The best responses to celebrities on Twitter

Merciless responses to celebrity tweets can be very satisfying...



















Source: Happy Place

The Internet: I want my life back!

#Winning on Twitter: The Top 10 Promoted Tweets

VW, Papa John's—and Twitter—win by 'keeping it real', using links and launching new products.

VW
Engagement: 52%
Why it worked: Linked to a live unveiling of the New Beetle, teased during Super Bowl.

Google
Engagement: 38%
Why it worked: New tech products resonate, and Google used Twitter to launch Google Instant, NexusOne and Chrome.

Old Spice
Engagement: 36%
Why it worked: Connected paid tweet to existing social campaign. Brought Old Spice guy out of retirement on Twitter.

Ford

Engagement: 34%
Why it worked: Auto category strong on Twitter. Linked to exclusive “spy photos” of the Mustang Boss 302.

Papa John's
Engagement: 34%
Why it worked: Good timing and a social component encouraged users to submit and retweet photos of people receiving a heart-shaped pizza.

Hollywood Records
Engagement: 27%
Why it worked: Another product unveiling, this time a Selena Gomez record release, which name-checked a retail partner (iTunes) and latched onto a popular hashtag.

IamROGUE
Engagement: 26%
Why it worked:: This wasn’t the launch of a show but a key part of building buzz for the build-up, with first images of the new “Wonder Woman” series.

Twitter
Engagement: 25%
Why it worked: Twitter users have a keen interest in, well, Twitter. Here, Twitter uses its own platform to promote its new web client. This tweet earned 5,971 re-tweets.

Xbox
Engagement: 25%
Why it worked:Contests, giveaways and premieres tend to perform on Twitter. Microsoft had already successfully seeded organic conversations for #gears3beta, which became a Trended Topic.

Source: Storify

Uniqlo Lucky Counter

A new one from Uniqlo, Lucky Counter: You tweet about a product and its price will come down for everybody. Excellent social interaction idea.

Source; Adverblog

"Most Beautiful Tweet" crowned at UK's Hay Festival

The “most beautiful tweet ever tweeted” was announced at the Hay Festival, which ended yesterday, 6 June. The UK literary festival introduced the award this year, with Stephen Fry (a prolific Twitter-er with more than one and a half million followers) judging the entries.

The winning entry, by Canadian Marc MacKenzie, read: “I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

Entries were judged according to a variety of criteria including the most eloquent, most evocative or the best pun.

MacKenzie, a medical physicist, is not new to social media; he claims to be “a very early Facebook adopter”, reports CNN.

“I admire the form,” he said to CNN about Twitter. “It’s like a Web 2.0 haiku. I like the challenge of Twitter-- if brevity is the soul of wit, forcing the compacting for a humorous idea into 140 characters encourages economy and getting to the essence of what you want to say.”

Source: Design Taxi

A fascinating and awesome video of social media stats

And here are the stats mentioned in the video:

- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old

- 96% of them have joined a social network

- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.

- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

- Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…

- Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

- iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

- We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”

- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India

- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%

- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.

- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts

- Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets

- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…

- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

- While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube

- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English

- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

- Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.

- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them

- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

- Only 14% trust advertisements

- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do

- Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas

- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation

- 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily

- We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

- We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media

- Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate

- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second

- The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

- Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Source: Socialnomics Social Media Blog

Uniqlo creates Twitter show in online campaign

Uniqlo is attempting to tap into the popularity of Twitter by creating UTweet, a somewhat off-beat online promotional campaign for its latest t-shirts.

The application invites Twitter users to enter their details in order to create a personalised 'Twitter show', based on the history of messages posted.

It then uses audio and imagery to tell your story and encourages you to send it on to friends. During the Twitter show, models wearing UT t-shirts from Uniqlo appear, promoting the range.

I love the vibrant, bold feel of UTweet - and the striking user-generated red and white typographical images. Nice work. And their previous campaigns are interesting too: eg. Uniqlock, an obscure video involving dancing models and another nice one, Uniqlo Calendar

Twitterature

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said.

In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash.

They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm".

Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.

All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.

From Media Guardian

Google 'falling behind Twitter'

Google's co-founder, Larry Page, admitted today that the company has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user's demand for real-time information.

Instead, the search engine's chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site. Twitter has come from nowhere to become the third most visited social networking site in the US in just three years by allowing its users to broadcast their thoughts, actions and news instantly.

Google's search engine, in contrast, can take hours or even days to update. While this is usually not a problem as accuracy of results is more important than speed of updating, as the internet community comes to demand ever faster information Twitter has left Google in its wake.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," Page said in a closing address at Google's Zeitgeist conference . "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."

He told the audience about the impact of technology on the world and that he has been asking his research teams to get faster. "Now I think they understand that," he said. "I think we will do a better job of some of those things."

But he admitted that there is a trade-off between making information instantly available and ensuring its accuracy.

The rise of Twitter has sparked speculation that the cash-rich Google could buy the business. Speaking after the event, Schmidt refused to comment on that speculation but admitted "they have done a very good job of 'what am I doing right now' – their tagline – it is very impressive."

He stressed that because of the way that Twitter is built, which allows any developer to take its stream of real-time messages, or tweets, and build applications around them, Google does not need to buy the business to get involved in the indexing of real-time information generated by Twitterers.

"There is a presumption that somehow you cannot have multiple solutions that co-exist," he said. "We can talk to them ... there is all sorts of stuff we can do. We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the web is people can talk to each other."

Earlier in the day, Page was forced to defend Google's Street View service. "Putting someone's house on Street View is not the same as putting it in a newspaper," he said. "It's radically different."

From Media Guardian