Putting Twitter Into Perspective

Perspective, a leading authority in apprentice training and distributed learning, has taken their online presence a step further by joining Twitter, the micro blogging social network.

The move comes as Perspective aim to utilise the network as a message platform, using it to communicate important and relevant information regarding the world of education and apprenticeships to all interested parties on the internet.

The rise of the social network Twitter has been swift and well documented, with many businesses and brands beginning to realise the potential of integrating Twitter into marketing strategies. Perspective will be using the social media tool to provide insights into issues from the education field, whilst also liaising with other authorities on schooling and apprenticeships in an effort to increase its contact base.

"Twitter has become such a popular network that it is almost impossible to ignore" commented Jim Davis, CEO of Perspective. "We will be looking to use Twitter as another medium through which we can impress our personality and expertise as a company into the public domain, as a way of highlighting and discussing important issues in the world of education, training and apprenticeships".

Perspective provides learner management software that acts to help enterprises, businesses, schools and colleges with monitoring a learner's progression and attendance in the field of distributed learning.

Perspective's Sunesis system allows both tutors and apprentices to track progression throughout the period of a training course, as well as creating trainee targets and areas that need more focus. The Sunesis Training Management System (TMS) also provides facilities for funding management, recruitment and the creation of training reports.

Perspectives CLM software has been designed to support the delivery of 14-19 diplomas, whereby many students undertake a distributed learning environment that sees them work outside the grounds of their school or college. CLM allows for the monitoring and measurement of student attendance and links the various partners involved in the educational process. This serves to relieve the strain that was originally placed on manual monitoring solutions.

Perspective is also part of the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) Association, which has defined a set of rules and regulations regarding the sharing of data in the education sector, aiming to streamline the data sharing process.

Through SIF, software application agents communicate with each other through a central communication point, improving accessibility and compatibility across the various different types of software available to the education industry.
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Can Facebook and Twitter Help a Startup Company Succeed?

Toronto, ON (Vocus/PRWEB ) June 1, 2009 -- ShipGooder, Inc. today announced that it has officially launched pages on Facebook and Twitter, the social networking websites that are both experiencing explosive growth by leveraging community-based interaction.

Image via CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

The term "Social Networking" has been gaining notoriety over the past few years. As of today, Facebook has over 200 million active users, while Twitter already has 17 million registered users in the U.S., up 3,000 percent from a year ago. Although Facebook and Twitter are primarily focused on individuals rather than corporate entities, both websites offer tremendous advantages for startup companies to bring their message to the masses.

Facebook provides businesses with a page that includes an overview, announcements, photo galleries and discussions. Users on Facebook become "fans" of the business, and are kept up to date on what the company is doing. When an individual becomes a fan, their friends on Facebook are presented with a "fan" notification; the friends then can become fans as well. The viral effect of friends announcing their "fandom" to other friends can lead to hundreds of thousands of followers for a company. The Starbucks coffee company alone currently has close to 1.8 million fans on Facebook.

Twitter is an announcement system, where users post a short message called a "tweet". The tweet can be a simple description of what they are eating, where they are going, website links and photos. Users "follow" other users on Twitter and receive a real-time stream of announcements. As each user follows a new user, they can "tweet" their new following, again creating a viral effect. Companies are using Twitter to post news and announcements, using the medium to promote their marketing messages.

"Facebook and Twitter provide ShipGooder.com with powerful communication channels for our customers, website visitors, and new visitors who may not be aware of the exceptional free services that ShipGooder offers," said Nancy Chafee, VP of Sales and Marketing for ShipGooder, Inc. "We're using both of these services to augment our existing sales and marketing efforts, promoting our brand, and our primary message that ShipGooder.com provides instant shipping rate quotes from FedEx, DHL, the U.S. Postal Service alongside quotes from regional and local courier companies," she added.

"ShipGooder.com is the 'search engine for shipping rates', offering its services free of charge, with no advertising and no visitor registration required," said Franc Vodopivec, President of ShipGooder, Inc. "Our proprietary Rapid Rate Search system allows smaller couriers and messengers to compete directly with large national carriers, and we're going to continue to promote this message through the mediums that prove to be the most effective," he added.

ShipGooder has used Facebook and Twitter to announce their new Courier Directory of carriers from across the U.S. and Canada, as well as announcing the recent addition of international rate quotes. Can social networking help achieve success to an innovative startup? The question was best answered by Nancy Chafee, who stated, "Word of mouth about ShipGooder is our most powerful promotional vehicle. We are delighted that 'word of mouth' is evolving into new, creative and exciting mediums."

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Twitter Integrates Search

For a while now, Twitter has been making use of the technology they acquired when they bought Summized back in July 2008, but until now this had only been available under a separate website.


The integration has taken a few months, but it appears to have finally made it through to the main site, as per the visions sketched during the discussions surrounding the partnership.

Since the early days, search has been an important element of Twitter:

"There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future."

And it looks like the future has arrived, what's more, as well as being able to find who's Twitting about a particular topic, you're now even able to save your searches to return to them at a later date.

Give it a try!

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Growth in social media spend

A study by Forrester Research found that while half of marketers said they would boost budgets, social media spend remains very small in proportion to other media -- 75% of respondents who knew their budgets said they were planning to spend $100,000 or less over the next 12 months.

Image by M. Keefe via Flickr

Areas that they highlighted for investment included social networks, blogs and user-generated content.

However, the majority of social media budgets are not predetermined -- 45% said they were generated on an "as needed" basis throughout the year; and 23% said that their funds were scraped together from wherever they could find them.
The research also highlighted that money being allocated to social media comes at the expense of other budgets -- the biggest proportion of respondents (35%) stated that social media spend came out of the corporate marketing coffers; while 24% of the sample said that it came from the advertising budget.

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Bebo Goes European

Bebo is launching local-language versions of its social networking site in five European countries, offering premium video content via media partners, the company said Monday.

Image via CrunchBase

Bebo will offer sites in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as it seeks to enlarge its user base. It also plans to leverage its Open Media technology, which allows media companies to distribute content on Bebo's network.

Bebo was bought by AOL in March 2008 for US$850 million as part of AOL's plan to move away from being an ISP and more of an advertising-focused content provider.

Bebo has been strongest in the U.K. market and has about 22 million unique visitors per month, according to January figures from ComScore, However, Bebo lags in user numbers behind social networking giants Facebook and MySpace.


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And the Brit Award goes to... Twitter!

Having spent last night sat in front of the TV watching the Brits, I begun to wonder how many people would be forming their own opinions based on what we liked and what we didn't.

With the help of Twitter, it didn't take long this morning for me to find out what my friends through of it, and I was intrigued by the mixed views on the event.

Image via CrunchBase

Having drawn my own conclusions last night, I wondered if the mix reaction was only based on my friends or whether this was in fact a true representation of the public in general.

Having sent myself on a quest to find this out, Twitter itself proved to be the answer to my question.

To get a full picture of what people using Twitter (even those you're not yet following) thought about the show, type "brits" in the Twitter Search box or alternatively see the results here.


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