smartphone!

My final talk was possibly the most illuminating. It was given by Andy Henshaw, CEO of Vee24. I only attended the talk because another I had planned to attend had started early. With hindsight I am so glad that it did as Andy’s talk backed up many things that I already believe about online behaviour and also gave me a glimpse of what will undoubtedly become a very popular feature of e-commerce sites in the next couple of years. Andy was talking about live video chat on websites. The idea is that if you are on a site then you generally do not have the opportunity to quiz anybody about the products and services that are available in real time. Andy showed stats that online conversion is between 3-4% while in store conversion is between 15-20%.

This has set me to thinking. If you went back in time 100 years then your local grocer would provide you with a very tailored service. You would walk into the shop and receive personal service from an individual. In the sixties and seventies we saw the rise of supermarkets, here the service was less personal but the tradeoff was in lower prices. You still had somebody that you could turn to and ask questions. With the rise of online shopping at the end of the nineties this function of questioning disappeared. Yes you could email the company, but to maximise sales you need to engage with the customer when the interest is highest. With live video chat you still get all the advantages of online shopping but you can also get that more personal touch that has been lost over the years. The fact that it is video means that it is a lot more instant than when you take part in a live text chat, no matter how fast you can type I will guarantee that you can talk faster.

The show itself has hundreds of stands offering a wide variety of services. I am going to decide whose stand was the best, in my opinion, on Friday morning. One early contender is Eazy Tiger. Their stand was one of the smallest but they used an X Box 360 with Kinnetic controller to play a football type game, the palyer with the highest score at the end of the show will win a prize.

I would also like to mention Kyle and the team from BoxPay who are a company that provide a payment solution where instead of giving your credit card details you simply pay via a text message charged to your mobile phone. I think that this is likely to be a real growth area over the next few years. People are going to become more and more reluctant to hand over their card details to companies due to issues about the security of their personal data. We only need to look at recent events with Sony to see what can happen when things go wrong. BoxPay can also be used for recurring billing to subscription sites and is definitely worth considering if you are looking for an alternative way of charging your customers. At this time there is a £10.00 transaction limit but they are looking at increasing the maximum transaction value.

All in all I have had an enjoyable day, but now it is time to recharge my phone, my digital camera, my video camera and most of all myself. Night all, and I will see you at the show tomorrow.

Tags: Andy Henshaw, BoxPay, cloud computing, Dave Edmundson-Bird, Earls Court, Eazy Tiger, Facebook, Graham Wilkinson, Internet World 2011, Just Search, London, Manchester Metropolitan University, Siddharh Jhunjhunwala, Social Media, Twitter, Vee24, Web Spiders, Webcredible
Posted in Technology | No Comments »

The UK’s Alternative Voting Referendum on the Web

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Here in the UK we are about to have a referendum on whether or not to change the way that we elect our M.P.s and so the Government. Traditionally we have used a first past the post system where the candidate who polls the most votes is declared the winner. This means that if there are nine candidates, one polls 20% of the vote and the others get 10% each then the candidate with 20% of the vote is declared the winner. With the proposed Alternative Vote system you would vote for the candidates in order of preference, if no candidate has an overall majority then the one with the least number of votes will have their second choices counted. This will continue until somebody gets a majority.

I have no intention of trying to use my Blog to exert any form of influence one way or the other, after all who would pay any attention to my political thoughts? I have been interested in how the referendum is playing out in the social sphere and on the web.
I started out by doing a search on Google for “Alternative vote referendum”. There is a sponsored link from The Electoral Commission to the site www.aboutmyvote.co.uk. I found this site to be very informative and has a great little video which explains how both systems work. There is also an option to share the video via Facebook, but no option to share the video via Twitter.

The About My Vote Website

Out of the organic search results on Google all but one of the first page of results are from various news organisations explaining how the two systems work. The only link that was from either the Yes or No camps was for www.yestofairvotes.org. They seem to be using a variety of media within their site. There are links to both videos and photos. The videos are on YouTube but the photos are hosted on their own site. This surprised me as I would have thought a Flickr stream may have been beneficial both from a search engine optimisation perspective and also from the fact that it would be another way of engaging with people. There is also a link to the Yes To Fair Votes Facebook page (www.facebook.com/YestoFairerVotes) that at the time of writing had 15 755 likes. There is also a Twitter stream with the username @YesInMay that currently has 7978 followers.

The first site that I came across for the No campaign was at the bottom of page 2 of the Google search results with www.no2av.org/04/referendum-broadcast/. This is a YouTube hosted video that comments on the reasons why the AV system would not be beneficial. As with the Yes vote they also have a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/NO2AV) that at the time of writing had 10 785 likes. They have also utilised Twitter, unlike the Yes camp, with @NO2AV and 5404 followers. They also have a YouTube channel. Again they are hosting their own photos rather than using something like Flickr. There is also a blog on the site but this does not seem to have been updated that much, which is a pity as this would have helped them with their Search Engine Optimisation efforts. One really great feature of the site is the advocates page (www.no2av.org/advocates/), this has a Google map and as the seconds tick by photos of people who have pledged to vote “no” are dropped onto it. You can zoom into the map which is interesting in itself as it possibly shows where the most support is for the No campaign. Of course this would be a far from scientific way of predicting where the No campaign will do well as there is nothing comparable on the Yes campaign’s site.

From this cursory glance at what is happening on the web you might be tempted to think that the Yes campaign will win the referendum, based on the fact that they have both more support on both Facebook and Twitter. However, it is worth noting that there is more support for the No campaign among the older generation. These people are less likely to be engaging in social media but are more likely to vote. We will know the result in the next couple of days but it has certainly been an interesting campaign, online at least.

I am already celebrating the referendum, it has given me a subject for my 100th blog post!

Tags: Alternative Vote, Electoral Commision, Facebook, Google, No to AV, Referendum, Twitter, Yes to Fair Votes, YouTube
Posted in Internet News, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | No Comments »

Facebook Business Pages Can Now Ban You

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Spambook? Let's hope not

Facebook seem to be constantly rolling out new features at the moment. A few weeks ago they allowed administrators of Facebook Business Pages to post material as the page on other people/businesses walls. This meant that you could potentially access new markets to pass on your message.

There is a flipside to this though and that is that other pages could now post material to your wall and appear in your fans newsfeeds. With everybody being able to post anything pretty much anywhere for free then you do not have to be a genius to realise that there is the potential for an awful lot of spamming to go on.

In fact for those that attempt to use Twitter for marketing purposes think about what your Twitter stream is like. Everybody’s talking but does anyone actually listen? How much engagement actually takes place on Twitter? My Twitter stream appears to be full of links to articles that I have little or no interest in.

I suspect that Facebook were fearful that their social media platform would turn into the worlds largest spam site and that in turn user engagement for the site as a whole would drop. With this in mind Facebook have now enabled page admins to be able to not just remove a post but to also ban the user, even if that user is a business page. I posted something earlier to my business page so that I could demonstrate the sort of options that you now have.

New Feature That Allows Facebook Page Admins Can Now Ban User

I think that this is a smart move for Facebook. The social media giant have always said that they will never charge people to become part of Facebook and, therefore, they need to be able to talk about their large user base to be able to attract the advertisers they need to become a sustainable business long term.

In the same way that Google gets search so Facebook gets social. Although both do make mistakes from time to time they both realise that the service needs to be free for users and that it needs to provide high quality content.

If your companies Facebook marketing strategy has previously been to just post the same message on hundreds of other pages then now might be the time to think again. However, as much as I applaud what Facebook has done I do feel that it will only be a matter of time before Facebook spammers just use different ways to go about their business, such as setting up multiple profiles that are tied to spoofed email addresses. This does not mean that I think we should just accept spam, on the contrary we all have to work at just making things that little bit more difficult for the spammers to operate so that it is not quite as cost effective for them to operate.

I would love to hear about your own experiences of using all forms of social media as a marketing tool, feel free to leave a comment or two!

Tags: Facebook, facebook business page, Google, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Internet News, Social Media | 1 Comment »

App Review: Vlingo (iPhone & Android)

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Vlingo on the iPhone

Vlingo is a nifty little app that allows you to search the web, update social networks, write texts and emails using your voice as the input method. The way it works is that the first word you utter tells the app what you want to do. For example, if you say “Search Freelance Web Design Blackburn” then the app will search for freelance web designers in Blackburn. You can also choose which search engine the app will use, Google, Bing or Yahoo.

I have been playing with this app for about five days and have found it to be really useful. I am getting to that point in life where my fingers have started to press two keys instead of one on my smartphone keyboard and so the ability to not have to type is fantastic.

I do find that you have to speak slowly and clearly but even so the voice recognition software has virtually no trouble understanding my Lancashire accent. My main use has been to use Vlingo to update Facebook and Twitter. I have learnt that the longer you speak for the more likely Vlingo is to make mistakes in its voice recognition. However, if you keep things short and sweet (can you do anything else with Twitter?) then it is very accurate. Vlingo displays it’s interpretation of your commands in a text box allowing you the opportunity to amend the text if it has made a mistake before you post your update to the world.

The app is freemium. The free version allows you to search the web, update Facebook and Twitter. The paid version also allows you to send texts and emails. The cost is £3.99 for either text or email or £5.99 for both.

There is a syntax that you need to get the hang of to really get the most out of this app but it is worth the effort. Vlingo is a great app and one that I would thoroughly recommend.

Vlingo is available from both the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace.

Tags: Android, apple, Bing, Facebook, Google, iphone, Twitter, Vlingo, Voice Recognition, Yahoo
Posted in App Review | No Comments »

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