Twittering up a Buzz, or Potential Uses for Twitter

Never one to have been an early adopter of social media, I have only just recently gotten around to signing up with the latest craze – Twitter.

Basically, Twitter allows it’s users to create a profile and post short messages, either through the site or by mobile phone, which are then sent to the page, and or phone, of anyone “following” the user in order to allow your friends/colleagues etc to know exactly what your doing.

Now, I’ll admit, I didn’t immediately get what the point of this, or the use would be. I don’t feel the need to let everyone know exactly when I’ve just sneezed or realised I’ve been walking about with my fly undone, and I’m pretty sure not even my closest friends and family would really care! But after a little more thought and a quick scout through some user’s profiles, I began to realise that it actually has alot of potential beyond simply keeping in touch with friends.

Even celebrities get caught "flying low"...

One of the better and more creative uses for Twitter that I have seen is London Tower Bridge’s profile. Some clever clog has written a piece of code that works with Twitter in order to automatically provide information on when the bridge will be opening (and why) and when it will be closing. This is clearly handy for anyone living in London, and regularly crossing the Thames at this point, to be updated with via their mobile.

Another method, employed by Objective Associates‘ very own Mr Software Scotland himself, is to mini-blog on events as they happen. Unfortunately, understanding this mini-blogging takes a bit of thought, sometimes more than my brain is capable of!

Understanding mini-blogging on Twitter can, at times, require more than moderate intelligence...

In SEO circles, Twitter has received alot of press as a useful method of driving referral traffic to your (or your clients’) website. However, gaining referral traffic only really works if you have interesting content that will appeal to a reasonable number of people. I’m not sure many people are going to link to our Web Wise Business website on twitter to tell their friends about “web design scotland” as it’s just not really one of those topics people tend to talk about. Or maybe we’re just not prompting them enough…

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Psychology and music at work

Music, and more specifically, its effects on human psychology and physiology is something that has always captivated my interest.

As a psychology student, my honours year dissertation looked at the topic of “the effects of frenetic, motivational, oudeterous and favourite music on anaerobic athletic performance“. Or, in layman’s terms, the effects of differing types of music on sporting performance, specifically in the field of weight lifting.  While the findings from my own study were not statistically significant enough to support the hypothesis that music improved performance, there have been a variety of studies which suggest that music can significantly improve performance on a variety of tasks.

The management consultancy company, Case and Company, carried out

a test of the effects of music on productivity at the Brooklyn factory of the

American Machine Foundry Co.. The production factors studied indicated

a 2.8 percent rise in the efficiency of the test department, a 4.1 percent

increase in the efficiency of 40 workers whose performance could be

minutely measured and a 31.2 percent increase in the promptness of

those workers

The management consultancy company, Case and Company, carried out

a test of the effects of music on productivity at the Brooklyn factory of the

American Machine Foundry Co.. The production factors studied indicated

a 2.8 percent rise in the efficiency of the test department, a 4.1 percent

increase in the efficiency of 40 workers whose performance could be

minutely measured and a 31.2 percent increase in the promptness of

those workers

The management consultancy company, Case and Company, carried out

a test of the effects of music on productivity at the Brooklyn factory of the

American Machine Foundry Co.. The production factors studied indicated

a 2.8 percent rise in the efficiency of the test department, a 4.1 percent

increase in the efficiency of 40 workers whose performance could be

minutely measured and a 31.2 percent increase in the promptness of

those workers.

So, while listening to my ipod on the train to the Objective Associates offices this morning, I began to wonder how listening to music while at work might effect the performance of certain tasks. Now obviously if your making phone calls for a large part of the day then the Steve Miller band’s “Joker” blaring in your ear isn’t exactly going to help (unless people really do call you “the Space Cowboy” and you feel the need to share this).

Steve Miller Band

However, if your performing tasks such as software development and coding, or designing the skin for a website (or even writing the content for a plumbing and heating website!) then would it have any beneficial effects on performance?

One study, conducted by management consultancy Case and Company on the effects of music on productivity at the Brooklyn factory of the American Machine Foundry Co. provides some interesting results. The study found a 4.1% increase in efficiency of the 40 workers whose performance was minutely measured.

Therefore, although AMF co. went bust (due to circumstances other than music in the workplace I hasten to add!), it would seem its not entirely impossible that music could credably emerge as a future tool for increasing productivity in the office space too. Most likely to be introduced by savvy, early adopting business managers….

…. or maybe not.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

My time with Objective Associates…

Sitting at my desk in our Stirling offices, and having decided to finally join my colleague and Director, Mr Software Scotland himself – Alex Ogilvie, at this blogging malarkey I’ve spent some time contemplating what to write. Finally I settled on a quick review of my first 5 months with Objective Associates, Scotland based software development and web design company.

Since joining the company in June of this year, I have learned alot in a relatively short space of time. While I already had a reasonable knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (on page stuff such as keyword density and meta-tags), I am much more confident in my knowledge of the area now, particularly when it comes to explaining this mysterious art to clients!

While there is the constant doom and gloom of the looming recession hanging over most businesses in the UK at the moment, it is something that, for the time being at least, we have yet to see any negative impact from (yes, I’m knocking wood and crossing fingers of course!). If anything, we seem to have gotten progressively busyer in recent months. While naturally I would like to believe that is at least in part due to my own efforts, I also believe it is a result of savy businessmen and businesswomen.

Many businesses are realising that there is a greater need to spend on marketing in order to maintain the pre-economic decline level of business they might once have seen. In this modern age of web 2.0 and e-living, what better way to do this than establish a powerful online presence. I read recently that advertisers and marketing departments, generally satisfied with the ROI they see from online marketing, are set to increase annual spend on SEO by more than 50%. The number of new businesses offering SEO services in the UK alone this year is a strong indicator that it is an increasingly growing industry.

Hopefully we will see an even bigger increase in clients in the coming months. I’ll keep you posted….