Now 140 is really an arbitrary number. The basic idea is to set the following limit to a small number, anything below 300 or so. This limit however, does not affect the number of people who can follow you. For example, your Twitter stats can be 3000 followers and 140 following. This could greatly improve the Twitterverse. Here’s why.

Reason 1: Reduce Spam Accounts

There are many spam accounts on Twitter. As reported by Twitter, the spam activity has decreased in recent months, but there are still many spammers out there. By restricting the following limit, spam accounts will be restricted to following 140 users at a time.

You might question, but this limit does not prevent spam accounts from rotating users through their following limit. By this I mean, a spam account will following a user hoping to attract a follow back. If the spam account receives a follow back, the spammer immediately unfollows the user and follows a new user.

This is a legitimate concern and is related to the second reason. Since all users have a following limit, they are less likely to use up one of their following spots on a spam account. Users are more likely to follow only accounts they find valuable.

Reason 2: Measure of Value and Influence

The number of followers an account has will become a greater and more accurate measure of the account’s value to users and the influence of the account. This is because with the limited following spots, users will only follow the top 140 users they find valuable. If an account has 2000 followers, it means 2000 people find the account valuable enough to “vote” for the account with a follow.

Reason 3: Promote Twitter’s Other Features

With the 140 following limit, users will have to find other ways to discover and promote content on Twitter. For example, Twitter lists will become a greater asset since users will still be able to create Twitter lists to aggregate information from users they can’t follow directly. Twitter’s advertising platform (Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends) will get a boost with legitimate users since it will be more difficult to mass promote messages.

Reason 4: Encourage Real Conversations and Relationships

Last, but probably most important, the following limit will help bolster real conversations and relationships on Twitter. This is what social media is meant to do. User who are following more than 300 people are probably not conversing with all of them on a regular basis. User who are following more than 300 people, are probably not reading all the tweets in their stream. So what is the purpose or value of following all these people?

For businesses and account who want to gain influence through their Twitter account and gain followers, they will have to build real relationships, engage in real conversations and provide real value through the account. Otherwise, it is unlikely they will successfully attract followers.

So do you agree or disagree with a following limit?

Victor Chan
eMarketing Strategist

Facebook’s privacy policy, user interface and controls have changed a lot in the past year. Here is a quick guide to help you set up your account the way you want it.

1. Go to www.facebook.com and log in.
2. Click on “Account” (located near the top right corner) and select “Privacy Settings” in the drop down menu. This is the first page of privacy settings you can change.
   
3. Under the “Sharing on Facebook” section, click the “Customize settings” link to customize your settings.
4. After customizing your settings, go back to the “Privacy” page.
5. Next, under the “Basic Directory Information” section on the “Privacy” page, click on the “View settings” link (located at the end of the paragraph). This page will allow you to customize what information you want to appear on your public directory profile. NOTE: Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are always open to everyone.
6. After customizing your settings, go back to the “Privacy” page.
7. Next, if you do not want your public profile to appear in search engine listings at all, under the “Applications and Website” section (located near the bottom right of the “Privacy” page), click on the “Edit your settings” link.
8. Click the “Edit Settings” button located right of the “Public search” item. Make sure the “Enable public search” item is un-checked.
   

There you have it. The settings are scattered about on Facebook, but using this guide allows you to control your privacy on Facebook. Well, some of it anyway.

Victor
eMarketing Strategist

“…Old Spice parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.”

I love this quote because I think that is the future. Companies must start easing up on the tight controls they’ve historically had over their brand. If you need to control every word that is spoken and written about your brand – forcing writers to submit every word they write for scrutiny, you’re doomed. Not to say you should let writers run wild with your brand, but creativity is so quickly quashed when the pen can only write one of 12 “approved” words to describe a product.

Honest exchange, meaningful engagement and worthy interaction in social media comes when speed (aka: real time) is a part of the equation.

Picture this: someone poses a tough question on Twitter to a company (well, hopefully a *person* with a name and a head shot, representing that company). Two days pass and no one has responded. It’s not because the tweet wasn’t noticed. It’s because the person managing Twitter for that company needs to get approval on the response before they can post it. In the meantime, the person who posted the question has grown increasingly frustrated and is now bad-mouthing the company due to the lack of timely response. It even starts to appear that the company is trying to ignore or dodge the tough question.

It may be the most counter-intuitive to let up on brand control.. but the wild success of the Old Spice online campaign proves that if you’re brave enough, and trust enough, it can pay off in ways you never imagined.

If you disagree – let me hear it.

FYI: the quote came from here.

Erin.

Creating, using and managing your personal or business Twitter account is a lot of work. If you didn’t realize this when you first created your Twitter account, it is likely being left idle and unattended for weeks or even months.

Many accounts have faced this fate and many more will likely join them in the Twitter abyss where fail whales loom and Twitter droppings litter the ground.

Twitter users may have abandoned their accounts for a number of reasons, for example, stating:

• “I don’t have time to tweet anymore”
• “Twitter isn’t that exiting or fun anymore”
• “I don’t think anyone is even reading my tweets”

These are legitimate reasons, but there are ways you can overcome them.

Twitter is an effective tool that can be used in a strategy to reach real goals and objective. Using Twitter effectively, however, takes dedicated time and resources.

Here are some ways to overcome the challenges of using Twitter.

I don’t have time to tweet anymore

Tweeting on a daily basis is a challenge for many people. Finding and creating valuable tweets beyond what you ate for lunch today, takes time. This is where technology comes in.

There are many free tools that can help you tweet on a consistent basis.

Hootsuite allows you to preschedule tweets to publish them at a later date. If you know you’ll be busy the entire day tomorrow, why not schedule a tweet or two in advance.

Mobile apps like Twitter for the BlackBerry or Twitter for the iPhone allows you to tweet on the go.

Twitter isn’t that exiting or fun anymore

It’s true that the dramatic growth of Twitter adoption has plateaued a bit, but what’s special about Twitter is not the tool itself, but what you make of it. If you’re bored with what you’re currently doing on Twitter, why not try something new?

Use a 3rd party app, such as StumbleUpon’s iPad app to discover new content and configure your new stumbles to publish on Twitter. (If you need help on how to set it up, ask me in the post’s comments section).

Or maybe find a new group of Twitter users who share a similar interest as you or your business industry and start conversations with them. You can discover new users through Twitter lists, through Twitter directories like WeFollow.com or through hash tags like #canucks (for Canuck fans) or #worldcup (for World Cup fans).

I don’t think anyone is even reading my tweets

It’s hard to be motivated to tweet on a consistent basis if you think you’re speaking to a void. The best way to increase the number of people who read your tweets is by building solid relationships with other Twitter users. Those who find you interesting will likely read and perhaps even retweet your tweets.

Do you feel good when someone retweets your tweets? Well, you’ll probably make them feel good by retweeting their tweets too.

Happy tweeting,

Victor
eMarketing Strategist

Courtesy of encoding.com

As of May 2010, the H.264 format has claimed a stake in 66 percent of all videos online, making it the current leader for internet video compression.

One reason is, well, H.264 is an athletic encoder – it looks great and weighs less! Technically, it offers nearly three times greater compression than MPEG-2, at half the file size, and still looks clean and sharp, I like to think of it as the star wrestler of video encoders, the way it squashes data flat.

Another reason for H.264’s dominance, is it’s flexibility. H.264 was created to allow content from your home computer to be delivered to other devices without the time consuming hassle of converting. So, if you happen to have the latest technology in your hands, you can share your H.264 videos from your computer to your iPhone to your iPod to your DVD player, to your TV set-top box with no sweat, no cursing, no mangled, stretched or pixelated video.

And finally, I would guess that YouTube – the Ruling King of Video – has been one of the major forces in pushing H.264 to the top.

In the beginning, YouTube’s favored codec was H.263 Sorenson Spark in an FLV container. And people were astounded at the speed of playback and the ability of H.263 to crunch a fat movie down to an edible size. We were finally watching video in real time, on our home computers, without fits and starts, and the world was forever changed.

Since then, YouTube, whose very existence requires the staff stay on top of evolving video compression standards, started using H.264 in 2007 and three years later, YouTube uses and promotes H.264 FLV. In a recent blog post, YouTube explained that they chose H.264 because they need a format that will work with as many browsers as possible. And for efficiency’s sake, YouTube needs to minimize the number of formats they accept to keep up with their manic upload rate of 24 hours of video every minute (makes me sweat just thinking about it!).

While YouTube gives a nodd to the people-friendly open video format VP8, YouTube says they’re sticking with the Flash Player and H.264 for now, noting Flash’s security features and it’s technical capabilities such as recording from a webcam straight on to YouTube for live chat and broadcasting.

On June 24, Victoria, British Columbia became the first city to proclaim June 30 as Social Media Day. See the signed Social Media Day Proclamation. Vancouver was not far behind as you can see in this photo of Pete Cashmore holding the Vancouver Social Media Day Proclamation.

On June 30, people around the world celebrated Social Media Day, which was initiated by Mashable on June 8. Check out what people did to celebrate on Flickr and on YouTube.

Of course, Social Media wasn’t the only big event that happened this week. Canadians across the country took some time to celebrate Canada Day on July 1. Everyone had their own way of celebrating which were shared through photos and videos.

Through online media, these two celebrations, one in its inaugural year and the other being the 143rd year, allowed people to share, connect and communicate across boundaries, time zones and cultures. The way we celebrate together today is vastly different from what was possible, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, let alone 143 years ago.

The world has changed.

Victor
eMarketing Strategist

I enjoyed going through the slideshow.. and I didn’t entirely disagree with its point. However, there is an “it all comes down to semantics” argument to be made against it. Let me explain.

The presentation stated you don’t need a social media strategy.  Instead, you need an engagement strategy, or an influence strategy. My take on the presentation was that it was capitalizing on the nausea widely experienced when hearing the ubiquitous phrase “social media strategy”. Fair enough.  However, in our shop, engagement and influence are key parts of every strategy. Doesn’t that go without saying?  Perhaps what the slideshow was trying to get at is the fact that it is vitally important to venture deeper than social media when designing an online plan. Mobile, website content, optimization, online advertising are all important, sometimes more important than social media depending on the business objectives for the strategy.

There is no question “social media” is getting way too much airtime. But for people new to the concept of having an integrated online strategy, this term can really help get them in the right line of thinking, despite its shortcomings.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

Resourcing Social Media

I’m attending the Canadian Public Relations Society conference in Regina.  Lots of great PR practitioners here, many of whom work for municipal and provincial government, and other large organizations.

A common question keeps popping up.  How does my organization resource an online social media strategy?

The question is understandable, given that many marketing and communications teams are working with reduced budgets and increased demands.  Here’s the thing, an online strategy is not a bucket to be filled.

Every online strategy should be designed to match the internal resources (e.g. the available time and skill set of your existing team) and/or external support (e.g. budget to hire content creators or strategists).  There is no point sketching out a comprehensive social media plan that will chew through content faster than you can create it.

Here are five questions to ask before designing your online strategy:

1)  Who is the person in-house, or a subcontractor, to lead the online initiative?  How much time do they have each day or each week to manage the project.
2) What is the skill set of the project lead?  Does the strategy need to allow time for training, either formal (training by an experienced strategy team, workshops) or informal (via free webinars, books, reading online).
3) Are there others who can contribute content? What time do they have available?
4) What are the objectives for the online campaign?  If the goals are too ambitious for the available resources, consider developing a multi-phase plan.  Appeal to management to gradually increase resources if realistic benchmarks are met along the way.
5) Is the person or team running the online strategy empowered to be responsive?  Are they authorized to answer questions and engage with target markets?  When a question is asked that requires information from another department, or a language translation, how fast can it be acquired?

With answers to these questions in hand you, or your strategy team, will be in a much better position to design a digital strategy that sets everyone up for success.

Good luck!
Moyra

What’s so great about the iPad you ask?  Is it really that sensational or is it just an oversized iTouch / iPhone?

The larger screen size does make it a more practical and comfortable experience when reading longer articles (eg. ebooks, pdfs, etc) or when using the multitude of Apps on the bright, crisp screen.

So what Apps are available? Apple has a featured selection and many other websites have a list of essential or top iPad Apps to download.

If you haven’t got your iPad yet, move fast and see if you can find one at the official Apple store or website. You might also find one at BestBuy, FutureShop or London Drugs. However, chances are you’ll have to wait a bit. With the 2 million iPads sold in less than 60 days since its initial release in the US, stock appears to be running low.

Do you have an iPad? How do you like it?

Victor

Feels like a tipping point. But why now?  Are we just coming out of our cocoons realizing that it’s sort of a drag there’s no church on Sundays, regretting that we traded the pub on Thursday night for a brisk walk on the sea wall?

A few years ago, Patrick West wrote a fascinating book called, Conspicuous Compassion.   West theorized that our public displays of emotion (wearing ribbons, joining rallies, laying flowers to mark the death of a celebrity) are an expression of our desire to connect. “We desperately seek a common identity and new social bonds to replace those that have withered in the post-war era.”

I have to wonder if the Internet, that frontier land of random connection, has allowed us to test drive these bonds, permitting us to reach out in an environment where the risk of rejection is mitigated by scale and anonymity. Might the world wide web have readied us to reach out to our real world neighbours?  Wouldn’t that be rich?

So much of what is happening in the social media sector is cloud shoveling.  Self declared thought leaders. “Benevolent” geeks building “safe” neighbourhoods that compromise our security and disrespect our very identify.

Might the greatest output of all that computing power, plastic and fibre wind up being the imperative it is creates in us to venture next door and invite our neighbour over for a cup of tea?

- Moyra