The terror that has taken over Iran the past several days following the June 12 Presidential election has the entire world watching and weeping. Last week, Iran's Guardian Council declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of the election with 62.63% of the vote, surprising many experts and supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi, who many expected to win.






Despite stern warnings from IGC, hundreds of demonstrators angry over election results have been protesting, most recently in a public square Monday in Tehran. According to hospital sources, at least 19 people were killed in clashes in Tehran on Saturday alone, but unconfirmed reports put the total number killed at over 150.

It's painful to sit by and watch as thousands of innocent people are being injured and killed, knowing that there is very little we can do to help. But the Twitterverse is showing it's support by turning their icons green. You can do this by visiting helpiranelection.com.

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At the WWDC (world wide developers conference) on Monday, Apple had a "hyperwall" on display which consisted of twenty 30-inch Apple displays. The screens were loaded with 20,000 of the most popular iPhone apps which would pulsate each time the app was download from the iTunes store via a live feed. The hyperwall was built using Apples latest technology. It's powered by 20 Mac Pro towers each running the new Mac OS X Snow Lepoard.

A pretty cool idea and crowd getter, kudos to Apple for innovative thinking once again.

Sarah Molinari, a public relations manager at Home Depot, (HD) was perusing comments about her company on microblogging site Twitter recently when she came across a discomforting post — or "tweet" in Twitter lingo.

A customer in Canada was building a deck. The home-improvement chain had not delivered items he needed. He concluded the Twitter message: "Home Depot order is being canceled. We are going to (rival) Lowes (LOW) because (of Home Depot's) epic fail."

Molinari used Twitter to write back: "Saw your tweets — can I help?"

Home Depot is one of a growing number of companies using Twitter to promote sales, serve customers and conduct public relations — one customer at a time. In Molinari's case, a Home Depot manager called the riled customer to fix the problem.

"We get a lot of feedback from customers on Twitter," Molinari said. "And we'd be remiss if we did not pay attention to this community and learn from it."


Home Depot created its Twitter account one year ago and has more than 7,800 "followers," Twitter's term for users who subscribe to other users' updates. Molinari responds to customer complaints or requests and occasionally sends tweets about promotions and articles she thinks might be helpful.

A Public Bullhorn

Twitter launched in July 2006 as a way for friends to let each other know what they are thinking and doing — in 140 characters or less. Users create a profile, sign onto the site and can then send to and receive messages from other users.Unlike e-mail, most Twitter messages are public, so it can serve as a high-tech bullhorn for customers.

The potential public-relations impact — both good and bad — is enormous. According to Web traffic research firm comScore, about 17 million people logged onto Twitter's site in April, up from 9.3 million in March.

And millions more use the service through their cell phones, third-party Web sites and dozens of software applications for computers and smart phones.

In addition to Home Depot, companies such as Dell (DELL), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), JetBlue (JBLU) and Comcast (CMCSA) have Twitter accounts. Dell, which jumped on the Twitter bandwagon more than a year ago, says it has generated more than $1 million in sales by alerting customers about deals on inventory it wants to clear.

"Companies are using Twitter to energize their brand, provide support, offer promotions and drive sales, but we're still in the very early days of this," said Diane Clarkson, an analyst at Forrester Research.

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Craigslist has been successful for long enough now that we can easily recognize some of its benefits over the printed newspaper industry. But a recent Pew Internet study really drives the point home, noting the debilitating affect web-based classifieds has on the classifieds revenue for newspapers.

Pew points out that 49% of Internet users use online classifieds, which is more than twice as many as noted in 2005.

Several aspects of web-based communication has overrun printed media, especially newspapers. And with other advances on the mobile front, from cell phones to the Kindle, it’s easier than ever to spread information across a mass of people. The ability for newspapers to take advantage of web-based trends has been dismal overall, and the revenue structure for printed media is suffering a great deal as a result.

So what happens when sites like Craigslist become even more social? The Pew study really draws on the fact that printed media is becoming less and less relevant in the grand scheme of things, and the power of the Internet is prevailing. As Internet users become more comfortable with social networks, and social networking platforms find better ways of effectively delivering information within a given social graph, the ability to provide additional value around something as simple as classifieds will become an actuality.

Interestingly enough, some of this value will inherently come from deeper integration with traditional media and mainstream forms of communication. This integration actually increases the credibility of certain systems, even a web-based classifieds site.

Finding better ways to further simplify the process of posting and searching classifieds, along with the eventual physical interaction between the two parties involved, are all things that can be enhanced by integration with social media. Whether it’s a mobile alert for proximity purposes or recommendations based on actual purchase history from within a given product category, the marriage of social media, classifieds and traditional media will be an interesting and powerful aspect of our future.

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Land Rover last week became the first national brand to execute a national Twitter campaign in a bid to promote its newest models' debuts at the New York Auto Show.

While brands as diverse as Southwest Airlines and Smirnoff vodka have been tweeting and accumulating followers for months, Land Rover attempted to use the burgeoning social-media platform in a more ambitious way, seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding.

While it's too early to know what sort of return Land Rover will receive for its efforts, "it cost us virtually nothing," said Keith Rhodes, VP and account director at WPP-owned direct-marketing firm Wunderman, which orchestrated the effort.
Mr. Rhodes said he was particularly encouraged by the Twitter-fueled traffic to a blog post he wrote about Land Rover's initiative. Posts on his site typically draw about 30 views; this one grabbed more than 200,000 views.

Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based "social-media affinity network" Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover's launch.

Mr. Eliason said the next national effort using Twittad's roster of 4,500 Tweeters, whom it pays to post on topics and brand their profile pages, with nearly 5 million followers, will be for Elations, a glucosamine-enhanced beverage from the makers of Sunny Delight targeted at women over 40.

Twitter machine
All told, the Land Rover effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers, Mr. Eliason said. Twittad used 15 different Tweeters with at least 5,000 followers, although the majority had between 2,000 and 4,000 followers.

Most won't get rich doing this anytime soon. One paid Tweeter, willconley777, wrote on his blog that he was paid $2.50 for letting Land Rover sponsor his profile page for seven days. Mr. Conley has 1,160 followers. Still, for those few Twitter users with huge reach, real money might one day be possible. The most-followed Land Rover campaign participant, queenoftheclick, boasts nearly 25,000 followers and was paid an amount "in the hundreds" for her participation, Mr. Eliason said.

Other larger-scale marketers are also eyeing Twittad, which is in talks with Sears.

The appeal to marketers is obvious: It's a cheap way to reach people through their trusted contacts. And Twittad's technology is able to sort its users by geography, demographics and interests, which can both lead to more targeted appeals and, perhaps, prevent Twitter users from feeling under siege by advertisers, a major concern.

"We were worried it would be considered spam, but we didn't get a single complaint [about Land Rover]," Mr. Eliason said. "What that tells me is that our connectors have influence."

Less clear is whether the model is sustainable. Mr. Eliason, who launched Twittad eight months ago, said he expects it to break even by the end of its first year. He said he has contacted Twitter about a revenue-sharing agreement but has yet to hear back.

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In an interesting light, Pizza Hut is hunting for a college student to spend the summer months as a member of the PR team in charge of tweeting about new developments at the restaurant chain. I wish when I was in college looking for an internship something like this existed.

The company is advertising for students to apply for the 10-12 week long "twinternship," based in its headquarters in Dallas.

Duties include:

• Collect and share insights and experiences while working for Pizza Hut through social and interactive media: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, New and emerging media
• Twintern will be given unprecedented access to marketing meetings, brainstorm sessions, ad shoots and special events
• Monitor social media for pop culture news, off-the-wall stories or anything else quirky and fun that he or she thinks would be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fans.
• Chronicle experience through video; edit and post to selected media
• Conduct media outreach for PR programs
• Assist with execution of national PR programs

With Twitter-use growing exponentially in 2009, brands are trying to work out how to best use the service to promote themselves, and monitor what is being said about them online.

Earlier this month Amazon experienced the power of the Twittersphere when rumours spread far and wide that it had adopted an anti-gay policy by removing thousands of books from its main search and best-seller rankings.

It emerged that there was no such policy and that the problem had been caused by a classification error, but not before hundreds of thousands of mentions of the term "amazonfail" had spread across the World Wide Web.

To apply for the twinternship

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon - from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.



Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.



The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

Keep an eye out for the March U.S. Twitter data, which should be available later this week. An early peek at the data suggests it’s going to be another HUGE month for the increasingly popular site. Follow comScore on Twitter and be the first to find out how the site did! You can also follow comScore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni on Twitter to hear his thoughts and insights on the digital media industry at large.

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