If VCs are so clever, how come nobody follows them on Twitter?

How many of you are following venture capitalist companies on Twitter? Not many I would suggest and I doubt you would be surprised if I told you most VC companies on Twitter are utter rubbish.

VCs, I know, I know, are the devil but it is beyond belief that they treat social media with disdain at the same time as investing in social media. It’s almost as if they’re asking people to hate them.

Startups can’t live without VCs and in a proper, perfect world following VCs on Twitter would be imperative for any young company. Tweets about the companies they’re interested in, sectors they want to be involved in, engagement with the startup community, interesting tips, the whole works. Startups would LOVE to be led by VCs. Continue reading

Brands need 7,500 Tweets to rank in the Top Five results on search engines

A new study has revealed, unsurprisingly perhaps, that lots of tweets means that brands rank higher in search engines.

Conducted using data from digital and search agency Branded3’s Twitter petition site, Twitition.com, and Google ranking data, the study analysed a sample of the site’s 1.4 million Twitter followers, 7.6 million signatures across 198,000 ‘Twititions’.

According to the company when someone signs a Twitition a tweet is sent from their account and for the purposes of the study it has been assumed that the number of signatures equals the number of tweets about a specific URL – the Twition.

Confused? So am I, but it sounds good. The study says that more than 7,500 Tweets means a Top 5 search enginge ranking while more than 10,000 Tweets almost guarantees a top ranking.

Click here if you want to find out more. I’m quite interested, but my brain hurts now.

Is social capital the new currency or a pile of Somaliland shillings?

Last summer I had an adventure and flew to Addis Ababa from Mumbai and then travelled through Ethiopia on African buses to the Red Sea and spent a week in Somaliland on the way. Right up there with the best of life.

I had to hire a soldier for $15 per day, had a few problems with child-soldiers off their tits on qat (a masticated opiate), saw amazing cave drawings at Las Keel, nearly lost a finger when ‘my’ soldier macheted a fruit melon and had my first ‘dry-swim’ in the Gulf of Aden, in temperatures of 50°C. Continue reading