Twitter has changed some people’s lives by allowing us to connect with kindred spirits and talk about a wide variety of subjects.  Looking to express what your twitter friends mean to you? This Twitter Love Song is written and produced by Marcome & Bruno Pelletier.   The song takes inspiration from songwriter Marcome’s (@Marcome) Twitter friendship with Reg Saddler (@zaibatsu), according to the song’s YouTube profile.   “I would really like to give a huge thank you to Reg Saddler for inspiring me to do this Twitter Song project,” Marcome says in the profile. “I’m grateful to my friends and followers on Twitter who gave me so much love and kindness. I’m proud to be alive because you are there with me!” As the song goes:

Twitter me some love / follow me / follow you
Twitter me some love

Watch the video:

Marcome (pronounced Marko-may) is a singer songwriter from Canada.  She was born in Quebec and speaks both English and French.  Gifted with a pure voice, she blends lyrics and fuses different world influences with jazz style and classical vocals.  Check out her website and blog where she talks about the making of the Twitter Me Some Love and the Music Video.   Click here pics of Marcome.  Bruno Pelletier is also a vocalist from Quebec.   For info on him go here and for pics of Bruno here.

Check out this article on Marcome and her Twitter love song by Simone Preuss

image courtesy of Marcomé

Bill Cosby is getting into social media!  Here he is on 12seconds.tv

Bill Cosby on twitter: @billcosby, Bio:  Comedy/Education

Bills’s 52 Twitter Lists 

Check out this post on twitter lists:  Twitter Lists – How They Work

Bill on Facebook

Bill on Cinch, or as he calls it:  Twit and Tweetie

Source for this post is from Mashable’s: Bill Cosby Learns the Twitting, Tweeting, Twit and Tweetie

Follow @KentBeatty

Even thought Twitter founder, Biz Stone says that there are no plans before 2010 to place ads on Twitter, the marketing heads have already valued the company at a cool $1 Billion dollars.  Can’t get you head around that number.  That is 1000 million or $1,000,000,000.00.  There you go.  Amazing for something that started way back in oh’ 2007.

Full story here…   http://bit.ly/4Bde1D

With the rise of Twitter, growing faster than a weed in the garden patch it is such an exciting time to be so involved and a part of the social media landscape.  I love numbers and statistics.  I guess that is why I am drawn to stuff like this video.  I like how the information is presented.  So it’s as much as style as the numbers themselves.

Did you know?  4.0  Enjoy

The lates version of their video series.   Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.

This ““Mad Men” vs. #Twitter – An Opinion on the Fortune 10” post written by Beth Frysztak (@bethfrysztak) was originally published at Beth’s Blog:  Network Your Life, on September 6th, 2009.  Beth is a cool twitterer, charismatic leader, successful marketer & Mom of 2 who thoroughly understands how to satisfy customers.  She is passionate about networking and “all things connected”.

Beth Frysztak

When I meet people IRL (in real life) – new acquaintances, peeps that I know well, friends, co-workers, and even family, there are only a handful of people who “get it” when I talk ‘Twitter’.

I speak so often to companies that I work with – as well as new corporations I am strategizing with – to talk about the value that their brand can receive through the right use of Twitter.  So, why is it when I ask a standard response is, “Yeah, we’re on Twitter”… I then ask them, “what does that mean?”.

DO LARGE CORPORATIONS REALLY GET IT?

Many large corporations do not.  They are struggling with the change from a world with ‘Mad Men’ media – to a world where messaging is cluttered, media is fast paced, multiple channels are available, and ‘Social Media’ is perceived to surpass other forms of media in short order.  So, what does this mean to your brand?

HOW DOES A BRAND BECOME EFFECTIVE IN 140 CHAR?

They don’t. A large corporation must understand that Twitter is not just here for them to promote themselves – PLEASE do not just promote.  People today want to have a personal relationship with your brand.  Twitter can help you to engage with your customers, potential customers and lapsed customers.  Just setting up a Twitter account is not enough.  Fortune companies that engage – are those that will make this change with ease.   The days of just “being there” are over.  ENGAGE!

TALK TO YOUR FOLLOWERS – DO NOT JUST PROMOTE YOUR COMPANY!

We do not care, nor really want to continual tweets about your product, service, offering or anything else.  We want to know YOU – the person behind the brand.  It does not matter if you have folks that support you in the US or other countries although, you need to engage and speak with those that follow you.  Realize that I am an extension of your brand – with the ability to promote you negatively or positively.

LOOK AT THE STATS BELOW OF THE FORTUNE 10 – AND THEIR FOLLOWINGS

Please note:  Some of these companies have more than one blog – if anyone has information on how to figure out WalMart – do let me know – I got tired of trying to find them – and what they did on Twitter!

Enjoy!!

The Fortune 10 on Twitter:

If you look above, you can see that most of the companies that engagement and involvement is extremely important to the number of people that are following a specific brand.

It would suffice to note that – those companies that are not engaged….or are just on Twitter to promote….will never have a following that will impact their brand.

It is time to realize that how consumers interact with your brand has definitely changed – specifically via Twitter.  In my humble opinion, Twitter is a media in which you engage, communicate, assist and as the individual behind the brand – you promote without being intrusive.  I would love your thoughts my followers!

Please feel free to comment!

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This post is based entirely on the post Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think – by Erik Qualman (which he posted August 11, 2009)

Video compilation of Erik Qualman explaining his Socialnomics with relevant social media statistics.  The book is in stores now.  Got mine last week! 

social media isn’t a fad,

it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate

Erik Qualman has written a book called:   Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business.

Socialnomics Contents

Socialnomics Chapter One in PDF

Socialnomics book at Amazon

Erik Qualman’s Photostream at Flickr

Stats from video after the jump:

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network 
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations 
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.  Please feel free to share with any non-believers!

Below are the sources used to compile this video.   

1. Source: Grunwald Associates National Study – Info highlighted on Trendsspotting Blog
2. Source: Huffington Post
3. Source: McKinsey Study also posted by David Dalka
4. Source: First Stats: United Nations Cyberschoolbus Document

   Facebook Stat: Mashable

   iPhone Stat: Apple

5. Source: Facebook

6. Source: TechCrunch

7. Source: comScore

8. Source: U.S. Department of Education Study 

9. Source:  Attempting to relocate

10. Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey  Note: 80% will use social networks in their assessment.  95% will use LinkedIn in their assessment.  When we revise the Video needs to be updated changing “their” to “a” primary tool need to see if we bump 80% to 95%

11. Source: Inside Facebook Blog
12. Source: Twitter & World Population Data
13. Source: Attempting to relocate

14. Source: Metro Newspaper

15. Opinion, not a statistic

16. Source: TGDaily

17. Source: www.wikipedia.org – calculated based on # articles per language category

18. Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia
19. Source: ClickZ Stats SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
20. Opinion, not a statistic
21. Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org

22. Source:  TechCrunchThis says 4 weeks so I may have been a little off here as my source at Facebook had said 2 weeks adjusted above

23. Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results

24. Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3

25. Opinion, not a statistic

26. Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (actually 90% now – updated above but video still shows 78%)

27. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007

28. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007

29. Source: Starcom USA-TiVo

30. Source: Nielsen

31. Source: Solutions Research Group

32. Source: Henry Blodget Silicon Alley Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-kindle-sales-now-a-shocking-35-of-book-sales-when-kindle-version-available-2009-5

33. Source: Yahoo Finance

34. Opinion from Socialnomics

35. Source: Facebook

36. Music in video provided by Fatboy Slim “Right Here, Right Now” (1999) – if you like it buy the single

See Also: 

Did You Know? Video by Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod

What the H**K is Social Media: One Year Later – Slide Deck by Marta Kagan

Behind the scenes filming at a Social Media Addicts Association meeting, with members discussing the problems caused by their addiction in graphic detail. Be warned -…

The epidemic is spreading rapidly with every age group.  Grandparents on Facebook, 12 year olds on twitter, those hopelessly stuck in MySpace and the ever increasing senior population on social media.  @jerrysmaa founded the Social Media Addicts Association in the spring of 2009 to help people beat their addiction to social networking sites and reclaim their lives! 

See Also:

First U.S. Rehab Center for Internet Addiction Opens Its Doors

Founder interview – Social Media Addicts Association

This “Twitter – What’s all the fuss about” post written by Beth Frysztak (@bethfrysztak) was originally published at Beth’s Blog:  Network Your Life, in April 2009.  Beth is a cool twitterer, charasmatic leader, successful marketer & Mom of 2 who thoroughly understands how to satisfy customers.  She is passionate about networking and “all things connected”.

Beth Frysztak

Twitter, is a micro-blogging service. It allows you to send short, 140 character “tweets” rather than typing an entire blog (as I am right now), You can “tweet” anything from getting coffee…to the days headline news. When Twitter was launched, I am sure there were only a handful of people who all followed each other! That soon became a hundred….then thousands. In fact, in the early stages of Twitter (in my humble opinion) the entire Twitter following was probably no more than the number of followers that I have today! (1,685 as of this afternoon (April 18, 2009) – in case you were wondering).

So, “What’s all the fuss about?”

What I receive out of Twitter-and my Twitter followers (whom I just adore!) is an unexplainable pleasure of “tweeting” the news of the day, a business article I have found, “re-tweeting” a fantastic quote or link and sharing stories of my life. Sometimes, my “tweets” are notions of nothing really important.

I hope that my followers appreciate my “tweets” as much as I appreciate theirs. It’s amazing and incredible that there are so many followers I have – and most I have never met face to face! If I learn something from someone each day – I am fulfilled.

I follow all kinds of peeps. I follow social media and marketing leaders (marketing is my business, so I have this insatiable need to read, read, and read more on any marketing topic!). I follow friends, to keep up with their daily coffee run, their frustration with work, their concern for “Twitter Addition” and their “run ins” with animal control. Some younger, some older and each and every one I have learned from

My followers all have their own “tweet style”. Some sit silently and read my tweets, some re-tweet my tweets if they have found it to be interesting, some send an @ reply or a DM saying – “Thank you so much!”, and of course, there is #followfriday when we can tweet out who we think that others should follow!

I wonder, as I sit and type this:

• “Are my followers enjoying me as much as I do them?”
• “Are my followers learning something from me each day?”
• “Have I put a smile on a follower face with a tweet today?”
• “Has someone Laughed Out Loud (LOL) at any of my tweets?”
• “Does anyone else ever think about this?”
• “Does any of this really matter?”

The answer is YES! If I had to choose the one thing that has made me a twitter-a-holic? Well, it is my followers of course! I am the lucky recipient of reading tweets of the “day in the life” of all those I follow! I learn from you and thank you!

“… knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.” (Albert Einstein)

To my Twitter family….I hope we never stop learning from one another.

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This "Ode to Twitter" post written by Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton originally ran on Pistachio Consulting’s website in August 2007.   Laura has since helped explain Twitter to thousands, including Guy Kawasaki, Johnson & Johnson and Harvard Business School.  Most recently, she wrote Twitter for Dummies and founded www.oneforty.com to help people take advantage of all the Twitter ecosystem offers.

Laura Fitton

Let me come clean about my Twitter adoption “arc:”

The wise student hears of the Twitter & practices it diligently. The average student hears of the Twitter & gives it thought now & again. The foolish student hears of the Twitter and laughs aloud. If there were no laughter, the Twitter would not be what it is. -Lao Tzu (well, sorta)

I was foolish. If you think Twitter’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen, I hear you.

But I evolved.

I recently tweeted what Twitter is to me:

water cooler, colleagues, sanity check, ideas, advice, good tips, friends, company, connections, inspiration. oh ya & network.

I poo-poohed Twitter in March, grudgingly tried it on May 17, and 4 days later met my first real world Twitter friends (aka, drank the Kool Aid.)

I began to see how creative/productive Twitterers can inspire. I used it to surround myself with role models. I started getting to know people, and to enjoy the company, humor, conversation and great links. Just by way of writing, reading and responding to each other’s tweets, unbelievably valuable networking contacts have become familiar workday presences. I’ve met and hired 3 subcontractors for my business, met numerous potential collaborators and even found extraordinary new business leads. I’ve been to numerous networking and social events (lifesavers for a WAHM in a new city!). Interesting, creative, challenging, thoughtful and very deeply caring people have come into my life. New ones seem to appear every week. Twitter has served up answers, opinions and inspiration. It’s saved my sanity and yesterday, my dishwasher.

Hugh McLeod’s mentioned both flippantly (April) and seriously (June) that Twitter has slowed his blogging. I’d blame summer for my recent slowdown, but maybe it’s Twitter. But as a wise ninja pointed out, Twitter also improves blogging by absorbing your off-theme tidbits, good links, quotes, questions and other scraps of ideas. It ain’t called microblogging for nothing. But it’s true my blog posts are more detailed and thought out now, the quick cool stuff goes on Twitter.

Because it’s a business and personal tool for me, I Twitter about a LOT of different things. Great finds from my feed reader, impulsive ideas, replies both sassy and heartfelt. I tweet pointers to new blog posts when they go up. Twitter’s kept me company and has let me blow off steam, comfort a friend, and get exposed to completely opposite thinking from my own. On Twitter, we share and promote each others’ ideas and media. We celebrate birthdays, promotions, graduations and anniversaries. We look out for someone traveling or near the site of a disaster. We introduce and we randomly discover each other. Some I follow are just plain entertaining. Others I look up to and hope to meet.

We also combine the power of our collective news/intellectual interests. I get the “best of” ideas that various Twitter friends read or create, any given day. This magnifies the depth and breadth of information I consume. Imagine if your “water cooler” at work were also a wire service/editorial desk? Yeah. Something like that.

Sure, Twitter contains a huge % of “what I had for breakfast.” But the elegance is this: Everyone starts out with nobody listening to them and nobody to listen to. How and who you add determines what Twitter will become for you. Nobody can tweet at you without permission. You add people. People add you. You see interesting exchanges and add new people. Read the Twitterstream of anyone who adds you to decide whether you want to hear what they have to say. Meet someone at an event and you can connect on Twitter to get to know each other’s thoughts a little, over time.

If you used your TV or radio to listen to EVERYONE on your block broadcast their every random sound or video, you’d dismiss radio and TV as useless. If you look at everyone on Twitter at once and complain about futility, you’re missing the chance to find interesting connections and dig in slowly. Before you dismiss Twitter, find some bright, engaging, thoughtful tweeters* and follow them for a little while.

So there it is. I’m an addict. I’m a poster child for Twitter, and I couldn’t be happier about it. If you don’t”get” twitter yet, that’s ok. I’ve been there too.

* I’d have to write a whole separate post to shout out my Twitter favorites and what each one brings to the table. So please, post your suggested “Twitterers to follow” in the comments.

UPDATE: Annotated pic from today’s Tweeter-Q

UPDATES 08/28/2007: Chris Brogan on Twitter; Dave Davison on Twitter ROA; Guy Kawasaki joins Twitter.

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