I was looking at my followers page tonight and noticed that Twitter have upgraded it a little. Both the following and the followers page have been improved cosmetically : now there is a drop down link to mention someone in your tweet, direct message them and block them (and follow them if you are not already following them).

You also have the option to view your following page as a list. This method shows a little less detail so makes it much easier to browse your follower pages.

Although this is just a small change in design, it is still the first time that Twitter has changed it’s main site in a long time. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come

I was reading yesterday about how best selling author Alice Hoffman’s reacted angrily about a negative review via Twitter. Hoffman was particularly unhappy about this review from Roberta Silman.

Yet Hoffman has a huge reputation and has built a large audience. There may be lots of readers who crave books that have their feet planted both in reality and fairy tale, complete with mysterious passages like those introducing each chapter of this puzzling, and, in the end, unsettling book.

She has sinced deleted her Twitter account but Gawker managed to do some screen captures before the account was taken offline.

The tweet below illustrates how nasty Hoffman got with her tweets (this was one of the 27 tweets directed at Roberta Silman) :

No apology has been issued by Hoffman or her agent yet but it’s something that I recommend she does do, less she loses even more fans. Check out some of these replies yesterday from some of her followers :

Ron Charles

Islinda

I don’t think this will be the last time we see a celebrity lose it on Twitter. Not that I’m complaining as it makes for good reading!!

The world was saddened yesterday by the news of pop legend Michael Jackson passing away. The internet went into meltdown with the LA Times, one of the first sites to report the death, shutting down because of the volume of traffic.

Just like many other people, I was a big fan of Michael Jacksons music. Thriller was the first album I bought as a child and I recall my mum even taking me to his awful film Moonwalker! And just like most other people, my opinion of him as a human opinion dropped considerably over the last 10 years due to all the allegations from minors etc, something which I don’t think I need to go into in this post.

Nevertheless, the response from the world about his passing has rightfully been positive. One person who wasn’t respectful was self professed internet celebrity Perez Hilton. When the news first came out Perez wrote a post suggesting that his reported death was just a stunt to generate interest in his upcoming tour.

The backlash he received was huge and he duly took the post down, but not before many people screenprinted the post.

The above post was quickly replaced with a few respectful posts including a rememberence post, however the damage was done. You only have to read some of the replies to see how angry people are about Perezs actions.

At the moment there is a huge campaign on Twitter to unfollow Perez (see #unfollowperez). Twitter themselves appear to be editing the Twitter Trends area so that this campaign doesn’t show however it doesn’t seem to be slowing it down.

I have to agree with Pete Cashmore that this kind of thing (speculatative posts) undermines the crediblity of all bloggers. Fake death reports on the internet are common but I think those with a large readership need to do a little more research before posting pure speculation.

If you were using Twitter yesterday then you would no doubt have read about how UK Furniture store Habitat generated a major backlash from the Twitter community.

The whole thing started a few days ago when Tiphereth Gloria from Digitial Tip noticed that Habitat were attaching the latest Twitter Trends hash tags to promotion links they were sending out. They used the terms #iphone, #apple and they even used #iran to capitalize on the current situation in Iran, something which really brought them some unwanted bad press.

According to Digital Tip, they didn’t apologise to followers or try to make amends in any way, they simply deleted the tweets that people had complained about.

During this time they were prepearing their PR reply :

I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message. We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.

Claire
Habitat Head Office
London

Habitat seemed to have totally distanced themselves from this whole thing and looked for a scapegoat. They have really messed up but I have to agree with Digital Tip that most people would have been happier if they just put their hands up, said sorry and admitted that they messed up.

This is a classic example of what happens when a company lets someone with no experience with social media look after their social media promotion.

Many Twitter users do not like to have affiliate links sent to them via Twitter. I myself have unsubscribed from many users who constantly promote products they apparently love, but then proceed to link to the product with an affiliate link!

However, some people don’t mind being pushed good offers via Twitter and others actually invite it. Darren Rowse has decided to capitalize on this by launching his own dedicated promotions accounts at Twitter. He still tweets from his personal twitter account however he will now inform readers of good deals and offers through the account @ProBloggerDeals.

Darren is not someone to take his readers for granted and has fully explained what people can expect from following the new account :

@ProBloggerDeals is unashamedly an account for promotional Tweets. If you’re offended by people pitching you products or services (at discounts) – it’s probably not an account for you to follow (and I take no offense at that – this won’t be for everyone).

I have no doubt that other successful websites have follow suit and create a dedicated offers account for their readers.

Link : ProBloggerDeals