Although Twimbow works in much the same way as the aforementioned clients, and offers the same functionality including support for multiple accounts, the bright and shiny interface is far from a gimmick or a rainbow skin for Tweetdeck – the colours are vital to how it works and how it can help everyone from regular users of Twitter to advanced-level social media marketeers.

The interface allows users to assign different colours to specific members and groups and then gives the option to sort and filter your timeline by colour by applying the #colour tag. It works much like Gmail and Mozilla Thunderbird’s labels and folders functions and it’s easy to see how this functionality can be applied to social media marketing.

Internet Marketing

Future versions will apparently offer the ability to track and colour code keywords making Twimbow a potentially vital piece of equipment for internet marketing professionals and those of us who are adopting Twitter and other social media platforms as our predominant form of online communication instead of email.

Whether Twimbow’s colourful approach is successful, it’s difficult to imagine that a colour-coding or other tagging feature won’t be a part of the future of Twitter’s use for internet marketing. Although Twimbow is still in its pre-alpha stage with a stable public beta arriving in autumn, it has the potential to be a presence in the saturated Twitter client market.

A new feature has materialised on everyone’s second favourite social media portal, Twitter. A golden coloured ‘Promoted’ button has appeared at the bottom of the trending topics list. For many, this will signal a real movement towards monetising what is a hugely popular site.

Social Media

It is tempting to be rather cynical about these revenue-generating tactics, but it is worth noting that Promoted items are required to be trending in the first place – therefore, Twitter might claim, the integrity of the site’s user generated ethos is secure. Social media people have to make a living too, though - and we might well agree. Just how Twitter utilises Promoted trends (or how colossal U.S. animation firms use it) is outlined in the ‘FAQs on Promoted Tweets’ page.

Clicking on the Promoted button takes you to a list of Tweets about Toy Story 3; topped by the Promoted Tweet. That uppermost Tweet has another inviting, golden tab labelled ‘Promoted by Pixar’, which takes you to the FAQ section on Promoted Tweets.

Twitter

Twitter has finally, it seems, worked out how to make some hard cash from its hugely popular site, following in the footsteps of Facebook – albeit in a rather less Big Brother like fashion. Disney’s Pixar looks set to be the pioneers of this new marketing method – harnessing the currents of public interest in what is an already popular franchise. Indeed, Disney look set to make a mint – and so do Twitter.

Promoted tweets are Twitter’s new advertising platform. When a user clicks on the trend advert, or promoted tweet, they are directed to a normal trending topic search results page, with the difference being that the advertiser’s promoted tweet remains at the top of the page, however many more tweets on the trend appear.

Twitter has been relatively transparent in sharing its plans for a new ad platform and has discussed the development of promoted tweets in its blog since April, drawing attention to its reluctance to adopt traditional web advertising models and insisting the reason for this is because it wants to ‘optimise for value before profit’.

Internet marketing

There’s no question that this new platform for internet marketing has generated a flurry of attention and exposure for Disney, the advertiser, with many users noticing the promoted tweet and subsequently tweeting about it, and it seems Twitter’s new platform may be just in keeping with its value-over-profit ethos. The promoted tweet is relatively non-intrusive and has not been introduced at the expense of a trending topic, merely added onto the bottom of the list.

Additional points should be awarded to Twitter for the very clear labelling of the topic as a promotion by an advertising partner, avoiding user-deception.

As a form of advertising for Disney’s Toy Story, disregarding whether or not the company is targeting the right demographic (are Twitter’s main users slightly older than the average Toy Story fan?), the advert certainly seems to have created a buzz (pun intended). But what does this mean for internet marketing?

Twitter is anchored around self-promotion, with all promoters starting on an equal playing field in economic terms; follower metrics and re-tweet numbers are based on wit, innovation and interest rather than cash splashed, yet rumours are rife that promoted tweets are in fact selling for tens of thousands of dollars, which of course takes the small-to-medium business marketer out of the picture for this ad platform.

This is actually true of any ad platform however. For example, TV advertising; the fact is, only big brands have ever been able to afford the visibility offered by this medium. At least with Twitter, for now, value will still steal the highest visibility, providing that it is valuable enough.

Although many services have tried to blend geographic location with real time content, Twitter may well have the best chance of making it work. Essentially, ‘Twitter Places’ will highlight posts made around a particular area and give this location its own page and, thanks to its integration with several popular location-based applications such as Foursquare, the service can be used to find restaurants, shops, clubs and other places of interest nearby.

Internet Marketing

What impact this could have on the internet marketing world remains to be seen. Clearly the potential’s there, especially with the range of other services this new feature is integrated with including Gowalla, Localeze and TomTom as well as the aforementioned Foursquare, meaning that before Twitter Places is even fully available, there is a large databases of locations to hand.

It’s eminently possible that Twitter Places could be the next big thing in location-based internet marketing, especially taking into account its real-time nature compared to Google’s more static location features, but this could also be its undoing. As we posted yesterday, only 10% of businesses currently involved in Foursquare would pay for their presence and there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to what ROI it can generate or how one would go about leveraging it. There is also the understandable concern that people may have about telling the world exactly where they are at any one time which may limit its adoption from the increasingly privacy-conscious online social media user-base.

Search Engine Optimisation

As with everything in the search engine optimisation world, only time will tell whether this will have any impact on how sites are handled from an SEO perspective. The potential for a large ROI is there and with Google indexing Tweets into their real time results, it’s certainly something which agencies could be looking into, it’s now a case of finding out the best way that companies can leverage it.

At this stage, it’s entirely up to the developers what kind of meta data they would like to attach to the Tweets, providing it doesn’t exceed 512 bytes. Twitter has recommended that developers begin by attaching annotations regarding location, websites, reviews, music and similar.

As important as Twitter has shown to be for internet marketing companies, this new development could prove to be invaluable if the right applications are developed to support it.

Search Engine Optimisation

Obviously, anyone worth their salt in the search engine optimisation industry knows that meta data is a very important piece of the puzzle, but is the addition of meta to Tweets likely to make Twitter more useful to SEO in a direct fashion? Although it’s not certain yet, the answer is ‘probably not’.

Optimising Tweets is all well and good and we would argue is eminently likely providing either applications or the UI is developed to allow for this the way YouTube does now, but it’s unlikely that even an optimised Tweet will be able to pass on much – if any – power as part of a linking campaign.

Twitter applies the ‘nofollow’ attribute to all outbound links and while there is some debate amongst the search engine optimisation community about exactly how much or how little link power is passed on through these, it’s certainly unlikely to replace a good old-fashioned linking campaign.

What there is no denying, however, is that now that Tweets are indexed by search engines, optimising them correctly could well be an excellent way of pushing social media campaigns forwards and driving more traffic to the site you are trying to optimise which, ultimately, should be the goal of any SEO campaign.

This is all speculation until the Annotations application is rolled out across the board and developers begin to get involved with it, but it’s certainly something that is worth keeping an eye on for search engine optimisation specialists, social media experts and internet marketers alike.

Within minutes of it happening, Twitter and YouTube were ablaze with posts, pictures and videos, sharing the news of the quake with the world. Reports suggested a ‘rolling’ style quake which seems to have emptied water out of pools and set lights and bottles moving and required an evacuation of Disneyland, but didn’t cause a huge amount of damage.

For many people around the world who simply don’t experience earthquakes like this in their country, social media can be an excellent way of helping them understand what goes on in these. Rather than earthquakes being the terrifying, apocalypse-bringers that they are portrayed to be in films, or simply after the event abstracts that we receive from the news, social media can help bring us closer to the event from raw, on-the-ground footage and un-coached testimony from the people who lived through it.

It’s in situations like this that social media can really help to show its power – it’s not just an excellent tool for businesses to reach their customers or potential customers, it’s a peerless way of bringing world events out to the rest of the planet.

@anywhere is intended to further the integration of Twitter with the rest of the web, meaning that users won’t have to go to a different web page or an external application to use some basic Twitter features with the site. A page with @anywhere features enabled will allow you to follow accounts associated with the website and also journalists or bloggers from their bylines. YouTube videos will also be Tweetable without leaving the page.

Further functionality is planned in the near future, according to Williams. Allowing a greater degree of integration with the web to the degree of the current leader Facebook Connect would certainly seem to be an intelligent move for the microblogging phenomenon, and from initial reports, the platform will be rolled out across popular sites such as Amazon, Bing, the New York Times, Yahoo and Salesforce.

Whether it will be enough to topple Facebook Connect from the social media/ web integration pedestal remains to be seen, but in the increasingly social web landscape, it gives Twitter another front to fight the battle from.

Twitter Activity Rates

It is problematic to compare activity on Twitter with runaway social media leader, Facebook – as well as Buzz – because the users carry out distinct actions on each platform. But the new data states that Twitter registers approximately 50 million tweets a day, which equates to 600 per second. This is compared to 700 Facebook status updates per second, and the most recent data from Buzz states there are 55 Buzz posts per second.

There is of course a great deal more activity on Facebook aside from status updates (comments, photo description etc.), and so by one measure, Facebook is way ahead of its competition. Another problem with this data is that the most recent Buzz post rates date from just a couple of days after its inception.

On top of this, the figure of 700 tweets per minute has to be tempered by the fact that comments on tweets as well as re-tweets are included in this number.

SEO and Social Media Marketing

The opportunities presented to internet marketers within social media are undeniably huge, but the activity on the three big platfroms is still dwarfed by the activity on the major search engines. Searches on Google approximate to 2 million per minute, with 194,000 per minute on Yahoo and 56,000 per minute on Bing.

Monetising Social Media

While there is a great deal of activity on the search engines, social media nevertheless offers a different kind of marketing proposition. Facebook, for example, can target potential customers very effectively by utilising the information it has stored about its users. Buzz could be developing in a similar fashion long-term, while Twitter offers a far simpler, user dominated platform – where tweets have to be genuinely engaging in order to attract attention from potential consumers.

Add to this the fact that Twitter has imminent plans to monetize its activities by bringing adverts to its users, and the battle to win social media users is a very significant element of the internet marketing landscape.

The event, dubbed ‘Fatgate’ by the Twitterverse, began when Smith was removed from a Southwest Air flight under the pretext of his size being a safety risk to other passengers. Smith launched the first salvo in the Twitter war minutes later by saying “I broke no regulation, offered no ‘safety risk’ (what was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?)”, and followed it up with a number of other posts on the subject such as ‘Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR’ and ‘Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?’

Southwest Air, who also boast over a million Twitter followers responded swiftly and Smith was on another flight less than an hour later. He posted a picture of himself on the plane with the caption “Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!”

Southwest Air’s response was swift and diplomatic through both Twitter and their own blog where they attempted to resolve the issue, but this whole incident has clearly highlighted the damage social media can bring to a brand. More than ever, it seems that having professionals running your company’s social media presence is essential to brand protection.

Google Buzz is directly integrated with Gmail and, although not yet available to all users, is expected to be rolled out into all accounts within a week. 

Buzz appears to be a hybrid of existing networking sites; there are the intimate networking facilities particular to Facebook which allow communication and sharing between those already connected to each other, and the mass-broadcast opportunities offered by Twitter.

Users of the service can post a public or private buzz, which is a status update, as well as share the content of and connect with other social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

Users get a profile page and Buzz lets you ‘follow’ people in order to share in their updates and photos, and there’s also the option to ‘like’ content.

You’ll also be recommended content that Buzz thinks will interest you.

Is Google Buzz a threat to Facebook?

Google buzz does, at first glance, appear to have cherry-picked the bits it thinks work best from existing social networking sites and amalgamated them into its own stab at stealing a slice of the pie for itself. But is Google Buzz a threat to Facebook?

Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site, gaining just short of 400 million users worldwide since its launch in 2004. In comparison, Gmail, which will host Google Buzz, can currently count its users at around 170 million.

The question is why would people migrate away from their favourite sites such as Facebook and Twitter to use Google Buzz? Because that is what will have to happen if Buzz hopes to anywhere near emulate the success of Facebook.

It should also be noted that this isn’t Google’s first attempt at making a splash in the social networking market. The company launched Orkut in 2004 which failed to catch on properly anywhere outside of Brazil.

Buzz seems very similar to what Yahoo is already doing by allowing people to view updates from other sites like Twitter and Flickr from their Mail page. Yahoo! Updates launched nearly a year and a half ago with the capabilities to keep friends and families connected with each other’s online activities, and although it does have users, it has no where near the numbers Google Buzz is presumably aiming for.

It remains to be seen whether Google has managed to select the best from the rest and created the network that everyone will want to use once Buzz is rolled out to all accounts within the next week, or whether this will be another of its network ideas which will fall by the wayside.