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A Great Slide show by Jay Baer on how to integrate social media into your overall marketing activities.

Here is a nice Presentation on Social Media Case study from Thomas Nelson Publishers. and the different ways by which you can benefit from Twitter.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report on the growing popularity of Twitter and other services used by people to post status updates to the Internet.This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the internet.

Twitter use and status updates in general are on the rise among Internet users overall and several specific user groups as compared to 2008 and earlier this year, according to research just released from the Pew Internet Project.

1) Thirty-five percent of those who use social networks reported that they also use Twitter , compared to 6 percent of users whose only social network is Twitter

2) The study also shows that more than half of all Internet users use a mobile, wireless connection, such as a laptop or cell phone.Mobile users also said they used their mobile devices primarily to stay in touch with others and access information online.

3) Interestingly, gadget geeks represent a large and growing group of Twitter users. Almost 40 percent of Internet users with four or more Internet-connected devices use Twitter.

4) The final growth area identified in the Pew study was younger users. Those under the age of 44 reported a rapidly increasing adoption rate, from 19 percent last year to 37 percent last year. Users 45 and older, on the other hand, have been much slower to adopt Twitter or a similar service.

Source:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_use_up_among_internet_social_network_mobil.php

According to Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur, Twitter will be a hub of hyperlocal news, be used more by devices than humans (eg. cars that Tweet their location) and replace chat applications for many people.

Here is an excellent video by Le Meur,from the 140conf in Los Angeles regarding 30 predictions for the future of twitter

Here is an excellent post from Media140 ,an Independent media movement exploring the future of the ‘real-time’ web.The 140 reference in their name reflects the 140 character limit of Twitter posts and text messages.

Brands must take social media such as Twitter into account .People have always interacted with brands, and brands have always been social. But since social media turned this world into a publishing society, brands have found themselves in a new situation.

In the age of social media, Brands can fail to communicate, vanish or produce an outcry which can affect their business badly.

Social Media are a challenge for brands, and they have to be taken into account. The brand of today faces much more interaction. Depending which way you look at it, social media either forces or enables brands to develop new ways of communication with their customers.

[Read the complete story..]

Found a Great post on mashable.com on how to actually do good on Twitter.

Twitter is good for a great many things, from sharing music to building your brand, from finding friends to playing games. There are many ways to help out others just by tweeting.

1. Follow Charities:
Charities use Twitter to spread information about their causes and campaigns, and you can stay connected to those issues by following them. For non-profit organizations, Twitter is an amazing way to reach constituents and you can help them extend their reach by retweeting the things that they tweet out to your network.

2. Participate in Twitter Fund Drives:
Twitter has proven to be an incredible way to raise money. Because information has the potential to spread so quickly, news of a fundraising drive can reach millions of people through retweets in a relatively short amount of time. As a result, Twitter becomes a great vehicle for encouraging people to donate to a cause, and a number of highly successful fundraising events have been held over Twitter.

3. Help Someone Find a Job:
Twitter is a great way to find a job.If you know of a job that fits their need, tweet it out to them.

4. Start or Sign a Petition:
One of the best ways to organize and raise awareness about an issue, is to start and sign a petition. Twitter has made it absolutely dead simple to create and spread petitions by combining both the means of signing and the means of spreading the word into the same action: the retweet.

5.Organize a Tweetup:
A tweetup is an offline meeting organized via Twitter, and they’re an incredible way to gather like-minded people and raise awareness for a cause, issue, or charitable organization. By bringing people together offline, you can make the issue at hand more real and get people more actively involved

Source:http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/how-to-do-good-on-twitter/

Here is a good guest post on Twitter and Business Branding ideas from Ben Johnson.

Twitter, among many other social media venues, can be used as one of the most powerful tools for branding your business.

Generally, people recognize your business by your logo whether you do business branding traditionally or over the internet. A unique logo gives you recognition and helps you to stand out in the crowd.

A very good example of branding using a unique logo, is the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama. With his unique logo he ran a campaign successfully over different social media websites, especially on twitter.

Along with a logo, be sure to add your business location, your website link, brief information about your business and so on. Moreover, to look more professional and more focused, it’s good to have a professional looking background for your twitter profile.

Next step is to plan your twitter marketing campaign carefully to attract the right attention. Share something of value with your tweet buddies. Tweet to share your latest projects, promotional ideas, upcoming events and valuable thoughts written by the industry leaders.

Twitter is a highly effective tool for business users to connect directly with the potential customers. By taking proper steps you can successfully brand your business over twitter, and of course your unique business logo will play a vital role in giving your business recognition among the competition.

Source: http://businessontwitter.co.uk

Twitter’s co-founder, Evan Williams, talks exclusively to the Daily Telegraph about the future of online search and his plans for improving the micro-blogging platform.

Imagine a world where you were given answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s the future of search according to the chief executive of Twitter, the site every tech company wants a piece of.

“Search is a huge thing for us. I think about it a lot.”- says Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter.

“Location is an obvious one – we can tell quite easily where you are and what information you could be interested in from that. But with our new lists feature [which allows people to create groups of those they follow] and as we get better at curating and filtering the information we have, we will be able to serve people increasingly personalized real-time content. That’s valuable and will make people continue to use and rely upon Twitter.”

Mobile is another key area which Williams is prioritizing because of the mammoth gains in reach and revenue he believes it will bring. “Mobile is really exciting as our goal is to make Twitter essential to everyone’s lives. We want to help people make better choices on the move.
“We think we can do well on mobile because Twitter is native to it. The 140 character limit [the maximum length of a single tweet] was originally set so it could fit onto one text message. Most people don’t realise that,” he says.

Read the entire conversation here….

The deals to make Twitter streams available to Microsoft and Google’s search engines may point to a potential new source of cash-News from nytimes news.

Back-to-back deals on Wednesday to make the company’s steady stream of posts available to Microsoft and Google’s search engines may point to a potential new source of cash. How large, however, is not known. The terms of the deals were not disclosed and Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, said in an interview that revenue was “not the focus of the deals.”

The deals represent the latest evidence of the intense interest in what is known as the real-time Web — the constant stream of posts and updates on Twitter, Facebook and similar services.

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