As you may know Twitter asks users to distill what they want to say to 140 characters.
Well, here is a guide for governments and pulbic institution types for using twitter – it clocks in at a heft 20 pages.
Hmmm, some usefull stuff in here, done by a strategist with UK Government, but 20 pages? In the age A.D.D. and CPA (continuous partial attention) that qualifies as a book.
Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments
The online microlender KIVA is bringing its services to the United States. Traditionally, KIVA provides “crowd powered” micro-loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Not amymore, it is now facilitating micro loans in select U.S. cities.
The service has been very successful. Since it’s existence Kiva says it has has raised more than “$75-million from 500,000 people and lent the money to about 180,000 entrepreneurs in 44 countries”. (source:globe and mail)
For those organizations, companies who have no clue how to leverage Twitter, here is a good reference guide, courtesy of the magazine muchmor
Twitter Usage Diagram
Here is a very interesting post about a study that looked at the impact of New York City’s waterfalls public art project. Last fall, there were 4 man-made waterfalls in various parts of NYC harbour.
The study from MIT SENSeable City lab guaged the digital footprint of these attractions by mapping the distribution of visitors to the respectives exhibits, grabbing where photos were taken etc.,
By collecting and analysing this type of digital information a city now has sophistacted tools to track the return on investement for such projects.
Fascintating stuff.
Tech Crunch points out some the Marketing challenges that Microsoft’s much hyped search engine, Bing, has been having. Well I would like to share a simple one but rather glaring error.
At the Bing demo site there is a video of the Bing offerring but there is no embed code. Hmmm, curious you can post it all over the place (facebook etc), but no Embed Code so Umm how do I show it you in this blog post? Oh yeah, a screen grab. Did I miss something obvious? Or doesn’t Microsoft want people to embed the video?
And I swear yesterday that video was in FLASH, today when I went to it was in Silverlight. I must be losing my mind.
