Category: Twitter

Buying Twitter followers?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on November 04

I’ve been carrying out a small experiment in one of the areas of greatest potential abuse of social media: Twitter marketing. If you Google “Twitter buy followers,” you’ll see lots…

Could Twitter be worth a billion BusinessWeeks?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 16

I read on TechCrunch that Twitter’s latest round of funding values the company at $1 billion. This leads me to wonder about the widening valuation gap between new and old…

Do Twitter people spell better?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 02

Just got a press release from GooseGrade.com with results of a study that Twitter users, on average, actually spell better than the average schmo. The study was conducted last week…

Twitter’s long sleepy tail

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 22

Just back from a long weekend, I read on Mitch Joel’s blog that Twitter has millions of “users” who signed up for the service and haven’t done anything on it…

New Twitter TV show might be a hit…

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 26

OK, chances are that the Twitter-inspired TV show will be a flop. Most shows are. But when it comes to successful tech-inspired plots, think about Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. The…

How Microsoft will scrape and crunch Twitter

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 02

Jennifer Chayes, the chief of Microsoft’s new research lab in Cambridge, Mass., was telling me yesterday about her Twitter epiphany. A theoretical mathematician, Chayes was at one of Tim O’Reilly’s…

Analytics on Twitter? Count me out

Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 30

I grimaced when I read Adam Kmiec’s post, Twitter Needs a Thumb. His idea is that Twitter should have a thumbs up/thumbs down voting system. This would provide us all…

Why follow someone on Twitter?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 09

Adam Kmiec enumerates what he looks for in a Tweet, and why he decides to follow certain people. I’ll add my own criteria. Like Adam, I follow people who link…

Twitter & Google: What War of Words?

Posted by: Heather Green on March 04

The Internet was all a-Twitter yesterday about some comments that Google’s Eric Schmidt made about Twitter. The takeaway from some observers was that Schmidt slagged Twitter by calling it a…

The downside of Twitter

Posted by: Stephen Baker on November 26

About 2,200 people follow my feed on Twitter. So if I tweet this blog post, which I just might do in 20 minutes or so (5:20 a.m. EST), how many…

We’re doing Yammer: A workplace Twitter

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 11

When we saw that Yammer, a messaging service for the enterprise, won the TechCrunch 50 award, we had to try it out here at BusinessWeek. Heather and I both signed…

What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on August 07

I was in the San Jose airport last night, waiting for my horribly late red-eye, when I checked my Twitter account. Lots of people had responded to a question I’d…

Building brand with Twitter

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 17

Andy Beal gives a good and brief instructional manual for those who want to dive into Twitter. My only beef is that he makes Twitter sound like a lot of…

Twitter: Community trumps computers

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 26

I just wrote a piece on Twitter, its maddening crashes and the excitement of investors, including Jeff Bezos, to pour money into it. I guess they figure that with enough…

Looking for more CEO resume tweets

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 30

Well, I should have known. The editor wants CEO and other celeb Twitter resumes for the BusinessWeek piece. Yes, she’d probably go for a wonderfully imaginative everyman/woman example. But the…

Twitter resumes: You’re a… lobster?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 30

I’m looking through these Twittery resumes, and I divide them into two types: One for appealing to machines (or people acting like machines), and the other for connecting with humans….

Write 140-char resumes for BW

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 29

Calling all entries: BusinessWeek is looking for 140-character resumes of top CEOs, politicians, and everybody else.

The Twitter Story I’ve been working on

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 15

Do businesses (and the rest of us) need Twitter? Is it around for the long haul. Dozens of Twitterers added to the reporting.

Sorting through Twitter comments: overwhelmed

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 09

Did you know that sometimes it’s easier to write an article when you’ve done minimal reporting? It’s true. You have the reporting equivalent of a tarp and two poles, you…

Twitter story (open thread)

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 08

UPDATE: Instead of sentence by sentence, I’m now twittering just the topic sentences for each paragraph. The reason: To get people engaged, the sentence has to state a position and…

Twittering a story on Twitter: Today

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 08

UPDATE: You can follow the story on this thread. the best way to keep up with the conversation is to follow this link. Starting at 2:30 eastern today, I’m going…

Creative Business Uses of Twitter

Posted by: Heather Green on April 30

For the revision of our blog cover story that we’re doing for the magazine, we’ve been rounding up updates of how businesses are using social media. But a response to…

Twitter and the Odyssey

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 29

I had a four-hour delay at O’Hare a few weeks ago, and I picked up the Odyssey. I’ve been reading it on and off ever since. As I write, Odysseus…

Is Twitter lugging a legacy?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 24

Very sobering post from Larry Dignan on Twitter’s erratic technology. (ex Dennis Howlett) Money quote: The big question: If Twitter were built today would it have used the same infrastructure?…

What to do when Twitter sputters?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 21

It’s been a bad weekend on Twitter. It’s not exactly broken. It sends feeds from about five of the 62 people I follow. The others? They’ll show up eventually, we’re…