A recent blog post and case study by Econsultancy has brought social conversations into the search realm. The post outlines a case study undertaken by Econsultancy on Magners cider whereby it appeared that online conversations mentioning the brand drove the Magners.co.uk website up search engine rankings for both brand and generic key words. Econsultancy had optimised the new Magners web site but there were no back links to it yet as it was sitting at a new domain.

It seemed that social conversations may have played a factor and Econsultancy set up a test site for the theory and you can read about the full results here. These social conversations did not include hyperlinks but instead seemed to rely upon a strong connection between the brand and the keyword “cider” in online conversations, and between the website and social media platforms.
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There has been massive outrage online and especially throughout the Twittersphere over the implications and rushed passing of the Digital Economy Act 2010. To manifest the angry sentiments and give voice to the Tweets Wired Sussex hosted a debate at the Lighthouse yesterday evening.

Chairing proceedings was Anthony Lilley, the chief executive of Magic Lantern and an Ofcom board member. He did very well to play devil’s advocate and ask the panel questions on behalf of the bill in an attempt to maintain some balance to the argument, although it was quite clear from the audience and panel’s vibrations that opposition was the reigning opinion.

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Snow has been here again, reminding me on my last trip to Paris, for XMAS, on Eurostar.

So to start this year’s blog, I thought that I would look back on my Eurostar experience over the Xmas period as I was trying to go to Paris to spend holidays with my French family.

Soon after five trains had broken down in the tunnel on December 19th, Eurostar started to send email updates every day, asking their customers to check the Eurostar website every evening at 8pm for traffic information.

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Twitter triumphed last week in a media battle for free speech. I’m sure you’re now familiar with the Trafigura story, but if not here’s a quick recap.

Trafigura are an oil trading company accused of illegally dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. In a desperate attempt to save face they instructed their lawyers, the firm Carter-Ruck, to impose a super injunction (an injunction on an injunction so said media outlet can’t publicly announce that it can’t publicly announce something) on the Guardian newspaper (who initially broke the story). And so they could not publicly report their findings or the parliamentary goings-on in regards to the Trafigura toxic issue.

However you can’t hold down social media and the collective conscience of the internet, soon the blogosphere was buzzing with the story but of course at that point, no one knew exactly what the story was, exactly why the Guardian had been gagged or what exactly was being discussed in parliament. Twitter soon became the platform on which people were communicating in order to solve this puzzle.

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With the huge growth of social media and in particular twitter, for a bit of fun it got me to thinking about types of bird and how they compared to the types of people who use social media. So here are some suggestions about social media bird types.

Which one do you feel you’re part of and feel you relate most to? Also can you think of any more?

Parrots; without a single original thought of their own, members of this group simply copy other people’s contributions. On twitter this is even supported through the use of retweeting, RT or via. Of course reasonable RT is excellent but Parrots go way beyond the simple retweeting of items of particular interest but in essence their only contributions are copies of other people’s content. (more…)

You can’t now seem to pick up a newspaper or watch television without the word Twitter being mentioned at some point. Twitter, in case you have been living on the moon for the past year is a social media and microblogging website which enables its users to send and read updates regarding information posted via “tweets”. Twitter is the buzz word and is becoming the main social media website to be seen and heard on.
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I attended “Harnessing The Power Of Twitter” in London last week, a conference organised by Internet World. It brought together an array of digital marketing specialists, twitter pioneers, and business owners.
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Some interesting new statistics regarding Twitter have emerged from The Harvard School of Business. Taking the results of 300,000 randomly selected Twitter users, it looked into how people were using the service and how it compares to social networking sites.
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Another day and another takeover bid for Twitter emerges, this time a $700million approach by Apple.

Following on from the Facebook bid and the reported interest of Google and Microsoft, Apple are reported to be in late stage negotiations by several industry bloggers who believe that they they hope to announce a deal in the next month or so. (more…)

The world is going Twitter crazy right now. From A-list celebrities twittering away daily to sports stars getting fined by their team for twittering during half time team talks, Twitter is everywhere.

Both Microsoft and Google have been linked with potential buyouts of Twitter and it is even now dabbling in becoming a fully fledged search engine of sorts. At the recent SMX conference in Sydney Twitter expert, Darren Rowse explained some of the benefits of using Twitter not only for personal use but for business as well. (more…)