Mar
19th

Oneupweb : Twitter Madness—Picking Up On The Social Heat

Posted by Kathryn on March 19, 2010 at 8:32 am

I’m not really the gambling type. And I’m definitely not a sports nut. But inevitably, the delirium of March Madness gets the best of us. Dollars are exchanged for brackets (including an unofficial office bracket), and the strategizing begins. Really, how complicated can it be?

Well, some people know how to make it very complicated—developing complex systems and methodologies for predicting the outcomes of each match-up. But how does percentage of wins divided by guard experience plus my gut feeling add up to Baylor over Villanova in the Sweet 16? Argh!

Okay, so I don’t follow college basketball all that closely, but I still have fun participating. And it would be nice to think I had a shot at winning the office pool.

So I needed another strategy, something other than copying my husband’s bracket. I remember reading last month about how a communications agency predicted “The Hurt Locker’s” Oscar win—an upset against the blockbuster “Avatar”—by analyzing Twitter activity. It could work for basketball, too. So I did a quick search on Twitter for “March Madness.” As it turns out, there are a lot of people tweeting about their picks.

It’s easy to search for a topic on twitter using hashtags. I can easily get a handle on all March Madness chatter by simply searching for the hashtag #marchmadness. But most twitter search engines will be able to find tweets, including the keyword, even without the hashtag.

Geomeme.me is another way to measure Twitter trends. Trending in Michigan: Love beats March Madness.

So after scouring Twitter I now have what I think is a “well-informed” bracket. But I also learned a couple other things about Twitter.

1) Hashtags are very useful for sorting the firehose of information out there—and by using location specific hashtags, like #NWMI (for Northwest Michigan), you can target regions with your tweets. This means that even those not following you may still see your tweets if they are following that hashtag.

2) Although March Madness is a hot topic, Justin Bieber is still hotter. According to TweetVolume, there were eight times as many tweets about Justin in the week leading up to March Madness.

So even though it isn’t recognized as a true “bracketology” method, it was still a fun exercise in seeing how trends are picked up on Twitter. And after all the research, I’m going with Kansas. What are your March Madness picks?

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Feb
23rd

Oneupweb : Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Get Social

Posted by Adam D on February 23, 2010 at 9:53 am

The 2010 winter Olympic Games have been full of exciting ups and downs. From Shaun White’s snowboard run for the gold, to the interesting outfits of male figure skater Johnny Weir to Apolo Ohno’s near crash with the Chinese, there have been plenty of exciting moments for fans to dig into. And this year, the Olympics have become more integrated with social media than ever before, resulting in the creation of some pretty cool new social tools.

Meet the Olympic Pulse.

Here you’ll find many different ways to stay updated on all things “Vancouver 2010″. You can view the “Tweet Sheet”, where tweets from athletes and NBCOlympics.com are posted.

Or you can try something a little more abstract like the Olympic Tracker. This neat tool uses images of a topic to sort tweets by popularity. The larger the image is, the more tweets it has received. You can also choose the time period you want to view. So you can view popular topics by adjusting the slider on the right side.

You can also see what’s being dug up on the Olympic Games from Digg.com, embed a widget into your social profile or use RSS to get your proverbial IV drip of “Vancouver 2010″ if you prefer. There are also some pretty slick photo and video interfaces where you can view celebrity sighting photos at the games and receive email and mobile alerts.

You can also just use Vancouver Olympic Games official Twitter and Facebook pages to keep up with the games. Are you an Olympic enthusiast? If so, let us know how you like to use social media for the 2010 Olympic Games!

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Feb
9th

Oneupweb : Apple Is Destroying The Way We Do Business: A Love Story

Posted by admin on February 9, 2010 at 2:30 pm

I remember a time back in college, back when the internet was in its infancy, there was an ad on TV for Butterball turkey. And at the end of that commercial they showed this newfangled thing called a URL. I remember thinking to myself, “Now why the heck does a poultry company need a web site? That’s just pointless.” Only now can I look back and see just how wrong I was and how right Butterball was: if you are a business, you need a website. Period, paragraph, end of statement.

Since the explosion of the internet, having an online presence is no longer something that you get around to, or even an option. It’s a must-have.

Jump ahead to 2006. A little website called Twitter is released into the wild, allowing people to send out 140 character updates into the ether, freely available for anyone who wants to listen. Once again, I found myself thinking, “140 characters? I guess it’s a neat concept, but it’ll never take off. That’s not enough space to say anything of substance.” Nostradamus, I am not. With tens of millions of users, Twitter has emerged as a juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing.

Fast forward to now—everyone has a website, your grandmother’s on Twitter and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who owns a “smartphone”. And what’s the number one “gotta have” smartphone out there? You guessed it, Apple’s iPhone. Released in 2007, and with over one hundred thousand apps available to download and over two billion (yes, with a “b“) downloads and counting, Apple is forcing companies to once again reconsider how they do business. It’s no longer enough to have a website, heavens no. To be truly successful in this Web 2.0 world, one must have a social media presence, mobile-optimized sites and yes, even an iPhone app.

Luckily, all of these are things that we fine folks over at Oneupweb can help out with. Whether you need your Facebook fixed, your Twitter tweaked or your main site mobile-phone-ified, give us a call at 877.568.7477 and find out what we can do for you.

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Jan
26th

Social Media Site Traffic Increases 82% Worldwide

Posted by Keirsun on January 26, 2010 at 10:36 am

Wondering if marketing via social networks is worth your company’s time? New stats from Nielsen should help you answer that question.

According to Nielsen’s recently released research data, consumers worldwide spent more than 5 ½ hours on social networking sites in December 2009. That’s up from a little more than 3 hours in December 2008, and 2 hours and 10 minutes in December 2007.

So according to Nielsen, time spent on social networking sites by people around the world has increased 82% in just one year. In addition, overall traffic to social networking sites has significantly spiked as well.

But wait, there’s more!

Nielsen says Facebook captured 67% of the global social media audience last month, with 206.9 million unique visitors. In the United States specifically, Facebook towered over its peers on the list of most visited social networking sites.

Similar to the data for global users, U.S. users are also spending much more time on their favorite social networks:

People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009. Year-over-year growth in average time spent by U.S. users, for both Facebook and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth for the category, increasing 200% and 368%, respectively.

Interesting Stat: Australians top the list of most time spent on social media sites, spending an average of almost 7 hours in December. (That’s a lot of G’day, Mates!)

For some reason, I don’t question Nielsen stats as much as I do stats from other research companies—probably because of the company’s history of measuring broadcast media audiences. But if, like me, you’re interested in how Nielsen acquires its data, you can learn more about it here.

This Nielsen data helps paint the picture of what we see happening online: social networks are becoming the user’s window to the Internet. Social networks are providing the content, information, recommendations and engagement that online audiences want and need.

Still wondering if your company should engage customers via social media? We can help. Check out Oneupweb’s Social Media Marketing Services to get a better idea of what we do, in addition to where we like to be social, too.

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