[Communications Report] for June 28th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

  • 5 Tools to Track Twitter Trends – On any given day there are over 600 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of over 50 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations.
  • Social Media Measurement Should Focus on Outcomes, Not Output – It’s not about simply looking for opportunities to drop messaging into ordinary conversation, but about finding shared interests, shared benefits and shared rewards for others in the communities where your brand interacts.
  • 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona – In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.
  • Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks – The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood.
  • How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload – Useful productivity tips.
  • 15 more awesome social media infographics – Infographics that demonstrate a mixture of both hard data and strategy practices. Hopefully, they’ll also provide some inspiration or can be useful in helping you with presentations or pitches. As before, links to the actual graphics are in the headline titles.
  • 6 ways to find value in Twitter’s noise – A great example that shows how we can get insights from analyzing Twitter data.
  • Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web [graph] – A search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web…it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.
  • How The World Spends Its Time Online [infographic] – Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.
  • Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? – Terrific insights about B2B site visitors referred from social media.
  • Diesel Cam – Interactive installation at Diesel Stores in Spain, being the first store that allows users to share the moment of buying and trying garments on their Facebook profiles from the store. Consumers are able to make pictures, publish them and boast their new acquisitions with their Facebook friends.
  • The Fun Theory – A great Volkswagen initiative. #engagement
  • Teens and Their Mobile Phones / Flowtown – Have you ever wondered what teens were really using their mobile phones for? A recent study released by Pew Internet Research has shed light on average mobile
  • Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform – The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

[Communications Report] for June 12th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

[Communications Report] for May 18th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Get the Best Out of Twitter

Last week I spoke at the Ignite in Rome (Italy). My presentation was in Italian but on this post you’ll find all the notes related to each slide (below) in English.

Learn how to use Google to take Twitter search to a whole new level. Enjoy!

Andrea

NOTES:

  1. Intro about me and itive.net
  2. Every time you go to an event it’s nice to take something back home. Something practical to play around with and experiment. So in my presentation I wanted to give more practical tips then just theory.
  3. Passive VS Active use of social media. Many people use social media in a passive way. They just use the standard features but they don’t use the tools at full and they don’t even combine them with others to get the best out of them. In this presentation we’ll do exactly this: Combining twitter with Google to get the best out of it.
  4. Challenge: Find stuff that matters. This is an open challenge for many communicators. When we are searching for something we look for information that can help us in better achieving our objectives. Searching junk that doesn’t apply to our aims.
  5. So from where we can start our search? Well social media/networks are a good starting point. According to Nielsen consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year. In this presentation we have a closer look at Twitter.
  6. So where do we start to search something on twitter? We start from http://search.twitter.com.
  7. Let’s say that I have a client, a restaurant for which we are conducting a competitive analysis. Among other strategic moves & tactics we want to search on twitter for potential competitors that we can examine and study. So we are looking for other restaurants on twitter that are located nearby our client. By typing and searching for ‘restaurant’ we’ll get thousands of results of tweets that contain the word ‘restaurant’ but that are not necessarily tweeted by restaurants.
  8. We need something more accurate. If we have a look at the advanced twitter search we can use multiple search terms, a specific location etc. but it’s still something that doesn’t help us much in narrowing down our results to only restaurants in that area.
  9. What we noticed with my team at itive is that the best result we can get at this level are the one that contain links. In fact when people share valuable information online they usually do it with a link to add more value to what they are sharing.
  10. What the advanced twitter search doesn’t offer (yet) is the possibility to search for multimedia content. For example videos and photos. This data can be really useful at times in our searches (keeping in mind that you might want to use these tips I’m giving also for other searches and not just for restaurants). Twitter is full of photos, but do we find them?
  11. It’s simple. You’ll just need to add to your search term some of the services that people use to share photos on twitter (like twitpic, etc.). Here’s what you need to type: restaurant twitpic OR ow.ly.
  12. But let’s try to use these channels in an active way. As you probably now recently Google started to index tweets in its search results. We can use this as an advantage that can help us achieve better results for what we are looking for. We’ll use Google to search Twitter.
  13. We can start by searching twitter profiles that have in the name/title the word ‘restaurant’. We’ll do it by using intitle:”restaurant* on twitter” site:twitter.com in our search. Interesting isn’t it?! 😉
  14. Yes but what is the this twitter profile (in my slide I used my own to not share the one of any restaurant -privacy) has the word ‘restaurant’ in their Bio instead of in their name/title. Example: The name could be ‘Delicious Food’ and the bio description could be ‘We are an Italian restaurant etc…’. How to we search our relevant info in the bio?
  15. we’ll simply need to change the attribute in our search with this: intext:”bio * restaurant” site:twitter.com. Keep in mind that we would have found any of these restaurants by using the previous ‘title search’. At this point our research is starting to give us better results but we still need to focus on our location.
  16. Location is very important. But once again the search we perform on the basic advanced search of twitter just gives us ‘general’ results. (to get these results we specified the location in from the advanced twitter search page). What we can do is something smarter…check the next point.
  17. A this point we can combine the two previous searches (title, bio) and add on top of those a third attribute, the location. So we’ll search for twitter profiles of restaurants (whether is specified in their title or bio) that are in New York City (I chose NYC as an example you can enter any other location/area/state/city). Here’s what we’ll nee to type: (intitle:”restaurant * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * restaurant”) intext:”location * NYC” site:twitter.com. The results are exactly what we were looking for 🙂
  18. Remember that this is nothing without a strategic communications plan. This tips are at tactical level, not strategic.
  19. Tactics like this can help us in monitoring trends, analyzing competitors and of course in gaining a competitive advantage.
  20. You can find more info related to similar topics on my blog andreavascellari.com. If you have any questions or you would like to talk more, drop you comments or get in touch via twitter @vascellari (please read my twitter policy if you start to follow me, thanks).

[Communications Report] for April 5th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

  • The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky – Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecoystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken.
  • Report – Future of the Internet IV – In an online survey of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political and economic change by 2020.
  • Facebook Summarized In A Single Picture – The chart breaks down Facebook’s history as well as some of the most important facts and figures from the company. Included in the chart is information about the site’s user base as well as the impressive engagement levels that Facebook is able to maintain.
  • Study: Mobile internet traffic is set to grow 400% by 2015 – What does that mean? As smartphones become more commonplace, phone companies could start charging a lot more money to keep them up and running. But consumers may not go along willingly.

[Communications Report] for March 22nd 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

#LiveGoodLife

#livegoodlife

Life is not easy at times.

Especially the last 2 years have been really intense for me. I managed fantastic projects and achieved great goals with my team. On the other hand one of the longest relationships I had came to an end and I lost a person that meant so much to me. I’ve been through wonderful and terrible periods. During the tough ones I was struggling to find something that was keeping me going.
So I decided to tag some tweets and facebook updates with #livegoodlife. These updates were about moments that I was living and that made feel good.

Since twitter is losing tweets (many old tweets don’t seem to be searchable) I decided to keep track of them so I could browse through this list of happy thoughts during hard times and feel good again.

It worked and this is what I keep doing.
I collect nice snippets of life and dive into them when I need something to remind me what makes me happy.

It might sound weird to some but for me it turned out to be a perfect way to get that inner strength during difficult periods at work or in my private life.

In addition to that it’s amazing to see how supportive has been all my community and network of contacts in the process. Often the #livegoodlife updates that I shared are the ones that got most traction. These social web vibes are another thing that can help you a lot.

#livegoodlife

Did my life change using #livegoodlife? Well it’s definitely easier to go on through tough times 🙂
Did it help me to get into a new relationship? Unfortunately not. Although I’m doing my best it doesn’t seem easy to find the right person nowadays. But #livegoodlife helps me to keep thinking positive and who knows maybe one day this will change too.

I hope #livegoodlife will help you too as it did with me.

Andrea

A New Way To Backup Your Tweets and Make Them Searchable with Google Calendar

In the long run many tweets don’t seem to be searchable. This is why I decided to have a backup of all my updates.

How to do it?

Few months ago I read the tips shared by Steve Rubel on this topic. The idea was to use Twistory to subscribe and consequentially import your tweets to Google Calendar. At that point all your tweets would have been saved and of course searchable. Really handy.

Unfortunately now Twistory works in a bit different way so Steve’s trick doesn’t work anymore but Marsh Gardiner came up with another interesting way to achieve the same goal. Enjoy!

You might be interested in checking also these other posts:

Andrea

[Report] for February 3rd 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.