Digital Tip digital and social media advertising

Digital Tip

Digital advertising & social media marketing, Sydney, Australia

social media

Don’t believe the celebrity Twitter hype

This excerpt from E! Channel’s The Soup is from one week of Twitter mentions on prime time TV in the US. Even though the celebrities have been drawing the masses onto Twitter, Nielsen reported yesterday that around 60% of users signing up to Twitter “fail to return” after a month. The report has been picked up verbatim by the ABC & SBS and has been retweeted throughout the day. In Australia, the report hasn’t been given any kind of analysis or insight by people who actually use Twitter

In one corner we have “celebrities are bringing the masses to Twitter and ruining it for early adopters”. In the other corner we have “Twitter has only 40% retention rate for new users and won’t keep exponential growth”. Reality is somewhere in the middle, but do celebrities amplify the Twitter hype?

Is public the new private?

Is public the new private? What constitutes oversharing on the public channel of Twitter? So a lot of angst of private being the new public relates to the equation
* how famous/reputable you are
* relative to how private you want to keep your life
* relative to your awareness of who your talking to
* and what you are saying
* how public the channel is

do strangers give better advice?

Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon gives Leonard the best advice when he’s down in the dumps about Penny paying attention another nerd. The advice from Sheldon?

“Its a perfect time to launch a blog with an interactive comment section”

The question is: do strangers give better advice than your friends?

Social Media Club Sydney and the Secret Handshake

There’s been some healthy debate around the “exclusivity” of the Sydney Social Media Club. And despite the title of the post, you won’t need a secret handshake to be let in. Mumbrella released the news this morning about the Social Media Club Sydney starting up, with the first event scheduled for April 27th featuring the figures at the centre of two famous social media incidents in 2009 – the (fake) Stephen Conroy a.k.a Leslie Nassar and Naked Communications Adam Ferrier.

Twitter as interactive backchat

Twitter since it’s launch 3 years ago has been a major part of SXSW, so much so that Pepsico spent some sponsorship dollars this year in creating an interactive visualizer of the various Twitter streams, following the parties just as much as the event itself.

Which brings me to the most pop cultural use of Twitter as interactive backchat. So You Think You Can Dance Australia has a bunch of amateur commentators (me included I’m afraid) who sit on Twitter every Sunday and Monday evening, tweeting on the minutae of costumes, music, hair, camerawork and oh yes, the dancing. Every week, the #sytycd hashtag becomes a trending topic, prompting Twitter users from opposite hemispheres (literal as well as metaphorical) to ask “what’s sytycd?”. Meanwhile the backchat goes on in an interactive (at least amongst the amateur commentators) stream.

What’s in a name? More on building brand you

What’s consistent about all these personal brand identities, is that that they have built an authentic brand without necessarily using their real faces or their real life names. That’s not to say they aren’t also known as their real life names, only that they have constructed a consistent and authentic online or brand persona that lives over and above their real life personality. Its the consistency in communication or voice as suggested by Seth is what makes the personal brand authentic.