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6 in 10 Twitter Followers are Existing Customers

More than six in 10 (64%) people who follow a brand on Twitter are existing customers of the company, according to [pdf] a study released in October 2011 by Chadwick Martin Bailey. Results from “10 Quick Facts You Should Know About Consumer Behavior on Twitter” indicate about six in 10 (61%) also want to be the first to know information about the brand.

No other reason for following a brand on Twitter is shared by more than half of followers. However, almost half (48%) follow to receive discounts and promotions. Another 36% want to gain access to exclusive content and 28% want to receive content and information to share and retweet with others.

6 in 10 Followers More Likely to Recommend

Six in 10 Twitter brand followers are either more likely to recommend many (18%) or a few (42%) brands as a result of following them. Another three in 10 (31%) are not more likely to recommend a brand they follow on Twitter and about one in 10 (9%) don’t know.

Twitter brand followers 35-49 are much more likely to recommend many brands they follow than those younger than 35. In the 35-49 segment, 33% are likely to recommend many brands and 14% are likely to recommend a few. Although a much higher percentage of followers younger than 35 are likely to recommend a brand overall (61% compared to 47%), only 14% are likely to recommend many brands and 47% are likely to recommend a few brands.

Interestingly, 33% of brand followers in both age groups are not more likely to make brand recommendations. The differentiator comes in the percentage who don’t know: 20% for those 35-49 compared to only 7% of younger followers.

Half of Twitter Users Go Online More than Once an Hour

Fifty percent of Twitter users go online more than once an hour, compared to 34% of Facebook users and 29% of overall online users. Facebook users are slightly more likely to go online once every couple of hours (46%) than Twitter users (40%) or overall online users (45%).

Meanwhile, 20% of overall online users go online once per day, compared to 17% of Facebook users and 7% of Twitter users. Only 5% of overall online users, and 3% of both social network users, go online two to six times per week.

Nearly Half of Twitter Users Been Tweeting Less than 1 Yr

Thirty-eight percent of Twitter users have been tweeting for six months or fewer and another 9% have been tweeting for seven to 11 months, meaning 47% have been tweeting for less than one year. Thirty-eight percent have also been tweeting for one to two years, and 15% have been tweeting for more than two years.

In addition, one-quarter of Twitter users older than 50 have been tweeting less than one month.

1/3 of Followers Interact w/More Brands This Year

Thirty-three percent of brand followers on Twitter are interacting with more brands this year, while 57% are interacting with the same number and only 11% are interacting with less. Men increased their rate of brand interaction more from the previous year (38% compared to 27% of women).

Other Findings

• 79% of Twitter users follow fewer than 10 brands, with 36% following one or two.
• 75% of Twitter followers have never unfollowed a brand.
• 26% of Twitter users 18-35 follow a brand, compared to 17% of followers 35-49 and 13% of those 50 and older.
• Half of followers say they are more likely to buy a brand after following, including 55% of men and 45% of women.

Performics: Entertainment Top Twitter Category

Entertainment is the brand category most followed/liked on both Twitter and Facebook, according to an August 2011 study from Performics and ROI Research. Data from “S-Net, The Impact of Social Media” indicates 46% of brand fans on both social networks are fans of at least one brand in the entertainment category.

While the top five brand categories are the same on both social networks, there is some variation in how the next four categories are ranked. After entertainment, Twitter users are most likely to follow brands in the restaurants, food, electronics, and apparel categories. In contrast, Facebook users are most likely to like brands in the food, restaurants, apparel, and electronics categories.

About the Data: Data was collected through a 15-minute online questionnaire of 1,491 US consumers age 18 and up fielded in January 2011.

Picture in your mind a happy scene from your past and then imagine being able to record it – maybe even upload it to YouTube.

It is still a distant possibility, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a system which can scan your mind and create a visual reconstruction of your thoughts.

They hope that eventually the breakthrough could lead to helping stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.

‘This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,’ said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and co-author of the study.

‘We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.’

The technology uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure blood flow to certain areas of the brain used to visualise certain shapes in our minds.

The software creates a reconstruction of a person’s thoughts.

Researchers fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into a computer programme which predicted the type of brain activity it was likely to provoke.

The software would then measure the real brain waves of participants, matching those to the predictions.

The programme goes on to gather a selection of clips, which it believes match the brainwaves most closely, producing a composite video to complete the reconstruction.

The resulting images are far from high-definition – visualisations of a scene involving actor Steve Martin show a blurry, unrecognisable outline – but researchers believe it is an important first step.

‘We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,’ said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study.

The software monitors blood flow to certain key areas of the brain

‘For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.’

The developments have been welcomed by Dr Sharlin Ahmed, research liaison officer at The Stroke Association.

‘Around a third of people who have a stroke are left with communication difficulties, which can leave many stroke survivors feeling incredibly isolated and frustrated,’ she said.

‘It can also be extremely tough for their families who often find it hard to understand how their loved one is feeling.

‘We are always looking for new ways to better understand the needs of stroke survivors, especially those who find it hard to communicate.

‘Using brain imaging technology to interpret what a stroke survivor might be thinking is a very interesting concept, however it’s likely to be a long time before anything like this is used in practise.’

The researchers have reassured those worried about an Orwellian intrusion into their inner thoughts that there is no need to panic – the technique requires participants to spend hours upon hours in an MRI scanner.

Source: www.bigpond.com

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An online gaming system has been launched in the UK that could revolutionise the industry.

The ‘cloud’-based OnLive service gives users access to on-demand games via the internet with no need for a console.

Gamers can play around 150 games on various devices including PCs, Mac tablets and net-connected televisions.

It was launched at the Eurogamer Expo at Earls Court, west London, where around 40,000 enthusiasts will gather over the next few days to try out the latest games.

Hundreds queued to test the new system.

‘This is gaming over the internet,’ explained Bruce Grove, OnLive’s senior director of business development.

‘We’ve had on-demand radio, on-demand videos, now we have on-demand video games.

‘We have all the latest titles streamed direct to your TV, PC, Mac tablet, any device. All you need is a broadband connection.’

The gaming industry is now bigger than the film and music industries, with the UK market – the biggest in Europe – worth almost worth almost 2.4bn.

It is predicted that by 2015, the gaming industry in the UK will be worth well over 3bn.

Playstation and Xbox have recently experienced problems with hackers accessing customers’ personal information.

But chief executive and founder of OnLive Steve Perlman said this does not pose a problem for them, as personal information is stored with a third party billing agency which is not on one of their servers.

He said: ‘The worst they could do if they hacked into our data centre is perhaps get your high score.’

OnLive, which launched in the US last year, has been developed to eliminate piracy.

Matt Hill, deputy editor of T3 Magazine, said it would be almost impossible to pirate the games – but warned there were some future pitfalls.

‘Because you don’t have the physical game, you are accessing it remotely from a server, you can’t pirate it, you’re literally streaming it from someone else’s server,’ he said.

‘There will be an argument made that eventually someone might be able to figure out how to get in and play the games for free, I imagine that is a long way off, but there’s always someone working on it.’

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Facebook doubled its revenues in the first half of this year, to 1.6 billion dollars ($A1.5 billion).

The Wall Street Journal reports that, with 750 million Facebook members worldwide, the online site has attracted major interest from advertisers.

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An expert says cybercrime is soaring, it already costs Australians more than burglary and will only increase as more people use smartphones.

Marian Merritt, internet safety advocate with computer security company Norton, said a new global study showed 69 per cent of adults around the world experienced cybercrime in their lifetime, much more than previously thought because this type of crime mostly isn’t reported.

‘Ten per cent of us have already experienced mobile device related cybercrime. That’s cybercrime on our cellphones, tablets and other devices we carry with us as we go about our business,’ she said.

‘It’s only going to get bigger because we are all doing more and more with our mobile devices,’ she said.

Cybercrime on mobile devices has produced a new word: smishing, or SMS-based phishing which aims to gain private information.

In some countries, many people go straight to mobile devices for all their computing needs, bypassing the home PC route. More and more, mobile devices are being used for routine financial transactions.

‘We are going to walk up to buy coffee and use our mobile device to make that financial transaction, we are going to check our bank balance and we are going to make purchases,’ she said.

‘This is what’s coming in the future and we need it to be safe. This is truly a phenomenon we need to take note of.’

Ms Merritt said part of the problem was that users didn’t treat smartphones in the same way they treated their home PC.

‘We are all playing little bird-related games on them. We put funny stickers on the back of them. They don’t seem like serious devices that need security but boy they really are,’ she said.

In its fourth global review of cybercrime, Norton surveyed the experiences of 20,000 people in 24 countries including 802 in Australia.

Taking into account actual financial losses and other factors such as time lost, the study puts the global cost at $US388 billion over the last year. That makes cybercrime bigger than the combined global market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined.

For Australia, that’s a direct cost of $1.8 billion and another $2.8 billion in time spent resolving cybercrime issues. On that basis, cybercrime costs Australia more than the traditional crimes of burglary ($2.2 billion) and assault ($1.4 billion).

The most common form of cybercrime relates to computer virus and malware infection (57 per cent of respondents), followed by online credit card fraud (13 per cent) and hacking of social network data (12 per cent). Worryingly, the survey said, most of this occurred in the last year.

Ms Merritt suggests some simple precautions:

- use security software and keep it up to date (Norton is of course a major vendor).

- use a password for a mobile device (something more sophisticated than 1234) so it can’t be readily used if lost or stolen.

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Websites all over the world are being told to pay a US company for the rights to their own .xxx domain name or risk having their trademarked names associated with pornography sites.

If they do not pay for the domain themselves within that time, porn sites and other buyers will be able to snap up addresses like facebook.xxx or google.xxx.

ICM Registry stands to make up to $400 million from Australian websites alone, with two million businesses operating online, according to the ABS.

Web addresses with the .xxx domain are now available for US$199 ($191).

More than 4000 celebrity names have already been blocked from use in what has been dubbed the “online red light district”.

Celebrity names blocked by ICM Registry include Barack Obama, Beyonce, Angelina Jolie and Margaret Thatcher.

Source: http://www.ninemsn.com.au/

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