Back in April I saw an article by security blogger (and CSTO?) Bruce Schneier titled Fake Facts on Twitter and was intruiged. In the beginning of April Bruce had instituted his own little Twitter experiment to see how effectively he could spread false facts among a group of eager republicans who were bickering over the details of the first stimulus. The results were shocking as he was able to spread his false information quickly and to a wide audience using Twitter and some social engineering as tools.
Let’s break this hack down and see if we can learn something about this and apply it to the legitimate business world.
1. Bruce created a Twitter account with a theme targeted for his audience,
2. He then harvested follower lists of popular republican Twitter accounts.
3. He used people’s tendencies to “follow back” to build a list of over 1000 followers.
4. He then spread his message which was highly targeted (and effective) to the audience.
In summary what Bruce did was create a brand, identify his market, acquire access to an audience (using Twitter) and then market to that audience his message.
Pretty simple when you break it down, and when you consider the reality that the effect would have been almost exactly the same even if the data was true, you start to realize how your business can benefit from social tools like Twitter combined with some creative thinking.
One of the key missteps I see many business owners make is they do steps 1 and 4, but without steps 2 and 3 their marketing and overall efforts in getting the word out either fall on deaf ears (wrong market) or aren’t heard at all.
Successful Twitter brands use the platform to build relationships, and engage the audience. Brands who simply ‘broadcast’ lose a majority of the benefits Twitter and social networks have to offer.
Twitoria helps you find people on your follow list that haven’t tweeted in a set period of time (when it works). This is great for users who follow lots of people, as there is a natural rate of turn over with Twitter accounts.
By default, the list contains all your friends and followers and is sorted by last update, showing those who most recently updated first. You can sort the list alphabetically either ascending or descending by Twitter ID. You can filter the list in several ways: only friends or only followers, all friends or all followers, and mutual friends.
My Cleenr is a brutally simple list trimming utility for Twitter that shows you a list of people you’re following, with the oldest tweeters on top. This allows you to remove accounts that may be dormant or abandoned.
Friend or Follow is by far the best looking of these utilities, which means absolutely nothing, but they get brownie points from me for matching that ‘Twitter’ look very well. The list of your friends who are not following you uses your Twitter theme which is a nice touch.
Twitterless is the most comprehensive of all these tools, and works in a very different way. To signup you need to follow them (how clever) and the purpose is to allow you to group your friends, filter & search them, locate your followers, and see graphs on your Twitter usage.
Torrent Freak has the good info on AllPeers which is a free extension for Firefox bringing socialness and BitTorrent to the masses.
Here’s a video snippet which mentions AllPeers (towards the end)
From Wiki…
AllPeers uses open source BitTorrent technology to facilitate file transfer.[1] The extension does not require any ports be opened. AllPeers encrypts its communication using standard protocols like SSL so as to protect the user against 3rd party intervention listening in.[2] AllPeers at the start its beta launch was 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript code.
1. New Take on a Social Network: CHECK 2. Built With Uber Cool Rails: CHECK 3. Investment from Rich Web 1.0 Moguls: CHECK 4. Crazy Ass Business Model: CHECK
The idea for Zivity is good, but the execution is not in line with the market, and I know a little something about the pron market. I mean who doesn’t?
According to VB, they want the photos to be “fine erotica” submitted by hot people where paid subscribers vote and follow these local hotty attention whores.
Hmmm sounds a lot like MySpace … which is free … and prob has 1000 times more local hotties to stalk than Zivity has. Where do I sign up? Oh that’s right I can’t (it’s in private beta)
Pron is free all over the mighty Interweb. There are free social networks, free attention whores, free fine erotica photos and free adult blogs to keep everyone more than satisfied.
Zivity, an adult social network, raises $1M before launch
Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.
It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.
It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.
Several former PayPal executives are among the investors.
I tend to think Steve isn’t going out on a limb much here in predicting that Facebook will overtake both MySpace and Bebo to take the UK Social Networking crown.
Bebo (design wise) looks very much like YouTube, and not knowing the history here I can’t comment as to why.
Comscore data for July reveals that Bebo is now the number one visited social networking site in the UK, overtaking MySpace. Sitting in third place is Facebook. According to the statistics, Bebo registered a total of 10.7m unique users ahead of MySpace which has 10.1m and Facebook with 7.6m.
Bebo is also ranked as the second most engaging website in the UK with 8.7b page views – only just behind Google which received 8.8b.
However, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. Based on anecdotal evidence amongst my friends and colleagues here in London, give it six months or less, and Facebook’s UK figures could look very different. I suspect they’ll be a lot closer to the other two — within the thousands not millions — and could eventually overtake them both.
