WASHINGTON: Twitter has over 145 million registered users and more people are using mobile devices to access the microblogging service, according to co-founder Evan Williams.

Williams, in a post on the Twitter blog, also said that nearly 300,000 third-party applications have been developed around the service, which allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less.

“These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities — both of which are critical to the long-term viability of the ecosystem,” Williams said.

The Twitter chief executive said the number of people using Twitter on mobile devices had jumped 62 percent since mid-April and 16 percent of new users start on mobile, up from five percent in April.

Forty-six percent of active Twitter users regularly use a mobile device, he said.

Twitter acquired a third-party mobile application called Tweetie in April and turned it into the official Twitter program for Apple’s iPhone.

Applications also exist for using Twitter on Research in Motion’s Blackberry and devices powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Williams also published figures on the top 10 applications people have used to access Twitter during the past 30 days.

Seventy-eight percent used the official Twitter.com website, 14 percent used Twitter’s mobile website m.twitter.com, eight percent used SMS, eight percent used Twitter for iPhone and seven percent used Twitter for Blackberry.

Other applications in the top 10 were TwitPic, a program for uploading photos, TweetDeck, Echofon, Google Friend Connect and UberTwitter.

Twitter said the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because people often use more than one application to access the service.

Read more: Twitter tops 145 mn users – Social Media – Tech – The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Twitter-tops-145-mn-users/articleshow/6491129.cms#ixzz0ypLA2srt

Facebook is reportedly testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.
Facebook is reportedly testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.

According to AllFacebook, users will receive notification the moment a specific user takes an action on Facebook. Some analysts have termed the button as Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s follow feature.

According to AllFacebook, it noticed the new feature on some users’ profiles. Facebook reportedly told the blog, “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links or notes).”

For now it appears to be just a test feature, however, it is being touted to change the communication flow within Facebook. Also, one hopes that it will be an opt-in feature. As though it may seem harmless to follow friends and family, but it sure has the potential to be misused too being a potent stalking tool.

Read more: Facebook testing ‘Stalk This Friend’ button – Social Media – Tech – The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-testing-Stalk-This-Friend-button/articleshow/6485281.cms#ixzz0ypIZ0Wj1

Finding your customers and making sure they find you just got a little easier. Facebook yesterday introduced a service that allows users to communicate their locations with each other and allows businesses to market to them based on their location.

The feature, called Places, is aimed at helping users of the social network find friends and disclose their own location.

The debut of Facebook’s Places is just another step toward small businesses being able to better harness the power of social media marketing. Small business use of social media has been steadily on the rise, with nearly one-third of small businesses reporting they now use social media to promote themselves, according to a survey released this week by CareerBuilder. Leisure and hospitality industries are leading charge in the use of social media, with IT and retail companies also using it regularly.

But how, exactly, do small businesses with anemic marketing budgets put social media to work? BusinessNewsDaily reached out to a few savvy social media marketers and asked them share their success stories.

Plus size benefits: Plus size retailer IGIGI by Yuliya Raquel, is using Facebook to streamline its customer service. By responding to customer service inquiries publicly on Facebook, the company, which has dedicated one full time customer service representative to its social media outreach, is able to share information more efficiently. Instead of answering the same question over and over again, IGIGI can answer the question once and all Facebook users will get the information.

Bringing customers home: McMillin Homes, a San Diego, Calif.-based home builder discovered many first time home buyers are also Facebook users. The company posts updates there, advertises new communities and runs polls which encourages interaction between users and the company. McMillin says social media generates interest in its developments. It also uses Linkedin to attract investors.

But be prepared to really work at social media, warned McMillin Homes’ web manager Char-Lou Benedict.

“Marketing by social media can be intense. You can not afford a long decision process nor can you have stale content,” Benedict said.

Trade show promotion: Nielsen-Kellerman, which manufactures water-proof pocket weather meters and navigational instruments, uses social media to build interest in the company before trade shows. At one trade show, the company was able to draw attendees and press to the booth by actively Tweeting throughout the show.

“We got to speak with key press people and develop contacts which will result in product coverage,” said Monica Devlin, marketing coordinator for the Boothwyn, Pa.-based company.

Cooking up conversations: ROASTe, a Boston-based micro-roasted coffee retailer, uses Facebook to create a community of coffee lovers. They use it for news, promotions, contests, and to facilitate ongoing conversations with customers.

“Our Facebook and Twitter fans are also some of our most active customers,” said Scott Lush, co-owner of ROASTe. “Social Media has given customers another way to communicate with us, and a way for us to interact constantly with them. They are attracted to us because they see that we’re obsessed with gourmet coffee. They see how lively we and our coffee community are,” Lush said.

Source: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/social-media-helping-small-businesses-find-customers-0466/

By Pierre DeBois

Social media has brought unprecedented change in the way a business markets its services and products online, as well as how it communicates to customers.

But how much of that change is being measured?  From the latest industry surveys, very little, despite heavy investment.  Yet with more corporations employing social media for branding, lead awareness and sales, the need for relevant metrics has become essential to successful financial performance.  Books on social media have appeared, but few have dealt with metrics from an analytics framework.  Until now.

Jim Sterne is no stranger to the Web analytics community.  Founder of the E-metrics Marketing Optimization summit and co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, Sterne  has tirelessly guided the discussion of digital marketing.  Now, Sterne has created a short guide to optimizing your digital marketing called Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.  I bought a copy to review, and feel that while the book is geared for large organizations, small business owners wishing to best manage their resources will benefit too.

Improve Your Social Media Gauge

Sterne says it best in the opening pages:

“This book is more for marketers who already know that social media is important and want to get a better handle on managing it as a serious business tool.”

And he wastes no time getting into the nitty-gritty of  measurement planning.  For example, Chapter 1 quotes a Web Analytics Demystified post on how to prioritize analysis around organizational requests:

• Is revenue at risk?
• Who’s asking?
• How difficult is the request?
• Can it (the analysis) be self serviced?
• When is the analysis needed?
• Why is the analysis needed?

A small business owner may not face all the aforementioned questions, but some of the questions may help apply some thought to developing a social media dashboard and asking the right questions around the three basic business goals in the book: increasing revenue, lowering cost, and increasing customer satisfaction.  Although referencing many corporate sources, the book complements social media beginner references, such as Chris Brogan’s Social Media 101, and also works well on its own.

Throughout the book Sterne combines numerous references to studies and resources, such as Groundswell author Charlene Li and Web Analytics 2.0 author Avinash Kaushik, regarding blogging ROI and opportunity cost.  Analytics resources like Eric Peterson’s Big Book of KPIs (a free e-book on business metrics) are also referenced.

Sterne first lays out the social media categories — blogs, microblogs, forums, review sites, social networks, bookmarking and media sharing.  Chapters 2 through 6 covers the kinds of measurement used — Reach, Influence, Sentiment, Triggering Action (Engagement) and Listening — while each social media category is included where appropriate.  Sterne takes time to explain what tools are available, and gives an overview of measurement results.  In an automotive example, he explains how hub-and-spoke relationships can measure influence and reach via tagging URLs:

“The first step is to code the links you publish so that when the are republished and re-tweeted, any clicks can be traced back to the original tweet or post.  That means a normal link like www.example.com becomes www.example.com?1234. You can count the number of times the code 1234 shows up in your analytics database to determine how far-reaching that post or tweet was.”

He then compares the tracking between subjects (power and style) in an example hub-and-spoke figure.

“You now have a clear understanding of what intrigues people most about your new vehicle. You have marketplace insight you can act on. You know how to tweak your tweets.”

This is analytic essence made into accessible language for small business owners and marketers alike.

Resources Available

For experiences with social media, Sterne uses familiar corporate examples, like Dell’s IdeaStorm, as well as some interesting how-do-they-do-its, like BestBuy’s use of Twelpforce to answer whatever Twitter-sourced questions appear.  Other tools mentioned include Twittratr, PostRank and Nielsen Buzzmetrics, along with a resource appendix that includes more on social media metrics, a free tool summary and insights from other respected marketers such as Jeremiah Owyang.

Chapter 7 focuses on business outcomes, with an underscore that social media is best seen as a long-term investment, warning that “regardless of what business outcome you are hoping, planning and working for…social media results take time.” Suggested metrics are offered here, while Chapter 8, Convincing Your Colleagues, brings up the current analytics challenges in organizations.  For example, Sterne notes the unspoken concern employees sometimes feel, in that they see analytics as more of a personal audit:

“First and foremost humans do not like being measured… ‘Accountability’ is another word for “We don’t trust you so we’re going to measure everything you do.”

Sterne then segues into an example given by a Symantec vice president which crystallizes the other challenge in introducing measurement responsibility and convincing departments of the benefits:

“Besides doing more with less, we’re asking people to add a page tag here and a reporting mechanism there. “

Sterne covers a few topics on organizational expectations and becoming a measurement leader (a recurring theme in many analytics books like Analytics At Work), though he admits at chapter’s end the topic of change management is too large to be covered effectively.  Still, you will definitely learn to manage people as much as the metrics and measurement tools given.

Glaring negatives are few. The book does not elaborate on the impact of some recent online developments, such as mobile devices (I know there has been discussion in some circles regarding measurement of digital magazine articles shared), applications and location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  Sterne does note this as he lays out the social media categories — “…more will appear before this book hits the streets.”  However, some further consideration would have given readers insight on how to prepare for more change in a fast-moving medium.

A Useful Guide

Overall, Sterne has taken a solid tone and approach with Social Media Metrics. It explains the value of social media in a style that complements strategies for organizations large and small, for-profit and nonprofit.  By any measure, Social Media Metrics is a truly helpful guide in the online marketing jungle.

Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/08/social-media-metrics-business.html

The disclosure of 92,000 Afghanistan war documents by Wikileaks was made possible partly by a relatively recent effort by the military to get fresh intelligence data to frontline forces. The idea was that the information would better prepare the troops for ever-changing guerilla conditions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the breach probably will lead the Pentagon to limit the distribution of such material. Although that could help prevent future leaks, it could also restrict the flow of potentially lifesaving information to soldiers.

Prior to the release of the documents, access to the network for classified information, known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), was quite loose. Soldiers would need a security clearance to log in. But once logged in, they might not have met any further controls–such as a brake on how many documents any individual could download. “Technical safeguards that are in place stateside were not necessarily implemented downrange,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and security think-tank.

What’s more, the dedicated SIPRNet terminals used by soldiers in the field were not necessarily available only to people with credentials. Brian Slaughter, who was a lieutenant and platoon leader in Iraq, says soldiers might log in but not log out, which meant other soldiers could go in and view data. “So who knows who is really accessing it at this point?” he says. “There is a certain level of trust at the lower tactical echelons that users accessing data via SIPRNet have the best interests of their fellow soldiers at heart.”

He added: “The nature of the environment we operate in forces leaders to place a certain amount of trust in their soldiers. With that trust comes a small amount of risk. In this case a soldier may have taken advantage of that.”

Data is subject to different classification levels. SIPRNet carries data labeled “secret” but not more sensitive “top secret” data. One application built on SIPRNet is called TIGR, or “tactical ground reporting system.” In Iraq, it is used as a mapping and visualization application that lets soldiers see the latest intelligence and incidents on a planned patrol route. A soldier can click icons to read reports, see photos, and even watch short videos or hear transcripts of interviews.

TIGR requires its own log-in system, atop the SIPRNet one, so it’s not likely that TIGR itself will be curtailed, Slaughter says. But other access points to SIPRNet are far looser, he adds. “There are numerous sites on SIPRNet that are ‘free’ sites that you can access without any permissions required,” adds Slaughter. “Unfortunately some of those sites might have value to someone looking to harm our efforts.”

Pike notes that information systems can either be ultra-secure or ultra-usable, but not both. “By definition there is a trade-off between security and operability. It’s just a question of where you want to make the trade,” he says.

It’s likely that inside the war zone, if not back in Pentagon offices, the bar on SIPRNet is set in favor of giving soldiers information that might save their lives, Pike says. “That would go to the question of why they took off technical protections of computers that are downrange. They are getting shot at, they are in the wire. ‘There’s nobody in here but us chickens, so we’re going to move the margin and move it in the direction of less secure and more operable.’ ”

Bradley Manning, an Army private who served in Iraq, is a “person of interest” for investigators examining the release of the latest documents, according to the Army. Even before this episode, Manning had been arrested by military authorities and charged with releasing other classified information, including a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed 12 people in Iraq.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25929/

New street-level imaging software developed by Microsoft could help people find locations more quickly on the Web. The software could also leave new space for online advertising.

Step back: Street Slide stitches together slices from multiple panoramas, making it possible to see all the shops on a street at once. Credit: Microsoft Research

Multimedia   How Street Slide works.

Services like Google Street View and Bing Streetside instantly teleport Web surfers to any street corner from Tucson to Tokyo. However, the panoramic photos these services offer provide only a limited perspective. You can’t travel smoothly down a street. Instead, you have to jump from one panoramic “bubble” to the next–not the ideal way to identify a specific address or explore a new neighborhood.

Microsoft researchers have come up with a refinement to Bing Streetside called Street Slide. It combines slices from multiple panoramas captured along a stretch of road into one continuous view. This can be viewed from a distance, or “smooth scrolled” sideways (see video).

“Today’s services plunk you down inside a bubble in a particular location,” says Michael Cohen, a senior scientist at Microsoft Research. “[Street Slide] helps you actually navigate using street- side imagery.” Cohen developed Street Slide with colleagues at Microsoft; the group’s work will be presented at the SIGGRAPH 2010 computer graphics conference in Los Angeles later this week.

A person using the original version of Streetside (as well as Google’s Street View) can rotate–within a “bubble”–to look in any direction. But this provides only a limited view of the buildings on a street, explains Cohen. “You want to back up until you can see the whole street but can’t because the buildings on the other side are in the way; we create that viewpoint using images taken from all the bubble panoramas along a street.”

Someone using Street Slide’s panoramic view can slide along the facades looking for places of interest, and zoom back in to a classic bubble view at any time. A user can also flip the viewpoint to see the other side of the street, or turn corners onto new streets.

The wider view provided by Street Slide offers empty space on the screen below the image of the street. This space could be used to display the logos of businesses, as well as a small map of the area. The space could also be used for advertising, Cohen says, or to display social information, such as the location of friends–if linked up to a social network.

Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

1. Set Community Expectations
2. Provide Cohesive Branding
3. Be Up To Date
4. Live Authenticity
5. Participate In Dialog
6. Enable Peer-To-Peer Interactions
7. Foster Advocacy
8. Solicit A Call To Action

Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession. As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.

Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the US. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.

McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.

The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the president is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.

Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).

When it comes to coffee companies, there is no contest. Starbucks’ closest competitor (in terms of its number of cafes across the US) Caribou has 154,754 fans. Peet’s has 45,497. Not long ago, Time Magazine wondered if the famed Portland, Oregon independent roaster Stumptown might be the next Starbucks. Not on Facebook. It has only 10,780 fans.

From the business side — and from the side of studying culture — what do all of these numbers mean? Clearly, brands and personalities have turned to Facebook to market their products, enhance their image, and communicate with their customers. But beyond that what does this new form of fandom mean, beyond a sort of crude measure of popularity?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Neworking-sites-top-in-billing-rates/articleshow/6232505.cms

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” will highlight news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the world’s leading online social-networking community, Joe Sullivan of Facebook said in a blog post.

The new page was intended to augment a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans”.

“Online safety is a shared responsibility,” Sullivan said. “We’ll continue to think of innovative ways to promote safety on our service and elsewhere on the Web.”

The number of people using Facebook topped the 500 million mark last week, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social netowork.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by privacy activists that Facebook give users of the booming social network more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-launches-online-safety-page/articleshow/6222131.cms