Tom Blogs » twitter

24 Hour experiments in Twitter

Tom — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:27:05 +0000

Companies are always looking for new ways to raise their profile and market themselves on twitter, but sometimes its the charity and even public sector that lead on innovative ways to raise awareness, forced to try news ways on limited budgets and powered by enthusiasm to make a difference.

One example of this is the 24 hour twitter experiment which gets a new look today. This has been tried a few times before with varying success:

Manchester police - kick-starting the idea was Manchester tweeting every incident over a 24 hour period to show the breadth and depth of their daily workload. The BBC wrote up the experiment: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11537806
Walsall Council – following Manchester’s lead, Walsall also spent a day tweeting what their staff got up to over 24 hours. This got a rather mixed response as the comments on the Guardian website illustrate: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/03/local-government-twitter-walsall-24
Today: WaterAid – the international NGO is tweeting it’s activities from across the globe, taking the idea to the next level and really showing the world wide communication opportunities that are available.

Best of luck to WaterAid.

Southern let the customer tweet for them.

Tom — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:19:04 +0000

Some say “it’s better to have no twitter account at all than an inactive one“, but I’m not sure that Southern feel that way, as two twitter accounts with their name on are not promoting the rail company in very good light.

Firstly, @southerntrains is mostly harmless narrating the life of a commuter in south London, with tweets such as

“Cancellations at charing x so missed my connection at London bridge again“

and

“London overground have put one bench back at Norwood, where there was 4. So am still standing up.”

Then there’s @southern_trains, which is far more motivated and often hilarious. As well as posting it’s own reviews on the trains service

“Just emailed Man Booker Prize awards people asking how I could submit our timetable for consideration for their fiction award.#seriously“

it mainly focuses on retweeting the cream of other people’s comments, some of whom aren’t aware that it isn’t an official account:

“Once again train cancelled due to the doors not opening at Preston Park. Service definitely worth £3500/year. Bloody #southerntrains“

and

“Exceptional service, @Southern_Trains. You are on time. It is an exception.“

There are many many more…

If you use Southern for your commute, you may like to follow these accounts to at least share your frustrations…

My mum’s dog

Tom — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:27:34 +0000

Maybe it’s this kind of honesty that gets Richard Bacon his 1,316,602 followers (at time of posting).

My mum’s dog is on This Morning right now (the bigger white one). I’m worried it’s got better TV work than I have. Posted at 11:22 10/02/2011

Join him at twitter.com/richardpbacon if you wish.

***UPDATE***

Twitter response from @richardwbiggs explains it all: twitter.com/richardwbiggs/status/35687861860835328

A social media example – not just opinion.

Tom — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:15:13 +0000

A good piece about difficulties and successes of using social media, with real examples – not just opinions! “A Positive Response to a ‘Negative’ Tweet“. How refreshing.

About a month ago I had this same conversation with my friend Shira Lazar and she said something interesting. The topic was on trying to get someone to stop saying something on social media. Shira said something like, “people are going to think bad thoughts. They are going to talk about it with their friends. They will be sharing. At least on social media you know what they are and you can address them” – BINGO!

Thanks to Sue Fiddler for finding it, you can read the full article at hardlynormal.com/blog/2011/02/05/a-positive-response-to-a-negative-tweet/

Evening Standard free for all

Tom — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:14:09 +0000

Today the evening standard relaunches after its “Sorry” campaign. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of talk about it, but not as much as I thought there might be.

To set the scene, the guardian has an interview with Veronica Wadley.

Saying ‘Sorry’ for the past smacks of a Soviet courtroom ‘confession’. ‘Sorry’ has all the hallmarks of a KGB-style smear campaign.

The paper is now out on the streets and the immediate opinions on from twitter aren’t great.

The new London Evening Standard… oh dear oh dear oh dear – justin_williams

Typography? Leading? My eyes hurt!http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/ Will the Evening Standard be apologising for this? tayler

Oh Dear London Evening Standard. Oh deary me. Dboy

Kept my free copy of the “new” Evening Standard for about as long as it took me to walk across the street & back in my office. Still trash! webcowgirl

And more here: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Evening%20Standard

Feeding friends a twitter mixx

Tom — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:27:44 +0000

This week I’ve been getting to grips with a few web services which I’ve looked at briefly in the past.

First was twitter, which i’m still not sure about, mainly due to the time needed to invest in updating it enough times to make it useful (even though you can do it by phone, email, web etc.) and also because it doesn’t have the big following in the UK as it does in the US. If i can get it to replace Facebook status updates (the fb application was broken when I tried) then I think it may be worth it. Untill then…

Next was Friend Feed, which I’m getting to like quite a lot. The list of services it can follow is impressive and I like it’s simplicity. So far I have it tracking my activity on del.icio.us, digg, flickr, google reader, last fm, linkedin, mixx (I’ll come back to that), twitter and youtube. So far so good and it will probably get used a lot to aggregate research for blog content.

Lastly was Mixx, which has a bit of an overlap with some other services (digg, youtube, del.icio.us). It’s a way of recording and sharing (of course!) URLs, photos and videos you find while browsing the web. I’ll use it mainly for photo and video and it’s great for tracking inspirational images you notice while browsing the web.