Twitter Brings Promoted Tweets and Accounts to Mobile Apps

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that sponsored tweets and accounts would soon be rolling out to the timelines, searches and suggested follows seen by users of the social network’s mobile client apps. Promoted Accounts will appear immediately in user searches and suggestions with the latest updates to Twitter’s official mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Twitter’s Promoted Products are the primary way the company earns money, each a kind of contextual advertisement that aims as much as possible to blend into the service’s overall flow. Promoted tweets, trends and accounts have been appearing in both search and user timelines on Twitter’s mobile website for some time, and the desktop version of Twitter.com before that.

Promoted trends have had a bad reputation on the mobile app, at least since L’Affair Dickbar a year ago. In what Twitter later claimed was an experiment in content discovery, trending and promoted hashtags appeared in an irremovable black bar at the top of each user’s timeline. The bar was wildly unpopular and was soon removed; now promoted trends and trending topics only appear in the “discover” button of the mobile app.

With this first post-dickbar attempt to reintroduce advertising into the main timeline on its mobile apps, Twitter has made three key corrections:

• All promoted content will be in the timeline or search results (not plastered elsewhere);
• For now, at least, there will be no promoted trends in the mobile apps (only on the mobile website); (As noted above, promoted trends are still in the mobile apps, just separated off in the “discover” section);
• All promoted content will be easily dismissable, with the swipe of a finger to the side in the case of search, by scrolling up or down in the case of the timeline.

Twitter is also moving slowly, rolling out promoted content over the coming weeks, and beginning only with sponsored tweets from brands that a user already follows. In this case, the tweet is just shifted closer to the top of a user’s timeline, to “ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.”

Users of third-party mobile clients, of course, won’t see any of that advertising at all — something bound to be a point of continued tension between Twitter and the developers who use its API.

Will Twitter users revolt, as they did with the dickbar, bolting to other apps or networks? Will lightly targeted advertising so innocuously displayed actually be effective at capturing user attention? Or is this finally the next step in Twitter’s evolution from fun feature to rock-solid future business? Only tomorrow’s trending topics know for sure.

Article source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/twitter-promoted-mobile

888poker Launches Twitter Poker Series

GIBRALTER, March 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ –

888poker, world’s fastest growing online poker room and recipient of the Poker Operator of the Year 2011 award will be holding the inaugural Twitter Poker Series event on March 11 2012.

8TPS is a unique series of events, allowing players to reserve a seat for themselves in exclusive tournaments through Twitter. The first 8TPS event is the $1500 Freeroll Tournament on March 11 2012, topped off with an LG Optimus 3D phone for first place winner as well as cash.

Full details about the $1500 Tournament can found here

http://www.888poker.com/social/twitter-poker-series-lg-event.htm

Players with active Twitter accounts will be able to register to 8TPS events by simply reserving their seat through a single Tweet-  stating their player name, event and adding the #888Series hashtag. The suggest format for participation in the first event is

“I am PLAYER_NAME. Sign me up for the free Twitter Poker Series at @888poker to win an LG Optimus 3D Smartphone #888series”

Additional event announcements and 8TPS related information will be released via 888poker’s Official Twitter account at @888poker

About 888poker:

888poker.com is the fastest growing online poker brand in the industry, hosting thousands of poker enthusiasts the world over at any given time. With over 5 million registered members, 888poker continues to offer the best consumer experience. 888poker strives to provide quality entertainment by providing a safe, fun and secure poker environment. Customers play on state-of-the-art software with 3D, PokerCam and Teams features. As part of the 888poker experience, players also enjoy an 888poker Rewards Program, 888poker Online Shop and access to My.888poker.com Community. 

Twitter:

 @888poker

Web:http://www.888poker.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/888PokerOfficial

Social: my.888poker.com

YouTube:888behindthescenes

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/888poker-launches-twitter-poker-series-070000983.html

If Twitter Is a Work Necessity

Now, with signs that the struggling economy is slightly improving, she is looking to get back into the fashion industry. To help strengthen her position in the job market, she returned to the classroom last year to develop expertise in social media that she can layer on top of her deep marketing and corporate communications experience.

“I didn’t have the social media savvy in the way I do in other areas of marketing,” said Ms. McMaster, 44, of North Babylon, N.Y., who signed up for the social media marketing boot camp online courses at Mediabistro.com. “When I left fashion, social media wasn’t even something we were doing in the industry. Fast-forward four years, and if you are a brand and you are not on social media, you are missing a huge audience.”

For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role.

“Six months ago, Pinterest wasn’t on everyone’s radar,” she said. “Because I am taking these courses, I am not behind.”

Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, based in Chicago, said digital literacy, including understanding social networking, is now a required skill.

“They are essential skills that are needed to operate in the world and in the workplace,” she said. “And people will either need to learn through formal training or through their networks or they will feel increasingly left out.”

For most people looking for a job, she said, it is vital that they understand how to use LinkedIn and other social tools to network and present themselves online. “If you don’t have a LinkedIn or Facebook account, then employers often don’t have a way to find out about you,” she said.

To help bridge the gap, major universities, community colleges, online educational businesses from Lynda.com to ed2go.com offer continuing education classes in digital media, including social media skills, Web design, search optimization and Web analytics.

The University of San Francisco has an Advanced Social Media certificate that can be earned in an eight-week online course. New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies offers courses where students can also earn certificates within its business programs.

Harvard’s Extension School has a social media marketing course for $1,900 aimed not at midcareer executives, but at younger marketers who need help learning how to integrate social media at their companies.

At Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and a professor who has been teaching digital journalism and skills for more than 16 years, began teaching continuing education classes in social media in 2010.

With students, Professor Sreenivasan said his goal is to “make them think really carefully about what they do and when they do it on social media.”

“We have to think about social media in a new strategic way,” he said. “It is no longer something that we can ignore. It is not a place to just wish your friends happy birthday. It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”

While the classes are meant for working journalists, people from many different fields have signed up. In addition to the two courses offered for nondegree students last fall and spring, Professor Sreenivasan and Ernest R. Sotomayor, assistant dean, career services and continuing education, organized a weekend of panels and workshops in late January for 500 people after a similar weekend conference approach drew 300 students last May.

Participants paid up to $200 for lectures and panels that began on a Friday evening with Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, talking about the future of social networking, and Vadim Lavrusik, who oversees journalism initiatives at Facebook, offering insight on how to use the platform for reporting, content creation and sharing.

Over the next two days, the discussions ranged from how to build a community using social networking tools to how social media is changing the way people watch television.

For those participants, who wanted one-on-one attention from an experienced social media user, the “social media doctors” were in the house.

Stationed at small tables with laptops in the school’s lounge, two dozen volunteers met with people throughout the weekend, offering guidance on topics like how to set up a Twitter account, create an audio recording on SoundCloud and how to take a Tumblr blog to the next level.

A professional photographer was nearby for participants who needed a profile photo for their online presence. There was a line of people waiting on his services both days.

The idea behind the “doctors” was to give people some individual instruction at a conference setting, said Liz Borod Wright, a freelance writer who works with Linda Bernstein, another freelance writer, to help Professor Sreenivasan teach the classes. “They are looking at your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn account and giving guidance on what is most relevant to you,” she said.

Dr. Kate Uraneck, 53, a doctor and emergency disaster preparedness official for New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said she attended the weekend program to learn more about social networking tools. A graduate of Columbia journalism school, she heard about it through the school’s alumni network.

“Within my field of emergency preparedness, social media is taking on a more prominent role,” she said, noting how government and Red Cross officials turned to Twitter and Facebook to get the word out during Hurricane Irene. “I wanted to get more knowledge about it.”

Dr. Uraneck emphasized that she does not have social media responsibilities as part of her job. She met with one of the social media doctors to learn more about how to use her personal account, @thedisasterist, more effectively. One of her chief goals, she said with a laugh, was to better understand the role of the hashtag in the Twitter system.

She sat down with one of the most experienced volunteers: Serbino Sandifer-Walker, a fellow alumna of Columbia’s journalism school who is a multimedia journalism professor at Texas Southern University in Houston. Professor Sandifer-Walker said she was interested in not only learning about new platforms during the conference, but also seeing how Columbia’s journalism school approached teaching social media skills because a similar continuing education class is being explored at her university.

“We are looking at creating a course that would be good for seasoned professionals, people who want to develop skills to move their career to the next level,” she said. “For the program to be strong, we know that it will be important to keep up with all of the changes.”

Educators also say skills classes have to help translate what seems to be a different language — hashtags, mentions, heart.

For Dr. Uraneck, her advice on Twitter was straightforward: “Use it to inform, enlighten, bring value,” she said. “Engage.”

Over the next hour, Professor Sandifer-Walker, using layman terms, explained to Dr. Uraneck how Twitter can be used to find people around the world who share similar passions and interests. They talked about the importance of sharing links to useful, relevant content and looking for organizations and people who did the same.

They also discussed how interacting with people on Twitter is an important part of both building and joining a community. And how a hashtag is a useful way to help discover and follow topics or issues on Twitter.

“To me, just learning about mentions and hashtags was almost worth the price of admission,” Dr. Uraneck said. “I had picked up books on Twitter but now I understand it. I also understand the relationship-building piece, being responsive and the give-and-take that goes with that.”

Several businesses also offer online courses to help people understand social networking.

For years, Mediabistro.com, now a division of WebMediaBrands, which publishes blogs about social media and sponsors trade shows, has offered a robust lineup of digital media courses for media professionals, including workshops on blogging basics and podcasting.

In 2007, there were 150 workshops and courses about digital media and technology but none specifically about social media, according to Carmen Scheidel, Mediabistro’s vice president for education and events.

Last year, she said, there were 190 workshops and courses in the digital media and technology program with 32 courses dedicated specifically to social media topics that included social media metrics and marketing on Facebook and Twitter. Many of these courses are now offered online.

“In general, the digital natives are earlier in their careers, and they are not the ones taking these types of classes,” Ms. Scheidel said. “It tends to be people who are very accomplished in their careers but are new to social media. It is an interesting mix.”

Fueling interest in learning has been a sharp increase in the number of employers looking for people with social media skills. Since 2010, the number of jobs listed on Mediabistro’s job board in the categories of mobile, social media, Web development and social-app gaming increased 140 percent, she said.

In January, job listings in those categories were up 51 percent over from the previous January.

To deliver social media training in a more effective way, Ms. Scheidel said that Mediabistro last year introduced a new approach. Instead of offering mostly small workshops with 15 to 20 students, they began offering what she described as an online social media conference.

As part of the course, industry leaders, who often appear at major digital conferences, deliver their presentations online during a webcast. At the same time, she says they still offer students small online workshops and one-on-one guidance with instructors who give them advice for whatever specific social media project they are doing.

“We wanted to give them the experience of being at a conference but maintain that small group setting, where you can get feedback and actually learn,” she said. “We also know that they can benefit from helping each other. They can share, connect and give feedback in small group workshops.”

The online conference approach also gives the students an opportunity to establish social media connections with one another, giving them an instant social network of peers interested in the same topic.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Ms. Scheidel opened the first session of an eight-week online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp by welcoming about 250 students linking in from their computers from around the country for the live seminar.

While some of the participants were in between jobs, most of the students worked for major corporate brands, universities and government agencies, including MTV, NBC Universal, M.I.T., Bobbi Brown and the World Health Organization.

At the first session, Ms. Scheidel introduced Michael Brito, senior vice president for social business planning at Edelman Digital, who was followed by Dave Kerpen, chief executive officer of Likeable, a marketing firm. The title of his talk was “How to Establish a Brand Personality Through Social Media.”

As both speakers delivered their presentations into a Web camera, zipping through their PowerPoint slides visible in one of the modules on the computer screens, Ms. Scheidel guided a lively interactive chat in another module, allowing the students to ask questions of the speakers and each other.

When one of the speakers brought up Pinterest, one of the students typed into the discussion forum, “What is Pinterest?”

In seconds, another student typed into the chat box: “It’s a social bulletin board — image based.”

Then, Ms. Scheidel typed in the link, pinterest.com. Another student added: “It is a new photo share. You have to be invited, which I think is not very friendly.”

Yet another student, suggested he “check out their Web site” but warned it “can be addicting.”

At the end of the first session, Mr. Kerpen from Likeable invited the students to find him on Twitter and ask any questions that they might have after the class.

He also announced that he would give copies of his book to students who said hello to him on Twitter immediately after the class. He emphasized, “There is no timeline tweeting me questions.”

“The timeline is the rest of our lives,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/education/digital-skills-can-be-quickly-acquired.html?pagewanted=all

Ads Now Heading to Twitter for iPhone, Android Timelines

Twitter users will soon begin seeing advertisements in their timelines when accessing the social network from their iPhone or Android device.

Twitter announced Tuesday that it plans to expand its ad program in the coming weeks to start showing Promoted Tweets, or tweets that have been paid for by advertisers, in users’ timelines on the Twitter for iPhone and Android apps.

Users will only see Promoted Tweets in their timelines from brands they already follow, Twitter said. But, in addition to Promoted Tweets, iPhone and Android users will also begin seeing promoted recommendations on their lists of Who to Follow, just like they already do on the main Twitter.com site.

“It has been nearly two years since we introduced Promoted Tweets, the first in our suite of Promoted Products,” Twitter said in a blog post. “In that time, people around the world have increasingly accessed Twitter from a mobile device. Today, we are taking an important next step in making our Promoted Products available to those users.”

Previously, mobile users only saw ads in search results on the iPhone and Android apps, and on the mobile Web version of Twitter (m.twitter.com). Rolling them out to users’ timelines on the Twitter for iPhone and Android apps makes them much more visible.

The advertiser-backed tweets will appear in Android and iPhone users’ timelines just like any other tweet, Twitter said. They will show up just once, and will flow with all the other tweets as users’ scroll through their timelines.

Users can dismiss any Promoted Tweets they don’t like with a single swipe.

Twitter first announced its Promoted Tweets ad platform in April 2010. At the time, it partnered with several specific advertisers, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. If you happened to search for those brands on Twitter, the top search result would be an ad from those sponsors. At launch, Promoted Tweets were only included in search results, but Twitter said it would eventually expand the program. By June, it added those Promoted Tweets to its trending topics bar.

In October, Twitter officially unveiled its Promoted Accounts program, which added advertisers to Twitter’s “Who to Follow” suggestions list. It also announced a “promoted products” option that allowed third-party apps to display promoted tweets and trends. In September, Twitter said Promoted Tweets would start showing up in the stream of tweets from people you follow.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400916,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121

Twitter Brings Promoted Tweets and Accounts to Mobile Apps

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that sponsored tweets and accounts would soon be rolling out to the timelines, searches and suggested follows seen by users of the social network’s mobile client apps. Promoted Accounts will appear immediately in user searches and suggestions with the latest updates to Twitter’s official mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Twitter’s Promoted Products are the primary way the company earns money, each a kind of contextual advertisement that aims as much as possible to blend into the service’s overall flow. Promoted tweets, trends and accounts have been appearing in both search and user timelines on Twitter’s mobile website for some time, and the desktop version of Twitter.com before that.

Promoted trends have had a bad reputation on the mobile app, at least since L’Affair Dickbar a year ago. In what Twitter later claimed was an experiment in content discovery, trending and promoted hashtags appeared in an irremovable black bar at the top of each user’s timeline. The bar was wildly unpopular and was soon removed; now promoted trends and trending topics only appear in the “discover” button of the mobile app.

With this first post-dickbar attempt to reintroduce advertising into the main timeline on its mobile apps, Twitter has made three key corrections:

• All promoted content will be in the timeline or search results (not plastered elsewhere);
• For now, at least, there will be no promoted trends in the mobile apps (only on the mobile website); (As noted above, promoted trends are still in the mobile apps, just separated off in the “discover” section);
• All promoted content will be easily dismissable, with the swipe of a finger to the side in the case of search, by scrolling up or down in the case of the timeline.

Twitter is also moving slowly, rolling out promoted content over the coming weeks, and beginning only with sponsored tweets from brands that a user already follows. In this case, the tweet is just shifted closer to the top of a user’s timeline, to “ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.”

Users of third-party mobile clients, of course, won’t see any of that advertising at all — something bound to be a point of continued tension between Twitter and the developers who use its API.

Will Twitter users revolt, as they did with the dickbar, bolting to other apps or networks? Will lightly targeted advertising so innocuously displayed actually be effective at capturing user attention? Or is this finally the next step in Twitter’s evolution from fun feature to rock-solid future business? Only tomorrow’s trending topics know for sure.

Article source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/twitter-promoted-mobile/

Next Page »