Month: September 2009

This interesting article from Fast Company features new research that proves 9 ways you can increase the ‘retweeting’ of your tweets.

Interesting stuff except that it’s one of those research projects where now that the evidence has been published, the circumstances will change. I predict within 6 weeks, if not sooner , these ‘rules’ will be out the window.

A common occurrence with this kind of ‘benefit’ research is that the mid section of the bell curve (the big bit) will adopt these tactics in their tweeting methodology. On some levels that is not so bad. I for one like complete sentences and punctuation. I also like that if the majority of people adopted and adhered to Point 3 then twitter traffic would drop by at least 50% and therefore junk tweets may disappear altogether. Epic Win!

But if everyone tweets, as per Point 9, at 4Pm on Fridays, then there is going to be an Epic Fail as twitter falls over.

Just when I was starting to think that news.com.au was lifting their game comes this story;

Advertisers pay for personal Facebook information

Shock horror! Oh, the humanity. On what planet does this constitute news. It may be to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this story but for every other person on Facebook its well known. Actually, expected.

Perhaps rather than coming from a journo this ‘story’ has fallen from the mind of a Myspace (owned by News Corp) PR hack and published on all their sites in some half hearted and poorly conceived strategy to bolster the flagging fortunes of Myspace.

And the comments on the story should give the editors some food for thought – if they do in fact think at all. Consumers expect to be advertised to when they receive a service for free.

Stories like this prove that news.com.au and the larger organisation is out of touch with their audience.