Ever dreamt of Olympic Gold? Maybe London 2012 will be your chance for gold, but for us mortals the International Olympic Committee have come up with a way for us to beat some of those who have won Gold in ‘The Best of Us Challenge’. Now you might not fancy your chances against Michael Phelps when it comes to swimming, or against Nadal in tennis, but hows your golf? Or even easier, how many tennis balls can you pick up and hold in 30 seconds.
There’s a wide range of challenges on-line and all you need to compete is a camcorder and the ability to compete, check out some of the challenges below or visit http://thebestofuschallenge.olympic.org/
Jack Johnson, the author of many mellow melodies that’ll make you want to stay in bed all day, has figured out a really cool way to promote his new live album on Twitter.
It’s really simple: just head on to twitter.jackjohnsonmusic.com. There’s a premade Twitter message there (you can add 24 more characters if you like) that promotes the new album, titled En Concert, and all you need to do is login into your Twitter account and send it. The download of the promised tune (it’s a 192 kbps MP3) will start automatically.
This is probably one of the simplest and best examples of how a musician can promote his work via Twitter, because everyone wins: you get a free song off the new album, and Jack Johnson will probably get a free Twitter trend and lots of good vibes.
We received ‘Flake (Live from San Francisco)’ – let us know what tune you get?
One of our favourite social media stories during the past week, Facebook use leads to arrest of burglar.
Facebook use leads to arrest
According to The Journal, a 19-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested earlier this week on a charge of felony daytime robbery. How did police catch him? Simple: the burglar left a trail, by way of checking his Facebook account before leaving the house with two diamond rings and forgetting to log out.
Jonathan Parker remains in custody on $10,000 bail, facing a maximum 10 year prison sentence if convicted. A friend of the defendant said Parker had asked him for help breaking into the victim’s house the previous night, so things are not looking too good for the perp.
So what do you think: is this a case of Facebook addiction, or just a very dim burglar? We’re sure there’s a burglar out there somewhere getting ready to tweet his thieving antics and maybe put up a photo album of his swag on Flickr…isn’t social media great!
Following the huge success of the original song ‘United Break Guitars’ which has amassed over 5 million views to date, the second song of the promised trilogy has been released.
It was reported in the the Times that within four days of the original song going online, the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million.
It is doubtful that the second song will have such an impact, but it will certainly be interesting to see if the story continues to have a following.
It was reported on the BBC website on July the 10th that ‘A strung-out musician who blames United Airlines for breaking his prize guitar has taken revenge by writing a song that has become a YouTube hit.’ Today this news story has made the national morning BBC breakfast news in UK.
The musician, Dave Carroll blames United Airlines for breaking his $3500 Taylor guitar and following a long fight for compensation has released the first of 3 Music videos aimed at United Airlines on YouTube
The video to-date has received 3.5million views and has over 25000 positive reviews along with almost 17000 comments on the video. The times has reported that within four days of the song going online, the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million. Which, incidentally, would have bought Carroll more than 51,000 replacement guitars.
United Airlines are trying to claim that “His video is excellent and we plan to use it internally as a unique learning and training opportunity to ensure that all our customers receive better service.”
It will be interesting to see if the other two parts of Carroll’s trilogy will have a similar global impact? – But a more pressing question is, are you using Social Media to support and promote your brand?
We just found this on-line thanks to Perry Belcher (http://twitter.com/PerryBelcher) hosted on www.slideshare.net.
It’s an excellent presentation by an American/Canadian firm Espresso (http://brandinfiltration.com/) highlighting the power and importance of Social Media.
Take a look at the presentation and let us know your thoughts. The figures make you realise how important Social Media is, and why you need to be part of it! Need help, then drop us an e-mail or pick up the phone and give us a call (enquiries@itpie.co.uk or 02920711607)
Now I’m not going to claim to be ground-breaking following my newly created Twitter account, in fact until last week I was a bit of a sceptic, but as is partly the purpose of this blog I wanted and intend to test all forms of social media and plan on maximising my companies exposure through social media whilst minimising the amount of time invested in achieving this goal. In a future blog I will explain how I am using Twitter to fully tweet my messages but for this post I would like to focus on Twitter the social media tool.
So I’m confident you have all heard of twitter following the mass media coverage it has received over the past months with many celebrities and even politicians using it (it was part of Barack Obama’s campaign) But in case you haven’t the concept is that you can ‘Tweet’ your message which is made up of 140 characters and contact all your followers with one single message. The idea was inspired by MSN Messenger where it is possible to add an out of office/ away to lunch message according to co-founder Biz Stone, Biz and the other two co-founders decided to create a prototype and insisted that family and friends use it, at first they were reluctant, but following a minor earthquake many turned to twitter to get a message of their safety out to friends and family instead of using the phone to contact everyone individually – this was a real moment in Twitters history when they realised that there was a use for Twitter. The other was when the plane was landed on the Hudson River and Twitter seemed to be ahead of the media in delivering the news! According to Sue Robinson from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Campus “It was a kind of mass network journalism, or crowd sourcing is another term for it. A lot of people are writing in, and that mass, that collection of data, creates the news story.”
So Twitter had arrived and had a respectable following for a social media site, but it was when celebrities began to use it that it really took off. It is claimed that when American celebrity Oprah Winfrey ‘Tweeted’ live on her show traffic to the Twitter site increased by 43%. The site has grown in the number of users dramatically, from half a million in February 2008 to seven Million a year later and in the past four months it is thought to have grown beyond 10 million, but there is a downside. According to a study by Harvard University, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content where as on a typical social media website the top 10% of users generate 30% of content. It also claims that more than half of people using Twitter updated their page once every 74 days. This research has led to the longevity of the site being questioned, will Twitter survive the hype?
It is our belief following our brief experience that Twitter is here to stay, it is just the way in which it is marketed and used that needs re-defining.
On the Twitter home page it claims that:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
But it is our belief that users do not want to share the same information with family, friends and colleagues and do not want to use Twitter to communicate personal information. In fact as a personal tool for communicating I am not convinced that Twitter has any future, but as a commercial tool for businesses to promote their services and to maintain continued contact with the clients who are interested it is ideal. In a matter of 140 characters it is possible to remind customers of your company and direct them to your website.
An additional bonus of Twitter is the way in which it now connects to varying applications, we believe it has become a useful SEO tool and an excellent way of generating inbound links. In a future post I will share with you how I am now using Twitter to create at least 3 in bound links to my post whilst writing my post – through blogging I am creating in bound links using Twitter (without even logging into Twitter) which will help to further promote my blog and website.
So now you know what the tweet it’s all about don’t you think you should get tweeting?
Well I’ve been thinking about tweeting for some time and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure of its value to our business (though I do recognise that it can be almost invaluable to certain industries) and I will blog on this later, but for now I want to anounce our arrival on Twitter and let you in on a little secret – I have a plugin which should update my Twitter account (This is a test) meaning that as I blog I Twitter, hitting two social media tools in one go and generating links back and forth between blog and Twitter.
I’ll post soon on my experience of setting up Twitter and the plugin used for my blog. But got to do some more testing first.
Welcome, this is my first post and to be honest I’m not sure what to write right now.I’ve thought about outlining the purpose of my blog or maybe a little about me, but it feels as though this information should be posted in the default ‘about’ section, so hop over there I guess for this information, or stay here and read below for a brief summary…
Basically, I’ve decided to grasp social media, web 2.0, blogging and the such with both hands and see what I can achieve with it, but without going out there and promoting it to my friends, family and colleagues (at least in the beginning) so other than my girlfriend, no one knows about my blog and I want to see who reads it if anyone does and more importantly, what traffic and new business I can drive to my business IT Pie via my blog and other social media. Currently I only use Facebook for personal networking and I have a LinkedIn profile (though I don’t make the most of it) for professional networking, but in the coming weeks I’m going to investigate all the various social media tools and blog about my experience, from setting it up to using it and the results achieved.
So please, continue to read this blog, post a comment to let me know when you found the blog and visit my company site (IT Pie) – better still employ me and use some of the services we offer.
