I just kept on waiting for someone to speak out of common sense on Nestle’s fan page in Facebook and it finally happened!

Earlier today Michal Marcinik – person that i do not know and have never heard of, certainly not a PR, media guru or some agency representative – spoke out, in the cleanest and most honest voice possible – ” Anyone of you have thought that you are being a little bit FOOLED by Greenpeace? Why they have not chosen f.e. LIDL, Boots, Danone or E.Leclerc to HIT AT? Those companies are much WORSE than Nestle. I would ask Greenpeace who HAVE PAID for that kind of ATTACK?”. The author of the post goes even further: “… I wonder how many of those here are without ANY fault? How many of them turn off the water while brushing teeth? How many turn off the light while its not used or any AC equipment? How many of you guys go from time to time to work by bike? Look at yourself people first, and sometimes think a little bit deeper about what it is being published and why… Dont just believe everything you are given, just because it is “eco-friendly”. ”

Since Nestle’s fan page is pretty overloaded with comments, here is also a screen shot for this post and the following comments:

Now… this case is certainly not about “true or false”, at least it has not yet come to my attention if Nestle deny using palm oil. The case here is rather about common sense and people’s tending ability to lose it at times and act shallow.

Is it possible that Nestle is the only corporation that does harm to our environment – of course not, and i bet it is not the corporation that harms it most. Would not you look at yourself as a consumer or you just need time for that …until Greenpeace points its finger at you? Are YOU doing your best to save and protect our environment? Would you give up on gas and oil and leave your car parked home so that you save our atmosphere some exhausted fumes?

And even further… can you guess what is the primary reason for rainforests to become dead flatlands and for orangutans’ extinction? It is again YOU – because you are the consumer that palm oil is actually sold to, so that you can safely enjoy your chocolate bars during lunch-break for example. Do you want a reason for wars? It is you again, because world’s economy is driven by oil and you, as a consumer, are a huge part of it. Nestle as well as other corporations and even governments, harm our environment because of you. Accept this and think about it.

On another note, wouldn’t you at least ask yourself the question – who are Greenpeace, beside your general shallow idea that they are “good people”, just because they are “green” ?

Here is a little teaser for you – back in 2006 Greenpeace released a report on “Guide to Green Electronics”. Since this is a topic, as expected, this is Greenpeace after all, dealing with big brands, there were people who questioned their report and responded by proving that Greenpeace’s report was “misleading and incompetent”. The analysis of the report is very interesting and i highly recommend you to read it. You can find it HERE.

And here is a little more about Greenpeace – opinion based on true, undeniable facts. It is up to your decision whether you should take their words, actions and initiatives as ultimately genuine and ethically driven as they appear.

“Greenpeace has worked to create awareness of important environmental issues since the 1970′s, but their methods, accuracy, and effectiveness have ranged from controversial to comical, to scandalous. Greenpeace activism is based upon simplification of complex political issues into epic battles between good and evil. Rather than devoting a lot of resources into educating the public, Greenpeace, like most political activist groups, tries to create sensationalist drama to grab attention and put simplistic issues in the headlines. This is pretty commonplace in politics; however, Greenpeace has an established history of playing fast and loose with facts in order to intensify their stories, and in some cases their pursuits’ careless disregard for the truth has caused more damage than the evil they attempted to target.”

– quoted from Roughly Drafted

–

I for sure know that people are now more irritated by the fact that Nestle do not respond to their voice rather than by their usage of palm oil, but it was high time somebody had said this. And, people, if you really want to look at the real picture of things, for your common sense’s sake, watch this move: The Corporation.

Expepctedly, Facebook is by far the No.1 social networking platform and had 206.9 million unique visitors in December 2009 – this is 67% of all social media users in the world (jesus…). Time spent on site is also impressive – the average time of a user is almost 6 hours a month… maybe mostly spent in farming and in viewing your friends’ photos.

On average time spent, social networks and blogs are the most visited online platforms. Right behind them are online games and instant messaging.

In the United States Twitter remains the fastest growing social network in terms of unique visitors – with 579% year-over-year increase, by 2.7 million uniques in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. Month-over-month, however, unique visitors deflated with 5%.

The United States continue to be the leader in terms of social networks and blogs usage, charting a 142.1 million unique visitors with an average time spent of 6 hours per month. The States are followed by Japan, whose unique visitors total 46.6 million for December with an average time spent of nearly 3 hours per month.

While the UK, Italy and Australia are with smaller user numbers (which is normal, because the US have much more citizens in comparison) all of them chart an average time spent between 6 and 7 hours.

What do these results mean?

From this year on, we will see more earnest efforts by marketers to penetrate Facebook and Twitter. If you can not be strategic, however, or if these websites do not fit into your existing marketing strategy – better don’t even try.

There is something else, too, that many people these days fail to notice – businesses offering development of corporate/personal/etc websites are about to face “extinction”. It is much easier, profitable and cost-effective to just go and create a profile on an already existing platform where your audience already is. Consider Basecent, Etsy, Linkedin, Shustir…

And here is the visual data:

- Admit you have a problem, dont tweet it!
- Accept to not validate or comment on a status to feel that you exist.
- Understand that poking a stranger is dangerous.
Repeat: “Alchohol and Twitter do not mix well.” : )
Remove one friend a day.

In the same manner, the website also offers its help to cure your addiction by watching video testimonials and confessions by other addicts. And even better, to share your struggle, they even have a web store selling SMAA t-shirts.

If the addict has still not recovered, after having covered all that is needed, then they can continue their addiction using the new Sony Vaio Mini W-series! This is quite an aggressive advertising message, but it worked for Sony. Sony highlights with a great deal of humor the place of social media in our lives and the risk of addiction that can be caused by excessive use. The campaign is nothing too original for a giant technology company such as Sony, but it is creating buzz by mocking the excessive praise social media gets. At the same time, Sony mock the cold seriousness of the social media critics with its Social Media Addicts Association.

So here are his tips:

1. Explain your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links.

This will promote your username not only in Twitter, but all across social networks. Further, you can follow your retweets using the Retweetist software.

2. Fill out your Bio (adequately).

This will allow people that you do not know to learn a little about you. This field is also published on the “suggested users” Twitter page. A blank or inadequate bio will eventually discourage people from following you.

3. Post links to your Twitter profile EVERYWHERE!

Post links to your Twitter profile on Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, in your blog, in your email signature and all your other online profiles. You can also use TwitterCounter widget for your blog. It is much like the FeedBurner counter.

4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hashtag them.

The use of #hashtags helps users to find content and thus people with similar interests more easily. If people like your content they will follow you.

5. Bring your Twitter account into the real world.

Push your Twitter profile in your presentations, podcasts, business cards…

6. Take pictures.

Photos are easily shared on Twitter. Those of the US Airways flights that landed in the Hudson were viewed over 350,000 times. Also use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific for photos taken on your mobile.

7. Start a contest.

@jasoncalacanis promised to offer a Macbook Air if he became the most followed person on Twitter. He did not succeed in becoming number 1, but this strategy allowed him to gain several thousand of followers.

8. Follow the top Twitter users and watch what they tweet about.

Notice how they address their audience and what kind of content they tweet about. But never copy them!

9. Get involved in #hashtag chats.

On search.twitter.com you will find a list of the hottest current Twitter topics. Join the conversation and use the #hashtags in your tweets.

10. Monitor your results (of course)

The TwitterCounter tool allows you to know how many new followers you acquire every day. Quitter notifies you if someone unfollows you after and after which of your tweets.

You need to realize, though, that increase in number of followers is not a goal in itself. There are many tools, which i really do not approve of, that will generate you thousands of followers quickly, but it is actually better to have 100 followers only that are actually interested in what you tweet, than to have thousands of followers that do not even read your tweets. However, integrated in a larger strategy, the tips recommended by Kevin Rose can be really useful. Please, do not hesitate to comment about your own thoughts and experience on this subject.

]]> http://psykoid.com/2009/10/10-tips-to-increase-your-twitter-followers/feed/ 3 http://psykoid.com/2009/10/9-ways-to-be-retweeted-on-twitter-statistics-based/ http://psykoid.com/2009/10/9-ways-to-be-retweeted-on-twitter-statistics-based/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:45:12 +0000 psykoid http://psykoid.com/?p=969 There are many people looking for ways to increase their Twitter followers, retweets and thus traffic to their websites and blogs. No wonder since it is already a proven fact that Twitter marketing is now much more powerful than email marketing. Consequent to Twitter becoming such a powerful and popular platform is the occurrence of many paid info and software products about Twitter marketing. To be honest with you – all of these products suck big time and in order to keep it ethical to some extent i won’t mention their names.

If getting more retweets is your case, then check out the study called The Science of Retweeting by Dan Zarrella. After having spent 9 months in analyzing 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets, he has now published his Nine tips and tricks on how to get retweeted on Twitter.

To those who are still wondering in why we need retweets, Dan Zarrella explains that retweets may seem like a small idea, but are applicable to the viral concept for other media.

Well, here are the key conclusions of his study:

1. The shortest links get the most retweets.

Retweets contain 3 times as many links as normal tweets. New URL shorteners such as bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd are more popular than longer ones such as tinyurl.

2. Ask for retweets.

Contrary to popular belief, it is favorable to you if you openly ask people to retweet you. According to Dan Zarrella, the words “please”, “retweet”, “check out”, and “new blog post” are often to be found in retweets.

3. Be pertinent.

Facts such as you may not have slept well or are drinking wine right now do not interest anyone. If you do not have anything interesting to tweet, you better do not.

4. Do not use abbreviations.

Retweets contain more syllables per word than normal tweets and are more difficult to understand.

5. Use punctuation marks, but avoid semicolons.

98% of retweets contain punctuation marks, while 86% of normal tweets do. The most popular punctuation marks in retweets are: the colon, the period, the exclamation mark, and finally the comma. Punctuation marks to avoid: the hyphen, the question mark, the ellipsis and the semicolon.

6. Tweet original content.

This may sound banal, but is still important to mention: original content is retweeted much more than already known and popular information.

7. Use names.

Retweets mostly contain nouns, proper names and verbs in the third person (example: Lindsay Lohan escapes from rehab facility; ).

8. Be pertinent.

Tweets about work, religion, money, media and celebrities are retweetd more often than tweets containing vulgarities, negative emotions or ones that talk about the author himself.

9. Wait for the ideal time to tweet.

Tweet on Friday afternoons at about 16:00. The proof is below…

Are you ready to tweet now : )

The explosive evolution of networks such as Facebook, interconnectedness in all places and at all times, the massive change in consumer behaviour… If you need to better grasp the changes that we have undergone over the past few years and, of course, their impact on the use of media and marketing, watch this excellent, thorough, video created by Socialnomics.

Socialnomics conclusion is that: No! Social media in not an ephemeral trend. They represent a shift in our communication behaviour and an economy driven by ordinary people.

In such a globalized world this is more and more dominated by new technology, people need more than ever to belong to communities and to maintain social relationships and activities. The paradox is that… it is the same advanced technology that allows them to do just that. We have yet to see what the future holds, but for now we realise that social media creates new possibilities to many people all across the world and that people do not hesitate to adopt and use these tools. Enterprises, governments and agencies need to adapt to this new situation.

Are you ready for the new era of communication?

With a stunning navigation, The Profiler, offers a never-ending data flow from your profiles, unless you disable some of the profiler tabs.

Without a doubt The Profiler is a remarkable technical achievement, and by communicating so much on social networks Belgacom taps right into the social marketing trend, but yet – not without a risk! Has anybody asked the question what happens to less experienced clients whose Internet use is more 1.0 rather than 2.0?

]]> http://psykoid.com/2009/09/the-profiler-enter-the-web2-0-matrix/feed/ 1 http://psykoid.com/2009/08/yahoo-know-your-mojo/ http://psykoid.com/2009/08/yahoo-know-your-mojo/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:30:47 +0000 psykoid http://psykoid.com/?p=947 I was on a vacation and have not updated the blog in a while, but now i am back and am getting more and more material to post about. So stay tuned, a lot is coming up. And i am also going to reply everybody’s emails later today : )

Few days ago i discovered Yahoo! Know Your Mojo – a site launched by the Yahoo! portal, claiming to know who you are on Twitter.

The twist is very simple, the user has to enter their Twitter username and then in turn is analyzed by being compared to the 16 possible user profiles.

According to online testimonials, however, the site does not do what it promises to, as you sometimes do not get the same mojo if you try it several times with one username.

No matter the effectiveness of the site, it still represents a victory for the hegemony of Twitter and its ability to generate buzz. There is an obvious proof for that: the US Internet leader uses Twitter to promote their new homepage.

People talk about your brand! No matter if you are happy with it or not, no matter if you are a big brand such as Apple, Starbucks or Sony, or if you are a small brand such as the coffee shop round the corner. Even the people you work with talk about your brand, and there are companies, such as Intel, which have already considered this: Intel Social Media Guidelines.

Social media works and is important today , because it gives a human aspect and authenticity to your brand. More and more are people trusting their human nature to be engaged in and be influenced by a person-to-person communication rather than to engage on a one-way broadcasted message from an  unknown source. This is why brands that act on their customers’ behalf get 44% more brand advocates. And if you are not present in the online conversation and do not consider actions based on this communication – you lose opportunities and be sure that your competitors will exploit them.

So… what can you do with social media?

Many tools exist for endless possibilities.

(and these are just very few of them)

These possibilities can be – to create a community, to promote and inform, to get to know more about your customers, to improve your product or service, to deal with complaints, to give support; all of which providing you with a long-term customer relationship!

And what is even more important – all of this is coming to mobile NOW! Via smartphones, notebooks, and God knows what other type of e-mobile devices, people can share their experience, ask, talk, look for advice and reviews online even as they are in your store and are about to buy!

Today people search with Google, but tomorrow people may start searching with Facebook or with any other social network where their friends are!

Addictomatic

A very simple and intuitive tool that tells you what people are saying about you or your brand in a form of movable widgets. Addictomatic shows you results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, etc. You do not even need to register on the site! In order to access your searches, you can just bookmark the URL of your search result and get back to it whenever you need.

Bloglines

This RSS feed, in competition with Netvibes, is very popular in the States. Bloglines can be used to start monitoring the sources you are interested in. And since recently, Bloglines is accessible via iPhone.

Blogpulse

This is a free service by Nielsen Buzzmetrics. Blogpulse allows you to easily search a brand’s name being mentioned in the blogosphere. It also allows you to have access to influence-statistics of numerous US blogs. Further, the trend section offers you graphs of the most talked about subjects on the blogosphere.

Board Tracker

This one is less known than the previous. This tool specializes in monitoring forums. Boardtracker is currently following more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums. English speaking forums are the most monitored.

Commentful

This is a service that monitors comments left on blogs, Digg, Flickr, etc. After sign-up, Commentful sends you a notification for every new comment.

Friendfeed Search

The less known relative to Twitter also has its own search engine. Friendfeed’s search engine is more interesting than Twitter’s. You can call this herecy, but not only does it retrieve text, but also generated content such as photos and videos posted by users.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an essential program for anyone who follows a brand or companies’ occurances and mentions on the Internet. It is simple and easy to use, and most of the time relevant. This tool has evolved a lot over the years, and you now have the option for transforming the alerts you set into RSS feeds – one very interesting option since dealing with mailboxes filled over capacity.

How Socialble

This is not a monitoring tool in the classic sense, it is rather a tool that takes notes on your visibility on social networks. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, Youtube, Myspace, etc, on the same page. This tool can be very useful to measure the impact of your actions across the social networks.

Icerocket

This one is above all a search engine that specializes in the indexing of blogs, using the “fresh links” concept to identify hot topics. It also offers a search module for Myspace, and this makes it the only tool of these that does so.

Keotag

As it is suggested, Keotag allows you to search content tags. Once you have picked a tag, Keotag lets you choose the sites you want to it search for you. Of course, the classics among the choices are: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others. After search, all the filtered results are posted on the same page.