De concurrenten van Twitter | B R I G H T

De concurrenten van Twitter

De groei van Twitter lijkt niet te stuiten. Welke kansen hebben Facebook en consorten om de concurrentie aan te gaan?

We wisten van niets, maar we misten iets: de statusupdate. Van het gesprek onder vier ogen aan de keukentafel tot de massacommunicatie van het NOS-journaal, van e-mail tot weblogs: het bestaande palet van off- en online communicatievormen bevatte een gapend gat. Het was binnen de omheining van een sociale netwerksite of een instant messaging-netwerkje al langer mogelijk om eenregelige oprispingen met sociale contacten te delen, maar de krachtige eenvoud van Twitter maakte pas daadwerkelijk nuttige toepassingen mogelijk. De statusupdate wordt zelfs 'de nieuwe e-mail' genoemd - en daarin schuilt niet eens zo heel veel overdrijving (wellicht een beetje). Dodebomencolumnisten kunnen dan ook sputteren wat ze willen (zo hier en daar en daar) Twitter gaat niet meer weg. Of vooruit: de statusupdate, de microblog, de lifestream, de mindcast in elk geval niet.

Want de wereld der lifestreaming wordt momenteel weliswaar nog gedomineerd door Twitter (waardoor al wordt gewaarschuwd voor de ongezonde monopoliepositie die zo ontstaat), er zijn meer deelnemers op het speelveld. Of het slagveld, zo je wil: dat wordt omschreven als bloedig, zonder doden. Wat zijn de belangrijkste spelers, diensten en applicaties in microblogland?

Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?

Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?


URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).

The URL Shortener Mega Chart

To make recommendations, I reviewed various services and how they stacked up in a variety of features. All this got dumped into a spreadsheet, below. You can also view it in full-screen here.

Each column represents a feature. Want to know more about that feature and why it is important? Each is explained below the chart. Green indicates that a particular service gets a good grade for that feature. Red indicates that it is lacking. Not all features are of equal importance, however, so don’t let the occasional red mark make you think a service is lacking. But in general, the more green, the better.

To busy to read the chart or the explanations? There’s a summary of recommended tools at the end of this story. But first, the chart:

Taming Twitter: Did They Really Just Say That?

Taming Twitter: Did They Really Just Say That?


As recent incidents have shown, on Twitter anything goes. But forward-thinking companies are mitigating risks of using the booming social network by designating Twitter reps and updating electronic communication guidelines.
By Michelle V. Rafter
Comments 4 | Recommend 18

erhaps by now you’ve heard of the PR guy whose snarky comments about Memphis, Tennessee, to his Twitter followers landed him in hot water with the Memphis-based client he was about to visit, a little company named FedEx.

    Or the congressman whose Twitter posts during a secret trip to Iraq had military officials worried he had compromised the mission’s security.

    And then there’s the very public and very profane exchange between a Canadian journalist and a product-marketing executive.

    As those instances show, organizations are using Twitter for almost anything and everything, often with unintended or even disastrous consequences. The social networking service, which lets people post messages 140 characters at a time to a circle of online friends, has grown so big so fast that it has outpaced companies’ efforts to create user guidelines—or in some cases understand what it is and how it works.

    If this sounds familiar, it should.

    Companies have covered this ground before, first with e-mail, then the Web and more recently with social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. In each case, advances in electronic communications forced organizations to decide what employees could or couldn’t do and revise corporate conduct guidelines or acceptable use policies accordingly.

    Although it’s still small compared with social networks like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter is catching on fast. The 2-year-old service grew 900 percent in 2008 to approximately 6 million users, according to company officials and Internet industry analysts.

    Given the avalanche of things HR departments are dealing with right now—a recession-induced talent upheaval and a new U.S. president intent on revising workplace rules and regulations—they’re not investing lots of energy worrying about Twitter, says Jason Averbook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion, the Minneapolis HR management consulting firm.

    "They’re slammed to the gills just trying to survive, and writing a guide to social media isn’t on top of their to-do list," he says.

    Maybe it should be.

    Because of how it works, Twitter can spread information exponentially faster than e-mail or blog posts.

    Think of Twitter as a giant chat room, but instead of person-to-person conversations, with a mouse click one person can instantly beam a message to however many Twitter users have signed up to "follow" them, whether that’s 20, 200, 2,000 or more. Any of those people can rebroadcast, or "retweet" the original message to their own network and so on and so on.

    Its viral nature makes Twitter powerful but also dangerous, says Michael Krigsman, CEO at Asuret Inc., a Boston IT consultant, and author of the IT Project Failures blog.

    "If a company does well, the positive effect can happen more rapidly than e-mail," Krigsman says. "If a company doesn’t do something or isn’t responding to customers, the possibility of negative spiral is far greater too."

    Some companies have responded by blocking employees’ access to Twitter with the same software they use to block gambling, pornography or other sites they’ve determined could hamper productivity or be perceived as harassment.

    But social networking experts agree that blocking Twitter will backfire.

    "It’s a hopeless battle," says Steve Boese, an adjunct professor at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology who teaches an HR IT course in the school’s HR master’s degree program. "You can issue blocks but you’ll be blocking more and more. It’s a game, and eventually you’ll give up."

    Besides, social media and HR experts say, there’s nothing stopping an employee from using Twitter to talk about work from their home computer or personal iPhone.

    Some companies have taken the offensive and tapped designated employees to act as their official eyes and ears on the network.

    Comcast, for example, has at least a half-dozen customer service and public relations representatives on Twitter fielding customers’ questions and complaints about the company’s telephone, cable TV and Internet service. UPS, Bank of America, Wachovia, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks and Zappos, the online retailer, all have official corporate accounts on the network for customer service, marketing or both.

    At Yahoo, 25 to 30 employees act as the Silicon Valley tech giant’s official Twitter representatives. Many are product or community managers who get paid to spread information about new Yahoo products and services.

    In early February, Nicki Dugan, a Yahoo corporate communications senior director, became the official corporate voice of Yahoo on Twitter.

    But even tech-savvy companies like Yahoo haven’t sorted everything out.

    Although Yahoo employees have used Twitter in an official capacity for at least a year, the company has yet to revise 4-year-old employee electronic communications guidelines to include the new service.

    The only update has been a wiki Yahoo engineers created in 2008 to share advice on handling complaints customers post on Twitter.

    It’s definitely time for more, Dugan says.

    Although Yahoo hasn’t encountered problems, company officials are discussing creating a separate wiki to spell out Twitter best practices, and are also talking about ways to use Twitter for customer service, she says, adding: "We need to formalize it."

    Having an electronic communications policy or employee-conduct guidelines that cover Twitter won’t mean much if employees don’t know they exist, according to HR and social media experts.

    Guidelines should be spelled out during new employee orientation. They should also be available in handbooks and online in multiple locations, such as on an internal company blog or on its HR employee portal.

    Most important, make sure employees realize Twitter is a public forum, says Krigsman, the IT failures expert.

    Employees may think they’re posting about minor company events, but you had better believe that competitors are out there, hanging on their every word. Says Krigsman: "Twitter is a competitive-intelligence dream tool."

Workforce Management Online, March 2009Register Now!


Michelle V. Rafter is a Workforce Management contributing editor based in Portland, Oregon. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet

tweetingthis.pngMainstream media is in an orgiastic frenzy of coverage about Twitter. Everyone's Tweeting, from celebrities to CEOs according to CNN, The View, Today, the NY Times, the Wall St Journal and just about everyone else. Each of them covers Twitter like it's an overnight phenomenon that came out of nowhere, although Twitter has been gaining traction for three years and now has 9 million members.

Should you company be on Twitter? Not necessarily.

Top 10 reasons not to join Twitter:


  1. every Tweet has to be approved by legal. Twitter is a social network where conversation is fast and interconnected. If you have to wait a day, or even a few hours for your 140 character Tweet to gain legal approval, Twitter will be the wrong platform for you.

  2. you plan to use Twitter like a giant RSS feed, broadcasting nothing but headlines, deals. People follow people they find interesting. If all your Tweets are a one-way street: Block!

  3. you think using Twitter is a social media strategy. It's a tactic, a tool, not a strategy. It works if you already have an online following who'll view your Tweets as a way to interact with your company on a human level

  4. you think it's a good idea to have someone tweet as if they are the president of the company. Authentic and transparent are the keys. It's fine if someone besides the CEO tweets for your company, as long as they say that's what they're doing

  5. you are not going to respond when people direct tweets at you. Twitter is like the new watercooler. If you walked out to the water fountain and talked non-stop to people gathered there, they'd certainly be happy when you left. Ditto for Twitter.

  6. you think paying for followers might be a good idea. Followers are earned on Twitter. Be interesting, make only every 10th Tweet about you and you'll gain and keep a following.

  7. you think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you. Quality trumps quantity.

  8. you want to protect your updates. If people have to ask permission to see what you're posting on Twitter, you're defeating the purpose - which is conversation.

  9. you plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Google Analytics won't give you true tracking. You need to track the urls you post with a service like budurl or bit.ly and use one or more social media tracking tools so you can get real-time stats on Twitter

  10. You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship Listen first. Monitor what's being said about your brand, your industry, your products. Then join the conversation and become part of the community. Then your occasional marketing messages will be accepted, or at least tolerated because you also add value to the community.

Six Revisions - Web Development and Design Information

10 Features That Will Make Twitter Better

March 1st, 2009 by Jacob Gube | 223 Comments

Twitter’s popularity has skyrocketed in the recent months. Usage statistics states that most people who use Twitter interact with the application via the web rather than a third-party client such as TweetDeck or twitterfeed.

Twitter’s web interface is simple and intuitive but lacks a few features that can make it much better. In this article, you’ll read about 10 excellent user interface features that can enhance the Twitter web experience.

HootSuite the ultimate Twitter toolbox

Welcome to HootSuite

HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.

HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Creating an account is easy. Enter your Twitter username and password, and add a profile for each Twitter account you wish to manage. Got more than one tweeter per profile? Add multiple editors.

Then get going! Post live or pre-schedule tweets. Check stats and analytics right from the dashboard. Search Twitter for keyword information. Reply @ and Direct Message the folks in your conversation. Do all this and more from one fantastic interface.