Google Wave

Having given up on buying twitter the BIG G launch google wave , well at the end of this year!.

As we all know email is still the most popular way to communicate, so google wave is googles attempt at reinventing email. Having sat through the video it's a mix between twitter, messenger & a bulletin board. allowing a more seamless conversation. It's a hosted conversation so people can post responses while others are actually offline.

From what I can see it looks good and will certainly give facebook a run for it's money!

Making Twitter Work...

With more and more businesses trying to utalise Twitter as a customer acquisition and brand awareness tool here are a few tips we give our clients;

* Don't start unless you intend to carry on! This is key thinking you can just post once a month with a special offer is not going to get you anywhere

* Try and TWEET at least 3 times a day.

* Start off by showing your personality, that means posting tweets around your activities or life and not directly about your business e.g. sales or offers.

* After 3 weeks you can start to drop in tweets about your business e.g. just uploaded new product, just featured in X magazine etc. The key here is do this every other day to carry on portraying your personality.

* To kickstart your twitter following, you need to start following some people. Search for retailers or businesses you like and who are non competitive. Follow them and hopefully before long they will follow you.

* You need to follow people, so when people follow you see who they are and who are their followers and make a decision to follow them.

* Reply to your followers or people you are followings tweets, this again helps you build up a following and be active

You could start to run competitions via twitter e.g. if we get to 1,000 followers we will pick one random person to win X.

I Head It On The Twitter Grapevine

Are Google on the prowl for Twitter. It would be no surprise if Google are trying to buy Twitter. The price tag for Twitter, even though there are no ad revenues should be higher than the recent valuation of $250 million! Twitter turned down facebook as a potential buyer for £500 million.

So why is Twitter popular as an acquisition, well more and more people are using twitter to talk about brands in real time and therefore interact on a social level. So its a win win both sides, brands get realtime feedback and consumers get 'honest' reviews, i say honest but as more and more affiliates manipulate twitter this may be slightly skewed.

So why would Google be interested, well Twitter is a great hub for integrating paid search and with paid search accounting for 40% of the advertising market this is a big revenue opportunity.

Twitter growing 25 times faster than Facebook

Have you seen the latest stats from Hitwise on Twitter? They reveal Twitter has grown by more than 3,000% in the last year. Between February 2008 and February 2009 Twitter’s share of UK traffic increased about 33 times. With facebooks recent homepage update looking for like Twitter you can see facebook are trying to mimic this growth success.

Twitter is what some call a micro blogging site (which falls under the main group of social networking), and according to co-founder Biz Stone there will be a paid-for “commercial” accounts available soon with additional features unavailable to casual users. Mr Stone said that businesses and individual users will still be able to use Twitter for free if they wish to, and that “for-sale” features will be add-ons.

Traffic to the micro-blogging site, which launched three years ago, has overtaken traffic to the homepages of the UK’s major newspapers, including the Sun, the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Followers is the name of the game, the more followers you have the bigger network you have to tap into. Average 'tweets' or mini posts are recommended at 3 times a day!

So what have been my experiences of Twitter for one of my own personal websites? Well it has introduced me to more retailers in my given retailer sector and increased subscribers to my on site newsletter. I only tweet 3 or 4 times a week so it goes to show that there are successes to be had even if you have minimal time to dedicate. So what do i tweet about, site updates mainly and maybe general chit chat on my retailer sector.

Littlewoods Don't Want My Money!

Well I take it all back there must be no credit crunch as Littlewoods or LittlewoodsDirect does not want my £3,000 CASH/VISA order! Having placed an order on 6th Jan for a range of bedroom suits (beds, chest of drawers you get the picture) it seems that half of the order was not actually process despite me spending hours on the phone AND handing over my credit card details. Now I have tried to get those items (downgrading the mattress as the luxury one was out of stock) and NOW they tell me they won't deliver to my chosen address, despite the last order happily haven been taken to deliver to my chosen address. So I had to cancel what items they did order as they were parts of sets, so without knowing if the other stuff could be delivered I had no option but to cancel. They did however deliver 2 wicker baskets to the value of £7, which unless I return they will charge me for. WELL what about the £6.90 i've spent in telephone calls, the 6 hours I have now spent ordering, reordering and trying to find out where my goods are thats at a cost of nearly £300 based on my day rate.


Customer service agent after customer services agent I am no closer to finding out what happened, why, and why their system is so backward despite the current day and age of ease of buying online.