Social Media

Crowdwire looks at politics via lens of social media, branding

The screen grab above is from The Crowdwire, a new, noncommercial project that among other things looks at the success of the political campaigns in regard to branding and social media.

As you can see, in this snapshot for the period July 16 to August 15 the brand of President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, figure in the top three most-discussed brands on social media (I was surprised to see that the Batman movie came in only at fourth place considering the fact that the Colorado shootings took place July 20).

The Crowdwire (@TheCrowdwire on Twitter), a … Read more

What Zuckerberg must do to right the Facebook ship

All is not well at Facebook. Some have even started calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's head. But the panic is premature, and the social network has plenty of time and opportunity to turn things around.

Facebook's stock price has traveled south since its flashy (and disastrous) debut in May. Facebook closed at $19.44 per share on Wednesday, barely half of its $38 IPO price.

Why is Facebook's share price dropping like a boulder off a cliff? M&A specialist Marty Wolf provides an excellent explanation, but I'll summarize the key points:

Facebook's price-to-earnings … Read more

Neighbors to Twitter co-founder: Cease and desist

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home. A year and half ago, they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house.

Not so fast. This is San Francisco, after all, where even little changes are hard, especially in old neighborhoods like this one, which sits near the peak of a picture postcard hill just south of famous Golden Gate park. The planned tear-down … Read more

How many of your Twitter followers are fake?

Twitter users who want to know how many spammy or "fake" accounts are following them can check out a new service called Fake Follower Check.

Designed by a group named StatusPeople, the service looks at your Twitter account to scan a certain number of followers. In return, it tells how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. In my instance, it informed me that 77 percent of the accounts were good, 19 percent inactive, and 4 percent fake.

You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and … Read more

The disappeared tweets of Michael Dell's daughter

It's not easy being a wealthy parent, especially if your kids want to do the same things as the kids of other wealthy parents do.

You know, like, um, constantly feeding your Twitter account.

Wayne Gretzky seems to have been one modern patrician who became frustrated with his daughter's Twitter postings, reportedly shutting down his daughter's Twitter feed twice. She does like a racy shot or two, does Paulina Gretzky.

Now I hear there might have been another marginal breach in Twitterdom in the bosom of Michael Dell.

As Bloomberg Businessweek reports it, Dell's 18-year-old daughter … Read more

Olympics score more than 150 million tweets

People who didn't follow the Olympics on TV or streaming media could still keep up with all the action via Twitter.

The micro-blogging site saw more than 150 million Tweets about the summer games, the company blogged yesterday. Now that the games have ended, which athletes and events won the most interest among tweeters?

Jamaica's Usain Bolt win of the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint scored a record on Twitter with 80,000 tweets per minute. His gold medal for the 100-meter sprint came in second with 74,000 tweets per minute. Bolt also was tops on … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg's topless photo stirs emotions

If there's one thing Vladimir Putin has shown the world, it's that a topless photo can add truth to power.

It can make a man seem more of a man, more 5'4" than 5'3".

Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg also feels the need to appear a little taller, stronger, and manlier.

For a photograph has emerged of Facebook's CEO topless.

My deeply religious reading of TMZ suddenly revealed yesterday the sight of Zuckerberg with his right hand on his bare chest, as if to say: "Sexy? Moi?"

It is impossible to know why … Read more

Zynga's new Gems With Friends puts spotlight on mobile

Zynga's latest game, Gems With Friends, launches today and it may give some hope for the game-creator's mobile future.

As the series' first arcade-style and first non-word game, Gems -- available in Canada with a worldwide rollout to follow in the coming weeks -- features gemstones of different colors and numbers that can be combined to score points.

"They combine and they create these epic combos," said Paul Bettner, vice president and general manager at Zynga. "It's a thrilling game and very, very addictive."

Zynga is introducing this mobile-only game amid criticism of … Read more

The spoken hashtag must die -- here's how

It's time to take a stand against the spoken hashtag. You know, that awkward habit some of the Twitter-dicted have of saying things like "hashtag are you kidding me?"

Believe me, I understand the yearning for words to convey that something is so awesome or horrendous that you'd rather be tweeting about it with your legion of Twitter followers than simply jawing with your analog flesh-bucket "real" friends.

If you happen to witness, say, a squirrel jumping on to the back of a golden retriever the moment the dog takes off after a tennis ball -- that's something obviously worthy of a hashtag, right?… Read more

Did Twitter alert NBC to Adams' Olympics criticism?

The drama surrounding Twitter's suspension of a U.K. newspaper reporter over his criticism of NBC has taken a rather surprising twist.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that it received an e-mail from Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sports vice president of communications, who told the news outlet that his company was alerted to tweets The Independent reporter Guy Adams sent out criticizing NBC over its Olympics coverage by Twitter itself.

"Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it," McCloskey told the Daily Telegraph.

Adams … Read more