First of all let me get one thing straight – I like Twitterfeed. It’s a perfect way for me to publish my feed to Twitter.
The problem arises when people start to publish other peoples feeds to Twitter. For example the people who think automatically tweeting the Mashable or TechCrunch feeds will somehow make them appear popular or the Twitter bots whose sole purpose is to syndicate the Google News results for a query such as “internet marketing”.
If you are lucky enough to be in Google News all you need to do to get 50+ people tweeting a link is use a popular keyword such as “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” in your title and the tweets come rolling in. All totally useless.
Because Twitter has no way of filtering duplicate messages the search results (and aggregators like Tweetmeme) are polluted with dozens of identical tweets.
Twitter could fix this in an instant by removing Twitterfeed tweets from the search results or creating a duplicate content filter but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
Many of you have been letting us know through Tweets, emails, blog posts, message boards, and even an online petition that you’re very interested in seeing recent satellite imagery of Tehran. Well, we’ve heard your requests and over the past few days have been working with our satellite imagery partner GeoEye to make this possible. We just received updated satellite imagery of Tehran, taken on Thursday the 18th at approximatly 11:18am local time.
The week before @ryanbarr started a Twitition asking AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices. With almost 15,000 signatures it’s the most popular Twitition yet and was credited by several news sources in forcing AT&T to modify their pricing.
AT&T said today it is modifying its upgrade policy for the new iPhone after existing customers of the popular device protested the $200 price difference they would have to pay if they wanted the new iPhone 3Gs, due out Friday.
As of Wednesday morning, more than 14,000 people on the microblogging site Twitter had signed a “twitition,” — a Twitter petition — asking AT&T to “offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices.”
US CARRIER AT&T has bowed to consumers over pricing of the Iphone 3GS thanks to a grass roots Twitter campaign. A similar effort aimed at O2 is gathering followers in the UK.
At the heart of the beef with the network operators is the astronomical initial cost of the 3GS handset and the distinct lack of an affordable upgrade path from its predecessor.
Initially AT&T had in mind to charge all muggles $399 for the new Iphoney, whether they’d bought an earlier version a few days ago or not. But Twitterer @Twititions gathered enough followers to pressure AT&T which has decided $199 is a fairer upgrade price.
The moral of this story is that if you want to get something done, start a Twitition about it.
On another note Twitition now uses Oauth which means you can sign petitions in a couple of clicks without handing over your password.
How much money have you made from Twitter? With most companies yet to even figure out how to get more than 100 followers Dell has made over $2 million from a number of Twitter accounts.
The main account is DellOutlet with 625,378 followers but they have a number of other accounts too. For a global company like Dell that’s a good idea – most people should just stick with one account.
We got 100,000 visitors from Twitter this week
This week has been a fun week for one of our internal project Twitition with over 100,000 unique visitors from Twitter in a couple of days and links from pretty much every major newspaper.
A lot of people think that because Twitter is still quite small a campaign won’t generate as much buzz as doing something on Facebook. What they forget is that the media loves Twitter and any Twitter campaign stands a much higher chance of getting a write up than a Facebook app.
This added PR opportunity is what makes campaigns doubly successful.
For those of you who can’t make it to SMX London this year we’ve decided to aggregate all the best information here on Blogstorm using a Twitterfall widget, right on the front page.
All the top SEO tips from search conferences get shared on Twitter so what better way to keep up than leaving the Blogstorm homepage open on Monday & Tuesday to see what’s going on.
Here at Internet World everybody seems to be talking about Twitter and we’ve got a 2 page guide on the stand with some great tips on how brands can promote themselves on Twitter.
None of the tips have been published online anywhere before – come and see us to get your copy.
While we’ve been hard at work building our stand the team at Twitterfall were building a widget to show all the latest Tweets about Internet World on the Blogstorm homepage.
If you want to get your name in lights on the homepage of Internet Worlds Official Social Media partner then all you need to do is click this link or post to Twitter mentioning Internet World or the iwexpo hashtag and the widget will pick it up.
Our stand E2062
The bash-a-shark game was proving popular with organisers & carpet layers last night so please come and give it a try. Winners get a bottle of very expensive champagne!
And yes, that is real sand on the floor of the stand. Not sure how much we will get charged to clean that up on Thursday.
Have you ever noticed how many people seem to re-tweet loads of useless news about internet marketing and make money online?
These users are just feeding the Google News RSS feed for a particular keyword through Twitterfeed and automatically posting it back out to Twitter.
So the bottom line to this story is that if you want to get lots of people tweeting about a particular keyword you just need to look for patterns. Look for people who always post about the same topics and who post a lot of strange links via Twitterfeed.
Once you find these users and the right keywords you just need to write a new blog post containing the words (for example “internet marketing” or “make money online”) and as long as the post gets picked up by Google News you should get at least a few Tweets on the back of it.
Let’s see what happens with this post.
What you need to make sure is that your blog is syndicated in Google News to start with. Next you need to make sure the post is long enough to get listed in Google News which might mean adding extra stuff at the end of the post.
Twitter has quietly released Sign in with Twitter which is a neat system allowing websites to access your Twitter account details without you having to give them your password.
I’ve used the Twit Connect plugin from Voice of Tech to implement this on Blogstorm so that all my readers can leave a comment without entering their URL & name. All you have to do is click the button and we can pull your name, avatar & Twitter profile page to go alongside your comment.
Next you need to upgrade your server to PHP 5 because the plugin does’t work with PHP 4.
Finally upload the plugin & follow the instructions below:
Upload `twitconnect.php` and all included files to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
Place `<?php if(function_exists(‘twit_connect’)){twit_connect();} ?>` in your comment template or rely on the default `<?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?>` code.
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Modify plugin options through the `Settings` menu
It’s worth noting that this plugin doesn’t allow blog owners to do anything other than pull your public details from Twitter so it’s quite safe for you to use. Personally I think it would be nice to give readers the option to automatically tweet a link to the comment they have left.
Please try it out using the comment form below & let me know what you think.
The search giant (Google) has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent “tweets” across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.
“It’s syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts,” said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.
I’m not sure about this – optimising your Twitter status updates to maximise AdSense CTR won’t make you a popular user on Twitter and will people who click on the ads understand what Twitter is when they arrive?
