Interesting Inklings from PR and Social Media This Week

Twitter Takes on War and Peace, Demographics Get Smarter, TechCrunch is Getting Huge Traffic from LinkedIn and WikiLeaks is Funny?

It’s been an interesting week in PR and social media. Twitter surpassed 200 million tweets per day. Ben Parr looks at this by the numbers in a piece for Mashable, including this tidbit from Twitter: “a day’s worth of tweets would be enough to write a 10-million-page book or 8,163 copies of War and Peace.”

I’ve been thinking about Twitter bios lately (see my post on Twitter Turnoffs). This week, I read Jeff Haden’s BNET list of the eight words that should never appear in your Twitter bio and I agree. His list includes “passionate,” “authority,” and “guru.” While I am a proponent of including descriptive words that convey why you are an authority and therefore someone worthy of following, the words that Jeff dislikes are no nos for a reason. They are subjective and lack real meaning. I recommend sticking with words that are in your title (founder, CEO, VP) or those that convey a specific accomplishment (author, speaker).

Jamie Beckland contributed a piece to Mashable on the changing nature of targeting for marketers that examines traditional approaches that tend to hinge on age as compared to new insights that are possible through social data. He writes that social data is a foundational element to psychographic information. He also covers behavioral data and customer lifecycle data and I encourage you to read his thoughtful assessment. He concludes with a comparison to the 1960s when marketers were beginning to embrace TV, “At that time, if you didn’t advertise on TV, you lost. Today’s new tools offer a similar choice: Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.”

For those of you Google Analytics geeks like me, it was interesting when TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn is driving more referral traffic than Twitter. MG Siegler’s post in TechCrunch has the details. As of this morning, TechCrunch has 1,732,786 Twitter followers. Yet, Facebook (TechCrunch has 247,998 Facebook fans as of today) is the number one referral source to TechCrunch and LinkedIn is number two. Siegler attributes this spike to LinkedInToday. I have been loving LinkedInToday since its launch in March and coincidentally (or not!), I found this TechCrunch piece there.

And speaking of TechCrunch, Vanessa Camones, principal of theMIX Agency, contributed a piece to DigiDaily that details her discontent with Michael Arrington and TechCrunch’s reporting tactics. All I can say is, that woman has guts! The piece has lots of comments if you’d like to read more.

I leave you with the WikiLeaks video spoof of the Mastercard commercials, courtesy of Mashable. “There are some people who don't like change. For everyone else, there is WikiLeaks.” WikiLeaks, I did not know that you were funny.

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

Happy July 4^th!