Leslie Lee Archive
Showdown: Twitter vs. Instagram
They say a picture is worth more than a thousand words – or in this case, 140 characters. This August, for the first time U.S. smartphone owners visited Instagram from their smartphones more frequently and for longer periods of time than they visited Twitter. Data from comScore’s mobile measurement report claimed that Instagram had an average of 7.3 million daily active users (DAUs) while Twitter had 6.9 million DAUs during the same time period. In overall visitor numbers, Twitter still wins (29 million unique U.S. smartphone-based visitors in August, versus Instagram’s 22 million.) But as Mike Isaac at AllThingsD reports, these numbers indicate that “Instagram’s users appear to be returning to the site on a more frequent basis, and spending longer on the site each time they return.”
PR Tips from the Land of Happily Ever After
Fairy tales seem to have come into modern media vogue this past year. Between shows like “Once Upon a Time,” “Grimm,” and now “Snow White and the Huntsman,” these age-old stories have been given new life (for better or worse), complete with special effects and eerie soundtracks. But no matter what lens you view them through, there is always something to be learned. They even have some PR advice to share!
The Hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and, to show his contempt for the Tortoise, lay down to have a nap. The Tortoise trod on and trod on, and when the Hare awoke from his nap, he saw the Tortoise just near the winning-post and could not run up in time to save the race.
Punctuation, Social Media, and Evolving Rules of Communication
A few weeks ago one of my coworkers passed along an article from The Wall Street Journal, Is This the Future of Punctuation?! It’s an entertaining read about the historical uses of punctuation marks and different theories on how punctuation rules might evolve in the Internet age. The author, Henry Hitchings, begins by explaining why some folks get so worked up about punctuation:
People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.
Five Simple Rules for Controlling Your Office Radio…and Social Media
A recent Inc.com article by Matt Hendrickson, The 50 Songs (and Albums) to Listen to at Work, caught my eye this week as I scrolled through the usual jungle of RSS feeds. We keep a lively office here at InkHouse, and that liveliness is reflected in the somewhat eclectic mix of music that streams over our office speaker system. Thanks to Sonos, we all have access and can put on any Pandora or MOG station/track that suits our fancy. It strikes me that this system makes our music process quite similar to social media, in that it is a form of publicly broadcasting a somewhat personal statement. And it turns out that the unofficial guidelines we have developed here to keep this system working translate well into guidelines for social media activities.
12 Great Free Tools for Social Media Monitoring
“Herding cats: A saying that refers to a task that is extremely difficult or impossible to do, due to one or more variables being in flux and uncontrollable.” – Wikipedia
For many people, the process of social media monitoring brings to mind the phrase “herding cats.” Social media is constantly in flux, and by its open and decentralized nature it is, in some sense, uncontrollable. And in this particular case, the cats might as well be cheetahs: as the recent news about Osama Bin Laden proved, in the social realm media can come as fast as 4,000 updates per second.
Luckily, there are tools to help monitor this constant barrage of media. Far from attempting to be a comprehensive aggregation of available options, this post highlights just a few of the many free tools that can be leveraged to create an effective social media monitoring process.
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