Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Read Liz’ account on her recent trip to the Chicago Hardrock Hotel (a hotel I am a fan of, too) and their use of Twitter to make people fans.

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Sometimes it takes a long time for the simplest ideas to take shape.  Flighttrackers have been around for a while, however nothing has been around for social media that had total accuracy (tripit and dopplr do connect to your social profiles, but they don’t do it in real time). In fact, we pitched a similar idea to LH earlier this year.

Finally, Lufthansa launched a service, called MyskyStatus, which allows users to have real-time flight data of their flight being automatically posted to their Twitter and Facebook. Not only does this mimic the already existing human behavior of people tweeting their arrival, it provides more accuracy and also twitters for you when you are still in the air.

What’s more, it doesn’t just work for Lufthansa, but pretty much all airlines, even when you’re booked on a competitor airline. Finally a common sense move based in the understanding that as a brand today, you cannot create proprietary experiences that last very long: you have to do something for people that makes a qualitative difference in their lives, enabled by not limited to your own brand. In fact, by offering this service, it could well be a first mover advantage that positively attaches to the brand image of Lufthansa. Kudos!! Next step: get existing services such as tripit and dopplr to integrate.

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I was just made aware of the business section at Twitter, which, until now, I didn’t know existed. Looks like twitter is getting more serious in trying to promote the service as a business tool. The site lists best practices and case studies, most of which you might already know, but check it out.

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Here is a fun and new, although not very precise, use of twitter data.

How hetero analyses your or anybody else’s twitter stream and check how hetero (or not) you are.

With the tool, the stockholm gay pride parade intends to create awareness for the event.

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I’ve found this “memorial” to Michael Jackson that it’s a nice idea involving Twitter.

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The ultimate for twitter geeks: a house that tweets. Currently, I feel it’s not past the geek experimentation phase, and I wonder if “getting a sense of the heartbeat of the house” is really an emotional benefit at this point. But then again, these thing are known to change. Technology changes human behavior more than anything.

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The trend to embed Twitter into physical location continues. After seeing some newspapers print tweets of the day, digital signage and sign in public places seem to be the rave now.

In King’s cross station, a “twitter poster” has been installed. This plays into people’s behavior of wanting to be seen and visible in public well, I would assume.

Seen on Nick Burcher

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There have been a lot of discussions and questions about the utility and merit of Twitter recently. So it’s timely for Twitter to come out with some interesting news.

Based on the known practice to follow conferences on twitter while speakers are on stage, starting tomorrow, ABC’s “Nightline” is expanding its ongoing relationship with Twitter to develop “NightTline,” a new half-hour digital program hosted by the show’s anchors and correspondents that provides a forum for viewers to simultaneously discuss and debate the news of the day through the prism of Twitter.

After years of wait for interactive TV, Twitter could prove to be the new connective tissue that was missing. Should be an interesting trend to watch, as it might change TV formats and programming. I am especially interested in how they will manage incoming tweet and make it all part of a conversation.

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Twitter lovers, justifying Twitter’s existence, have always talked much about the ability to share information and reports news “faster than the networks”. They should watch out with that one.  In regards to the Swine flu outbreak in the U.S, Evgeny Morozov states that Twitter has done its part to create am “unnecessary global panic” about the flu, and what could be done to prevent this from happening.

Evgeny does point out that the fault is the twitterers and their practices themselves, trying to fit in:

Thus, Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.

Evgeny continues to state that Twitters use to shape conversation in most cases is no problem, but in the case of serious topics, such as this one, something should be done about it to avoid panic or even conspiracies. I agree with the analysis, but I have to say that Evgeny starts panic-mongering, too:

I think it’s only a matter of time before that the next generation of cyber-terrorists – those who are smart about social media, are familiar with modern information flows, and are knowledgeable about human networks – take advantage of the escalating fears over the next epidemic and pollute the networked public sphere with scares that would essentially paralyze the global economy. Often, such tactics would bring much more destruction than the much-feared cyberwar and attacks on physical – rather than human – networks.

All sorts of media have been used to misinform people intentionally, or unintentionally. Now that we are in a networked age, people themselves can misinform other people. It’s called empowerment. What are you gonna do? Turn off the Internet?

No matter what people will use and abuse media for their own personal gain. And yeah, a lot of the content out their is mindless and stupid. But this is true for all channels, even the ones that claim to do “objective reporting”. It’s up to individuals, organisations and even governments to put in their own stake, not to try to control it through bodies with political agendas.

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Just in the last week I saw a surge of this type of Twitter behavior in my Twitter-network. I am not going to name people, to avoid looking like I am bashing them, in an outrageous attempt to copy their strategy.

Tell me if I am way off here, or if you think what I am saying is obvious and naive: In my research of strategies and tactics with which people try to increase their followership on twitter, I came across this, at first sight, counter-intuitive strategy: just bash the people that recently followed you.

You could say that this is one of the basic way Twitter works: when you post something interesting or controversial, people who disagree will join in and ultimately more people will follow you. However, the strategy I am describing works for people who have nothing controversial or interesting to share.

1) you post a tweet, and then wait until someone follows you because of it. For example: you post a funny video on apples and then get followed by an apple farmer. This would be an occasion to essentially retweet and ridicule the reason why this someone followed you. It is important that most of your followers and their followers would agree with your ridicule or find it funny. This way, if you gauged correctly, you get more followers because they think you are cool for bashing the follower or at least laughed at it, wondrously.

2) This is the more girly version: you just WAIT until someone follows you and then tweet to everyone, asking if they know this person, because you’re not sure about them, and you’re, like, totally worried, and stuff. Again, people might find this funny, and do the bashing for you and thank you for it by following you.

So essentially, if you got nothing to say, you can still go back to the high-school bully or girly way of making sure you are the most popular kid in class.

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