The micro-blogging website Twitter now has 10 million users in the UK and 140 million worldwide. This is a significant figure and exceeds, for the first time, the number of people that take a daily newspaper.

The website is a public forum where major and minor celebrities vie with each other for the number of followers and comedians such as Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais frequently ‘tweet’ their thoughts, jokes and public disputes. As well as the famous and pretenders, Twitter is an open forum for members of the public and businesses to put information out into the public domain with links back to your business or project.

Twitter is a fascinating place for checking opinions, generating publicity and provides great opportunities for businesses to promote their products.

Here are some commonly used terms that you need to know about:

• Tweets – new posts on your profile that instantly appear on the latest tweets lists of your followers and is searchable by others.
• Hashtag – adding # to a word or phrase (the words must be run together or concatenated) enables your tweet to be easily found amongst other Tweets on the same subject. These can often be topical, controversial, funny or informative e.g. #cricketfilms was a particular favourite of mine recently ‘Driving Miss Dhoni’, ‘The Wicket Man’ ‘Monty Panesar and the Holy Bail’ ‘The Curious Case of Len Hutton’ etc made me smile! Also programmes like BBC’s Question Time have a live twitter response under the hashtag #bbcqt.
• Retweet – where a tweet is copied to someone else’s timeline.
• Reply – reply to a tweet and the message goes back to the originator with twitter tag included so it will appear.
• Twitter username – the ‘@’ sign followed a name of your choice, choose wisely!
• Tweet to – You can message people directly and it’s sometimes worth a punt on asking someone famous or influential to retweet a message on your behalf.
• Trends – a live list of the most popular topics being tweeted about using hash tags or simply keywords or phrases. ‘Promoted’ tweets are effectively paid advertising links to new products or media.

A Twitter account is free and could help you promote your business or new project. Get in touch if you need help or advice on setting up your twitter account on 01788 844014 or use our contact form.

Businesses and website owners could be facing fines of up to £500,000 if they do not comply with the new Cookie Laws¹. A new KPMG study found about 95% of UK companies have yet to comply with new data protection rules due to come into force on 26^th May 2012.

The legislation – postponed from last year – limits the use of tracking cookies on business sites and requires businesses to get browser’s permission or alert the browser to their existence. Fines for non-compliance could be up to £500,000.

Cookies are small text files which are used by websites to analyse their visitors’ Internet behaviour. The files are stored on a user’s hard disk to enable targeted advertising and personalised web pages and are also used by e-commerce sites to manage users’ shopping carts.

The directive becomes enforceable UK law from 26 May 2012. From then on, websites need to obtain users’ opt-in consent first if they install cookies that pass on information about browsing activities to third parties. Non-compliant websites may be subject to a fine.

Last year, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) gave UK companies a year to get into line with the EU regulations, which require them to obtain consent before placing a cookie on a user machine.

The UK Regulations mean that a website operator must not store information or gain access to information stored in the computer (or other web-enabled device) of a user unless the user “is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information” and “has given his or her consent”.  The consent requirement in the UK Regulations replaces the previous position which provided that visitors should be given the ability to refuse cookies.

The only cookies that do not need users’ consent are those that are strictly necessary to fulfill the user’s request for services. That will cover, for example, the use of cookies to remember the contents of a user’s shopping cart as the user moves through several pages on a website. Other cookies, including those used to count visitors to a website and those used to serve advertising, will require consent.

Please get in touch with Dinesh on 01788 844014 to discuss how you should be complying with this legislation or send us an email enquiry form.

1. The law comprises the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 as amended by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 (“UK Regulations”).