"We Didn't See This One Coming"
While the Precogs could not be reached for comment, according to this story on TheNextWeb Google has acquired Recorded Future – a company that, yes, predicts the future. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
SEO consultant Indu Priya recently wrote a post for the site Quick Online Tips about measuring return on investment (ROI) when it comes to Twitter. While the piece was not directed at lawyers, its messages were well taken and certainly apply to our practices. As the author notes there, it is notoriously hard to measure results on new-media platforms like Twitter; to discern what works from what doesn’t. But there are a number of tools available for those who want to measure their Twitter results and extrapolate their ROI.
Obviously, to assess how close you are to your destination you must know where you’re going. Some firms have gone to the length of assemblying a marketing plan in order to set goals for themselves – but if you ask me a simple outline will do until you find out whether your aims are realistic, achievable, or economical. Consider these well-known Twitter success stories:
Dell famously uses Twitter to disseminate offers and discounts, as well as to listen in on market chatter. To guage success Dell counts the number of Twitter-based discounts redeemed by consumers, comparing those figures with the number of purchasers overall. The difference should represent the difference that Twitter makes in its customer-count.
Barack Obama’s Twitter account is the stuff of history – launched during his lightning 2008 presidential campaign, its goal was simply to touch as many people as possible and allow them to communicate with one another. Once their common Twitter friend (the Obama campaign) brought them together, the key metric measured b y the campaign was the number of posts (tweets) that were circulated (retweeted) by followers. After that the multiplier effect took over and delivered the vote.
Of course not all goals are measurable or even achievable; but most can be reached following some creative planning. In the meantime, consider these ROI measurement tools for Twitter and find more on OneForty:
In “How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media” @Mashable guest poster @SorenG shares his take on how the micro-blog phenom is affecting the 5th Estate. In his estimation the big changes brought about by Twitter are
I should be all for these changes. Strangely however, I’m on the fence. Here’s why. People-powered information sounds great and has the potential to be much better for society than information being in the hands of the newserati. But when it comes to us in an immediate, raw, unfiltered feed, news still should be vetted and processed before it is trusted. The alternative could easily be panic caused by a cascade of misinformation.
Still, that’s the democracy of Twitter – everyone has a chance to succeed and an even bigger chance to fail.
Another day another buzzword. Today it’s the real-time web - one in a series of recent developments making the web more useful. Now the web
Much high-quality writing about this comes from Read/Write/Web, host of the Real-Time Web Summit going on right now. Here are some of the companies they’ve featured thus far:
While the legal applications for these developments are virtually limitless, even day-to-day applications are intriguing. At last my refrigerator can call, IM, or e-mail with a reminder to go grocery shopping; or it may just transmit a pre-programmed list to the store based on the fridge’s lastest contents (adjusted for plans to have the neighbors over). Events that I upload from my phone to my calendar are communicated to the refigerator which can remind me to buy party supplies, etc. The list goes on and on.
Now if you don’t mind I’m going to tell my house to raise the room temperature in time for my arrival this evening.
get on with it already
Has Google’s marketing department been co-opted by Lucas Studios? I’ve been angling to try Google Wave, the much-touted “next generation” communication platform, for a year. Thus far nothing. This is the longest I’ve waited for a promised payoff since the first Star Wars prequel. And we all remember how that turned out … so make with the Wave already.
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