Group items tagged

I've been capturing the Twitter Public Timeline since late 2009.  I have now nearly 6 million records, each one containing the message, of course, but also the name of the user and their "Followers" and "Following" count at that point in time.  I started doing scatter plots of this data and was amazed at the detailed structure evident in the data, that illustrate some interesting ways in which Twitter is being used.  No single graph can show it all, so I'm giving you a series of charts, each one showing an area of the Following/Followers phase space 10ox larger.

Much of the TV, video, film and sport we watch is sponsored by a brand, a product, a corporation. But … why? With humor and persistence, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock dives into the hidden but influential world of brand marketing, on his quest to make a completely sponsored film about sponsorship. And yes, the onstage naming rights for talk were sponsored too. By whom and for how much? He'll tell you. 

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

As more shoppers arrive in stores with price and product data literally at their fingertips via smartphones, their interaction with sales associates - most still earning a risible $7-10 an hour in an era of $4-per-gallon gas - is more crucial than ever. A study conducted by the Verde Group and the Wharton School of Business found that the single most critical element in customer satisfaction was not billion-dollar branding, advertising or extensive use of social media, but the quality of those personal moments when a shopper chooses -or not - to become a paying customer.

When the camera switches on in one of the busiest courtrooms in Massachusetts, murder arraignments, traffic and drug cases heard there will become fodder for a new experiment: how bloggers and other citizen journalists can cover courts using new media and social media.

A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden's death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White House announcement. Keith Urbahn wasn't the first to speculate Bin Laden's death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. Why did this happen?