Marriage counselling? Not if Twitter’s new “similar to you” feature’s algorithm is accurate!

In keeping with their respective brands, while Facebook gets all up in your business for not talking to your spouse “enough”, Twitter says “Hey. Mathematically you’re totally compatible. Similar, even. So don’t worry about it”. Look, even my husband’s company is similar to me. So eat it, Facebook.

#FF: The cutest boys on Twitter

You should follow these boys based on their decorative function in your Twitter stream.

Obviously, the cutEST boy on Twitter is my husband, @KevinGlasier

Betoqued French Canadian graphic designer @andrelavergne

Stylish Minneapolitan developer—hey, he looks just like the last guy!—@andylemay

British with cartoon indie hair: @willfrancis

Strategic stripey Googler @malbonnington

Italian-sounding Edelmen Digital kind of guy, @armano

Mobile UX designin' nice guy @fiftyforty

Norwegian, sitting on blonde bent plywood furniture: @arnteriksen

Canadian AND an illustrator. @ben_weeks

Googly guy avec personal flair. @chrismessina

A man who really cares about pencils: @forcedefrappe

My mental picture of Leonard Cohen @HipGnosis23

Just cute, kwim? @ChrisSaad

Smart & stylish Peg City developer @envex

Digging 30-something foreheads! @ev

Serious cowlick Jim Carrey thing @jack

Real or art gallery? @JeromeJenner

Art, culture, hoody @ryanwmurray

GSPish Montreal designer @jmbrais

Confrontationally cute @kareemy

Symmetry & suiting @mashable

Creative! Tidy! @MassimoFarina

Indy Pegger @mikedeurksen

It's nice to wear a tie. @ninjarunner

Blow it out @shauncy

Harvard. Glasses. London. @umairh

Creative BBHer @zachianblank

#NewTwitter, taxidermy & a reluctant philosophical shift to competition

Note: I’m a huge fan of redesigns & wholly love the new Twitter. However, I’m taking this whole wider column thing a little hard. Don’t forget I have a bit of a stat-junkie problem.

Edit: Apparently not all users have the sidebar width I describe below. At my res, 1920px, the sidebar is equally as wide as the tweet area. I‘m kind of glad Twitter isn‘t selling out to the capitalists and all that

We saw this at work with my ethnosemantic look at online communication, where I looked at vocabulary & how a nuanced set of verbs shows that written communication is culturally ascendant.

Did you know interface design can symbolize cultural values too?

Twitter’s redesign: eye of the tiger

Twitter’s new interface highlights cultural forces not yet fully formed when Twitter was first designed. I suggest this is because Twitter itself helped form them.

I’m talking about the popularity/influence/whuffie-index of personal statistics.

Twitter ushered in an era of overt online influence. Of “self branding”. The main feature of the new layout is the swelling of the “sidebar” into a “dashboard” for tracking numbers, trends, and relationships.

In the beginning, prominence was given to the left column, highlighting the tweets. It was a pure, and at first unfiltered, information stream.

Lists and Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite came along to “better” organize the content fountain. Twitter’s new dashboard echoes this call for control.

Statistics now have equal weight in the user experience—dominance, actually, because of the large block of unfettered colour. All your existing and potential relationships are closely monitored. Are you keeping score? Trends are given prominence of place in the dead centre of the design, lit up by the contrasting nadir of the dashboard. It’s a visual cue that if you didn’t care about #tt before, you better start.

Like tweets to the slaughter

In the original design, the tweet column was headed by the tweet box. The first things you saw was your last tweet, taxidermied and mounted on the wall of the lodge of posterity, and your future tweet, caught in the headlights, waiting to be shot.

The shift towards constant self evaluation is making me nostalgic. It’s like the frontier has been fenced, the congenial belligerence corralled. Metrics are walking around the ranch with cattle prods, making sure you’re networking with the other animals.

I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog.

Sunday morning Twitter in Wolseley.

I came upon this folk art Twitter bird nailed to the front of a house in my neighbourhood (I live in that kind of neighbourhood). Of course, the woman who owned the house busted me standing on her steps to take the shot. We both agreed it was kind of odd, but she generously let me continue. Happy Sunday!

Either I’m having a stroke, or I’m getting the new Twitter.

What’s happening indeed?

New, need I say “free”, Twitter bird illustration.

In light of my recent dissertation on Twitter’s damn bird, the last thing I ever want to see is another blue avian anything, but here you go. Available on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.

Not your cup of tea? How ’bout this older, but no less adorable, free Twitter bird? I’m full of ‘em!

The live-tweeting mobile journalist

Live-tweeting an event is like stating the obvious, caffeinated, to your best friend, while ziplining. It’s personal. It’s fast.

I did my first “social broadcast” live from a 1300-person event, and let me tell you, it’s a blast. You’re the news director, editor, on-air talent & film crew all rolled into one. You’re trying to tell the story as it happens with as much media as possible. A little too much media, it turned out. Here’s the scene:

That’s not exaggerated, either. I literally shot HD video with one hand while taking photos, uploading them and tweeting about it with my other hand. The dSLR was for can’t-miss Kodak moments, to be exploited later.

My plan for amping the day online included an early morning Facebook fan page post letting people know we’d be reporting live, photojournalizing and microblogging during the event on Twitter, and polishing off the day on Facebook with a big thank you & full photo gallery. That’s how it went down, too, with a bit of feedback on Twitter and many Facebook likes.

I did a few things I wish I didn’t, though, and here they are to make it easier on you when you try this.

Live-tweeting an event: what not to do

Don’t overmediate. Trying to capture video and photos at the same time will result in you missing one (usually the one you really want) in your live coverage. Be the “I need this now” guy and delegate a videographer or photgrapher to the “we’ll need this later” content.

Don’t tweet images constantly. Not because this is boring—au contraire, it made people say our event looked “awesome”—but because your mobile battery will self destruct. I was fully charged when we started and almost dead halfway through the event.

I switched to text tweets at that point, but should have interspersed text and photo from the beginning. Alternatively, have access to a second phone or invest in a solar charger (from the future).

Let your network know ahead of time. I told the event’s network we’d be broadcasting, but not my personal peoples. They probably don’t follow me at work, but might have, to see the event go down live. I actually wanted to do this on the spot, but the pace was so frantic that I couldn’t get a tweet out.

Dress for success. It was frickin’ freezing, and I was loaned a fabulous down vest with many a pocket. This allowed me to stash up to two cameras at once while operating the third. While I’m torn on facilitating overmediation with such a garment, storage space did allow capture of some video gold.

I bet you thought I’d mention heels at this point. Well, I carried off the day in dreggings (that’s dress-pant-leggings, unfashionistas, and they inconveniently sported no ass pockets) and a mid-heel boot, and was too busy to complain. My feet hurt now though, and I wish I wore jeans.

Power up. I skipped breakfast and ended up eating a donut, seriously jeopardized the fit of my dreggings. I also regret not bringing portable coffee.

Live-tweeting your next event: go for it!

If you’re super engaged in the total funness of throwing an event, your audience is going to respond.

If you have a hard time explaining what it is your organization does, this breaks it down and gets people involved.

You’ll learn how to tell a story.

You’ll get some great stuff, some intense, in-the-moment, brand expression stuff.

Your fans will feel like they’re at the event with you, and like you care enough to take them there.

You’ll feel the rush and crave MORE!

Twitter & the crowdsourced brand

Behold Winnipeg ad campaign Recycle Everywhere! I chased buses for days to bring you these shots, so take a minute to really behold.

If you’re confused what this ad campaign (designed to ease in new, higher recycling levies in Winnipeg) has to do with Twitter, so am I.

The crux of the branding seems to be a small blue bird with voice balloons. Hallmarks of, you know, the 10th most famous digital brand.

Can you brand something with a blue bird in 2010 and not be referencing Twitter?

It’s a lovely brand, I just think someone’s using it right now.

I’m struggling with whether the designers:

1. believe Twitter, with about 6800 local participants, according to a quick Tweepz search, just isn’t prevalent enough in Winnipeg for the brand similarities to matter
2. are planning a brilliant Twitter campaign to support & extend the print blitz, or
3. have never heard of Twitter

Does Twitter own birds? Do they want to?

Modern birds have had their own look for roughly 65 million years. Can Twitter own the notion of a bird, or subset of birds (the blue ones)? If a brand spawns thousands of mashup logos, does it really make a sound?

Twitter famously licensed the first bird on iStockphoto for roughly $6. Designer Simon Oxley still sells it there for 14 credits.

That Twitter didn’t feel the need to purchase the icon outright like they did with Yiying Lu’s Fail Whale suggests they don’t want to ‘own’ the bird as logo. It’s a “decorative element”, branding wall art.

Logo liberty and the essence of crowdsourcing

The thing with Twitter is that the community really took the wall art and ran with it. You can find literally infinite permutations, literally, of  Twitter’s blue bird and they all mean ‘tweet’.

Logo liberty is one of the sticky factors of the Twitter brand. In true crowdsourced, Web-2.0-at-it’s-best fashion we are all permitted to customize the brand to suit us while still projecting the brand essence. That’s because the brand essence is crowdsourcing and participation. It’s a unique medium-is-the-message branding model born of a cultural shift to group brand ownership.

Let’s examine the extent of this Bird of the Crowd metamorphosis, shall we?

Blue birds = Twitter

A marriage of Twitter’s corporate blue and Oxley’s iconic (not blue) bird, blue birds from a variety of artistic  traditions were the first mascots to say “Twitter”. Beyond style preference, designers inserted their attitude visually as a means to convey their communication style (“I’m cute! I’m fun!”) or expertise (“I’m a freakin’ NINJA with WOLVERINE CLAWS!).

ANY bird = Twitter

We don’t all have blue websites, so soon all manner and species of bird came to symbolize a link to the Twitterverse. Twitter’s bird mindshare grew to encompass every bird.

Dissolving birds that are hardly even birds = Twitter

The whole ‘bird’ idea began to abstract, to simplify, to fly like a small blue bird to the wide open sky of possibilities, of barely-birds.

Anything blue = Twitter

With the bird concept now optional, the final ties to the corporate brand lay in colour. Twitter icons expanded to include anything in a fresh Web 2.0-y shade of blue.

Things that are neither blue nor birds = Twitter

Blue is so limiting. So are birds. There’s no reason a piece of toast can’t symbolize Twitter.

I’m sure you can appreciate the scope of the designer’s problem. If Twitter’s brand encompasses blue birds, all other birds, everything blue, and anything that isn’t blue or a bird, we’re going to need to open up more of the visual spectrum or something if we want to keep creating distinctive work.

This does make it tough to brand new products and services. Perhaps we’ve reached the end of branding, and it’s safe to start over again with small blue birds.

I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog. Interactive & social media marketing insights served piping hot!

Race and the social web: a bit of a moment right now

Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:

● Microsoft social researcher Danah Boyd gets frustrated that racism and classism, while as evident on the social web as they are IRL, are a taboo subject. MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)

● Slate digs into the culture phenomenon around How Black People Use Twitter, wherein I learned about the dozens, an important piece of African American history.

● Ad Age isn’t sure about the Slate piece, “cringing” about the “awkwardness” of making observational generalizations. Ad Age themselves have an entire section devoted to Hispanic marketing.

● I discover McDonald’s bizarre 365Black, a website where McDonald’s compares itself to the African baobab tree, nourishing African Americans with “opportunities”, basketball and “fresh” music.

● And the good folks at Pew Internet & American Life Project note that while broadband access has barely increased from last year among the general population, not so for African Americans, whose home access increased a dramatic 22% from 2009 to now, closing the high speed gap by 8 points to 67% of whites and 56% of African-Americans.

Facebook goes #local, Erica freaks out/geeks out

I am freaking out so much right now that I thought the best way to show my reaction to the news slash rumour that Facebook is incorporating location-aware updates and releasing the API to developers is in pictures. Pictures of me going mental on Twitter.

And THIS is why I love Twitter

You get to rub (possibly the wrong way) elbows with the smart and famous! Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, lifestreamer, AdAge and Forbes columnist and avid sports fan, has personally told me to ‘buzz off’. I earned it for protesting that he nearly roped me into signing up for Google Buzz, when I (kind of  ironically) went to comment on his ‘buzz’ about social media overload.

Steve has tweeted 10,095 times (as of this tweet), so that means .009906% of the time, he’s talking about me!

I should also take this opportunity to note with gratitude that I get a large amount of traffic (for me) from comments I’ve made on Steve’s lifestream, and that Steve’s readers spend by far the most time of any visitors to my site reading content—an average of  12 minutes each over 5 pages! Some smart fans, Steve Rubel’s lifestream has.

/sense of accomplishment for today.

You’d be amazed how detailed (& quick!) it is to gauge brand sentiment with social media

This is the kind of real-time, granular brand monitoring you can achieve with social media (Doritos is pictured here). Brand Bowl 2010 demonstrated the percentage of positive and negative reactions on Twitter to Super Bowl ads and extracted people’s reactions down to the most frequently-used words, as the reactions were happening.

Twitter may not be where your audience is talking about you—I’m still blown away by the recent stat that only 1.45% of Canadians tweet, as opposed to almost 20% of Americans—but this shows the level of sophistication available to brands interested in monitoring their influence & measuring their social media ROI. As a marketing nerd, I’m inspired by this.

Before Tweeting got local…

You may have felt like this.

What should you do with your advertising budget in 2010?

The spread of smartphones and location-aware mobile technology is opening up a (smaller) world of local marketing possibilities.

3 words: location, location, location. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

You’re the CEO, Senior VP of Marketing, and Chief Janitor of your very own local small business. You typically place an ad in the yellow pages, stuff a few dayglo flyers in mailboxes, and have a brochure website with an infrequently-updated ‘news’ section (because frankly, you can’t think of a whole lot of news with which to fascinate the public). You’ve heard of this new-fangled socialized media thing, but near as you can tell it’s all retired ladies stalking their in-laws and teenagers sending untoward photos to each other. But you also hear it costs less than fluorescent photocopies.

With major marketing superpowers like Pepsi skipping the superbowl and Coke basically declaring websites obsolete in order to refocus ad dollars on social media, Local Small Businessmen can safely assume the research is in, and traditional advertising isn’t. Social media is officially a great publicity channel. But what makes 2010 the year to dive in? Read the rest of this entry »

Design freebie: Twitter bird illustration

Doesn't he just look like he can barely contain his brilliant tweet?

There’s a tweet in there somewhere! If you need a lovely blue bird to illustrate a pithy blog post you’re writing about Twitter, or something, feel free to download a big version of this illustration here.

Social search: conversational clutter?

Our oversocialized friend talking to the cloud about social media search

The (algo)rithms of society