Twitter adds more targeting options to Promoted Products

Advertising agencies will now be able to localize some of their Promoted Products on Twitter, thanks to new targeting options the social network recently rolled out, ClickZ reports.

Advertisers will be able to choose the country that their Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets are displayed in.
Additionally, they can target Promoted Accounts even further by choosing to display them to Americans who live in either metro areas or the countryside.

"We continuously launch features to enhance the advertising experience on Twitter.

As with all of our advertising efforts, we are watching this test closely and will use feedback from advertisers and Twitter users to fine-tune and iterate on the feature," a Twitter spokesperson explained to ClickZ.

Targeting has been an issue for many brands that us...

Source: bignewsnetwork.com

Google Launches a Query-Answering Chatbot

Google has quietly launched Google Talk Guru, an instant message chatbot that can deliver search results and answer queries such as sports scaores.
Once a user adds Google Talk Guru to his or her Google Talk chat client, he or she can send it instant messages with a pre-determined set of commands. Here are the current list of commands Google currently supports, as well as some of the company's examples:

Sport scores: "score arsenal"

Weather: "weather Nairobi"

Calculate: "123 * 45"

Currency: "120 KES to USD"

Definition: "define laptop"

Translation: "translate earth to French"

Web result: "web Mount Kenya"

Help: "help translate"

Unlike the traditional chatbot, Google Talk Guru doesn't engage in conversation with users; it simply answers queries. It's yet another way to access Google's archives of information, though the company's search engine can perform all of these tasks and then some.
What do you think of Google's new IM bot? Will you use it? Let us know in the comments.


Thanks to Steve Rubel for the tip


Source: yahoo.com/mashables

Twitter elite tweet the most

Just 20,000 'elite users' put out most tweets though there are over 200 million registered accounts, a study has found.


The Telegraph reported Tuesday that 50 percent of all tweets are by 20,000 elite users.

Yahoo! researchers scrutinised 260 million tweets between July 28, 2009, and March 8, 2010. They used Twitter 'lists' to distinguish between elite users - celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organisations, and ordinary users.


'Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter - roughly 50 percent of tweets consumed are generated by just 20,000 elite users - where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed,' a Yahoo! researcher was quoted as saying.


The researchers found that those on Twitter follow back far less than they're followed.

'The Twitter follower graph, in other words, does not conform to the usual characteristics of social networks, which exhibit much higher reciprocity and far less skewed degree distributions, but instead resembles more the mixture of one-way mass communications and reciprocated interpersonal communications,' they explained.


Twitter turned five earlier this month. It has said that a billion tweets are sent a week.


Source: bignewsnetwork.com

Facebook 'can put vulnerable kids at depression risk'

An influential group of doctors has warned that teenagers can suffer from "Facebook depression" after becoming obsessed with the social networking website.


According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, being shunned on a social networking website can be more harmful than if a child is ignored by their friends in real-life.


The group, which has published its first set of social media guidelines, explains that online harassment "can cause profound psycho-social outcomes", including suicide.


AAP lead researcher Gwenn O'Keeffe, a Boston-based paediatrician, said that social media had the power to "interfere with homework, sleep and physical activity" among the young.


"Parents need to understand these technologies so they can relate to their children's online world - and comfortably parent in that world," the Daily Mail quoted her as saying.


O'Keeffe added that the site provides a skewed view because its users cannot see body language or facial expressions which provide context for messages posted on the site.


Megan Moreno, a University of Wisconsin adolescent medicine specialist who has studied online social networking among college students, said using Facebook can enhance social connections among some youngsters, while having the opposite effect on those prone to depression. (ANI)

 

Source: bignewsnetwork.com

'Breaking News': Internet Passes Newspapers for First Time; TV is Next

More people get news online now than they do from newspapers.


That’s according to Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual “State of the Media” report published on Monday.


The Internet was the number two platform behind television in terms of adult news consumption -- with 46 percent saying they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40 percent) for the first time. Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50 percent) than the Web, and “the trend line shows that gap closing.”


According to PEJ, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time, too.


More highlights from the report:


>> Newspapers were the only medium to suffer continued revenue declines last year. An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs were lost last year -- meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30 percent smaller than in 2000.”


>> Nearly half of all Americans (47 percent) now get some form of local news on a mobile device.


>> Advertising revenues at newspapers fell by 6.4 percent in 2010, compared to a 26 percent drop in 2009. Overall, newspaper ad revenue is down 48 percent in the last four years.


>> For the first time, more money was spent on online advertising than on print newspaper advertising. Overall, online advertising overall grew 13.9 percent to $25.8 billion in 2010.


>> “The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.”


>> The audience for cable news fell 13.7 percent across the entire day in 2010. Prime-time (down 16 percent) fell even more.


>> For the first time in at least 12 years, every cable news channel lost viewership. CNN’s fell 37 percent in prime-time. Fox News fell 11 percent, while MSNBC declined 5 percent.


>> Despite declining audiences, revenues for each of the cable news channels were projected to increase in 2010 a total of 10.7 percent across the three networks.


>> Audiences for almost every network news program fell again in 2010. “Evening news audiences fell by 752,000 viewers, or 3.4 percent, from 2009 and have been on a downward trend for three decades.”


>> Local TV news stations were able to add audience at the “new early timeslot of 4:30 a.m.; stations in 69 cities had news that early, up from 28 a year earlier.”


>> Print circulation for newspapers continued to decline, though not as sharply as 2009. Weekday circulation fell 5 percent and Sunday fell 4.5 percent.


>> Of all the traditional media, the audience for AM/FM radio has remained among the most stable. A whopping 93 percent of Americans listened to AM/FM radio at some point during the week in 2010, according to data from Arbitron -- a figure that’s dropped only three percentage points in the last decade.


>> NPR’s audience grew 3 percent in 2010, according to NPR internal data, to 27.2 million a week. That is up 58 percent since 2000.


By: Dylan Stableford
Source: thewrap.com