We all have to suffer over exposure to politics during the run up to an election. It is going to get worse! The next UK General Election will be played out in minute detail and in glorious Web2.0 technicolour using Twitter.
In fact there is now a website dedicated to furthering this cause. Tweetminster.com is a wonderful resource for those actually interested in politics. The site concentrates the tweets of MPs, sorts by party, constituency and by subject matter and even has a tweetometer that indicates who is ahead in the tweeting game on any particular issue.
You will be an expert on MPs views like never before and the resource makes it easy to engage an MP in debate on a specific topic.
One wonders how we will cope with the sheer volume of information that will be coming at us, other than by switching off of course. There is definately something advantageous to be said here about the British election system when compared with that of the USA. At least we will only be getting a few short weeks of it rather than the protracted years they take across the pond.
I can see another spike in internet bandwidth usage coming..!
If anyone is interested I did a search for the topic “expenses” on tweetminster and came up with 161 references 🙂
Last night I felt I was part of a real life drama. I live over the fields from Lincoln prison. In Lincoln they put the prison in the best part of town to make it quicker to lock up the burglars when they catch them 🙂
As I was hitting the hay I could hear a lot of loud noises coming from the direction of the prison together with dogs barking. I sent out a tweet to this effect and was immediately contacted by a couple of BBC journalists asking for more info. There have been other prison riots in the UK this week so the tweet was topical.
Independent verifiaction suggested that there was no activity outside the gaol. After about 10 – 15 minutes I checked again and it grown quiet again. Presumably the noisy prisoners had been locked back up again.
I guess the point of this post is the observation that twitter is really a newsfeed rather than a social networking tool. You also have to be watching it all the time to catch randomly generated news, as my two BBC contacts must have been.
It is also usable as a marketing tool and interestingly as such it offers a highly targeted approach. Twitter users have to be searching for specific news items. I follow too many people to be able to sensibly catch all their tweets so I would have to be looking for, say, “Lincoln prison riot” to read any news about this.
The same the applies for product marketing. If I wanted to push Timico’s MPLS capability on twitter the chances are that people reading that tweet would be specifically looking for information on MPLS.
This is another Twitter experiment. If anyone really wants to know I have an each way bet on Cloudy Lane and Irish Invader.
Footnote Monday morning:
I wanted to see if the post title would attract many visits via twitter. It didn’t especially, even though I used the two most popular twitter search strings at the time in the title.
Twitter has been in the news a lot recently. It’s been around for 3 years and I started using it a year ago to experiment and to understand what it was all about.
One year ago it wasn’t really clear where it was all going but I could feel that there would be some uses. In the meantime celebrities have latched onto it and it has been a way of following news as it happened. Also my experience with “attending” the SocComm conference via twitter was an education.
I began to get followers who I had never heard of and when looking at their own profiles they had many thousands of followers and were in turn following thousands. It looked then as if people follow people who follow them.
I began an experiment by randomly following others who were either following or being followed by people that were following me, if you follow my drift. I got these results:
There is obviously an increase in followers in line with those being followed. This not massively scientific but interesting nonetheless. There is a scenario whereby if I spend enough time at it 25% of everyone on twitter would be following me. Of course I’m not going to waste my time doing it and I’m sure the dynamics change with volume.
Something that has come out of this excercise is a slight increase in visits to trefor.net due to traffic from twitter. So if I was focussed on nothing but growth in my readership, which I’m not because I also have a day job, amassing huge numbers of twitter followers would probably be a good thing to do.
Also it gets to the point where there is so much twitter traffic it gets difficult to see the wood from the trees. It then becomes a kind of ticker tape where you randomly glance ast tweets. Twitter has I’m sure got a lot of evolving to do.
I spent some of this morning with our marketing team discussing our twitter marketing strategy. This is a very new field and it is interesting to see how people go about getting exposure on the site.
For example I get people I’ve never heard of signing up as followers. This prompts me to take a look at their profile and as often as not I sign up to follow them. Voila – their marketing approach worked. I was amazed to see people with 20,000+ followers – who were following similar numbers.
Jeff Pulver, who has appeared before on this blog has launched a call for speakers for a new conference called the 140 Character Conference (if you don’t understand where the name comes from I’ll explain offline 🙂 ).
This is perfect timing in my book. I could have done with it before our marketing meeting this morning because we were learning it and making it up as we went along – “it” being the science of twitter based marketing.
The conference is in New York New York so it is unlikely that I will be going. I will however be following it on line, on twitter of course which I successfully did for Jeff’s SocComm conference last month. Jeff is going after 140,000 online followers for the event.
You can see the conference call for papers announcement here on facebook or sign up for a place here.
Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.
UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.
Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station in my home town of Lincoln (England). He has a website and a Facebook home page. The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100 listener contacts/interactions.
Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.
Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.
So where is this leading to? For radio show read business. Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space. Corporate websites are going to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.
Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it. Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”. I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.
As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties. This then is not just the domain of the teenager!
PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people. Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm.
What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else. A bit of a generalisation and very dramatic I know but anyone expecting to be a player in communications markets in the future needs to have an open approach to doing business.
So vendors traditionally associated with fairly closed UC plays, such as Nortel, Cisco and Microsoft need to make it easy to integrate their tools with new kids on the block such as Facebook and Twitter. They are all moving towards this slowly. Timico is in the middle of a major platform upgrade with its Nortel UC capability and the new offering will optionally enable Instant Messaging with other networks such as MSN, jabber, yahoo etc.
It is only a short hop then to see Nortel soft clients embedded in Facebook (they already do this with traditional business tools such as Outlook and Lotus Notes), Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds embedded in corporate websites and vice versa and wall posts embedded wherever you care to embed them (plasma display on the fridge?!).
There was a time when I thought that the world of UC would be dominated by a few giant players. Now, we are seeing that new companies can easily develop applications that sit well with existing systems. 2009 is looking like a year of accelerated integration and I think that the phrase Unified Communications is already dead on it’s feet because I don’t think it adequately describes what is actually happening.
As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people. Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm.
What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else. A bit of a generalisation and very dramatic I know but anyone expecting to be a player in communications markets in the future needs to have an open approach to doing business.
So vendors traditionally associated with fairly closed UC plays, such as Nortel, Cisco and Microsoft need to make it easy to integrate their tools with new kids on the block such as Facebook and Twitter. They are all moving towards this slowly. Timico is in the middle of a major platform upgrade with its Nortel UC capability and the new offering will optionally enable Instant Messaging with other networks such as MSN, jabber, yahoo etc.
It is only a short hop then to see Nortel soft clients embedded in Facebook (they already do this with traditional business tools such as Outlook and Lotus Notes), Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds embedded in corporate websites and vice versa and wall posts embedded wherever you care to embed them (plasma display on the fridge?!).
There was a time when I thought that the world of UC would be dominated by a few giant players. Now, we are seeing that new companies can easily develop applications that sit well with existing systems. 2009 is looking like a year of accelerated integration and I think that the phrase Unified Communications is already dead on it’s feet because I don’t think it adequately describes what is actually happening.
I already posted about SocComm which is happening in New York today. Well I just caught up with it via Twitter and I’ve been blown away with what I saw.
You can follow it at the SocComm web address http://www.soccomm.com/twitbuzz.html.
When I looked it was during the government and regulation session and the tweets all address this. The main concern I could see from the tweets was associated with what the US government might do in terms of regulating personal privacy issues and whether this might suppress development of Social Networking.
I was going to say Social Networking Technology but I hesitate to use “technology” because it seems to be much more than about the engine/platform that makes it all happen. It is more philosophical than that.
The information is coming in think and fast. It is really a speed read. Jeff Pulver told me he had 25 twitterers lined up in the audience but I can believe, undertanding the nature of the conference, that most of the audience is Twittering. The conference goes on all day New York time and if you miss it I imagine you will be able to catch up at a more leisurely pace .
PS it is too late I’m sure to invent another word for it but twitter is a bit irritating ! 🙂 .
PPS SocComm has just flashed up as the 3rd most active event on Twitter at this time
I’ve been conversing on Facebook with Jeff Pulver and am somewhat gutted that lack of time keeps me from attending his SocComm conference in New York this coming Tuesday, 10th February.
Jeff has a lot of experience in running such events and is confident that this one “will represent a defining moment” in Social Networking. His line up of topics is very interesting covering a range of areas such as regulatory, marketing, communications, mobility and investment.
What is also educational is the line up of sponsors, (ZiXi | Vivox | Phone.com | Pathable | Ripple6 ) fairly short this being the first time this show has been staged, but also an example of where people think there might be money to be made in this space.
I’m sure Jeff will be running other SocComm events and I look forward to the time I will be able to attend. In the meantime if anyone who is going wants to give me some feedback that would be great.
You can follow the event on Twitter at #sc09 and #soccomm. Jeff has a team of 25 twitterers lined up in the audience.
Next week I will be attending a Social Networking Breakfast organised by Jeff Pulver in London. For those of you that don’t know him Jeff was one of the pioneers of VoIP and ran the Voice On The Net conferences (VON). VoIP is mainstream these days and Jeff has shifted his focus to Social Networking.
Being a user of sites such as Facebook and Twitter I am a strong believer that the structures underlying what might be called the whole “social networking phenomenom” will server the business world well. This is why I am attending the breakfast. I want to understand how best to use these tools to further my business interests.
This is despite the “not for business use” stance of Facebook. The interesting thing for me is that you can use Facebook to build relationships and get a message across without having to sell. In fact one of the things I like about Facebook is that I don’t feel I am being sold to. I don’t mind the notionally well targeted ads (I keep getting pitched singles dating agency ads though which as far as I know is not good targeting 🙂 ).
I am quite happy to mix personal friends, customers, suppliers and business colleagues as friends on Facebook. After all people do business with people.
As for next week this is an open event. It is being held at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, 12 Carlton Terrace, London between 9am and 12 midday. Jeff would I’m sure appreciate advance notice of attendance and you can register your interest at this Facebook Event Notification.
For those of you who can’t go don’t worry. I’ll report back although it won’t be the same as being there.
PS I first met Jeff at one of his VoIP industry Executive Summits at Cannes in theSouth of France. It must have been around 1998/99 and was my first foray into VoIP for my then employer. I recall sitting down for three days just writing page after page of acronyms for decoding later. I don’t anticipate the same problem next week.
I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.
Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook. Twitter will gain in strength.
The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs.
The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4.
Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
Liverpool will win the Premiership.
6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .
I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.
Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook. Twitter will gain in strength.
The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs.
The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4.
Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
Liverpool will win the Premiership.
6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .
I’m not a sad person, I like to believe, but I do seem to spend an awful lot of my time on the PC. I don’t play computer games. Typically I work, though the type of work that I do in the evening is different to what I do durng the day in the office. I like my job.
Tonight I have spent reading market research briefs and checking out some fixed mobile solutions on the internet. I also note that Facebook is trying to buy Twitter. I use Twitter to update my facebook status via sms. In checking out my facebook homepage I note that 12 out of 108 of my friends are online too.
I’m not a maniacal collecter of friends. Ten percent, if extrapolated across the whole population, is a huge number of people online. My son Tom has 381 friends and he claims to know them all in person. Without prying this would suggest that around 40 of them were online at any time. I’d like to bet that the number in his generation Y case is a lot higher.
I’m also watching Manchester United play against Villareal on the TV. Of the 6 people in our house five have a PC. The youngest is 8 and he is the lone unfortunate without one. On the arm of the chair next to me is my Nokia E Series mobile phone which also has email. The phone also has wifi and I use it to browse the internet when my laptop is switched off.
My electricity bill is huge. I am glad to say that they don’t allow mobile phones at Lincoln Golf Club.
The more I play with websites such as Facebook the more I find out. Initially I couldn’t see the sensible use of Twitter. The selling pitch to me was that it provided someone who was sat in a closed meeting with the ability to send messages that could be broacast to the outside world from their mobile phone. I didn’t really get this.
Now i have found out that I can use Twitter in conjunction with Facebook. When I send a SMS to Twitter it not only posts the message on Twitter but also as a status change on Facebook. For me it is easier to do it this way than to use the Facebook mobile upload.
I have used the Facebook means of uploading photos from my mobile – I just send an MMS message to a Facebook address and hey presto the photo appears in my profile.
This is all technology that now looks useful for business purposes. The Twitter SMS service, if embedded in my company intranet might be a secure way of me sending out messages whilst on the move (ok I can email it but Twitter can be programmed to send the same message as an SMS to other mobiles). I could say the same thing for the photo upload. This adds to the flexibility of business communications and who knows what it will evolve to.
I don’t know if businesses will use Facebook in anger or whether they will demand closed websites that are specific to their use. This is to some extent possible with Facebook already but would I trust my secure business data to Facebook? Probably not yet. Still the ride is exciting.
