So the latest Mashable article on the use of social media points to emarketer results indicating that two-thirds of marketers use social media in some capacity. The number is projected to increase to 82% in the next 12 months leaving a mere 12% of businesses uninterested in using the online outlet. The reasons companies aren’t using? They range from not knowing what to do, to not understanding measurement and benefits, to believing it is a poor use of employee time.

As this seems to be a great thing for businesses like myself that teach companies how to use social media and help create and execute social media plans, it definitely leaves the social media space cluttered. The space is becoming filled with a lot more noise than a few months ago, and the noise can definitely get in the way of effective messaging. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook Announces Real-Time Search

Just hours following Facebook’s (FB) acquisition of Social Media aggregator FriendFeed, the ever-growing Social Media site announced real-time search for it’s users. The joining of the two entities gives Facebook some leverage to compete with Google and Twitter. In case you’re not familiar with FriendFeed, PC Magazine explained that:

FriendFeed aggregates and publishes updates from sites like Twitter, Yelp, Netflix, Blogger, and Flickr in one stream. It debuted in 2007 and is the brainchild of [Bret] Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh – all former Google employees who worked on products like Gmail and Google Maps.

Facebook had been testing their new search product for about a month before going live on August 11th. The enhanced search will sort through the 250+ million users and update any search terms that are marked “Post by Everyone” in real-time. Read the rest of this entry »

MyTwitterButler.com has posted on their site that they received a letter from Twitter claiming several violations of the Twitter terms of service.  The details including a PDF of the letter sent to the site owner can be viewed here.  While the site owner claims they are being sued, that does not yet appear to be the case.  In fact, the PDF outlines the various violations this site has in regards to Twitter and their terms of service.

Site Background

A quick background on MyTwitterButler is that they sell a desktop application to help Twitter users get more followers.  Twitter has been known to be against “aggressive following” and it appears that is what they consider this application to do.  While Twitter never clearly defines what “aggressive following” is, it leaves it up to speculation of the developers and users. Looking at the developer terms of service, it simply says:

Do not create a bot to promote mass following. Twitter enables users to find and connect with people. Mass following does not help users find interesting connections. Applications found to be promoting valueless mass-following or following-ponzi schemes will be promptly blacklisted. So please, spend your time developing something that helps users find people with interesting connections.

As you can see, the definition of “mass following” is not clearly defined. However, alot of Twitter activity is based on third party apps that make the use of Twitter more efficient.  What is the real difference if you manually go through the Twitter search to find new users to add based on your interests/keyword opposed to using an application that automates the process for you?  You can save countless hours with the help of an application that does this.  In fact, MyTwitterButler allows you to search for users based on keywords. Therefore, I would think this application could be classified as “something that helps users find people with interesting connections” in reference to the last sentence quoted above. Read the rest of this entry »