2009 is The Year of Twitter – Yes, Twitter is Officially the Top Word of 2009

It is official.  Twitter is popular.

According to the Global Language Monitor “twitter” was the most popular word of 2009.

That is right.  Twitter beat out major international news events like  H1N1 (3rd place) and the election of President Obama (second place).

Shocked?  I was (and I’m a social media junkie).  Is Twitter (in the context of the website) even acknowledged in the dictionary?

Also amusing, twitter is defined as “the ability to encapsulate human thought into 140 characters”.

Also surprising was that 2.0 was rated #6 (and defined as “The 2.0 suffix is attached to the next generation of everything”).

Interestingly only 1 web word made the top 10 phrases – “Cloud Computing”.

This information really highlights the significance of the web in the mainstream.

You can see the whole list here.  You can also see previous years highlights here.

30 Challenges to Social Media Marketing

I have done a lot of speaking presentations recently in Cincinnati and around the US.  One of the key things that we often discuss are rules of engagement for social media.  Especially if you are new to the space, there are some basic guidelines or etiquette that should be observed in order to be successful in the space (we’ll share these tomorrow).

These rules are not unique to social media.  They exist for all social interactions.  In the real world we understand how to behave in social settings because we get immediate feedback from people – we can see their response and reaction to our behavior.

We also learn how to behave over time as we watch how other people interact.  As adults, it is second nature – our socialization as a child prepared us for how to interact with people.

Online social interactions present a few unique problems:

1. We haven’t been doing it very long.
2. We don’t get immediate feedback.
3. It is hard to know when you are offensive.
4. The rules are still being written.
5. We don’t have experience.
6. We forget that we are talking to people.
7. It is easy to be offensive.
8. There is no face-to-face interaction.
9. Automation is tempting.
10. The rules are the same but different.
11. We always want to sell.
12. Softer sales techniques are hard to measure.
13. Social media is hard to measure.
14. Being direct is not the best approach.
15. You have to earn the attention.
16. You are invading on people’s conversations.
17. Value is a must.
18. Content creation as a strategy is difficult.
19. Internal “ownership” issues create problems.
20. Being interesting can be difficult.
21. It is easy to be a dirty spammer (and it can get you results).
22. It might just be a fad….
23. BtoB organizations struggle with the applications.
24. People are not passionate about your brand, so you have to talk to them about something else.
25. It changes all the time.
26. The tools change.
27. The rules and etiquette change.
28. Effective tools vary by community and brand.
29. The same things don’t work for everyone.
30. There isn’t a formula to success (like TV).

As you can see, there are a lot of challenges with Social Media.  As individuals and as marketing professionals it is a tough nut to crack.

The good news?  There are some general rules that will help you overcome these issues.  There are a lot of brands seeing success in the social space and driving sales and ROI.

In the next part of this post (tomorrow) I’ll cover principles for success in social media.

Industry News: Twitter Trends Data

Twitter is all the rage these days, and a few individuals and organizations have done some great research on twitter trends and how twitter is being used.

2% of Tweets Match Google Trending Topics

First, Techcrunch recently reported that only 2% of all tweets match trending topics on google. So what?  Why does this matter?  What does this mean?

Well at a base level it means that people don’t tweet about the same things that they search for.  I just pulled twitter trends and google trends.  As you can see there is some overlap, but not much.

What people are searching for and what they are talking about are not necessarily the same thing.  Twitter trending topics tend to be more focused on popular culture (MusicMonday/MM, New Moon), technology (google wave) and general things going on (Christmas and Thanksgiving).

As Twitter Search continues to attract attention from major search engines it will be interesting to see more data on how search and conversation overlap.

Vik Singh’s Twitter Analysis

Vik Singh (the engineer behind Yahoo Boss) conducted an analysis of 10 million tweets and shared some trends and findings.

Percentage of Tweets with URLS: ~18%

(Percentage of those which were unique URLs: ~65%)

Percentage of messages @replies or other @x terms: ~37%

Percentage of messages with #hashtags: ~7%

Percentage of messages with retweets: ~1%