We are our own Big Brother

New developments in social media and technology make more and more of your private life public

Social media offers up a way for people to express themselves in ways never possible, but like Uncle Ben told a young Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Information that used to be difficult or impossible to find, people now freely offer up. Over the course of this week, my Internet prowling unearthed some new trends that made me wonder if social media wasn’t starting to ask me to put too much of my life out in the public domain.

We can now make it easier than ever for people stalk and track us. Check out the new SenseCam. This little gadget is designed to capture pretty much every aspect of your life on camera. You wear it around your neck and its fisheye lens takes a picture every 30 seconds. It’s easy to see the appeal – there’s potential for a whole lot of wonderful images and moments from your life to be captured that would otherwise be missed if you hands are otherwise occupied.




Somehow the thought of a whole lot of people walking around with these things taking automated pictures all the time makes me just a little uneasy.

Now combine that with SoundBiter, a new iPhone app that constantly records the world around it. This nifty little app constantly records all audio around you. If you hear something you want to share, you hit a button and the phone saves the last 60 seconds of audio. You can then instantly send it out to the world via Twitter.

This could be a fun party app but the potential for paparazzi to exploit celebrities they are stalking or for people to be quoted out of context means there is great damage it could do.

Another trend that’s taking advantage of technology’s watchful eye are location based services (LBS) like the new Google Latitude. Thanks to built-in GPS, most new phones know where you are all the time . Developers are creating apps to show you nearby locations of people in your network.

With automated alerts when someone you know is close by, don’t be surprised if your friends suddenly start popping up a lot more often when you’re out and about.

As if that wasn’t enough ways to expose ourselves, here is my personal favorite. This new scale guilts you into losing weight by Tweeting how heavy you are automatically when you step on it. The Internet has officially invaded your bathroom.

The brilliance of social media and technology is that it you can share your life with people in ways never before possible. If you want to stay in the loop, putting a whole lot of yourself out there is inevitable. After all, that’s the spirit of social media. But the question is how much should we share? Is the rapid advancement in social media technologies putting too much of our lives online? Perhaps, but these gadgets sure do look cool.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

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Polling Twitter

 Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of Twitter applications.

What’s the best way to get feedback from Twitter?

If you’re using Twitter for your brand, at some point you’re probably going to want to understand how your followers feel about your brand, service or product. Polling is an excellent way to get a quick understanding of how people feel. It’s also a great way to run a contest, get demographic information on your followers, or get a rating on an idea. There are several sites that do just this. Their features range from only one service to a wide variety of services with a slight service fee.

I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter polling service. Of course, all the apps have to be free and require no downloadable client. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• have a unique url
• use analytics
• use multiple types of polls
• insert images
• brand polls
• make them visually interesting
• tag keywords
• categorize topics
• leave a message
• embed on our site

The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the interface and then spent about ten minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.

Polls.tw is one of the simpler polling sites. You ask the question and then enter the multiple choice answers below. Polls.tw will post a short URL to Twitter. You login to Twitter using OAuth to track your results. It also allows you to leave a comment. That’s it. It could have been so much more with a bit of work.

PROS: Easy to use and creates a poll that can be easily used by others.

CONS: It only creates one type of poll: multiple choice. All the other sites do the same thing but offer a lot more features.

RATING:

Poll Your Followers is another extremely simple to use site to create surveys/polls on Twitter. You can create either yes/no questions or multiple choice. Poll Your Followers pops up when you first view a Twitter profile. This is great if you ever go to that person’s profile, but if you use a third party site to access Twitter, you’ll never see the poll. You also get a short URL to the poll for retweeting and sharing with others.

PROS: Easy to use for short multiple choice polls.

CONS: Outside of posting a poll, it has no other functions. You can’t leave any feedback or find out who voted in your poll. This is another site that needs a few more features to make it worth your while.

RATING:

Twttrstrm is a free tool from Squidoo. It’s one of the more interesting Twitter polling tools. You can ask any kind of question, create keywords to track, pick a category and add tags to make the poll searchable. Once you submit your question, it creates a Squidoo like lense or page that has a wide variety of functions. The new page is a standalone site that allows any Twitter user to start a discussion, ask for advice, add YouTube videos and basically create a resource for others surrounding your Twitter question. 

From their website:

Here’s the magic part: as your followers click through and respond, the storm spreads to their followers. So, in short, it’s a threaded, viral, structured conversation in the middle of the Twitter melee.

There is an abundance of information that could be added to your Twitter poll, to the point where it can be overwhelming.

PROS: Twttrstrm is easy to set up. The lense aspect is unique to Squidoo and creates an incredible resource around your questions.

CONS: It’s a mess. Looking at examples from other more established polls, it’s a hodgepodge of information that can be very difficult to sort through.

RATING:

StrawPoll is the most visually interesting of the polling sites. You can ask any question as long as it only has two possible answers. It sounds very limited, but where they succeed is in listing the answers for each side of the question which helps provide some extra insight into the answer. You get your own url that uses the background of your Twitter profile.

PRO: Of the single feature sites, I like this one the best. It’s simple to use, visually appealing and allows you to see the tweets surrounding your poll.

CONS: It’s usefulness is limited to just the one type of question. The site feels like more of a gimmick than something that a business would seriously use.

RATING:

SocialToo lets you ask multiple choice or yes/no questions and gives you a bunch of useful tools for Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook. On Twitter you can:

• Create surveys
• Auto-follow
• Auto-unfollow
• Blacklist
• Direct Message new followers
• Receive a daily stats email

There are a lot of useful little things you can do, but beyond the basic poll creation and stat tracking you have to pay for each add on. Also, it’s pretty ugly.

PROS: Simple interface and lots of nice add-on features.

CONS: You have to pay for the add-ons and it’s not the most attractive layout.

RATING:

With 17 different question templates including multiple choice, rankings and matrices, Twtpoll gives you all the options you’ll need to gauge public opinion. It gives you a custom url and your Twitter icon appears with the poll. You can also brand your poll, but this requires a nominal fee that you choose yourself. You can also add pictures to go along with each answer option, making the poll more visually lively. Once you start getting results, you can view them in pie charts, bar charts and tables. The only downside is that there’s no option to ad keywords.

PROS: Lots of question types, has a clean and simple look and it’s easy to spread your poll around.

CONS: Branding must be paid for and it lacks keyword tags.

RATING:

Poll Everywhere has the most polished offer of all the sites. But there’s a big catch: if you plan on getting more than 30 responses to your question, you have to pay them. The coolest thing about Poll Everywhere is that it’s mobile – respondents can send in answers via text message and the results update in real time in your browser or in a PowerPoint presentation. So this is a great tool if you want to give a presentation where the audience can text in responses to your poll and have the results displayed without missing a beat. The reports it generates are also more advanced than the other sites.

It’s not a bad deal if you need software to interact with an audience. Otherwise, you can get the functionality you need for free elsewhere.

PROS: Instant stats gathered from phones make it an ideal audience polling tool.  It also generates professional reports.

CONS: Price tag not worth paying if you just want to send your poll out through Twitter or other social media channels.

RATING:

 

CONCLUSION: While there are some sites that are easy to use, one trick ponies, it’s worth putting a little extra effort into your polls with the sites that offer more functionality. Twtpoll edges out Twttrstrm as it provides nearly all the features we wanted while still being simple to use and visually appealing.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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Spooktacular Halloween – 2.0 style

What are the scariest online activities for this Halloween?

It’s my favorite time of the year, Halloween! For me, Halloween is Christmas for adults. We get to dress up, make fools of ourselves and have fun. In order to set the mood, we have to get our Twitter avatar properly set up. Trickotweet gives you several really cute and fun monster avatars to choose from. I went with the hockey masked one.

On to Facebook. Pet Zombie allows you to create your own pet zombie that you can feed, play with, cover in toilet paper and make dance. My zombie is named Marvin.

Cute isn’t he.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “How would I do in a zombie apocalypse?” Find out by taking this short Facebook quiz. Turns out I might survive.

I love carving jack-o-lanterns. But sometimes I have problems coming up with ideas. Extreme Pumpkins has lots of jack-o-lanterns that people have taken to unusual levels. The 2009 winners provide lots of inspiration to go far beyond the mundane. The site is packed with “how to” tips, patterns and lots of photos of pumpkins.

If you need some practice before you start carving your pumpkin, try carving a virtual pumpkin.

If you don’t want to sit inside this Samhain, join a zombie walk.


What could be more fun than dressing up as the undead and shambling down the street?

If dressing as a zombie isn’t your game, why not play some? Re-kill the undead with Boxhead, a Lego like character game where you’re stranded in a tunnel where you shoot or get eaten. The more you kill, the better your weapons become. If the undead become too much, shoot barrels to thin the herd.

If you need something a little bloodier to slake your zombie thirst, Endless Zombie Rampage is your game. You have to defend your ground against gut-munchers with a handgun. As you gain experience points, you can upgrade your weapons to assault rifles, shotguns and laser cannons. Both games are great fun.

Sometimes you can’t be at your computer (you have to eat, poop and sleep sometimes). Thankfully, 148apps.com has found four iPhone applications to fill the void that’s in your soul when you leave your computer. Alive 4-ever gets their highest rating and from the images, it looks action packed. Personally, I can't wait to play Hysteria Project, check out the screen capture below. There are also iPhone versions of DOOM and Resident Evil for a bit of classic game play.

Finally, this All Hallow’s Eve, I want to leave you with this bit of stop motion zombie mayhem fright, Chainsaw Maid. 

What are you favorite Halloween sites?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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Analyze your Twitter profile

Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter applications.

What’s the best way to get analytics on your Twitter profile?

As you try to build your Twitter profile and find new people to follow, it’s important to track how you use Twitter. Odds are you’re doing things with your account that you’re not even aware of. By using analytics, you can discover not only what your Twitter habits are, but the Twitter habits of your friends as well. This is important info when you want to get a lot of exposure for a tweet or launch a Twitter campaign. There a lot of websites that provide one aspect of user statistics or have a gimmick to measure popularity, but today we’re looking at sites that provide thorough user statistics. In the future, we’ll cover user trends and ranking.



I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter account analyzer. Of course, all the apps have to be free and require no downloadable client. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• see how many daily tweets are added
• see how many daily chats we have
• analyze subjects we tweet about
• see the hashtags we use most often
• see our online follower growth rate
• see the location of followers
• see who is retweets most often
• see who we contact the most
• see who mentions us the most


The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the interface and then spent about ten minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.

Twitter Grader is best known for its Twitter user account grading. What people don’t realize is that it also has analytics. Well...sort of. They can analyze followers within their site, meaning that if your followers or followings are registered with Twitter Grader, they can be analyzed. Of our 3,681 followers and 2,705 following only two people were found. 

Twitter Grader’s best feature is its user history. This is a quick chart that shows how your follower rate compares to your following rate. You can also register with the site to get more functionality, but I didn’t see any after registering. While it’s not a very good analysis tool, the site’s account grading is still the best bragging rights tool available.

PROS: You can grade your account against other Twitter accounts with a tangible grade. You can also see how many people follow you and you follow.

CONS: None of the other metrics really work or have any meaning. While the grading is a good indication of how well you use Twitter, none of the other metrics are useful.

RATING:




Twitter Analyzer is a great free tool that provides over 26 different analytics, and more are in the works. If you need to know specific information about your Twitter habits, this is it. From the number of times you tweet a day to what groups your Twitter followers fall into to the friends you mention most in your tweets, Twitter Analyzer covers all my analytics needs and then some. It is easily the most thorough free analytics tool available today. The best part is you don’t have to register with the site to use it. This means you can also check out the Twitter usage of your friends as well. Analytics like “the friends you’re most in contact with” can help you identify the people that influence the people that influence you. This can be incredibly helpful in building your online network.

PROS: If you need to know something about your Twitter habits, this is the place to go. I’m looking forward to seeing what the ‘Trends’ and ‘FUN’ tabs will add to the experience.

CONS: Some of the analytics get a little confusing. Under ‘Mentions’, it’s hard to tell what exactly the difference is between the mentions. What is the difference between “the friends you mention the most in your Update Messages” and “the friends you mention the most”? Since the results can be slightly different, some deeper explanation of the functions would be appreciated.

RESULTS:

Twitalyzer measures your Twitter profile against five analytics: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. The concept is similar to Twitter Grader – your profile is measured on a scale of 0-100. The grading is rather harsh, so you really have to work on your account to bring it up. Each of the five areas go into more detail and offer up suggestions on how to improve your score. This can be very helpful if you’re trying to be more influential on Twitter. A nice additional feature is the use of time-based analysis using Google Motion Charts and the ability to set benchmarks to work towards. Finally, if you’re weak in one area, Twitalyzer provides the top 100 people in each of the five components you can follow and learn from.

PROS: Simple to use and provides lots of details. While it doesn’t hit many of the criteria I set out to find, the information it does provide empowers you to create a superior Twitter account.

CONS: It takes several uses to remember exactly what the five components do. Even after reading each one, I found myself returning to refresh my memory. There are also some loading issues. When you click on any of the analytics under “Recent Activity”, it either takes a very long time to pull up the information or it just hangs in limbo forever.

RATING:

TweetStatswas the first Twitter analytics tool I ever used. It’s bright, colorful and simple to use. Not much has changed in the time I’ve been using it. There are eight graphs and two tweet word clouds. From time of day to who you reply to and retweet the most, the graphs give you a quick overview of your Twitter activity. As for the Tweet Cloud, this gives you a great breakdown of which words you use the most, the top five words you use and the top five hashtags you use.

PROS: Simple and colorful. The Tweet Cloud is a great way to see what you’re saying online.

CONS: The site needs more analytics to deliver real impact. If you need a quick breakdown with graphs you can use in a report, TweetStats will do in a pinch.

RATINGS:

Xerfer serves up your Twitter usage. You can find the times you most often tweet, reply and which days and hours you’re mostly likely to tweet. This is a useful function, but considering that other sites have this as one part of a bigger package, it just isn’t enough. Sure, you can research anyone on Twitter, but you can do the same thing with other sites.

PROS: Easy to use and simple to understand but with useful graphics.

CONS: Doesn’t provide much past the one chart. With other sites doing the same thing and providing more content, it’s hard to recommend this site.

RATING:

Klout is another grading site, but with much more statistical analysis. Using five key analytics – reach, demand, engagement, velocity and activity – Klout allows you to not only  see who you influence and who influences you, but also shows who is losing influence and who is gaining influence. The site feels very similar to Twitalyzer in look and feel. There is no explanation for what their five analytics mean or how to influence them. Klout’s current offer is a good start, but still has some growing to do.

PROS: Lots of analytics that provide a good deal information. The influence tracker is a great feature to find out who is most influential in your network while helping you build your own influence.

CONS: Little explanation of any of the analytics used. Klout could easily rip off what Twitalyzer does to create a better experience, but for now they are living their shadow.

RATING:

CONCLUSION: While TweetStats and Twitalyzer both have very useful analytics, neither comes close to the depth and variety of Twitter Analyzer. Twitalyzer’s benchmarking tool is a great way to set goals for yourself. Combined with Twitter Analyzer, you have all the software you need to mount a Twitter campaign and measure its success. Because the analytics are live, you can make course adjustments on the fly to optimize your Tweeting.

What tools do you use to analyze your Twitter profile?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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Social media and death

How to use social media to cope with loss

As Halloween draws near, our thoughts turn to the more macabre areas of the imagination. While visions of ghouls, goblins, vampires (no, not the sparkly Twilight kind) and zombies creep into my mind, the celebration of the darker nature of humanity eventually brought me to thoughts about death. Sure, social media helps people connect to meet up for coffee, attend conferences or find a good place to buy shoes, but how does it help us cope with death? I had no idea, so I set out to discover how support groups are using social media these days.

The Compassionate Friends , a support group for families dealing with the death of a child, has gone beyond a standard support site and added a Facebook page. You can leave videos, upload photos and participate on their discussion board to help build a community on a site you already visit regularly. Their discussion page is very active with many people offering up stories and advice about their experiences.

Pocket Cemetery is an iPhone app that lets you create memorials to your lost friends and relatives (or beloved celebrities and pets). You can create customizable virtual gravestones, send virtual flowers and send prayers and messages.

This is the only iPhone app I could find in this area. As death is something that touches us all, without exception, I’d expect to see a lot more effort to cater to our need to cope in the future.

People often turn to religion in their grieving. Tangle, a Christian lifestyle site, has embraced Web 2.0 technology. They’ve launched an online prayer wall that allows you to share videos, photos, leave prayers and have someone add their own support for you. They allow you to share your prayers through Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and via email and Twitter. Tangle is very active within the Christian community, and with comments posted on almost every prayer, many people are finding the community support they need.

Muxlim.tv is the world’s largest Muslim lifestyle site. On it, you can read blogs, watch videos, listen to prayers, take polls and a whole lot more. It’s a social media haven for Muslim’s online. Once you register, you create a personal profile, which appears to be a cross between Facebook and MySpace.

But what about those of us who aren’t religious? Experience Project is for anyone regardless of religious preference – or lack thereof. You can create a group to talk about your experiences where others can comment and offer support, insight and help. Each group has its own built-in support system that helps create a support community.

Dealing with the death of a loved one is never easy, but with the help of social media many people are finding it a little less painful.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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When to DM and when to @

 
Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter applications.

It’s the difference between looking like a n00b and looking like a pro

In our previous post entitled “These are the twrules”, rule #10 is: “Don’t have a huge conversation.” It’s always good to communicate with the people you follow on Twitter. You can make new business connections, find an excellent resource or make new friends. I’ve done all three through Twitter. It’s very easy to start chatting with people and the more you use the site, the more this will happen. Just remember that it isn’t a chat room or instant messenger.

Twitter is a broadcast system where you send out a message for everyone to hear. Imagine Twitter as your local television station. They broadcast the latest episode of “30 Rock” and anyone watching will see the episode, but so will anyone else searching for the words “30 Rock.” This is the essence of Twitter. Anyone following you can see your message and so can anyone searching for the keywords in your tweet. Now imagine that anyone that sees your broadcast can respond to it with their own message. This is called an @ reply. 

By using an @ symbol and the Twitter user’s name, you can reply to their message. As such, you can have a simple conversation. So if I ask, “Does anyone know a good steak restaurant?”, anyone that lives in my area can contact me with an “@stefanhy you should try Mando.”

And I might reply with  “@username Thanks.” Since my tweet and my follower’s tweet have been broadcast to all of our followers, and if our respective followers aren’t following both of us, they are only seeing a fragment of the conversation. That’s why a conversation shouldn’t go much beyond this.

If I need further information about location, prices, reservations or opening hours, as a good tweeter, I would move the conversation to direct messages (DM) that only the two of us can see. DM’s are best used when asking someone a question that the general population doesn’t need to be aware of. If I’m asking @maydbs if she’s going to debaser for lunch, it’s not really a question everyone needs to see, especially my followers who aren’t in the Malmö area.

Any direct remark that is only useful to you and the responder should always be a direct message. Any tweet that is business related should probably be a direct message. Also, use DM’s for setting appointments, giving someone a notice, planning events or confirming personal information.

These aren’t rules set in stone. It’s more of a general guideline. Like most things, the more you use Twitter, the more you’ll get a feel for the do’s and dont’s. How you use Twitter and how you communicate with others can greatly effect your follower count and how people view you. If you feel like you’re having too many instant messenger style conversations, odds are you probably are. Be vigilant of how you use Twitter and you’ll discover that your experience will be more beneficial and rewarding.

What are your rules for using @replies and DM's?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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Twitter follower management apps

 
Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter applications.  

What’s the best way to manage your Twitter followers?

The longer you’re on Twitter, hopefully the more followers you’ll gain. The more followers you gain, the more difficult it becomes to monitor who you follow and who follows you. Fortunately, there are lots of applications created to solve this very problem. It’s important to monitor your followers and the people you follow to make sure you’ve got the right audience. Finding the right online application will make doing this simpler and help make you even more productive on Twitter.

I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a follower management application. Of course, all the apps have to be free and have no downloadable client. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• see who we’re following
• see who is following us
• unfollow/follow people
• bulk unfollow/follow users
• see how active our followers are
• view profiles
• tag followers to better organize them
• add comments to followers profiles
• sort followers by Twitter activity
• offer suggest for new people to follow

The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the interface and then spent about 10 minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.

 






The URL is Huitter.com but the site is also called Mutuality. You can find both names in various places on the web. It allows you to sign in using Twitter Authority, which is nice since you don’t have to create another account just for this site. Once logged in, you’re presented two options: Manual, for people with accounts with under 10,000 followers; and Auto for accounts with over 10,000 followers. The Manual version is free, while the Auto has a slight charge. Mutuality doesn’t do much. You can follow all who follow you and unfollow all who do not follow you back. It’s possible to make exclusions to these tasks but you have to know their Twitter name.

PROS: You can bulk follow or unfollow Twitter users.

CONS: That’s all you can do. This is the definition of a single service site. It does one thing and not very well. At the very least they need a way to view your users to find the accounts that you want to exclude from your action.

RATING:

  

UnTweeps allows you to unfollow users based on the last time they tweeted. This is a great way to cut out the dead users. It’s very easy to use and uses the Twitter Authentication to login. On the downside, you can only use the site once every 14 days unless you want to pay for the service. You can get a 3 day subscription for $1.37 or a monthly subscription for $5, which can only be paid through PayPal. I would have taken a screenshot but after using it once I discovered I had to pay to get back in.

PROS: Easy to use and allows you to filter your followers based on how many days since their last tweet. The site is very straightforward and looks great.

CONS: The one time use feature is a huge drawback for a single service site. UnTweeps only does one thing and then charges you for it after you use it once. It’s even more limiting by the fact that you have to have a PayPal account.

RAITING:

Friend or Follow was my “go to” site to manage my Twitter account before I started researching this article. You don’t have to register with the site. You simply enter your Twitter username and it will pull in your following, fans and friends. The interface is very graphic. Each follower’s picture is lined up and when you roll over their photo, you get their name, followers, following, last tweet and the date the account was created. Because you don’t login, you’re unable to follow or unfollow from the site. When you click on a photo, it takes you to that person’s Twitter account. It’s also possible to sort users by A-Z ascending or descending order, most recent tweet and the date the account was created.

PROS: No login and easy to use. Easy to navigate and sort users.

CONS: You can’t follow or unfollow from the site. Looking at a bunch of tiny boxes can be hard on the eyes and makes it difficult to keep track of what you’re doing.

RATING:

With its rainbow color pallet, Tweepular looks like it was designed by someone with a passion for Skittles. But this is the first site that really gets what Twitter follower management is all about. You can bulk follow and unfollow, see who you mutual follow, who doesn’t follow you and who you don’t follow back. The main display shows each follower and has their Twitter name, last update, date added, if you are following them, if they are following you and their follower count. Under their photo, there is a follow and unfollow button. There is a tick box that allows you to select multiple accounts to follow/unfollow. There is also the ability to sort by “tweepularity”, number of followers, date added, last updated or A-Z ascending and descending. Finally, they have a tab that recommends new followers to you. There is a warning window that appears when you first visit the site. After using the site several times, I never experienced any problems. I'm not sure what the reason for the warning is.

PROS: Tweepular has all the main features we want plus it suggests new people to follow. It’s easy to use and simple to understand. You can see who you’re following and see who is following you. Plus, it has the standard unfollow/follow accounts, bulk unfollow/follow users and allows you to see how active accounts are.

CONS: We can’t tag accounts or comment on profiles to better organize followers. It’s not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have.

RATING:

Refollow has it all. There are seventeen different ways to filter. Besides the expected follow/unfollow filtering, you can also sort by never followed, with picture, without picture, last tweeted, search for, users who are following other users, users who are followed by other users, users who have @mentioned you, and more. Sorting is available by last tweet, tweet count, screen name, follow count and friend count. You have the ability to bulk follow and unfollow. Moving your cursor over a profile brings up a window that shows their last tweet, any tags you’ve given and their entire Twitter profile. There is a details button that opens a sidebar with the person’s profile, the ability to retweet their last tweet, tagging options and comments.

PROS: WOW, this site hits all of our criteria save one – the ability to suggest new followers. I can’t recommend this site enough.

CONS: It doesn’t recommend new followers, but we can find those people though other sites if we have to.

RATING:

Twitter Karma was my other “go to” site to manage my followers. It’s slow to load and times out if you have more a than a few thousand followers. The site allows you to see who you’re following, who is following you and who you mutually follow. It also allows you to bulk follow/unfollow and select individuals to follow/unfollow. 

PROS: Simple to use and easy to navigate.

CONS: Very slow to load and refresh. It doesn’t do anything beyond allowing you to follow or unfollow accounts.

RATING:

I also tried to use MyCleenr, Tweeple, Tweetscan, Mr. Tweet and Twitterless. Some of the sites simply required I follow them on Twitter, like Mr. Tweet and Twitterless, but then I never heard back on how to access the site. In the case of MyCleenr, it simply couldn’t handle accounts with more than 700 followers.



CONCLUSION: Refollow and Tweepular are the hands-down winners here. Refollow slightly edges out Tweepular due to the variety of filtering options and the ability to tag and comment on user accounts. This is a great site for beginners as well as super users. Tweepular’s colorful design, broad functionality and suggested user tab make it a strong runner up. This is still a wide open field as the top two sites are miles ahead of the rest. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more contenders in this arena soon that offer even more features.

Which Twitter follower management application do you use?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He love to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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Sorry all, had to shut down the comments because of too much SPAM.

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Google verses the world

Google moves one step closer to world wide web domination

Google has once again dominated internet conversations. People clamored over each other trying to get an invite to the beta release of Google Wave.

Only 100,000 invites were given out and each invited person was given eight invites. Contest were constructed, promises were made and hoops were jumped though to get one of the precious invites. The irony is, as far as I know,  very few people that were invited by the inital 100,000 have received their Google Wave invite.

While you wait on your Google Wave invite, check out Google Wave: A Complete Guide to see what you’re missing.

Another app has been released to much less fanfare. Google Sidewiki is a toolbar application that allows users to add more content and provide context to a website. Imagine visiting a website and being able to add more information for others to see. Sidewiki does just that.

The release has been applauded for it’s user interaction and criticized for allowing people to add content that wasn’t provided by the original site creator.

Taking the offline to the online, Google announced the release of TED 5000 (The Energy Detective) from Energy Inc. The device is a home energy monitoring device that measures a home’s electrical usage in real-time. The Google PowerMeter takes that information and puts it online or your mobile phone.

Personally I think this is a great way to be more aware of your power consumption and helps people decrease their energy useage.

Finally incase you think Google might becoming the Microsoft, Hitwise is reporting that Google controls 71% of the search engine market share.

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Free Twitter scheduling apps

Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter applications.

The verdict on seven free online Twitter scheduling apps

When you have a company Twitter account, odds are there will be several people posting. And if they are all posting at once, your tweet stream can become cluttered and come off as the worst thing possible: spamy. To prevent this from happening in our own agency, we wanted to find a tool that would allow multiple users to schedule tweets. 

Before we set out to find the best app on the web, we created our wish-list of the 12 qualities our perfect tweet scheduler would have. We wanted to be able to:

• use it for free
• schedule tweets at any time during the day
• have tweets recur so that they would post multiple times in the same day
• shorten URLs
• support multiple Twitter accounts
• post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet
• spell check scheduled posts
• handle an unlimited number of scheduled tweets
• be web-based
• translate our posts into other languages
• provide extra relevant functionality beyond scheduling tweets
• easily navigate and use it with intuitive GUI

My methods were simple. I visited each site and registered. I scheduled a tweet, took a screen shot of the scheduling interface and then spent about 10 minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After the tweet posted, I rated each app against my wish list.

Click to enlarge image

Twuffer is probably the simplest and easiest to use of the automated Twitter tools. You log in with your Twitter name and password and no further registration is required. But making it simple and easy means they didn’t include much in the way of functionality. You can post a tweet to be published on the hour on any day up to the year 2019.

PROS:

• Simple registration
• Automatically shortens URL’s upon publishing tweet
• You can see the queued tweets and sent tweets
• Clean and easy to use with no explanation of how it works

CONS:

• You can only publish on the hour
• You cannot set recurring tweets
• Can’t handle multiple accounts
• No way of knowing it will shorten URLs when you first use it

RATING:

Future Tweets is a step up. The user interface is simple and intuitive. The user can schedule tweets on any day down to the second for the next hundred years and beyond. You can either type in the time and date or there is an awkward clock that allows you to move the hands to set the time. It looks nice but is difficult to use. Tweets can be scheduled to recur daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. They have included a collection of simple icons like a skull and crossbones, music note, snowman and bio-hazard symbol. You can also flip your tweet to appear upside down and backwards.

PROS:

• Simple registration
• Allows you to opt out of showing people that tweet went through program
• Schedule tweets at any time or day up to the second
• Easy-to-use interface
• Can have a recurring tweet daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
• Cute extras like including simple icons in a tweet or posting it upside down
• English spell check

CONS:

• Can’t set tweets to recur more than once a day
• Can only support one user account at a time
• No additional functions

RATING: 

Boasting the most features of any of the tweet scheduler tool sites, Social Oomph is also the most confusing. Registration is simple, but once you get into the site the cluttered and busy design runs interference on your brain.  The site layout isn’t intuitive or simple. The site seems more concerned with selling their professional version ($29.97 a month) than facilitating the free user. This site is a mess. Which is a shame because it boasts so many features. When you do navigate your way to the scheduler, you’ll find you are limited to 12 tweets per hour and no recurring tweets unless, of course, you upgrade.

PROS:

• Allows you to post without identifying you’re using a scheduler
• You can save a tweet as a draft to finish later
• You can pick the time and date down to the second to publish your tweet
• Track keywords on Twitter
• Automatic shortening of URLs
• Automated follow and un-follow function
• Allows multi-account support
• Purge your DM inbox
• Create channels of 10 twitter users
• Tutorials to help learn the system

CONS:

• Site design is a mess
• Requires a sherpa to navigate
• Difficult to figure out how extra functions work
• The site is in your face trying to sell too hard

RATING:

Registering with the site is fast. Just log into your Twitter account to give their system access. Once in Twit Robot, you’ve got one of the best looking interfaces for any of the scheduling tools. You can schedule a tweet to appear at any time or day. From there, it gets confusing. There is a section called ”Auto Posting.” Because the section is hard-coded, most of the options are cut off by a predefined box that won’t resize – so you can’t see them, or use them. It appears to be an area where you can add an RSS feed, create a campaign of tweets or let the software add random auto tweets. The RSS feeds section is cut off, so how it fully works remains a mystery. You can choose to run this feature, but it defaults to ”stoped.” There is a feature called user search. I thought it would help me find users on Twitter. It doesn’t. It gives back Google search results.

PROS:

• Super-simple to register with the site
• Great for Twitter campaign management, in theory
• Attractive and easy-to-use interface
• Able to add an RSS feed to site to publish feed

CONS:

• Couldn't get scheduler to work. It seems to post on US central time and I couldn't find a way to change it.
• No recurring tweet function unless you run a campaign
• Interface cuts off half of the functions of the site making it difficult to use all the site resources
• It’s not clear if you can have more than one tweet in a campaign and how to schedule time intervals
• Doesn't have auto URL shortening feature

RATING:

Tweet-U-Later doesn’t have the most flamboyant site design. In fact, it’s pretty boring, but they aren’t trying to impress you with a pretty site. This site does one thing and does it very well. You can schedule your tweets based on time and date down to the minute for a public or private message. This is the one of two sites that allows you to change the time zone per tweet and schedule recurring tweets based on hour, day, week, month or year and limit the number of times it occurs. This is a great way to retweet an important post at different times of the day over the course of a day or week. Unlike other sites, you don’t have to go back in and unschedule it.

PROS:

• The only app that has rescheduling intervals of an hour on recurring tweets
• Ability to set recurring tweets according to time zone and number of times it occurs
• Allows private scheduled messages
• Easy registration

CONS:

• Doesn’t support multiple accounts.
• Can’t post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet
• Doesn't have auto URL shortening feature

RATING:

Twaitter has really thought through the issue of scheduling tweets and developed a terrific solution. You want to schedule a tweet? No problem. Pick the time down to the minute and time zone. It’s a recurring tweet? No problem, pick if it’s hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, if it will run forever, a select number of times or if it should end on a select date. Want to tweet in Swedish but don’t know any? Not a problem. Pick between 38 different languages. Throw in a spellcheck, a url shortening button and the ability to use multiple accounts and this becomes the most powerful free tweet scheduling tool available. If all that wasn’t enough, you can edit any tweets you have queued or already tweeted. The only drawback for my needs is that I can’t schedule posts to repeat on the same day.

PROS:

• It is has 10 of the 12 criteria from my wish list - the most of any app
• It is simple to register and easy to use
• Easy to schedule tweets and a nice selection of options
• Calendar view visualizes scheduled tweets by the day, week or month
• Will be adding the ability to add RSS feeds soon

CONS:

• Can't schedule tweets to recur in the same day
• Can't post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet

RATING:

Dynamic Tweets has a three-tier system. The basic system allows you to add multiple accounts, schedule up to 20 tweets and do minute-by-minute scheduling intervals. For $99/year you get additional features such as recurring tweets, bulk upload tweets and campaign tracking. They also have an enterprise level for businesses. The registration process is one page, but asks for more information than any other site. Most of it is optional, but name, address and phone number seems a bit much for a site to ask these days when you consider that other sites just have register with your twitter username and password.

PROS:

• Easy to work with multiple accounts
• Minute-by-minute scheduling
• Spellchecking
• URL shortening

CONS:

• You can only add up to 20 tweets at a time.
• Most of the options they want you to pay for you get for free elsewhere.
• Can’t set recurring tweets
• Can’t post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet

RATING:

CONCLUSION:
Overall, Twaitter came closest to my wish list. It does almost everything I wanted it to do. First and foremost, it’s very easy to use and understand. While it does a lot, it doesn’t overwhelm you. The designers really thought through the issues and how to solve them. But in the final analysis, I will go with Tweet-U-Later for one reason: It is the only app I found that makes it easy to have recurring tweets on the same day. When working with followers in different time zones this is essential for me. Coming in at the bottom of the list is Dynamic Tweets. Too many of the options that they want you to pay for can be found on other sites for free. Social Oomph needs to rethink their site design. It’s too cluttered and every link feels like it takes you to a sales page for the pay version. There’s a great looking user interface on Twit Robot, it’s just too bad programming glitches prevents you from using them.

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Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He love to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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