It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort. Read the rest of this entry »

The question “do you deserve your following” might sound a bit odd. After all, if it is a followerbase like on twitter that you have, people have the option to unfollow you once they feel mistreated. Nevertheless it is a good thing to stop and think about how you treat the people that follow you online. Yes, of course there might be real life friends and other contacts represented in your following, but quite often posts on how to deal with your following tend to lean towards “what do you get from it”  side.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy. Read the rest of this entry »

If new media, social media or web ‘2.0’ has something new to offer from the ‘old’ ways then it’s the way of sharing information. I think this is, besides the way of creating this information, indeed one of the key points that many before me have described about this new way of using the web. But what is this new way of sharing information all about? Is it indeed the ‘prosumer’ approach where everyone is creating and consuming content at the same time? If one would name sharing, editing and redistributing content as the key to social media, a virtue of this new way of sharing and consuming content then one neglects the underlying question; why this ‘works’.

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I’m not going to say “someone had to do it” because I’m not really sure, but the fact is that Levi has made a fanpage for me, on Facebook. So I guess this might be my first bit of fame. If you really like me, or just my handle ThE_ED, you can become a fan of me here… And no, I’m not a fan of myself yet.

In the meantime 2009 is coming to an end and so we find ourselves looking back and making lists about just about anything. The überlist of course is twitter, that itself has lists and I ‘ve even spotted a website listing twitterlists. Jeroen Mirck has compiled the Dutch “Twitter Top-40” of 2009 (Dutch Article) and new on the 8th spot is me! Women seem to be taking over the heavy tweepslist, so I should perhaps make up an excuse already for next year as to why I’ve dropped so many places.

A couple of months ago I noticed something strange; some of my tweets didn’t always show up in the twitter search. Quite soon it appeared that my hashtags were not indexed or omitted from the search functionality. Whenever I would click a hashtag to find it’s latest connected tweets I would never see any of my tweets. At first I thought that this might be some smart thing on the side of Twitter, where it would omit your own tweets from any search you would do. This didn’t turn out to be the case, however as it also happened when using a different system where I wasn’t logged in. I didn’t think too much of it, keeping in mind more search troubles with twitter that had been reported earlier this year.  The fact that this also keeps me from being included in backchannels made me think after a while and I searched a bit more.
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Text-analytics on data present on the internet, in a way a sort of quantitative way of doing research that is traditionally qualitative seems to hold a lot in store for research. But despite the fact that this is actually one of my personal favorites for the future of Market Research, little seems to really take off. Sure there are talks about doing research on twitter, but very few real efforts have been made or at least way less than one would maybe expect. For now most of marketing efforts seem to regard online communities as just another advertising space, but things slowly start to change.

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Is Google Internet Stats a peek at the near future of the Web?
Yes, Google Internet Stats has been live for quite some time, albeit only in the .co.uk domain. However, due to some recent discussions I had with people about the future of presenting information on the web I think it might be useful to have a look at this website anyway. Moreover, this seems to be a good moment to look at this, now attention for Google’s bigger new toy, Wave, is fading. This is because the way that this site is presenting the information might just be part of the next step in publishing, blogging or whatever it is you do on the web.

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Something different, perhaps, than the usual article you’ll find about twitter. I may have a lot to add to any article that’s out there already, but as people have been publishing so many articles in the past two months or so it might be best to let it all just be for a n while.

There are a lot of excellent and less excellent articles out there about how you might use this microblogging tool to your advantage and I’m not going to add to that, for now. Instead I want to talk about a more basic thing and that is the structure underlying the whole tool.

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