All the Buzz of a Google Press Launch

9 02 2010

The press conference has changing.  It has become a form of ‘event marketing’ and it is no longer restricted to selected journalists (and bloggers).  They have to be invited of course otherwise it wouldn’t be a press conference but they are no longer the exclusive channel for the launch message.  We can all attend the launch.

This change has already taken place in the technology sector with two major examples in the past week.  Apple, who have mastered the craft of the press conference event, launched the iPad, and today Google launched its new killer social networking application Google Buzz.

For me what was extraordinary about the launch of Buzz was that this morning I didn’t know it was about to happen.  I picked up the buzz around ‘Buzz’ on twitter.  I saw that the press conference was going to be channelled live on YouTube so I joined Jeremiah Owyang and the select few who were actually there and tuned in.  I realised immediately that Buzz would be big so I ‘live blogged’ over at PR Media Blog whilst the conference was still on, screen grabbed an image from the YouTube feed and posted my take a couple of minutes before the conference ended.

I subsequently discovered via @scobliezer that meant I had broken the embargo that the journalists attending had signed up to.  Surely, they broke their own embargo?


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Journalism, Media evolution, Social Networks, Social Web, Twitter

The Twitter Formula

9 02 2010

twitter-formulaIt is a common view that the optimum length for tweets should be the maximum length of 140 characters (including spaces and punctuation).  Wrong.

A key element of the success of twitter is the extent to which information can be passed on, or the use of the retweet as it is commonly known.  Despite the recent introduction of a native twitter retweet function, the retweet or RT was created by users and the original method ‘RT @username’  is still the preferred means of retweeting.   If other users are to retweet your microposts without editing them, there needs to be space left for them to do this within the 140 character limit.   Therefore the optimum length of a twitter message depends on the length of your username and the simple equations is as follows:

x = 140 – (y+5)

In this formula x is the optimum length of the message in characters and y is the number of characters in your username.  The five is the number of characters required for using RT @, including the space – plus an extra space before the original tweet (thanks to The Crocodile for pointing out the need for that final space).  Geektatsic.


Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : Twitter


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