A Social Media Analytics firm recently reported that nearly 50% of Justin Bieber followers on Twitter–were fake. This meant that nearly 18 million followers on Justins twitter account either belonged to no ‘real’ person or belonged to a spam account–and that dear readers is a lot of spam!

That’s like a newspaper saying its circulation was 100,000 a day, but it was only being read by 50,000 people.

Now of course, even if the first 18 million twitter followers were nothing more than spam bots, there’s still another 18 million ‘real’ followers that Justin has–and not many people have even 1 million twitter followers, let alone 18 million, so Justin still has twitter-cred.

However, that does beg the question–how many followers of our Prime Ministers twitter account–were real? For the uninitiated, the Prime Minister tweets at @NajibRazak and has nearly 1.4 Million followers, about 10 times less than Justin Bieber–but nearly 7 times more than his political rival Anwar Ibrahim (who has ‘just’ over 250 thousand followers).

So were these followers real?

If you don’t know what RSS is, prepare to have your mind blown. If you’ve never used RSS, chances are you’re still bookmarking your favorite websites and blogs and visiting them on a regular basis painfully one at a time. RSS feeds allow you to magically consolidate all the content you read online, into one platform where you can get your daily dose of information all at one go.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it was designed as a simple way for web authors to syndicate their content across the internet. Conversely (and more importantly), it also provides a way for web users to consolidate all their favorites blogs, searches and forum threads onto one single platform.

So what is it really? Well I’m not too sure of the technical specifications to be honest, but here’s how I think it operates.

I just finished Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, the definitive book on crowdsourcing, and although it was written nearly 4 years ago, I was really bowled over by key insights throughout the book. Crowdsourcing is more than just the design work or iStockphoto, there’s also an offshoot into the world of Crowd-predicting. Utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to predict anything from sports results, Hollywood sales or even Presidential elections, and it appears these prediction markets actually do a pretty good job of predicting the correct outcome. They’re not right 100% of the time (then again neither are the experts), but overall the Crowds can –and do–predict with great accuracy.

The premise of crowd-predicting is simple. Get a whole bunch of people together and then ask them to predict the outcome of a particular event, once each individual prediction comes through you then aggregate that information to get the final result. Proponents of crowd-predicting say this result often beats the ’experts’, and they have some data to back it up.

A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.

Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]

I’ve been using twitter for some time now, as I hope to make it the default social media for promoting my blog. Thanks for platforms like bufferapp and bit.ly, I can track how often people visit my website from twitter. The result aren’t good, in fact I’d be lucky if a tweet was able to garner 2 hits to my website, most of the time it hovers around an agonizing ZERO!!

So what am I doing wrong?

Buffer is a great tool that helps your organize and schedule your tweets to maximize your shameless attempts to promote your website on twitter.

Well let’s face it, I’m on twitter but with only 39 followers its not really adding any hits to my website…well maybe one or two. What’s clear though is that good blog content without any social media promotion on twitterr , LinkedIN or facebook means I have to rely on Google bringing in the hits, that’s like starting a company with only 1 customer and then relying on that customer only. If I’m going to get 1000 hits/ month, then I’m going to have to get serious on twitter and start churning out content that aligns with what my followers on twitter want to see.

Working for a Multinational company means I have colleagues from all over the globe, some of whom I’ve developed a friendly relationship with, friendly enough to ‘friend’ them on facebook. Today I received the tragic news of the Oslo bombings not from CNN or BBC, not even from the Google news, but over a facebook status update from a colleague of mine in Norway. The sad news of such an atrocity was heart-wrenching, but in the midst of this I decided to do a small study to see how twitter was reporting the news as opposed to the usual mainstream internet news companies.

So going online I searched twitter for Norway and saw the very first tweet on the list, a condolence message from BO himself:

Fox news, the great TV channel that brought us the Simpsons and Bill O’ Reilly today had it’s twitter account hacked. Hackers manage to break into @foxnewspolitics twitter account and start posting bogus tweets, one notably about an assassination of Barack Obama. The hackers painstakingly painted a picture of Obama dying from two shots to the head over the course of 3-5 tweets separated by a couple of minutes.

Twitter Blackbird is a cool wordpres plugin that let’s you embed tweets the way they appear in twitter without having to go through snapshots and uploading jpegs into Wordpress. The tweet will then appear prominently and with all it’s formatting intact (if the tweeter had a black background, the backgroud would appear as part of the tweet…AWESOME!).

Nathan Yau, the guy over at Flowing Data (an amazing blog),  recently posted about a website called tweetolife that allowed you visualize tweets by either gender or by hours. So for instance a simple check on the word ‘shopping’ allows you to see what words were most associated with shopping on every tweet sectioned out by gender. For instance Men are more likely to tweet about shopping portals, or amazon or cash. While women are more likely to tweet about dresses or their parents (weird!). The data itself isn’t complete but it does let you kill about 10 minutes of your time trying to figure out the twitter universe. I had a fun time looking at the differences between men and women, confirming my suspicions and creating doubt in some others.