How One Entrepreneur Is Profiting From March Madness

When the men of Kentucky try to drive through Kansas’s powerful defense tonight, the cheers and groans of March Madness fans will be easily known, thanks partly to Kevin S. Ryan.
The former newspaper editor and publishing exec has built a business consulting and teaching how to create social media strategies. March is madness for him. His company, KSRyan Group, partners with Turner Sports Interactive to manage social media features for March Madness Live, the video app that lets fans watch the NCAA tournament on their computers and mobile devices. Viewers can see Ryan’s work, a torrent of fans’ comments on each matchup, flowing alongside game video.
"These are fans interacting with fans," says Ryan, 48, who lives and works in New Hyde Park, N.Y. "It’s analogous to a viewing party or the bar stool conversation people have while you’re watching the game. You want to talk about what you’re seeing…It allows viewers to participate in ways they hadn’t before."
It’s an incredible gig for someone who’s been working on his own for just two years. He started out as a newspaper reporter and editor before joining Barnesandnoble.com in 2000 as a vice president and web editor. "When I left The New York Times in early ‘97, it was somewhat of a risky move," Ryan says. “I remember people saying, ‘why would you want to leave The Times?’ But the fast pace, always moving Internet schedule, was very similar to what I lived with in my journalism days.’’
He learned about marketing and online content, working on ways authors and readers could interact. He created online book clubs at the moment when people were starting to blog. He plunged into social media, building the book conglomerate’s presence among Facebook and Twitter users.
Ryan began to think about how he could marshal this new technology in his own business that would let him spend more time with his wife and three children. He realized that social media is just another way to tell stories and that he could help a business “build a narrative for customers.’’
Ryan consults and trains, getting businesses to understand and build a social media strategy. “A lot of companies are still trying to figure out what they should do on a Facebook page,’’ he says. “If you’re not paying attention to what that conversation is, then you’re at risk of allowing brand damage to be done without you knowing about it.’’
March Madness work is Ryan’s most intensive part of the job. He helped define the social product features for the March Madness Live app, organized the social arena features on Facebook, worked with vendors and managed the kit and caboodle throughout the tournament.
Ryan’s work with customers through social media had trained him well to judge when someone’s comments were helpful and when they were made just to get noticed, says Michael Adamson, Turner interactive vice president for new products.
For the fan chatter, Ryan and his March Madness colleagues set up Twitter feeds for each of the 68 college teams that played, filtering out swear words and insensitive or inaccurate remarks.
Monitoring is important, he says. "Social media is a no-holds-barred kind of enterprise and people will push the envelope with what they can say," Ryan says.
Take for example the NCAA’s decision to suspend Syracuse starter Fab Melo for academic reasons. “The Twittersphere just blew up,’’  Adamson says. Turner and NCAA relied on Ryan’s journalism training to filter through the posts. "We wanted to make sure we were filtering out the ‘you sons of b--ches’’’ and included what most fans were writing:  “Holy Cow! I need to change my bracket!”
A 1985 graduate of Syracuse University, Ryan says the Orange men’s loss on March 24 to Ohio State didn’t crush him. “They’re going to break your heart at some point,’’ he says. “Now it’s easier to focus on the work.’’
The folks at Turner hope the conversation will be “absolutely crazy,’’ Adamson says. “I hope [Ryan] gets slammed. That means there are interesting stories and the fans are talking.’’

Should You Focus on Facebook or Twitter?

A new poll of small-business owners found that entrepreneurs ranked their time as their business's most valuable asset (yes, even ahead of their computers).
So with time scarce, and with business owners performing multiple roles, something has to give. Should it be Facebook or Twitter? (Sproutsocial, a startup that builds social media management tools for small businesses, suggests as a rule of thumb that Facebook is better for business-to-consumer marketing, while Twitter trumps for business-to-business.)
A new study suggests Facebook engages fans better than Twitter, at least if the biggest brands on the Internet are any guide.
Social media analytics company SocialBakers compared top brands' Facebook and Twitter presences over a month-long period. It concluded that brands such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Playstation and McDonalds were getting better results—sometimes dramatically better results—on Facebook.
Starbucks, for example, which has spent millions on Twitter efforts, gets 80 percent engagement on Facebook but less than 5 percent engagement on the microblogging site.
Of the 10 brands studied, just one—Oreo—got eye-popping numbers on Twitter: Nearly 80 percent engagement. Oreo gets just under 20 percent on Facebook. It and Skittles are the only two of the 10 brands that do better on Twitter than on Facebook. (Check out Oreos' Tweets, which seem heavy on chances to win some free sandwich cookies.)
Coca-Cola and Pringles did equally well with Twitter and with Facebook, though "well" is a relative term; Coca-Cola's engagement rate was about 5 percent, while Pringles's was 10 percent.
The study did not offer analysis of the results, though mediabistro's AllTwitter found them surprising.
Observed Lauren Dugan: "McDonalds and Starbucks, for instance, have been among the beta testers for Twitter’s advertising products, Promoted Products, since they launched. Both brands have spent millions on advertising on Twitter, offering coupons, free coffees and discounts—but their engagement rates are between 1 and 5 percent on Twitter, while they’re seeing between 30 and 80 percent engagement on Facebook."
How to improve your own engagement rates on Facebook? Socialbakers suggests taking advantage of the site's new "Facebook questions" feature, which can be used to ask questions of fans without forcing them to add any applications to answer them (a deterrent).
Socialbakers gives the feature's "viral-ability" a thumbs up, observing: Questions appear not only on your page’s wall as full stories but each time one of your fans answers the question, it appears as a full story on all of their friends feeds. If their friend answers, then it also shows as a full story in their feed and so on. Anyone who sees the poll can also post comments and “follow” the question to be alerted of future comments and outcomes.

Viralheat Adds Social Media Publishing With Version 2.0,

Viralheat is launching version 2.0 of its social media tools today, an upgrade that takes the product beyond the standard monitoring and listening.
One of the biggest changes in version 2.0 is a new feature that Viralheat is calling engagement, and which basically means you can post comments to Facebook and Twitter directly from the service. Posting to social networks may not sound like a big deal, but CEO Raj Kaddam says it makes life a lot easier for customers.
Instead of using one tool (such as, well, Viralheat) for monitoring social media mentions and sentiment, then jumping to a different application (such as CoTweet) to actually publish content, Viralheat allows you to do both in one place. Wherever you are in the service, there’s a button at the top right that lets you post to social networks. When you’re reading through Facebook and Twitter comments, you can hover over them to get more details about the commenter, then click to respond directly.
Viralheat 2.0 also refreshes the product’s user interface to one what Kaddam says is “more of an inbox-type layout.” One of the big goals, he says, was to make it easy to access all of Viralheat’s reports with fewer clicks. And the upgrade also incorporates Facebook Insights, giving companies more information about the conversations on the Facebook Pages, and more data from Twitter.
The company’s investors include Mayfield Fund. You can see a demo of the new version below.

Posterous Acquired By Twitter

Twitter has acquired Posterous, the blog-posting service that grew out of the Y Combinator program in 2008. The terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Posterous seems to have traded its staff for Twitter’s wider audience.
In September Posterous launched Spaces to give users more sharing control over their content and so far, the new features have been successful in increasing engagement. According to the company’s blog, “four times as many photos and five times as many videos are shared on private Spaces as on public Spaces.”
Shortly afterward, the company started raising money. The most recent round of funding through Redpoint Ventures and Jafco Ventures brought in $5 million, for a total of $10.1 million since the founders first participated in the Y Combinator fundraising and mentoring program in 2008.
News of the acquisition follows a report in late February that Posterous had “absolutely no plans to sell,” according to TheNextWeb’s sources.
But sometime between then and yesterday’s announcement, Posterous changed its tune. They wrote, “We couldn’t be happier about bringing our team’s expertise to a product that reaches hundreds of millions of users around the globe.”
Twitter explained in a blog post, “We’re always looking for talented people who have the passion and personality to join Twitter. Acquisitions have given us people and technology that have enabled us to more quickly build a better Twitter for you.”
They weren’t kidding. Gawker got a hold of Twitter’s 2011 financials and learned that the company was hemmorhaging money, in part by doubling its team of 450 employees in mid 2011 to nearly 900. Twitter has since been working on new sources of revenue, including a self-serve ad platform, paid access to historical tweets, and smartphone ads.
Twitter has assured Posterous users that the blogging platform “will remain up and running without disruption,” while Posterous has an FAQ page that will at some point have more information on how to transfer your files in the event that this changes. But our sister blog, AllTwitter, advises users to start packing now.

Twitter Surrenders One User’s Data to Police Investigation

Three months after being subpoenaed by a Boston district attorney, Twitter has handed over user data from one account that tweeted data allegedly obtained by hacking into police websites.
The district attorney of Suffolk County had subpoenaed Twitter in December, requesting “all available subscriber information” for @p0isAn0N, @OccupyBoston, #BostonPD and #d0xcak. The subpoena also included the name Guido Fawkes, which is associated with the @p0isAn0n account.
On December 28, after the subpoena was issued, @p0isAn0n tweeted: “Haha. Boston PD submitted to Twitter for my information. Lololol? For what? Posting info pulled from public domains? #comeatmebro.”
Twitter spokesman Matt Graves told Boston.com that @p0isAn0n is the only account for which Twitter ultimately provided any information, and he declined to comment when the website asked about how Twitter dealt with the request for information related to the Occupy Boston account.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was among the most public opponents of the subpoena, and it challenged the measure in court. All court proceedings and documents involved in that challenge were sealed.
A judge ruled last week against the challenge and Twitter complied with the decision, according to Boston.com.
“We continue to believe that our client has a constitutional right to speak, and to speak anonymously; and that this administrative subpoena both exceeded the scope of the administrative subpoena statute and infringed our client’s rights under the First Amendment,” ACLU lawyer Peter Krupp said in a statement Thursday. “With the turnover of these documents any subsequent review of these issues will be moot.”
Should Twitter be obligated to hand over information about its users to law enforcement? Do you see such requests as necessary to investigations or as attacks on free speech? Let us know in the comments.

The Secrets of a Twitter Co-Founder's Success

Entrepreneurs need to take pride in their mistakes, because otherwise it's impossible to succeed, said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
The 37-year-old entrepreneur was speaking to an audience of 1,000 at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal.
"Failure is great," said Stone, who co-founded the microblogging site in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams. "It's really scary, but it's totally worth it, because you can't succeed at these exponential levels until you dramatically fail."
One failure of his own: Starting a company that allowed people to send broadcasts to iPods. "We thought we were geniuses, and it turns out it was called podcasting and people were already doing it," Stone said, according to the Montreal Gazette.
Twitter's beginning was not auspicious.
"When we started it, nobody thought it was a very good idea," he said. "But we kept working on it."
An early sign that the naysayers might be wrong: When Stone attended Austin's South by Southwest in 2007.
"One person tweeted to tell a few people to meet him at a bar, and in the eight minutes it took him to walk to that bar, it had filled to capacity and there was a line out the door," he said.
The site now has some 500 million users.
He suggested entrepreneurs not fear madcap ideas to solve problems–in fact, entrepreneurs actively should look for the most off-the-wall solution and see if it works.
"I learned creativity is a renewable resource," Stone said, referring to his first job, which was as a graphic designer. "It's a wonderful way of thinking about challenges, because it turns work into play. It makes everything fun, and you can always take another crack at something."
He also advised businesses to own up publicly to their mistakes. (Twitter had to do this as recently as last week. When it was revealed that the user agreement allowed the company to store information from contact lists of iPhone users for 18 months, the site apologized and changed the agreement.) Not surprisingly, he suggested Twitter and social media are a great way to do this.
"I think vulnerability is essential," he said. "For so long, companies and brands thought they needed to seem bulletproof. I think when a brand uses Twitter, they're able to communicate when they make a mistake. I think when you do things like that you reveal you're open and honest and willing to change and admit to your mistakes. I think brands are using it to really build trust with consumers."
He also said no one should spend hours on Twitter at a time – that it "sounds unhealthy."
"I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you've found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something," he said. "I think that's a much healthier engagement. Obviously, we want you to come frequently."
Stone said his goal for any of his projects is that they help improve the world, make money and have fun. He advocates socially conscious business.
"It just makes good business sense because consumers and good employees are attracted to products and companies that care about the world," said Stone, who is vegan. "If there's a $5-million marketing budget, maybe, you can spend $4 million bringing clean water to a region in India, and another million making a big deal about that."
He told the audience he was proud that Twitter hired a corporate social responsibility employee before it hired its first salesperson.

Twitter Co-Founder: Spending Too Much Time On the Site is ‘Unhealthy’

Biz Stone, a cofounder of Twitter, told an audience in Montreal this week that spending up to 12 hours a day on the platform is not necessarily a great idea.
“To me, that sounds unhealthy,” he said on Wednesday at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal business conference, according to a report in The Guardian. Stone told the audience that users should leave the site after they found the information they were looking for.
“I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you’ve found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something,” Stone said, according to the report.”I think that’s a much healthier engagement. Obviously, we want you to come frequently.”
Twitter doesn’t provide stats on the average amount of time users spend on the site. Alexa, however, pegs that time at about four and a half minutes a day on the site. According to a 2009 report by Sysomos, only 1.13% of Twitter users update more than 10 times a day. Some 85.4% of Twitter members tweet zero times a day and about 6.5% tweet once a day.
The relative healthiness or unhealthiness of compulsive tweeting wasn’t the only subject that Stone discussed. He also described how he thought it was important for entrepreneurs to take pride in their mistakes. Before Stone helped create Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams, he created a company that let people send broadcasts to iPods. “We thought we were geniuses,” Stone said, according to The Montreal Gazette. “It turns out it was called podcasting and people were already doing it.”
Stone also outlined his vision of social media — including Twitter — as a positive force. “The more connected we get through all social media, the more humanity can move as one,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being hallucinogenically optimistic, but the idea that once we’re connected we’ll be able to move together, suggests we’ll be able to get a lot more done in a lot shorter time.”

Decide if Social Media Is Right for Your Business

Social media is often a big help when you're developing your brand. It allows businesses to connect to customers on a more personal level. But that doesn't mean it's right for every small business.
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, believes that 9 million small businesses in the U.S. use Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook are useful in different ways. Twitter is known to be better for customer engagement, while Facebook helps funnel traffic to your site. Both sites help you better your search engine optimization (SEO).
Take three steps before launching Twitter and Facebook campaigns and decide which social media platform is right for your small business.
1. Is social media right for your company?
Remember the old question, “If everyone was jumping off a bridge would you do it too?”
The buzz makes everybody feel that social media helps their business. It's likely that's true, but it’s vital that you decide if social media is necessary for your business to succeed right now.
Though millions of small businesses have jumped on the social media train, your target audience might not be caught up in it. If you feel that's the case, it makes sense to hold off. Or, perhaps you aren’t ready to make the most of social media's benefits, so wait until your company is ready.
2. Timing is everything
Having a strong presence in social media takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. If you can’t dedicate the manpower to keeping up a quality profile, it might hurt your brand in the long run.
Look at your team and decide if your business can handle the workload. If it can, then be fully prepared to implement it. Like any good marketing campaign, your social media portfolio has to have a clear identity, and reach your target audience.
If you forge ahead, prepare the information you want to share each week. Figure out what time of the day your posts and tweets have the most impact by reaching your core customers.
3. Set goals and guidelines
In 2011, companies saw a 63 percent increase in marketing effectiveness. But businesses of all sizes are trying to establish a strong ROI when it comes to social media.
Setting goals for the next few weeks, months and years helps you decide if your valuable time is worth the effort and if you’re using social media successfully. It’s also important to set ground rules of who in your company will handle your social media sites.
Decide on what content is and isn’t appropriate to post. Learn how to handle customer interaction and what steps to take if something goes wrong. Then spend some time educating your staff before the first day of having a visible social media profile.
Once you have created a place for your business in the social media realm, look around your direct and indirect competitors' pages. It helps you understand what the best practices are to engage customers.
Also research the different ways social media platforms are reaching out to help small businesses advertise. See if those steps are right for your brand as well.
In the end, social media is another tool for your company’s toolbox. It will only be effective if you can take the time to learn how to use it properly.

5 Clever Social Media Campaigns to Learn From

You don't have to be in the market for a Super Bowl ad to learn who the world's biggest marketers are. In fact, as a quick visit to Facebook illustrates, social media has a leveling effect: Whether you're Coca-Cola or Jones Soda, your Facebook page looks pretty much the same. Coke's billions won't buy a dedicated wing on Twitter, either.
With this in mind, the following social media campaigns from marketers big and small are designed to be idea generators. This isn't a ranking of the most effective social media campaigns of the year, but rather the ones that have the most to offer a small-business owner with big ideas and a not-so-big marketing budget.
1. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese's Jinx
Last March, the venerable Kraft brand launched an interesting campaign on Twitter: Whenever two people individually used the phrase "mac & cheese" in a tweet, Kraft sent both a link pointing out the "Mac & Jinx" (as in the childhood game Jinx.) The first one to reply back got five free boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese and a t-shirt.
What you can learn from this: This is a very low-cost way to track down potential fans on Twitter. All you have to do is search a given term and identify two people who tweet the same phrase at (roughly) the same time. In return, you'll gain goodwill, a likely follower and probably some good word-of-mouth buzz on the social network.
2. Ingo's Face Logo
When Swedish ad agencies Grey Stockholm and Ogilvy Stockholm merged last year, they wanted to get social media fans involved. The two agencies asked fans to participate by signing into Facebook to see the new name. Every time new people logged on to the dedicated site, the logo added their profile picture. With every picture, the logo got a little bigger, until 2,890 fan photos comprised the full name, Ingo, over a four-hour period.
What you can learn from this: This is another inexpensive way to get fans literally enmeshed with the brand. Another alternative is to create a real-life mosaic based on pictures of your Facebook fans, a project that Mashable recently completed in its headquarters.
3. BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota's Human Doing
What better way to illustrate the plight of the common man than an actual common man? That was the thinking behind a BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota program last year that put Scott Jorgenson, a St. Paul resident, in a glass apartment in the Mall of America for a month. To demonstrate the recuperative effects of exercise, Jorgenson was put on a workout routine for the month that compelled him to exercise three to five times a day, in 10-minute spurts. In a social media twist, Twitter and Facebook followers dictated the type of exercise for each session.
What you can learn from this: Creating an event, especially one that involves social media fans, is an alternative to launching an ad campaign. Humanizing a problem for which your company provides a solution is also a good idea.
4. GranataPet's Foursquare-Enabled Billboard
Pet food brand GranataPet earned worldwide attention last year for its billboard in Agenta, Germany. This wasn't just any billboard, though. It was rigged so that if a consumer checked in on Foursquare, the billboard would dispense some of the company's dog food. Someone from Granata's ad agency filmed the billboard in action, and the video now has more than 50,000 views on YouTube (in various iterations).
What you can learn from this: In the social media age, a single ad or a single billboard can generate images, press and videos, but only if it's clever enough.
5. Reinert Sausages's Wurst-Face App
Another German brand, Reinert Sausages, transcended its roots with a clever Facebook app that lets users upload their photo and receive a "Wurst Face," a graven image of themselves in cold cuts. The name "Wurst Face" comes from the extra piece of sausage that kids get for free at the butcher.
What you can learn from this: If you can create an app that's social, fun and brand-appropriate, it will function more effectively than even a high-budget ad campaign.

5 Free Ways to Market Your Nonprofit

Just like any for-profit business, nonprofit organizations need to have a marketing strategy to survive and thrive.
Nancy Schwartz, founder and president of the nonprofit marketing firm Getting Attention, emphasizes that marketing for nonprofits is all about building relationships, and those relationships are vital to an organization's success.
“The goal of marketing is to build and strengthen relationships," says Schwartz, who in addition to her consulting work also serves on the board of the Nonprofit Technology Network and on marketing committees for her synagogue, local high school and PTA. "Nonprofits are based on fundraising, but you can’t meet someone the first time and ask for money. You need to build that relationship."
Nonprofits don't have a lot of money to throw around on marketing, however. So it's important for you to make every penny count. Luckily, free marketing opportunities abound. It's just a matter of being innovative, creative and flexible in your marketing approach.
Here are five ideas for affordable nonprofit marketing.
Engage your current supporters
Nurturing and engaging your current supporters, donors and volunteers is, according to Schwartz, one of the most effective free marketing strategies for nonprofits.
“You have to be very appreciative of your supporters," explains Schwartz. "Nurturing your existing supporters is the best low-cost, highly-effective marketing strategy. It’s always easier to retain existing supporters than it is to get new people in the door.”
That means keeping them updated and informed, and it also means getting them to do things with and for your organization. And here is where the second part of this strategy comes in: Ask them to tell their friends, family and colleagues about your organization.
"Not only does that expand your reach and increase the number of folks engaged in your organization, it’s asking people to get involved more than just writing a check," says Schwartz. "It works to get your existing supporters engaged.”
Social media
Social media sites are a gold mine of free marketing opportunities. Set up a business page on Facebook, and use it to communicate with your various constituencies—posting photos, updates, links and information. Create a Twitter account and mingle with others, keeping them up-to-date about your nonprofit's activities. LinkedIn, too, provides plenty of opportunities to market, by creating a business page, promoting your organization and keeping in touch with like-minded people. Look, too, for smaller, lesser-known social media outlets that are specific to the focus of your organization.
It's important to remember, however, that though there's often no upfront cost associated with these sites, it does take time for someone within your organization to keep them updated—and time is money.
"The key to effective use of social media is engagement, and engagement means that somebody from your organization is engaging with people through that conduit," explains Hamilton Wallace, owner of SmallBusinessMarketingConsultant.com. "To have an authentic voice and create engagement, it needs to come from someone inside the firm."
Blogging
Create a blog on your website and update it daily with helpful and useful information that readers be likely to share with others. The more useful the information you give, the more it will help your marketing strategy, increase awareness of your organization and mission and engage your audience. Another upside of blogging is it will draw people to the rest of your site, where they can see what you're doing and learn how they can support your activities.
Videos
Anyone with a smartphone and simple editing software can create professional videos that can be posted on YouTube or directly on your organization's website.
"We're a video-oriented culture, especially with YouTube," says Valerie Moody, owner of Fodeo, which provides photography and video services for individuals and organizations. “Anything we want to do we can go to YouTube and find something that shows us how to do that."
Your nonprofit might post an instructional video, for instance, or a video message from the director, or clips showing community service and involvement. Getting people to watch and share your videos will help spread your message.
Speaking engagements
Line up representatives of your organization to speak at conferences, trade shows and other events related to your field. This is a chance for free publicity and an opportunity to get your message out there. You can put information about possible speakers and topics on your website, so people searching for a speaker will be able to track down your organization, or you can register with a speaker's bureau.
Each of these techniques works in tandem with others. Thus, you can promote your speech-making over social media, or mention it in your blog. An e-mail newsletter can point people to your Facebook page. T-shirts that your employees wear to community events can have your organization's name and website on them.
Great marketing doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, the more creative you are with your marketing, the less you'll have to spend.
Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio. Vivian blogs via Contently.com.
Photo credit: Thinkstock

 American Express OPEN Forum

As OS X Mountain Lion Proves, Twitter Is Apple’s Social Network

At Apple’s WWDC event last June, Twitter made a new best friend: Apple. The tech giant announced that it would bake the social network into every single iOS device by way of the new iOS 5 software. This left many stunned for two reasons. 1) Apple rarely does such deep partnerships with third-parties. 2) It wasn’t Facebook.
It was all-around a huge win for Twitter. And a win for Apple as well, as it has been proven throughout the years that they don’t get social — a subject which was a topic of debate again yesterday coincidentally. Apple needs to build it’s own social network, Dan Frommer argued! No, they need to get their social platform right, argued TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon. Well, today they’re taking a big step: by doubling down on Twitter.
Apple has just revealed that Twitter is also going to be baked into the latest version of OS X, Mountain Lion. This means that every single new Mac sold beginning this summer will have Twitter functionality built in. And all of the older ones that upgrade will have it too. There are now just over 60 million Macs out there. Again, a huge win for Twitter.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in December that following the iOS 5 integration, Twitter monthly sign-ups jumped 25 percent. iOS already has a much larger user base than the Mac does, but still, Twitter could see another double digit jump from this integration as well.
More importantly, Twitter has now firmly established itself as not just the iOS go-to social service, but Apple’s go-to social service. Sure, Apple could always rip Twitter out of iOS and OS X at any point in the future, but doing so would now piss off users who are being trained to expect it as an Apple core OS feature. For a service still not making a ton of money and as such, has its future questioned constantly, this is important. It’s a huge endorsement.
It’s also big news for Twitter because it opens up a whole new world for the service as a method of authentication. With iOS, apps can choose to use Twitter to ease new sign-ups — allowing people to get going with one or two clicks. Now Mac apps will be able to do the same thing. I don’t think there’s any question that Facebook still dominates this authentication space, but Twitter’s Apple alliance is making them much more compelling for this purpose — for developers, at the very least.
Just last week, some were criticizing Twitter for seemingly wayward focus. Today, they just scored a second massive partnership with the most valuable company on the planet. That sure seems like a sign of good focus to me.

A History of the Business of Social Media

Social media has come a long way since it's humble beginnings over 30 years ago. This infographic gives us a short history of the many innovative companies that have helped shape the environment that we so heavily rely on to communicate and also takes a look at some of the business deals behind them. What's next? You decide.

Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT]

In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible,Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report.

Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn’t been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August.

According to the article, Weaver’s departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter’s reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. “We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years… There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares,” Costolo added.

Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.

Costolo’s stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. Like other social media firms, including, for a time, Facebook, Twitter appears to be holding off an IPO as a way of limiting outsider investors’ influence. That approach has hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the stock, though. Last March, Twitter’s valuationhit $7.7 billion on Sharespost, which trades shares on the secondary market.

Limiting shareholders means catering to deep-pocketed investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who sank $300 million into the company in December. Like Facebook, Twitter has also stopped giving out stock to employees instead offering them restricted stock units (RSUs), which can only be converted to actual shares after an IPO or a corporate buyout, according to the report.

Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh

The Social Media Salary Guide [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social Media Week is upon us, so we thought it would be appropriate to delve into the social media industry and see how its salaries stack up. Social media is an evolving and cutting-edge field, so it should come as no surprise that you can make a great living managing a brand’s presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare and other social platforms.
In the infographic below, produced by OnwardSearch, you can see where the social media jobs are concentrated, the breakdown of job titles in the industry, and how much dough the average social mediate is bringing home each year. (The graphic shows the 25th and 75th percentiles for salary, pulled from Indeed).
Does this stack up with what you’ve seen in the industry? Do you think these positions and the salaries make sense, given the rise of social media? Let us know in the comments.

How Well Are Schools Using Social Media ? [Infographic]

Is social media a distraction for students or an integrated part of college life? This infographic shows how schools have joined their students on sites like Facebook and Twitter to make college campuses even more social.
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a Social Media Adoption study to see how social media is used in higher education. Not surprisingly, one hundred percent of the colleges and universities studied were using social media in some form.
The most common tool used was Facebook, which is used by 98 percent of the schools that participated in the study. The other tools used were LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs and message boards. The study, which lasted three school years between 2008 and 2011, showed some especially large growth rates for Twitter and LinkedIn in the last year.
LinkedIn recently enhanced its student profiles to include organizations, projects, awards, test scores and courses taken to make that first job out of college more attainable. Twitter users reported that professors used the microblogging site to make announcements about class schedules and tests.
Professional networking, outreach to current and potential students, and school pride were among the reasons listed for engaging in social media.  The Harvard University Facebook page, for example, includes articles from the Harvard Gazette, an ad for the “Tour Harvard Yard” mobile app, and pictures of life on campus in a folder titled, “As Seen at Harvard.” The posts drew comments from many hopeful applicants, as well as a few students.
The most social schools were John Hopkins University, University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University, Columbia University in the City of New York, and of course Harvard University, which was the school Mark Zuckerberg was attending when he created Facebook. None of these schools made Princeton Review’s list of top party schools in 2012, so the party must have moved online.
The infographic comes from Online Universities and includes some of the do’s and don’ts of social media at school. Take a look.

12 Most Effective Ways to Engage on Twitter

Even though Facebook tends to dominate social web, Twitter is an important tool for social sharing and for building your own community. Twitter is an ideal tool to use to stay informed and to drive traffic to social properties. Most importantly, it helps you build relationships with like-minded people.
Below are tips that enable you to increase engagement with your communities on Twitter.
1. Infuse personality into your profile
People trust people, not default profile images. Use a real picture of yourself and infuse your unique personality into your bio. This generates interest and encourages people to not only follow you but relate to your passions and keep an eye on your tweets. It all leads to more retweets.
2. Be the first to break the news
Choose a topic (or several topics) that are near and dear to your heart and consistently provide valuable information. That will allow you to position yourself as an expert in that area and your followers will come to rely on the valuable information that's hitting their Twitter streams.
If you stay on top of the latest and greatest, try to break the news to your followers as you get it. That will increase the number of retweets you get and will foster the conversation around your news.
3. Tweet consistently, leave space
I recommend tweeting consistently. However, most of us choose a time during the day to catch up on the news and do some research. We come across multiple data points and links that we want to share with our followers.
But sending 15 tweets within the same hour may be overwhelming to your followers and may be considered spam. So, I suggest you schedule the tweets throughout the day with at least 30 minutes between them.4. 4.Ask and answer questions
Asking your followers a question is the best way to engage them (and get some valuable information in the process.). But if you want your followers to engage with you, you need to engage with them. Answer their questions, share your knowledge, participate. Also consider engaging in chats. Twitter becomes more beneficial to you when you provide value to others.
5. Connect people
Be a connector, in real life and on social networks. When you connect people with each other, your followers take notice and your credibility goes up. People are more likely to engage with you.
6. Be generous, promote others
Make sure you retweet your most passionate followers. Thank them and link to their social properties. #FF and #Recommend others and their work.
7. Craft your tweets
Make sure your content stands out. When you retweet, customize the copy and add your own thoughts. When you tweet the link, choose a quote or statistics from the article that you thought was impressive or interesting and tweet that instead of the headline.
8. Use under 140 characters
If you want to be retweeted, leave the room for others’ Twitter handles. Some folks prefer the old RT style to the new one. They retweet you more if you leave space for their handle and a little space to add their short comment.
9. Ask for a retweet
If you ask your followers, “please RT,” you usually see higher number of retweets.
10. Acknowledge the source
Always, always acknowledge people who shared the information with you, even if they shared it through other channels. If that person has a Twitter handle, credit them as a source.
11. Tweet the same content again
The Twitter stream moves very fast. There's a good chance that most of your followers won’t catch your first tweet. If you stumbled on great information or you want to share your own content, schedule multiple tweets in advance during multiple days. If your followers are spread across the globe in different time zones, schedule tweets during different times of the day.
12. Be open to new connections
Follow people back. This allows them to connect with you personally through DMs. And you expand your social network. I've made many invaluable contacts just because I was open to new connections.
Image credit: Thinkstock

Occupy Protestor’s Twitter Account Subpoenaed

Smacked with yet another subpoena, Twitter must submit an Occupy protestor’s account information to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office — unless the account holder can stop the order before Feb. 8.
The District Attorney’s Office issued a subpoena for Malcolm Harris (at the Twitter handle @destructuremal) on Jan. 26.
Harris is the managing editor for the blog The New Inquiry, which seeks to explore ideas through criticism and examination. He alleges via Twitter that the District Attorney’s Office is only requesting three-and-a-half months of his account information because of a disorderly conduct violation he was slapped with during the Brooklyn Bridge protest and subsequent arrests
“I’m not sure why they’ve singled me out, but I’m not too worried,” Harris told Mashable. “The charge against me is disorderly conduct, which is a violation, not even a misdemeanor, for blocking traffic, just like the other 700 people arrested. ”
Harris is due to appear in court for that violation on Feb. 29.
The District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on this issue. Mashable also asked if the DA would subpoena Twitter for account information for the hundreds of other people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge during the protests. The office declined to comment.
It’s not clear from the subpoena what specific information the District Attorney’s Office is looking for. If Twitter does not hand over Harris’ account information from Sept. 15, 2011 to Dec. 31, 2011 executives could serve one year in prison and face a (nominal for Twitter) $1,000 fine.
In his stream of tweets, Harris thanks Twitter for informing him of the request for his account information even though it says not to.
He tweeted, “Don’t worry @twitter, when they ask how I got the subpoena, I’ll just tell them a little birdy told me.”.
Harris said that he hopes he can prevent the order from being carried out and send a message to protestors that it’s safe to use Twitter for protests.
“But if we win, it’s a sign to protesters that what they say online doesn’t just belong to the government to use against them,” he said.
Harris said he’s pleased with the way Twitter has handled this issue.
“Twitter so far has been really great, actually. They broke the gag order at the bottom of the subpoena to send it to me, and have agreed pending a motion to quash it not to move forward on disclosure,” Harris says. “Twitter could have just provided that information to the DA without telling me, and I may not have found out until my own words were being used against me in a court of law.
“I’m not usually one to hand out any sort of credit to social media giants, but they definitely saved me from a surprising trial.”
A Twitter spokesperson Mashable reached out to declined to comment, but said, “to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”
Twitter’s policies dictate that the company will comply with government-issued subpoenas but inform users before giving their information to the government, unless the request is accompanied by a statute or gag order to keep it quiet.
In December of last year, the Boston District Attorneys Office issued a subpoena for two Twitter accounts of alleged protestors. The Boston DA revealed its lack of knowledge about social media when it requested a user’s name and handle, plus two hashtags. Twitter also informed those account holders of the request for information despite the fact that it was made private.
Earlier this month, the state of Texas issued a subpoena to Automattic, Inc., the creators of free blogging platform WordPress.com, to access an occupy supporter’s blog and reveal the person’s identity.
You can view all three subpoenas here: [Scribd account].

Twitter CEO: 2012 Will Be the Twitter Election

“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter Election,” Dick Costolo said on stage at AllThingsD‘s media conference in Laguna Nigel, Calif., Monday evening. It was an unusually confident declaration from a CEO who has hitherto appeared remarkably modest in his communications.
By saying that 2012 would be a “Twitter Election,” Costolo was not suggesting that sentiment analysis of tweets would indicate the winning candidate. Instead, he meant that Twitter has become an essential platform for reaching voters, and for gathering and responding to feedback in real time.
“We already saw this during the State of the Union when [President] Obama made the spilled milk joke and a collective groan went up across the country on Twitter,” Costolo posited. “In the past, you’d have to wait for the networks to cut to the pundits after the address was done to discuss it. You don’t have to do that anymore.”
“Washington is really starting to get that too … [It's] actively engaging in the real-time feedback loop now,” he added. “Instead of waiting for the rebuttal at the end, there were two senators live-tweeting their rebuttals [during the speech].”

This kind of real-time engagement is essential, he said. “Candidates who don’t participate in the conversation on Twitter will be left behind [in the elections], The next morning is too late to respond.”
He also emphasized Twitter’s role in humanizing public figures. “One of the reasons we’ve gotten so many celebrities from all walks of life [on Twitter] is because it gives them a vehicle to communicate directly with the people.” That capability could be crucial during election season, he suggested.

8 Crazy Things IBM Scientists Have Learned Studying Twitter

A team of IBM researchers spends their days sifting through Twitter. They use live streams of tweets to develop machines that are smarter than the typical computer, an area of study known as "machine learning."
Using these tweets, they've developed technology that allows a machine to understand that some tweets are just background noise and others are newsworthy and important.

For instance, a tweet that says "I urgently need my cup of Starbucks and a scone and before I head over to Staples" is distinctly different than a Tweet that says: "URGENT: I just bit into a scone from @starbucks to find over 10 staples baked into it. Please RT and be careful."

IBM scientists have also come up with ways to measure "sentiment" … to identify which tweets are saying something good about something important and which are saying something negative.
After two years of studying Twitter, their work wound up in an IBM social media monitoring product, Cognos Consumer Insight.

But it also led to lots of funny stories and interesting facts about Twitter. Rick Lawrence, who leads IBM's Machine Learning Group at IBM Research at Yorktown Heights NY, shared some of these stories with Business Insider.

Twitter's new censorship plan rouses global furor

This screen shot shows a portion of the Twitter blog post of Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, in which the company announced it has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis. The additional flexibility is likely to raise fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money. But Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or "tweets," remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world. (AP Photo/Twitter)

(AP) -- Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.

It was a stunning role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting unfettered expression, 140 characters at a time. Twitter insisted its commitment to free speech remains firm, and sought to explain the nuances of its policy, while critics - in a barrage of tweets - proposed a Twitter boycott and demanded that the censorship initiative be scrapped.
"This is very bad news," tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, who operates under the name Sandmonkey. Later, he wrote, "Is it safe to say that (hash)Twitter is selling us out?"
In China, where activists have embraced Twitter even though it's blocked inside the country, artist and activist Ai Weiwei tweeted in response to the news: "If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting."
One often-relayed tweet bore the headline of a Forbes magazine technology blog item: "Twitter Commits Social Suicide"
San Francisco-based Twitter, founded in 2006, depicted the new system as a step forward. Previously, when Twitter erased a tweet, it vanished throughout the world. Under the new policy, a tweet breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere.
Twitter said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed and will post the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the website chillingeffects.org.
The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions, said Alexander Macgilliviray, Twitter's general counsel.
"This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability," he said. "This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don't. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn't changed."
Some defenders of Internet free expression came to Twitter's defense.
"Twitter is being pilloried for being honest about something that all Internet platforms have to wrestle with," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "As long as this censorship happens in a secret way, we're all losers."
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland credited Twitter with being upfront about the potential for censorship and said some other companies are not as forthright.


As for whether the new policy would be harmful, Nuland said that wouldn't be known until after it's implemented.
Reporters Without Borders, which advocates globally for press freedom, sent a letter to Twitter's executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, urging that the censorship policy be ditched immediately.
"By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization," the letter said. "Twitter's position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is unacceptable."
Reporters Without Borders noted that Twitter was earning praise from free-speech advocates a year ago for enabling Egyptian dissidents to continue tweeting after the Internet was disconnected.
"We are very disappointed by this U-turn now," it said.
Twitter said it has no plans to remove tweets unless it receives a request from government officials, companies or another outside party that believes the message is illegal. No message will be removed until an internal review determines there is a legal problem, according to Macgilliviray.
"It's a thing of last resort," he said. "The first thing we do is we try to make sure content doesn't get withheld anywhere. But if we feel like we have to withhold it, then we are transparent and we will withhold it narrowly."
Macgilliviray said the new policy has nothing to do with a recent $300 million investment by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Mac or any other financial contribution.
In its brief existence, Twitter has established itself as one of the world's most powerful megaphones. Streams of tweets have played pivotal roles in political protests throughout the world, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria.
Indeed, many of the tweets calling for a boycott of Twitter on Saturday - using the hashtag (hash)TwitterBlackout - came from the Middle East.
"This decision is really worrying," said Larbi Hilali, a pro-democracy blogger and tweeter from Morocco. "If it is applied, there will be a Twitter for democratic countries and a Twitter for the others."
In Cuba, opposition blogger Yoani Sanchez said she would protest Saturday with a one-day personal boycott of Twitter.
"Twitter will remove messages at the request of governments," she tweeted. "It is we citizens who will end up losing with these new rules ... ."
In the wake of the announcement, cyberspace was abuzz with suggestions for how any future country-specific censorship could be circumvented. Some Twitter users said this could be done by employing tips from Twitter's own help center to alter one's "Country" setting. Other Twitter users were skeptical that this would work.
While Twitter has embraced its role as a catalyst for free speech, it also wants to expand its audience from about 100 million active users now to more than 1 billion. Doing so may require it to engage with more governments and possibly to face more pressure to censor tweets; if it defies a law in a country where it has employees, those people could be arrested.
Theoretically, such arrests could occur even in democracies - for example, if a tweet violated Britain's strict libel laws or the prohibitions in France and Germany against certain pro-Nazi expressions.
"It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there," said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. "We'll have to see how it plays out - how it is and isn't used."
MacKinnon said some other major social networks already employ geo-filtering along the lines of Twitter's new policy - blocking content in a specific jurisdiction for legal reasons while making it available elsewhere.
Many of the critics assailing the new policy suggested that it was devised as part of a long-term plan for Twitter to enter China, where its service is currently blocked.
China's Communist Party remains highly sensitive to any organized challenge to its rule and responded sharply to the Arab Spring, cracking down last year after calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China. Many Chinese nonetheless find ways around the so-called Great Firewall that has blocked social networking sites such as Facebook.
Google for several years agreed to censor its search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population, but stopped that practice two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown with Chain's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt declined to comment on Twitter's action and instead limited his comments to his own company.
"I can assure you we will apply our universally tough principles against censorship on all Google products," he told reporters in Davos, Switzerland.
Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said it was a matter of trying to adhere to different local laws.
"I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with - and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue - which is laws in these different countries vary," Drummond said.
"Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis' issues and so forth," he added. "In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere?"
Craig Newman, a New York lawyer and former journalist who has advised Internet companies on censorship issues, said Twitter's new policy and the subsequent backlash are both understandable, given the difficult ethical issues at stake.
On one hand, he said, Twitter could put its employees in peril if it was deemed to be breaking local laws.
"On the other hand, Twitter has become this huge social force and people view it as some sort of digital town square, where people can say whatever they want," he said. "Twitter could have taken a stand and refused to enter any countries with the most restrictive laws against free speech."