August 7th, 2009
Noticed a lull in the conversation in the past day? Its the result of a distributed denial of service attack that hammered Twitter, along with Facebook, LiveJournal and Google. For the most part Facebook and Google weathered the attacks, but Twitter and LJ crumbled under pressure. The attacks seemed to have been launched by pro-Russian crackers targeting a pro-Georgian blogger with a massive botnet.
Things may be a little quieter than normal on Twitter ’til the service fully recovers. Our update script is currently sipping down a trickle of tweets rather than drinking from the normal firehose. While we wait, why not check out the Fail Whale Fan Club for a little history on Twitter falling down?
Posted in News | Comments Off
July 21st, 2009
Starbucks received a boost on Twitter today with their ecoupon, enabling visitors to get a free pastry with their coffee, becoming a top trending topic. Most of the tweets seem largely positive such as this from @sereneangel who says “free starbucks pastry this morning=great way to start the day :)”. While some of the Tweet250 team are over the in the States I guess we could have joined in but it seems we missed out. Anyway shows how far a brand can come from creating a coffee revolution through to having to offer free food to get people to come to their stores. What’s next free coffee?
Starbucks gives Twitter a sweet tooth
Posted in News | Comments Off
July 3rd, 2009
Okay, it’s a little bit of a cheat, but if you overlook the fact that gum is our in-house magazine, it’s still nice PR for the tool. Here is an excerpt from the article:
…our hope is it becomes something people use either in research of as a tracking tool to see how a brand is doing. As we said its early days, the kick-off meeting was only six weeks ago, but it should prove an interesting test to see if brands pick up on the need to listen and respond to what people are saying about them.
Tags: grand union, gum, magazine, PR, tweet 250
Posted in News | Comments Off
June 29th, 2009
The BBC reached a monthly peak in June after the twin events of Glastonbury and Michael Jackson’s untimely death sent mentions of the BBC over 17,000 a day. Other mentions were in relation to Wimbledon and the BBC’s own expense scandal.
But by far the most mentions were for Jackson who was mentioned in association with the BBC 4,467 times over the weekend which is perhaps not surprising given his global appeal. However despite high number of mentions for this event the “BBC + Glastonbury” got a total of 2,312 mentions over the weekend. Again perhaps not surprising given the multi-channel content access available over the weekend.
BBC mentions on Twitter in June
Posted in News | Comments Off
June 29th, 2009
So the day finally came when we removed the barriers and launched Tweet 250. In the end it all seemed very sudden. Andrew and Petr ripped through the remaining bugs and it was launched internally to the agency.
The objective of the beta for the group involved was to get something ‘out there’ in a manageable form. However over the next few months we plan to make some important improvements to both the usability of the site but also the access to some specific data such as specific tweets related to a brand.
So that’s the beta. But why did we do it all? Well it started out as a project designed to look at how people were using channels like Twitter to talk about the recession. But like all start points this quickly became an increasingly less important path to go down as people started to talk about recovery.
Then it struck us that there was no real way of measuring and comparing brand mentions on Twitter over a sustained period of time. As a digital agency we use measurement tools to advise our clients. In this instance we wanted to create our own tool.
So please use the tool and let us know if there is anything you think that would make it better. We should also say a big thanks to Twitter who not only have created such an iconic tool but also for white listing the agency as twitter developers.
Tags: Beta, grand union, live, tweet 250
Posted in News | Comments Off
June 5th, 2009
Tweet250 is go! The brand birdy has landed. Well, we’ve managed a holding page. It feels good.
Tags: design, excitement, holding page, logo
Posted in Beta | 1 Comment »
