Tagged: social media

May 24, 2010

How Exciting: Algorithm Detects Sarcasm

The amusing nerds over at Geekosystem, and the more serious nerds over at Slashdot are reporting in that someone has created an algorithm capable of picking sarcasm in written statements. Great, just great. That immediately ruins the chance of ever messing with some straight-laced, sensible robot slave in the future.

It’s called SASI (semi-supervised sarcasm identification algorithm), and apparently “SASI achieved a precision of 77% and recall of 83.1% “on an evaluation set containing newly discovered sarcastic sentences, where each sentence was annotated by three human readers.”” More info and a couple of thoughts after the jump.

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May 19, 2010

New Facebook Privacy Tools: A Cunning Ruse?

Everybody is mad at Facebook for destroying privacy all the way across the Internet. Here’s the thing though, they’ve recently had this meeting, right? You’ve probably heard about it. Only two things appear to have come out of this meeting so far, and neither address the issue at hand.

In essence, the two new tools described here allow you to give specific devices (your phone, work computer, and home computer for instance) the authority to log-in to your Facebook account. While this is fantastic for account hacking prevention, and are therefore important for privacy, they’re barely related to the reasons an angry mob has formed at Facebook’s gates.

My rant after the jump.

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May 10, 2010

Social Media Win: A Radio Station That Listens

It’s far too easy to focus on all the negative things in life, especially in this slippery social media scene that people are still getting a handle on. As a friend of mine quite wisely observed just yesterday – “social car crashes are compelling.”

As compelling as an epic fail may be, it’s still important to shine a light on all the little wins. Here’s one I prepared earlier.

A few days ago one @chess65 decided to share something of interest on the ABC Radio National Facebook Page. This was not a spammy comment, or something completely out of context – it was a link to Sounds of Australia content – something that may well be liked by people who like Radio National.

Moments later it was moderated into oblivion. How this turns into a win, and what that says about ABC social guidelines after the jump.

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May 6, 2010

Moshtix Needs To Sing Their Sorry Song

Update 17/05 at bottom of post, after jump

Splendour in the Grass went on sale today, and Moshtix had a pretty good go at ruining absolutely everything. Quick summary for the uninformed:

8:45am Everyone in Australia who loves music preps their computer
9:00am 32,000 tickets go on sale
9:01am – 2:14pm It all goes horribly wrong, site outages, mass complaints, Aussies take their complaints to the social space, Moshtix disable comments on Facebook, realise their mistake some hours later and switch comments back on
2:15pm All tickets are sold out, thousands of people are filled with rage

After the jump I’m going to lay out a few examples of the kind of negative sentiment Moshtix have been receiving over the course of the day, and then lay out some blunt advice for what I’d like to see them do now. Yes, there will be swearing.

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April 15, 2010

US Library of Congress Archiving All Public Tweets – Even Yours

Due to an issue with the their official blog, the US Library of Congress posted the following note in Facebook earlier this morning, and gave followers of @librarycongress a heads up tweet. I’ve posted the note here, to prevent you from having to login to Facebook if you don’t want to/work does not allow. Speculative thoughts at the bottom.

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (By the way, out of sheer coincidence, the announcement comes on the same day our own number of feed-followers has surpassed 50,000. I love serendipity!)

We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can possibly conceive.

Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Twitter plans to make its own announcement today on its blog from “Chirp,” the Official Twitter Developer Conference, in San Francisco.

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

In other words, if you want a place where important historical information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!

This raises a few questions, like… who has access to the data? Who will be using it, and to what end? Does it include all the location data? It’s the US Library of Congress, so is the data only available to US citizens? If so, then what about my tweets, can I at least see those from here in Australia? I can imagine market research organisations clawing their eyes out and selling whatever souls they have left in storage to gain access to this wealth of raw opinion and conversation.

So, who has been archiving all the data from 2006? I always assumed Twitter would be keeping it somewhere, but the fact that they only give us access to 3200 of our tweets at a time made it seem less likely. Does that mean the Library of Congress have been keeping track of them all this time? If so, then why just announce it now?

More importantly, as someone who prefers to keep a back-up of my own personal Twitter stream – so that I might look back on it in later years with fondness – will I, the individual have access to this? Do I even need to bother to keep an archive of my tweets any more? Give us your thoughts, people. Is this benevolent, or kind of scary? What’s the value of what’s essentially a snapshot of the thoughts, emotions, events and opinions of the last four years – as expressed by individuals?

@tali3sin

[Source: Original Facebook Note HT @barrysaunders]

April 8, 2010

User-generated electioneering

Every election these days is called ‘the internet election’, and not surprisingly since each election brings new innovations in social media. Howard Dean did really well out of e-campaigning in 2004, although he was probably less enthusiastic about it once ‘the scream’ appeared all over YouTube. MyBarackObama.com was a cracking success, expanding into a SMS programs, 2,000 YouTube flicks, 3 million online donors, 5 million ‘friends’ across Facebook and other social sites. In Australia, Labor claims a lot of its success is due to marshalling support through digital, and the Coalition admits they didn’t make the best use of it, falling before the bold and youthful Kevin07 brand.

There’s one month of furious electioneering to go in the UK before folks head to the polls, and we’ll see how the parties make best use of digital and social in particular in these next few weeks. Already, my Facebook news feed has changed. Status updates allow everyone you know to see your opinions, comment, and get notifications of others’ comments. It wasn’t that long ago that these were about X Factor, but political conversations are taking their place – people are linking to opinion pieces on the economy and social policies, and the same political discourse is all over twitter too.

But what I’ve found most interesting is how user-generated content has already made a big splash. Following the launch of (Conservative leader) David Cameron’s much mocked airbrushed billboard campaign, Tory-bashers are giving those ads an amusing PhotoShop once-over at mydavidcameron.com.

Labour had an official crowd-sourcing poster competition won by a 24 year old’s entry depicting ‘Nice Dave’ sitting on a 1983 Audi Quattro (below), recalling a character from recent BBC drama Ashes to Ashes in which a police officer inexplicably wakes up in 1981.

The ad was launched last Saturday by Labour’s agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, but immediately repurposed by Euro RSCG (the Tories’ ad agency) to great effect (more on this here).

Clearly crowd-sourcing hasn’t paid off in this example (more of an own goal really), but I’m looking forward to more UGC in the coming weeks.

February 23, 2010

Official promotions roll out across FourSquare

As I am sure anyone with an iPhone is currently aware, the latest darling of the social app scene is a little location based game called FourSquare. FourSquare allows a user to “check in” to locations and through doing so you can become the ‘Mayor’ (most frequent check-in’s in a designated period) and earn ‘badges’ for completing certain combination of check-in’s.

There has been a lot of conversation around the potential use of FourSquare by local businesses but until today the only Sydney based use I had seen was a cafe that gave a free coffee to the “Mayor.” However earlier this morning I was visiting Sydney creative agency Lowe Sydney and when I went to check in I was presented with an interesting little tab in the top right corner (fig. 1)

Fig. 1

When you select this tab you are then taken to a promotion screen for a local business (in this instance the Baroque Bistro Patisserie) and you are presented with the opportunity to earn a gift if you check in 3 times. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

This is a brilliant use of location based data to target users and bring a point of difference to a business. While FourSquare doesn’t have a large enough user base to work as a reach medium, it is perfect for small businesses working to increase their repeat business. Were I in area and assuming that Baroque do reasonable food and drinks this incentive offer could very well be the differentiator in where I go to get my morning coffee, after all if their coffee is just as good as the next place why wouldn’t I go there and get a free French Macaron.

From a glance it appears that the process of implementing one of these specials is a reasonably straight forward matter of filling out an online form.

The one feature I would really love to see added to the promotion page would be a ‘tell your friends’ feature, so that even if you’re not checking in there, you could push a ‘shout’ to your friends via FourSquare/Twitter/Facebook and share the promotion with others who might find it interesting.

I personally will be paying very close attention to see what kind of traction this gains with Australian businesses.

- @JoelyRighteous

February 18, 2010

@Westpac Twitter Account is “So Over it Today”

Maybe one of the best brand tweets ever by @westpac, but sadly it appears to have been deleted. Some are calling it social media marketing genius whilst others suspect that Westpac may not have stocked the kitchen cupboard with enough TimTams today.

Here it is, preserved in screenshot glory:

Substantiated by a Google Search below:

Anyone know the real story – let us know in the comments

January 8, 2010

Refreshingly Fun: What we've been doing with Pepsi

You’ve probably seen the billboards and bus ads by now, but in case you weren’t aware, we recently launched the digital side of Pepsi’s new Hit Refresh campaign. MTV are pushing it on television, we’re running it here on the ‘net.

It’s pretty cool, a mash-up of Pepsi re-inventing their image and placing a huge focus on digital marketing the combination of which turned into a Twitter based scavenger hunt, with the prizes coming in the form of cold hard cash. Well, not cash so much as 101 slick little EFTPOS cards loaded up with $250 each.

A brief run down: the refreshment company activation team (known as Pepsi Refreshers) make their way out into the world, choose an obscure location in a well populated Australian city, and then start tweeting out clues about where they are from the Pepsi Australia Twitter page. We’ve rigged it so that game playing, money lusting, Pepsi fans can also catch these updates on the Facebook Page, or at the Hit Refresh site, in order to more effectively race each other to the prize.

This is excellent because the entire thing can essentially be run from a smartphone, an easy thing for a Pepsi Refresher to have on them at all times. Plus, the players themselves aren’t tied into any particular service in order to keep up with the clues. It’s infectious, interactive, and incredibly efficient – social media at its best, really.

Creative mastermind Toby Caves really took advantage of the fact that APIs and widgets basically rule the internet now, and the main campaign site grew into a deliciously crafted overview of everything that’s happened, and is happening in the competition at any given time.

The latest clues are fed in from the Twitter page, Facebook fans are prominently displayed, a schedule and Google powered map let people know which cities the Refreshers are going to pop up in next and the Winners Gallery shows off all those lucky sods with their fancy new free money cards. It’s all ruled over by an explanatory Flash header, and coated in a vibrant blue that only exists between shades of Pepsi and Twitter.

Speaking of those cards, we feel like they’re a bit of a win. Based on the global Refresh campaign posters and candy colour palette, they are a bit more recognisable and fun than straight up cash in your hand while still being just as usable.

Stamped with the new Pepsi globe logo, we’ve also slapped some helpful thematic suggestions for spending the well won dollars. Things like style, scene, and so on – after all, if you win a prize you shouldn’t be using it to pay your bills (unless you really need to, then it’s ok). As a general rule though, prizes are fun, should be used for fun, should be spent on your self, and we wanted to encourage that.

We wanted the prize cards to be like the campaign, simple, effective, fun and it feels like we nailed it.

No, it’s not modest or polite to rave on about oneself, but this is a pretty exciting project for us, and the response so far has been amazing, so we thought we’d throw out a few more details and see what you all think.

Check out the campaign, hit us up in the comments and let us know.