By Mark Hughes and Jason Walsh

Monday, 18 January 2010

A Twitter post landed Paul Chambers in hot water with the police

When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’ travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Unfortunately for Mr. Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post,” said Mr. Chambers, 26. “I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”

While it has happened in the United States, Mr. Chambers is thought to be the first person in the United Kingdom to be arrested for comments posted on Twitter. His ordeal began on 6 January when, after hearing that extreme weather had forced the closure of Robin Hood Airport, he posted the ill-advised message – frustrated because he was to fly to Ireland from that airport on Friday 15 January.

On 13 January, after apparently receiving a tip-off from a member of the public, police arrived at Mr. Chambers’ office. “My first thought upon hearing it was the police was that perhaps a member of my family had been in an accident,” he said. “Then they said I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act and produced a piece of paper. It was a print-out of my Twitter page. That was when it dawned on me.”

Mr. Chambers said the police seemed unable to comprehend the intended humour in his online comment. “I had to explain Twitter to them in its entirety because they’d never heard of it,” he said. “Then they asked all about my home life, and how work was going, and other personal things. The lead investigator kept asking, ‘Do you understand why this is happening?’ and saying, ‘It is the world we live in’.”

After the interview, Mr. Hale was returned to a cell for an hour then released. But, he said, not before the police deleted the post from his Twitter page. He has been bailed until 11 February, when he will be told whether or not he will be charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax. In the interim, detectives have confiscated his iPhone, laptop and home computer.

The civil libertarian Tessa Mayes, an expert on privacy law and free speech issues, said: “Making jokes about terrorism is considered a thought crime, mistakenly seen as a real act of harm or intention to commit harm.

“The police’s actions seem laughable and suggest desperation in their efforts to combat terrorism, yet they have serious repercussions for all of us. In a democracy, our right to say what we please to each other should be non-negotiable, even on Twitter.”

A spokesman for South Yorkshire Police confirmed the arrest and said: “A male was arrested on 13 January for comments made on a social networking site. He has been bailed pending further investigations.”

Nobody from Robin Hood airport could be contacted last night.

via Twitter joke led to Terror Act arrest and airport life ban – Home News, UK – The Independent.

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Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, [Google Fellow] Amit Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Singhal also told Technology Review it’s not a popularity contest. They also have to weed out the noise. Hashtags make that task difficult. And sorting through trending topics when so many people are Tweeting is a challenge, too.

Singhal pointed out that Twitter the only source of real-time information for Google. Sources such as blogs and news are also relevant and being weaved into the real-time search experience.

Takeaways:

1. Cultivate your following on Twitter.
2. Don’t overdo the hashtag.
3. Be comprehensive in your real-time efforts. Don’t just focus on Twitter.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on January 15, 2010 1:14 PM

via Ranking Tweets: Google Says Reputation Analogous to Links – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

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By Michelle Kung

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Google’s AdSense is brilliant in that it very simply provides relevant contextual ads across millions of web pages. But what if you make that process a little less automated and provide ads that are endorsed by the creators of those web pages? So instead of an algorithmically matched text ad appearing next to a blog post about the same topic, readers see an on-topic product recommendation by a writer they trust. It’s something that could get very messy very fast — and it already has, in the form of outrage over paid tweeting and blog posts with undisclosed sponsorships.

San Francisco-based MyLikes.com is wading into those waters with full awareness of the potential pitfalls, but a hope that it can evade them and in doing so steal AdSense’s $6-$7 billion per year in revenue. The startup comes from two former Googlers, including the former tech lead for AdSense, Arvind Sundararajan. He and wife Bindu Reddy, the former head of product management for Google Apps, have co-founded the company, are its only employees, and have invested into it $200,000 of their own money.

So why not start the same product within Google? “Doing stuff inside the company always takes longer,” Reddy said in a phone interview. And what about taking outside investment? Well, for one, Reddy and Sundararajan didn’t have to — but as she explained, “Getting capital right now would be similar to Google — you’d have to answer to someone.”

In an effort to offer an endorsement service that’s decidedly not scammy, MyLikes started out by building a consumer product, Likaholix (see Om’s write-up from March). “We were afraid that if we started an ad product with no consumer product, people would not be genuine,” said Reddy. Now, the company is extending its network of 30,000 members and 300,000 “likes” as seeds for its sponsorship program.

On the new site, which launches Wednesday morning, each user has a profile, and earns an “influence score” based on their presence on Twitter and their blogs. They can post one ad every two days on their sites, which they write in their own words. The ads either appear in a post that discloses the relationship with the sponsor or in an AdSense-like unit. They receive 20-60 cents per click. MyLikes (which was formerly called Likes.com, but switched names after Like.com complained about its trademark) currently doesn’t take a cut, but will at a later date from for-profit users (users also have the choice of donating their proceeds to charity).

MyLikes and its affiliate ads face competition from the likes of Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets. Federated Media also does similar work on what it calls “conversational marketing” with larger publishers. My concern would be that as such services become more widespread, lifestyle blogging will be so littered with product placements that it will be polluted and boring. (In some cases, that’s already happening.)

Reddy said that she thinks MyLike’s model of full disclosure (which is what the FTC now requires) and performance-based payments will incentivise effective ads. Plus, bloggers will be limited to one ad every two days.

So if you can only run one ad every two days at a 20-60 cents CPC, is there actually a real business here for bloggers/tweeters, and eventually MyLikes the company? Reddy thinks so, because as compared to an impersonal AdSense placement or a banner, “our ad is going to be better.”

via With MyLikes.com, Ex-Googlers Want to Build the Next AdSense – GigaOM.

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

In his Twitter stream from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last weekend, actor-director LeVar Burton beamed a different kind of tweet to his 1.57 million followers:

“Be the 1st to own a NEW Sony bloggie camera RT for a chance to win #SonyCES http://bit.ly/6OccaR (ad).”

That message, which included a link to the electronics company’s Web site, was a paid advertisement arranged through one of several startups that have discovered pay-per-tweet as a way to cash in on the popularity of Twitter.

Advertisers like Sony, NBC Universal and Microsoft have lined up for campaigns that pay Twitter users a few dollars to $10,000 per tweet, depending on their number of followers or their sphere of influence.

“Twitter is the evolution of the Web page,” said Sean Rad, the 23-year-old chief executive of Ad.ly Inc., a Beverly Hills company that has gained publicity by bringing advertisers to celebrity tweeters such as Burton, model-actress Kim Kardashian, who has 2.7 million followers, and rapper Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, who has 1.9 million followers.

“Content is shifting from static pages to the stream,” Rad said. “Everyone from CEOs to celebrities to random joes are all producing content. If there’s anything that Ad.ly has shown, it’s that the largest influencers on Twitter have an interest in being compensated for the value they’re creating for the ecosystem.”

San Francisco’s Twitter Inc., founded in 2006, has more than 60 million users worldwide and has become slightly profitable through income from search engine deals, although executives have said the firm may introduce some form of advertising this year.

But other firms aren’t waiting. In the past six months, companies like Ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets of Orlando and newcomer MyLikes of San Francisco have launched services to broker ad deals between Twitter users and sponsors. The tweets are supposed to be marked with notations such as “(ad)” or “#ad” to comply with new Federal Trade Commission guidelines governing advertisements or endorsements by bloggers, experts and celebrities.

MyLikes, founded by former Google executives Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, emerged from beta mode last week with a roster of advertisers like 1-800-Flowers.com and about 30,000 Twitter users.

Sponsored Tweets

MyLikes campaigns pay Twitter to post up to one sponsored tweet per day. In return, they receive 20 cents to 80 cents for each click-through on ad links, depending on how MyLikes rates their influence or relevancy to the sponsor. Longtime Internet tech blogger Chris Pirillo, for example, earns about 74 cents per click from MyLikes, Reddy said.

The ads have caused a backlash in the blogosphere by those who say they pollute the Twitter stream. But Reddy said her company wants Twitter influencers to avoid alienating their audiences by being selective of sponsors and by writing their own ad copy.

“The voice of the influencers is what’s important,” she said. “There’s no incentive to writing a Viagra ad and sending it into a tech toys blog.”

Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets pay Twitter users by the tweet but say the click-through rates are high. One recent Ad.ly campaign that started with 37 tweets generated 10,000 re-tweets in two days, said Rad, whose firm launched in September and is already cash-flow positive.

Small Firms Benefit

Kardashian has reportedly denied she is being paid $10,000 by sponsors to tweet, although her streams do include Ad.ly messages marked by “ad.”

Sponsored Tweets also counts Kardashian as one its Twitter producers. Still, Chief Executive Officer Ted Murphy said the biggest portion of his company’s business comes from smaller Web sites and services “that don’t have humongous marketing budgets and can’t afford to hire a PR firm, but can afford to spend a couple of hundred dollars to get their name out on Twitter. Someone with 100 followers can generate as many click-throughs as someone with 100,000 followers.”

Pirillo, the Seattle-based tech blogger who has 74,000 followers on Twitter, also had the same Sony ad in his stream. He has also rejected potential sponsors, but said he had no problem with Twitter influencers such as himself tweeting ads as long as they fully disclose what they are doing.

Although he noted no tweet was worth $10,000, Pirillo said he has earned about “four figures” in pay-per-tweet income so far.

“That helped get me through Christmas,” Pirillo said. “That helps pay the bills.”

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page DC – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

via Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet.

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Do you remember what you were doing back in the spring of 2006? The first users of Twitter probably do – they were signing up for the new service that had been developed when Jack Dorsey told a brainstorming meeting at Odeo that “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text”.

You can see the list of the first 140 people to sign up with Twitter, which of course includes Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone at No.1 and No.2.Evan Williams, for many the face of Twitter, is down there at No.8. [Note: at present, the Listorious page is throwing a fit for me, and only showing users 141 onwards. But that should be the link...]

The list does have some intriguing elements: third user is crystal, whose biography is simply “Twitter support” yet only has 14,827 followers (at last count). Dorsey, Stone and Williams of course have way more than a million followers, but so many others have fewer than 5,000 followers that you realise that longevity on Twitter isn’t the key to large numbers following you – its publicity.

And who do you think the first Briton on Twitter was? No, it’s not Stephen Fry. He didn’t get around to it until July 15 2008 – the laggard. Instead, the special mention goes to web developer Jonathan Markwell, who can proudly claim (as he does) to be Britain’s first Twitterer, having been on the service since July 12 2006, as user No.51. (Update: Rod Begbie points out that he was Twitter user 76, “born and raised in Scotland”. So, first Scot. Though he then became an American. So technically it’s still correct to say that only one Briton *is* in the first 140.. though at the time, two Britons were.)

And of course there’s Mom – which I think we must recognise as the ur-mother-twitterer, whose tweets include “What is this russ? What does it mean? Yo mama” and “OK WILL TRY IT WILL MAKE MY FAT DISAPPEAR TOO?”

Yes, that’s your mother, dear.

The first Guardian user? Since you ask, we think it’s (update: ) notJemima Kiss, who joined on 20 December 2006. Although Simon Willison, now of this parish, did join on 15 November 2006 – though he wasn’t then working for The Guardian.
Update: Bobbie Johnson points out that he joined on 17 November 2006.
Update 2: Meg Pickard points out that her @megp account was created at 11am on 15 November 2006. Yes, we are cutting edge.

The 140characters site, by the way, does have a very interesting short (of course) history of how Twitter got set up, by Dom Sagolla (he’s there in the first 140). Particularly:

“We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

“Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.”

That’s what you’d call loyalty: using the product of the company that just fired you.

via How Twitter was born: the first 140 users | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

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www.openforum.com -Jan 09, 2010 -At yesterday’s CES show, I failed once again to meet Guy Kawasaki in person. The line around him was 6 deep, and I had appointments to go to.

But I did manage to catch most of his talk about how to kick butt on Twitter. And I was tweeting here and there. Soon, several of you following me on Twitter asked me to summarize some of his key points.

So here goes – 10 points that I picked out from the dozens Guy Kawasaki made in his talk:

1. The Tweetmeme button is the most powerful button the Internet today, if you run a blog or content site. It instantly shows that others have found value in an article or post. People see the number of tweets and think, “It must be good.” Second, the button makes it easy for people to retweet your article.
2. Make your tweets retweetable, by providing interesting stuff. “Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery,” says Guy. “A person who retweets is saying I think what you said is interesting enough that I am risking my reputation to send it to other people.”
3. To find interesting stuff to tweet, subscribe to Smart Brief updates; Stumbleupon categories; and Alltop categories.
4. Get people to help you. Use ghost tweeters (i.e., ghost writers) to do outbound tweeting. Never use a ghost to respond to Direct Messages or “@ questions” people send you. Guy says there’s an 80% probability that he will respond to an “@ message” or a DM, except at 3 am PST.
5. Ignore the dogmatists who say Twitter is only about telling people about “me” – he calls it “meforming.” Guy says, “If you are Lance Armstrong tweeting ‘I have a flat tire,’ that’s interesting. You or me tweeting about a flat tire — not interesting. Do not do much ‘meforming.’”
6. Tweet everything on your blog. If you don’t think something is tweet-worthy, then why are you writing about it on your blog in the first place?
7. Repeat your tweets. According to Guy, “We repeat each tweet 4 times. Each time we tweet, something gets an average of 600 click-throughs regardless of how many times we tweet it. If we had stopped at one tweet, we would have limited the potential of that tweet to 600 visits, instead of 600 x 4 visits” to the site where the link leads. (Remember, many many site owners are getting the benefit of the visits from these multiple tweets, not necessarily Guy’s sites.) He went on to point out that mainstream media, such as CNN, repeats their news every hour because they know that people are not listening every minute of the day.
8. Be prepared for negative feedback — you WILL get someone saying something negative if you tweet.. No matter what you say, some people will disagree with you. If at any given moment, if you’re not upsetting someone on Twitter, you’re not using Twitter. Don’t let the .001% dictate using Twitter as a marketing tool. Mother Teresa would get negative feedback on Twitter. Use Twitter the way YOU want to use it.
9. Do not buy followers — most of those offers are scams. You should earn your tweets by tweeting out interesting stuff.
10. 10.  Should you tweet a sponsored message for money? Guy says, “It depends. If Reynolds Tobacco asked me to tweet that cigarettes don’t cause cancer — absolutely not. But if the manufacturer of a car I love, like Audi, asked me to, I don’t think I would turn it down. And I would disclose it as a sponsored tweet.”

For Guy’s slides please go here

Author: Anita Campbell
Editor and Founder, Small Business Trends

Anita Campbell is Editor and Founder of Small Business Trends, LLC, which manages online communities touching over 250,000 small business owners and managers each month.

via 10 Twitter Tips I Got from Guy Kawasaki at CES – Midwest AGNet – Your Source for Everything AG.

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January 11, 2010 02:51 PM ET

We all like to think we’re interesting. And on Twitter, that’s often measured and validated by how frequently other people retweet your posts. Maybe you’re looking to hear feedback on your recent blog post. Or you’ve found an interesting article or a funny YouTube video that you want to share with others. Aside from the instant ego boost that being retweeted provides (“Hey! They like me!), retweeting also helps you reach a greater portion of the Twittersphere than you’d be able to on your own.

Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, knows his Twitter stats. He’s combed through tens of thousands of tweets and compiled a report detailing his findings. Read on for his five tips to help you craft the kind of tweet that will get you noticed.

1. Time and day matter.

Zarrella’s research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends. More specifically, Friday yields the highest number of retweets, while retweeting occurs much more frequently from 3 p.m. to midnight.

2. Choose your words carefully.

Zarrella has found that the most retweetable word is “you.” “The word ‘you,’ while very common, seems to occur especially often in retweets, indicating that if you’re talking to ‘me,’ I am more likely to retweet it,” Zarrella says. The least retweetable words: game, going, haha, lol, but, watching, work, home, night and bed. “The lesson learned here is that if you’re trying to get more retweets, don’t just engage in idle chit-chat or tweet about mundane activities,” Zarrella suggests.

3. Include a link.

In a random sample of tweets, Zarrella found that about 19 percent included a link. Compare that to a sample of retweets, and the percentage almost triples–57 percent included links, suggesting that the presence of a link may increase a tweet’s chances of being shared.

4. Get friendly with bit.ly.

The most successful URL shortener, according to Zarrella’s research, is bit.ly, followed by ow.ly, most likely because they are newer and contain fewer characters, he says. The least retweetable URL shorteners are the older and longer tinyurl.com and twitpic.com.

5. Less is more.

“New data I’ve been working on seems to indicate that the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get,” Zarrella says. If you tweet several times an hour, you decrease the likelihood of being retweeted. Keeping your tweets to one per hour will increase your chances of being retweeted.

Staff Writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter: @kmburnham.

via Twitter Tips: 5 Proven Ways to Get Retweeted.

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