Meassuring Twitter in Iran

I just read an interesting opinion about the whole Twitter phenomenon in the Iranian elections. Gaurav Mishra’s (co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech) said in a post the following:

"Calling what’s happening in Iran a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche (see Moldova)". Click HERE to see full post.

Also, I read an article from The Guardian that talks about the importance of meassuring Twitter in the right way:

"Supporters of reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi are more likely to use Twitter and Facebook. Poorer, less-educated voters have flocked to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged the limited group of users in Iran, who don't necessarily represent the mainstream. "Because Twitter is still a nascent service the sentiment is likely narrow," Stone said in an e-mail Monday to The Associated Press". Click HERE to read full article.

Building a social media strategy

Everyday, you can find lots of articles giving you suggestions about the things you must do with social media in order to improve your business, your blogs or your causes.

In order to get a better sense of what is going on, I decided to summarize some of the most repeated suggestions you can read whenever someone is writing about social media.

The first thing to keep in mind is that social media is aimed at improving your brand name throughout an efficient customer service. Because of this, the biggest turn off when opening your social media channels is trying to sell something.

Having said this, the first thing you have to do is listening to people. Yes, as simple as that. Go into the social media world and listen what kinds of things people are saying about your company, your field or your topic of interest.

After you do that, you should evaluate if what your heard is useful for you. Is it really important to venture into social media for your organization? If so, then it comes the biggest task: you have to define goals and strategies.

Once you are clear about that, get involved (without rush) into the social media world. Start talking to people, add value to the ongoing conversations, respond to people's questions in a friendly and helpful way and share your knowledge telling your own story in an honest manner.

Finally, make sure you do all of the above with a unique voice because that is going to be you best bet to nurture your brand name. Ah! and never forget that creativity will always be the best tool you can use to achieve all this.

A pretty cool Twitter application

I just discovered this new application that allows you to follow Twitter conversations and hot topics in a very easy way. The application is called twendz and this is how the folks at twendz describe it: "twendz is a Twitter mining Web application that utilizes the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does twendz by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute." It's pretty cool, check it out by clicking on the image below.

Social Media World Map

The other day, I came across an article featuring a map of the most influential social sites around the world. According to that analysis, Facebook is the most popular social media site in the world. However, reading some of the comments people left in the post, it seems there are some inaccuracies in the results. Click the image below to read the post.

Social Media in Plain English

This is my very first post. I decided to share with you a very nice video that will give you a refresh intro to social media. When I started to read and explore the Net for information about social media I was overwhelmed by the infinite amount of information. So, before you start going crazy with all the frenzy behind one of the hottest topics of the moment relax and enjoy this simple explanation elaborated by the Common Craft Store. Click the image below to watch the video.