Kanye West Tells the World on Twitter that He Is Hiring
January 5, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Kanye West, who’s touring with Jay-Z, and whose daring and gorgeous album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was the toast of 2010 and 2011, has just put out a huge For Hire ad on his, let’s say it, acclaimed Twitter feed. Scientists, designers, writers, social media experts, tech guys (and gals), and even nutritionists are asked to reach out and participate in DONDA, West’s still-in-formation, 22-division “design company.”
The company is named after his mother, Donda West, who died in November 2007 after undergoing elective plastic surgery. Mrs. West was a literature scholar and the former Chair of the English department at Chicago State University.
In his tweets, West proclaims his willingness to invest in creativity and his commitment to making a difference in the world using his talent for “connectivity,” his resources, and his access to the world’s movers and shakers.
Kanye says, “I invest every dime back into creativity… hiring amazing creatives paying for flights, offices … etc…” and continues with “DONDA is a design company which will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce there dreams and ideas…”
If you’re looking for a job, hear ‘Ye out: “If anyone would like to reach out email us at contactDONDA@gmail.com.”
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Charlie Sheen Tweets His Cell Number to Justin Bieber, Publicly
December 14, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Reportedly, “Winning!” and “Ray’s Pizza!” is how Charlie Sheen was answering his cell phone last week after the torrent of calls and text messages started coming in: he had inadvertently tweeted publicly a direct message disclosing his phone number. His online followers did not wait a second before commencing the serial retweeting and dialing of the once-privileged digits. As if that weren’t enough to cause a media riot by itself, the kicker was that the would-be direct message was sent to @justinbieber, the person whose unquestioned dominance in the Twitterverse forced Jack Dorsey’s group to recalibrate the trending formulas.
To go by captured screen shots, Sheen’s would-be direct message to Justin Bieber read: “310-954-7277 Call me bro. C.” Although questions remain about why Sheen wanted Bieber to call him, many are probably relieved that the message didn’t contain anything scandalous beyond the individuals involved in the exchange. Sheen, who’s seen his share of controversy, was the object of unrivaled attention earlier this year after a tumultuous exit from “Two and a Half Men” and his subsequent replacement by Ashton Kutcher as the show’s lead. Sheen has a Twitter following that exceeds 5.5 million while Justin Bieber comes in second only to Lady Gaga.
Read More:
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/charlie_losing_on_twitter_R1a76bCjgMCgQcTeZRNX6O
Big Changes for Twitter Before 2012
December 9, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Earlier today, Twitter invited the press to its still-under-construction new digs on San Francisco’s busy Market Street to announce some big news: a site redesign is going live before January. The updates are meant to make Twitter even more engaging and interactive. The overriding principle for the adjustments seems to have been making the site more accessible and easy to use, for both ordinary people and for advertisers. As it could only have been expected, a hashtag has been created for the new Twitter design: #LetsFly.
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, was quoted as saying: We are going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity.” Those who attended the conference did not miss the fact that many of the redesign’s aspects harked back to the Jobs-ian/Ive-ian minimalist aesthetic. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and current executive chairman, has called Steve Jobs his “mentor from afar.”
Because the company is looking to court advertisers, it needs to demonstrate Twitter’s potential for attracting and retaining readers. With the new design, embedding and watching videos in tweets will be much simpler and pages for brands will have more space for content. As of now, the company has no plans to charge for this additional space, but it’s only open to Disney, Pepsi, American Express, and Dell. Twitter said brand pages would be available other users later on.
Read More:
http://allthingsd.com/20111208/your-ad-here-twitters-big-brand-friendly-makeover/
Photographer Chris Floyd Takes Twitter Avatar to Next Level
December 5, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Chris Floyd, a popular photographer from the U.K., decided he wanted to meet his Twitter followers and take their mug while he was at it. The result is an exhibition that showed at the Foto8 Gallery in London last month. Tallied up, there are 140 subjects and the exhibit’s aptly titled “One Hundred and Forty Characters.”
Among these it’s possible to find some high-profile personages, including Lily Allen and Harry Potter’s Tom Felton. The portraits are in black and white. Stark, blank white is the only backdrop to Floyd’s Twitter followers, who were shot dressed in everyday clothes — simple dresses, slacks, and wrinkly button-downs or form-fitting tees. There are many group portraits and most individuals come out looking relaxed and goofy.
While chatting with the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes, the London-based shutterbug gave his take on the marvelous, and the not-so-marvelous, of social media: the ability to crowdsource, banter, form friendships, and keep-up appearances, for better or worse. Nevertheless, the photographer has massive love for Twitter. He likens it to a “huge, massive, endless free-flowing conversation with lots of interesting, witty people,” and asks, “What’s not to like?”
The photograph shown is part of the exhibit, and in it one can see: @sarahdrinkwater, @isabelleOC, and @carolineno (hidden).
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Twitter: Turning a Penny With Self-Service Advertising
December 2, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Twitter is making its way to big-time advertising, and the company is already demonstrating that it’s capable of turning a pretty penny. Jack Dorsey’s jaunty whale of a baby recently launched self-service advertising on a small scale, but it’s prepping the groundwork for a larger, well-executed, and calibrated lineup.
News of the ad service came from the lips of Adam Bain, Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer. Bain said that for now, only a small group of businesses were being offered the service. Self-service advertising is a huge deal because that’s one of the avenues Google used to reach its gigantic proportions. According to reports by eMarketer, three-fifths of Facebook’s $3.8 billion grand total of advertising revenue in 2011 came from self-service ads.
Back at Twitter, Bain himself gave out two interesting numbers: Less than a year and a half ago, Twitter had six advertisers; today, it has 2,400. To tackle the added golden bulk, Twitter hired around 100 new staff. By eMarketer’s estimates, Twitter should be pulling in around $399.5 million in ad profits by 2013; that’s up from 2010’s $45 million showing.
That Twitter is stepping out thoughtfully bodes well for its future capacity to deal with spam and ad fraud. Above, Adam Bain grins for the camera.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/02/BUHO1M726N.DTL
Kansas Teen’s Tweet of Dissent Goes Viral
November 28, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Most people know that one’s social media presence must be well managed, lest potential employers, college admissions officers, or would-be beaux got the wrong idea. But what if your state governor was the one who got the wrong idea about you? That’s just the question Emma Sullivan, an eighteen-year-old high school senior from Kansas, had to grapple with last week.
Shortly before Thanksgiving break, Sullivan went to the Kansas state Capitol for a Youth in Government program. While there, she tweeted “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” The “he” in the tweet’s hashtag refers to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, who’s a conservative Republican.
The governor’s sharp-eyed social media sleuths spotted the tweet and, rather quickly, the administrators at Emma Sullivan’s high school, Shawnee Mission East, issued a request that Sullivan address a letter of apology to the governor. The plucky teenager refused and her plight garnered mass media attention. A big spectacle was created and today the governor himself released a letter of apology to Sullivan, declaring: “My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize. Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms.”
Sullivan currently has 12,436 Twitter followers. For anyone who’s wondering, the governor has 3,285 followers.
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Questlove Goes on a “Midnight Ride,” Tweets First Warning of Police Raid on Zuccotti Park’s OWS Encampment
November 16, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Today, Questlove from The Roots is being hailed as the Occupy Wall Street movement’s Paul Revere. Approximately twenty minutes before midnight, Questlove, who’s also known as Ahmir Khalib Thompson, wrote in his Twitter feed that he saw a thousand police officers, geared up and ready for action, near the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park. In shortened verse that even Longfellow would approve of, Questlove tweeted: “Omg, drivin down south st near #ows. Somethin bout to go down yo, swear I counted 1000 riot gear cops bout to pull sneak attack #carefulyall.” The timestamp on that first tweet read 11:39 p.m. EST.
The “Midnight Ride” he took was pure chance, but his resolve to warn the protestors via Twitter was not. Nevertheless, OWS leadership was not sure what to make of the warning, and there was a prolonged online debate about whether the excess police was due to a “shift change” or Christian Bale filming his “The Dark Knight Rises” scenes with many extras in tow. Less than ninety minutes later — throughout which Questlove continued to confirm his eyewitness account to Twitter readers — the police force arrived and began clearing out the park. OWS is regrouping and the episode confirms Twitter’s privileged status among popular, democratic movements around the world.
Read More:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/uestlove-warned-of-occupy-wall-street-police-raid-20111115
Ashton Kutcher Hands Over His Twitter Account
November 10, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Ashton Kutcher has just declared himself overwhelmed with the responsibility of managing his popular Twitter account. Today, the actor published a blog post acknowledging that the size of his following — 8 million and counting — demanded greater editorial supervision lest he became the unwitting source of misinformation. In his own words:
Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual.
He continued:
It seems that today that twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics.
The words came a day after releasing this jewel of a tweet: “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste.” Kutcher got that 84-year-old Joe Paterno had been fired from his stint as Penn State’s football coach, but he didn’t catch the reason why. In 2002, Paterno did not inform the police about an eyewitness account he received concerning the possible sexual abuse of a minor at the hands of Jerry Sandusky, a perennial assistant coach for the University. Sandusky was arrested November 5th and charged with a long list of sexual crimes against minors.
Ashton is “going to turn the management of the feed over to [his] team at Katalyst as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content.” The actor’s mortification and subsequent action — stepping away from Twitter — makes sense if one recalls his outspoken engagement in the battle against human trafficking.
Read More:
http://aplusk.posterous.com/twitter-management
Capitol Police Eyes React to Ludic Onion Tweets
September 29, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The Onion’s Twitter stream suffered from an expected spate of unpopularity today, which was unexpected even considering its eponymous etiology. The cause of the stink? The strong-arming of Washington, D.C. police into investigating successive “Breaking News” tweets made by the satirical newspaper. The tweets, hashtagged #CongressHostage, asserted that members of Congress were demanding $12 trillion in exchange for the return to safety of 12 schoolchildren they had taken hostage. Many found the satire to be lacking good literary form and, more generally, thought the joke to be unfunny.
People wondered if The Onion’s Twitter account had been hacked and some living in the District of Columbia even called the police to inquire about the tweeting commotion. The men (and women) in blue issued a formal statement to reassure the public that the tweeted assertions were false and that an investigation into the postings had been started.
The gem that started the ruckus was: “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.” “BREAKING: Capitol building being evacuated. 12 children held hostage by group of armed congressmen #CongressHostage,” quickly followed it.
The reaction of @MrMcLeez was quoted in The Washington Post: “I work at the Capitol and I just yelled at my coworkers that there was gunfire… you scared the [expletive] out of me #fakenewsscares.”
Commentators cut the folks in the District much slack for their humorless reactions given that that the less aggressively satirical news outlets had been reporting about the apprehension of man suspected of planning an attack on the Pentagon and Capitol with explosives-carrying remote-controlled airplanes.
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http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/the-onions-hostage-tweets-draw-scrutiny/
Twitter Web Analytics, Finally Here
September 19, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Twitter Web Analytics has arrived. If you have a website, you can use this new tool to gauge in more fine detail the volume and type of traffic that Twitter is generating for you. Likewise, everybody with a Tweet button will be able to better understand the benefits that integration is supplying them with.
If you want to thank somebody for this godsend of an herramienta (Spanish word of the day = tool), say thank you to Twitter itself and its savvy acquisition of BlackType back in July. Together, they were able to make this recent rollout possible.
According to Christopher Golda, a developer at Twitter, Twitter Web Analytics will:
• Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
• See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
• Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration
While it’s still in its pilot stage, the tool will be available for use by all sometime in the coming weeks. Golda also announced that developers should continue to expect the eventual release of Web Analytics API so that they can integrate “Twitter data in their products.” It was about time arithmetic joined in the twittering fun!
Read More:
http://mashable.com/2011/09/13/twitter-web-analtyics
https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web-analytics
