Twitter

If you follow my blog and my writings (and rantings, and presentations, and panels — if you ever talked to me about this) you know that I am not a big fan of using Twitter for Customer Service.

It is not that it is not possible to do it well, but it is that the resolution times, close rates, escalation rates, and just about any other metric you can use are so horrible by comparison that to do it is almost a waste of time and resources.

Travel enough, and you encounter a lot of elevators. This simple device can offer some interesting user experience lessons. Some are bizarre ones, like the incomprehensible control system I described in Don’t Redesign Your Elevator! The other day, in a perfectly fine Southern California hotel, I found elevators whose control panels all showed a virtually identical wear pattern. In every one of the four different elevators, the white paint was rubbed off the “L” marking the Lobby floor.

The other week I gave a talk to De Monfort University’s digital marketing and social media course. Afterwards, I was asked: Why should brands invest in a given social network, if it might not be around tomorrow? 

Maria Popova once joked that it seemed as though we'd "reached a cultural point at which every time someone uses the word 'curation' in reference to content and publishing, an actual museum curator kills a kitten".

Sustainability is a vibrant topic on Twitter, but the corporate crowd is just catching on. A small but growing corps of corporates are now tweeting, to varying degrees.

Compete recently ran article claiming that Mobile Twitter Users Are the Ideal Audience for Advertisers. In it, Compete reports that, compared to other Twitter users, mobile Twitter users in the U.S. are 86% more likely to be on Twitter several times a day and 57% less likely to use Twitter on a desktop computer.

Showcasing the growth of the so-called visual web, Comscore (vla All Things D) today came out with figures to show that, in the US at least, Instagram had 7.3 million daily active users (DAUs) beating Twitter’s 6.9 million.

You may have heard that the 2012 London Games are the first “Social Olympics,” as if adding the word “social” to anything makes it different (I think adding “in between the sheets” at the end of a fortune pulled from a Chinese cookie is far more insightful).

So how exactly is Twitter changing the Olympics? I can see at least 7 ways it’s ruining the Games:

With elections in Russia already happened, those in the UK, France and the US to come there is much debate about how social media is now being used in both the electoral process, and more broadly as part of engagement between our world leaders and others on social media. Barack Obama has traditionally been held up as an example of using social media for campaigning and for engaging with people through Twitter, Facebook and other channels. But he is not the only world leader to use social media.

Russia's intellectuals, creative class and Golden Youth – Russia’s modern-day Decembrists - failed to bring about revolutionary political change this weekend in Russia despite an enthusiastic past three months that culminated in some of the greatest shows of political opposition since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly 20 years ago. Embracing tools like Twitter, V Kontakte (the Russian Facebook), YouTube and Live Journal, these young idealists organized massive rallies in the center of Moscow and energized a heretofore politically apathetic middle class.