Michael Messina’s posterous

Fascinating. According to this article by Dan Macsai, Hubspot's viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella "spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets" to formulate "The Science of Retweeting."

There is a lot of interesting information that I've been curious about in Dan's analysis. I especially like the Time of Day graph - good stuff. The afternoon tends to work better for me too, and I can honestly say that I've personally contributed to the Friday, 4pm spike. Who doesn't like to do a little tweeting before the weekend?

To top off the sweet analysis, from the little interaction I've had with Dan, he seems like a really nice guy. Dan also (apparently) has a book coming out called The Social Media Marketing Book.

Social media is here to stay," says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. "Online social networks are more than just a fad among the younger generation. They've become an integral part of our personal and professional lives. They're an effective way to keep in touch with people, connect with friends and family, and network with colleagues. Social media will also transform marketing as we know it. They're powerful communication tools, and are becoming an essential part of successful marketing strategies.

According to this study, 43% of the online community uses social networks. My biased statement is that number sounds a little low, but according to PEW Internet & American Life Project (PEW), it could be a little high or we've seen a huge boom in folks trying out social networking since January 2009.

PEW reported that 35% of the online population used social networking sites in January 2009: http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/Generational-differences-in-online-activities.aspx

For all us geeks out there, we know how big the potential is. FriendFeed can do so much. I've been considering doing all my online business there - keeping me up at night thinking about how I might do that... It may be one of the most multi-purposed social media tools out there.

It's like a highly customizable Google Reader, where you can get all your news and easily organize.

It's like a real-time search engine, like search.twitter.com.

It's like twitter where you can send out 140 character messages with links. Even has a sweet bookmarklet.

It's like many other social networks that have groups.

It's like a microblog like tumblr or posterous where you can easily serve up posts, ping your networks with a short url, and let them come back to your post to "like" or "comment"

It's like a blog or a network where you can subscribe or follow your friends and easily link people that interact with your own blog.

It's like not very user-friendly, and I mean that in the most general way, thinking of all online users of all abilities - it is just way too complicated for the average or passive user.

ENTER FACEBOOK, masters of usability among many other things.

Imagine all the tools above and much more rolled up into your Facebook account. I've read some posts that this acquisition is not a game-changer... well, I think that it is... this is pretty big, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they integrate.

Tech quote of the day: Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, compared the Aug. 6th meltdown on twitter to "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time."

No offense to people struggling with their weight but this is a really good analogy.

Social media monitoring/analytics agencies are smiling wider today than yesterday...

SEO - twitter style, coming to an agency near you...

• Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.
  • Authors: Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng.
  • Date: August 12, 2007.
  • Abstract: Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.
• Twitter Tweets for Higher Education.
  • Author: Alan A. Lew.
  • Date: August 19, 2007.
  • Abstract: Blog post on my Web 2.0 Teaching Tools site about using Twitter in education, with a focus on higher education. Includes links to other websites that discuss Twitter's uses in education.

 

• Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
  • Authors: Bernado A Huberman, Daniel M Romero and Fang Wu
  • Date: December 5, 2008
  • Abstract: Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers.

now, theses articles just might come in handy...