The thing we’re facing now is that, you know, the State Department is suddenly really cozy with Twitter because they are like, “Oh wow, we were trying to get this done with AK-47s and you guys got it done with Tweets. Can we be friends?” But I maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. You don’t want your technology, you don’t want Twitter, to look like it’s simply a tool for spreading U.S. democracy around the world. You want it to help for good, but you don’t want it to look like you’re in the pocket of the U.S. government. So we try to speak out and say that they have no access to our decision-making.

Biz Stone Isn’t So Sure About Twitter’s Cozy Relationship With the State Department

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Spreaking to Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD’s D9 event, Costolo said that Twitter was a “remarkably successful business” that currently has over 80% of its advertisers choosing to renew their campaigns on the service. Referring again to Twitter ads as “orders of magnitude higher” than traditional web adverts, advertisers including Volvo have seen 50% engagement rates via one advert on the Twitter website.

Radio Shack are reported to have upped their instore exchanges and purchases by double digits from the day before they ran an advert on Twitter, keeping the campaign exclusive to Twitter users.

Twitter CEO: 80% of advertisers choose to renew advertising with us

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Full-time, human hosting of a brand’s main Twitter account is unquestionably a better approach, said Zach Seward, the main voice behind The Wall Street Journal’s @WSJ account.

The @WSJ account has been run by people since January 2010, Seward said. “The metrics went up considerably and almost immediately after switching from automated to personal. We’ve seen the same effect with several other accounts.”

Why The New York Times replaced its Twitter ‘cyborg’ with people this week

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It doesn’t look that great for an investor to sell company stock before an IPO, but Fred Wilson doesn’t deny that his firm has already sold some of its Twitter shares.

When TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld asked him point-blank, Wilson replied, “I don’t want to say what we’ve done, but I wouldn’t argue with any of the reports out there.”

Fred Wilson Doesn’t Deny That He’s Sold Twitter Stock

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As it stands, a Promoted Tweet is shown to anyone who searches for a term or who clicks on a Promoted Trend. This is targeted, a bit, but not enough to really capture high click-through rates – after all, how many times have you clicked on a Promoted Tweet at the top of a trend you clicked on? This would be an issue for smaller businesses who need to see high returns on investment through sales.

Advertisers Speak Up About Twitter Ads: “The click-through rates were paltry.”

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I reject the idea that Twitter trips up naïve users such as Mendenhall and other athletes who don’t fully understand how social media works, as Washington Post sports columnist Jason Reid recently wrote. If that were the case, why did Olbermann and Carlson get into Twitter trouble? As TV talk-show hosts, they’re experts in maintaining second-by-second media discipline. I also don’t think the 140-character count of Twitter is much of an excuse, either. I doubt if any of the controversial tweets in question could have been avoided had the writers used more space. It appears all of them wanted to provoke or stimulate their readers from the get-go. Nor do I think that Twitter turns the meek into blowhards, a proposition I’m willing to test with a scientific experiment. And don’t even try the “open microphone” excuse on me.

Twitter in a Wringer

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For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist…

…How come [NYT ombud Arthur Brisbane] is ignoring all this? Stelter was way ahead of the rest of the NYT, but Brisbane incomprehensibly discounts his excellent work. That might be because he doesn’t consider tweeting to be part of a NYT reporter’s job; it might be because he doesn’t consider retweeting to be reporting. But Brian Stelter is a prime example proving that neither is true. Brisbane should have taken this opportunity to congratulate Stelter on a job extremely well done. Instead, he is completely overlooked, in favor of tweets from Zeleny and Roberts which came out more than a quarter of an hour after Stelter had publicly jumped onto the case. Which, of course, is an eternity in the twittersphere.

The hermetic and arrogant New York Times

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