Eight Ways Twitter Could Make Big Money

The big news: Twitter is raising another $100 million on a valuation of $1 billion! Well I guess that seals it. Twitter is in it for the long haul, declaring its intention to remain a freestanding media company.

But as Bloomberg News reported, "Twitter has yet to report any significant revenue." So how can it justify that kind of valuation? Let's put it this way -- remember when Google had yet to report any significant revenue?

Twitter attracted 25 million users in August, compared with 2.2 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen. With that kind of groundswell and large database of registered users, the opportunities for highly targeted contextual, demographic, geographic, and behavioral advertising is huge. Twitter could monetize in ways that would be non-intrusive.

Twitter has reached a point where there aren't many alternatives to the micro-blogging platform. While it's not impossible for one to emerge, it's unlikely. People are pretty much wedded to Twitter, plus there are so many complementary applications in use on desktops and mobile devices around the globe. It would be difficult to topple Twitter off the top of the heap anytime soon.

Then there are fears about injecting advertising into a media environment that people enjoy. I always hear, "Well, people don't like advertising," or "We did a poll and people said they did not want to see ads." If you asked television viewers if they wanted to see ads during their favorite show, close to 100 percent would probably say "no." Now conversely if you asked people if they preferred to have their favorite show with ads or not having their show at all because there was no funding, close to 100 percent would probably take the show with the ads.

The same goes for Twitter. Of course, no one wants it cluttered with ads. But if there were only two choices -- Twitter with a way to stay in business or no Twitter -- the vast majority of us would choose Twitter with a way for it to stay in business.

The same thing happened with Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Even YouTube has pre-rolls running on certain premium partner channels and I haven't heard of any huge consumer backlash.

So, I started to think of the different ways I'd monetize Twitter if it were my site. And that includes programs that I'd find valuable as a media buyer.

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Labels: ClickZ, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Twitter

Social Media Weekly Buzz

• Myspace beats Facebook to Two-Way Twitter Sync – Myspace will now allow users to synchronize their Twitter and Myspace updates using the Twitter OAuth service. While Facebook currently allows individuals to post status updates on Twitter, and Twitter offers an app to push updates to Facebook, there is a lack of any simultaneous syncing among the services. Will Facebook soon follow suite and offer a comparable feature?

• Twitter to Soon Feature Location Functionality – While current mobile applications such as Ubertwitter offer location based features for mobile Twitter users, there is yet to be a geolocation feature built directly within the Twitter API. This is soon to change with the release of Twitter Local, which, if a user chooses to opt-in, will assign a longitude and latitude to each of their tweets. Ever wonder what your next-door neighbor was tweeting about?

• Twitter Worm On the Loose: Login Information at Risk – A rather convincing worm has been spreading throughout the Twitter world through direct messages from infected friends. The phishing scam attempts to steal login information through a cleverly disguised Twitter landing page. Mashable did alert Twitter to the threat, and the service is quickly taking measures to stop any future distribution.

• FCC Pushes for Net Neutrality – The FCC launched on Monday a website promoting web neutrality. In a nutshell, this important development should help to keep the Internet free and open, and is targeted at discrimination by Broadband providers in particular. This important act should help sustain users’ freedom in deciding which applications and services they wish to use.

• ROI Soon to be More Easily Measured on Facebook – A recent study featured on our Stats Blog noted that 84% of businesses do not measure the ROI of their social media programs. Nielson and Facebook have teamed up to offer a better way to gauge ROI through a new product called Brand Lift. Ad measurement will be improved by showing viewers a poll after viewing the ad on Facebook. The responses will be compared to those who haven’t seen the ad, with the data then being distributed to advertisers in a succinct report.

• Survey Says: Social Media Most Commonly Accessed from Work – A study published this week by Crowd Science explored and compared the usage patterns of Twitter users to that of users of other social media services. While the trends in general mirrored each other, there were some interesting differences. Twitter users were much more likely to access the service from work, from the toilet, and from a car. These findings could have potentially dirty and deadly consequences respectively.

• Social Media and Phone Calls Collide – It looks as if the phone call will soon be getting a facelift thanks in part to social media and an iPhone app called CallSpark. The app will pull social media information from Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Twitter and display this info while you call a friend. In addition, CallSpark can also act as a search engine for phone numbers, utilizing whitepages, yellow pages, Facebook, and Salesforce. GPS will help to rank the results to make sure you are receiving the most accurate information.

Labels: Advertising, Facebook, LinkedIn, online marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter

Social Media Weekly Buzz

• Facebook to Launch Voice Chat – On its way to implementing a video chat service within its platform, Facebook will be rolling out a voice chat feature during the next couple weeks. The technology for the service is being offered by Vivox, a Boston-based company that has created voice chat applications for virtual worlds. Voice chat
  will work seamlessly within the Facebook framework, and support everything from one-on-one chats to group discussions.
  


• Facebook Tops 300 Million User Mark – In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that not only was the service now in the green, but that it also had recently passed the 300 million user mark. The growth of Facebook has actually be accelerating, as it took only 5 months to reach this milestone, compared to the 8 months it took to make it from 100 to 200 million users.
  


• Facebook In Top 10 of Most Trusted US Companies – Facebook is now ranked as one of the ten most trusted companies for privacy in the US. The study was conducted by TRUSTe and the Ponemon Institute, and consisted of a two-stage survey which focused on the “privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands.”
  


• Google Takes Over reCAPTCHA – Google continues to gain power over the web with its recent acquisition of reCAPTCHA, whose technology is used to power many of the captcha security boxes to make sure the user is in fact a human, and not a robot or spammer. Google will use this technology to power large scale scanning projects such as Google Books.
  
  
• Google Public Sector Launched – The US Government, after recently declaring that it will be making use of many of Google’s cloud-based products to streamline operations, now has apps specifically designed to work with the public sector. The page is more of a directory and information site for government agencies and organizations, and will help these entities to coordinate more effectively.
  
  
• eBay Sued For More Than $75 Million Per Day – eBay, who recently sold Skype a few weeks ago to a group of private investors, is now being sued by the software’s creators for copyright infringement. The main focus of this lawsuit is around a core piece of peer-to-peer technology that Skype uses and which Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have been attempting to reclaim since early March.
  
  
• Bing Currently Fastest Growing Search Engine – Microsoft continues to make strides with its new search engine, with official data coming from Nielson MegaView Search that Bing has a month-over-month growth rate of about a little over 22%. Compare this with the second largest growth rate of 2.9%, and it becomes apparent that Bing is quickly on its way up the popularity scale when it comes to search engines.
  

Things are truly looking good for Facebook these days. Now that the service is finally making money, albeit only $2 per person, and will soon be implementing video and voice chat features, it seems as if this social networking giant is on an unstoppable course to dominating the social market. The fact that Facebook is also one of the most trusted companies in the US will do well to solidify the service’s future growth, and should be a source of great concern for competitors such as Twitter, of which Facebook has recently launched a full-scale assault upon. Does Facebook have the momentum and power to ultimately become the only social networking service worth using?

Meanwhile, Google continues on its never-ending domination of the web with the acquisition of reCAPTCHA. The technology and service is featured on over 100,000 sites worldwide, and in addition to providing increased security for Google’s services, will more importantly allow the company to improve their books and newspaper scanning process. This will undoubtedly give Google Books and Google News Archive Search a significant competitive edge. The release of Google Public Sector shows that not even the US Government can escape Google’s reach. Not that they were trying very hard in the first place however, with Apps.gov already featuring a whole suite of Google cloud-based applications. Is Google becoming too much of an influence in the web market?

eBay thought they had seen the last of the Skype debacle, however Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the original creators, have other plans for the online-auction giant. It seems that the core peer-to-peer technology featured in Skype was copyrighted to Mr. Friis and, as every download of the program is seen as a copyright infringement, the founders are seeking a mere $75 million dollars per day in damages. Most likely this amount will be reduced significantly once the investigation is underway, however other online companies should make note of this situation. With the proliferation of ideas and technology becoming more readily available in the online world, lawsuits have become more plentiful as the claimed creators seek to defend their ideas, or make a quick buck.

Bing continues to show impressive growth when compared to other popular search engines. Though still far behind in total searches, the service is quickly closing the gap. More recently, the growth has been due to a large-scale advertising campaign launched by Microsoft. The fusion of Twitter and Bing search results (bingtweets.com) and the recently launched visual search have also helped to ratchet up popularity of the still relatively new search service.

Labels: Facebook, Google, Social Media, Twitter

Twitter Changes TOS, Sparks Chatter Over Privacy Concerns

“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us… license to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish,transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

“It seems to me that there are a couple of problematic things in the Ownership section. ‘Adapt’ and ‘modify’ suggest that the Twitter folks are saying they have the right to alter a Tweeter's words, and thus the meaning, of a tweet. I doubt if they have evil intentions, but it is very easy to make something say the exact opposite of what you intended.

“By asserting the right to ‘publish’ your work, there is the implication that they have the right to publish your stuff not just on Twitter but anywhere. Suppose, however, they wanted to produce a book called the 1,000 Stupidest Tweets Ever or some other commercial reproduction of your tweets? The implication is that they have the right to do that without compensation.”

Labels: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter

Planning The Buy: Seven Value-Add Ad Placements to Consider

Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media, Paid Search

Social Media Strategy & the Importance of Listening to the Conversation

So, you’ve been tasked with developing a social media strategy, but where do you start? In most cases the focus is on building an actual presence, which means building your Facebook page, MySpace profile, Twitter page and YouTube channel. Then, just like a magician waving a magic wand, your social media channel will be up and running.

But is this really the right approach? As we all know, what makes social media unique is the ability able to socialize with your target. To simply just look at social media as an extension of what you are already doing elsewhere online is not necessarily a sound strategy, as most online strategies are based on a one way exchange…speaking to your customers, while social media strategy is about socializing with your constituents. However, can you really socialize with people if you don’t know what they are actually talking about and what’s important to them? Now, you may think you know what’s important to them and in doing so try to barge in on the conversation, but is that really the proper way to engage someone in a social conversation?

While establishing a presence on major networks is by no doubt important to any social strategy, I’d like to argue that its not necessarily the first thing you want to do if you truly want to socialize with your constituents. In order to truly socialize with your audience, you need to first listen and understand the conversation that’s already taking place. This approach will in turn enable you to form the foundation of a social media strategy that is truly based on socializing with your audience, versus just speaking to them.

A Four Step Approach
With this being said, I would like to propose a different approach towards social media strategy development that is first about understanding your audience and the conversation taking place, versus building out a physical presence on major social networks. In the case where you might be inheriting an existing social media infrastructure, which as a result needs to be managed, I would like to argue that this approach still applies, as understanding the conversation that’s taking place will enable you to more effectively evolve the channel you've inherited.

With this being said, I would like to outline an approach to social media strategy that is based on the following four sequential steps.

1) Listen
2) Learn
3) Build
4) Engage

1. Listen to the Conversation
As any company knows, based on today’s environment there’s a conversation going on. And knowing there is a conversation, but not knowing what’s being said, scares the heck out of them. From blogs to Twitter to groups/forums and more, people are talking and conversing about your brand, products and company in more ways than you can imagine.

Thanks to social media monitoring technology such as Radian6 and other tools, it’s now possible to monitor this river of news and understand what people are saying about your brand and organization. These tools enable you to see what people are saying on Twitter and in the Blogosphere and by monitoring the conversation, you can get a handle on what’s being said.

Therefore, focusing first on “Listening to the Conversation” is more important than ever, as the intelligence you can gleam from it can form the bedrock of your social strategy, in terms of how you will ultimately choose to socialize with your constituents.

2. Learn from the Conversation
It’s not just enough to listen to the conversation, but you must then learn from it as well. By having your ear to the ground, you’ll be amazed by what you suddenly can learn about your brand and the people discussing it.

With this being said, following are just a few of key strategic elements that can be garnered and be used to develop your baseline strategy:

*** Topics of Conversation ***
- What are people talking about?
- Which topics are most popular?
- Which topics incite the greatest passion?

*** Sentiment ***
- Are people speaking in a positive or negative tone?
- Are there certain topics that garner positive and/or negative responses?

*** Influencers ***
- Who’s steering and guiding the conversation?
- Are there particular individuals, bloggers or Tweeters, that have a large following and are seemingly influencing how others perceive your brand in the social landscape?

3. Build Your Presence
Now that you’ve listened to the conversation and learned about what’s actually happening on the social front, you’re now ready to begin building your actual channel. The key thing here, is that unlike most strategies where this is often the first idea that is put forth, we’ve only come to this point after listening to what’s being said, and then garnering strategic learnings from it. This will ultimately enable you to develop a much more sound social media strategy, as it will be based on what people are actually conversing and socializing about, versus your assumptions, or worse, what you think they should be conversing and socializing about.

With this being said, building your social presence is composed of a few key components:

*** The Plan ***
Once you’ve decided to build your presence you must then develop a plan of action. Specifically, what’s the timeline, how and where is your channel going to be constructed and what kind of content are you going to populate it with.

This is obviously a huge endeavor, but when based on steps 1 & 2 of Listening and Learning, it becomes much easier and more strategically sound. The reason for this is that your plan and all of its components are rooted in the realities of the social conversation that’s happening and what people are responding to. Therefore, you can be confident that the plan you put forth will ideally be well received because its based on the realities of what your audience wants, not what you think they want.

*** The Platform ***
This is the point where you put your plan into action and start building your actual social media platform…Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

In doing so, your key advantage here is that you will be building a platform that’s based on knowledge of how your constituents are already socializing, so it can be constructed with this in mind. Therefore instead of merely constructing a social media presence, what you can construct is a platform for socialization.

4. Engage Your Base
One, if not the most important, component of your social media strategy, is your Engagement Plan. The reason I say this is that engagement is really just another word for socialization and this is this is what truly makes Social Media a unique marketing medium.

While anyone can listen, learn and build, what will ultimately determine the success of your social media strategy is its ability to engage your base. In short, if you want to build your friend/fan/follower base, you need to be consistently updating your channel, responding to inquiries and developing new content.

However, it’s important to realize that engagement is a two way street. It’s about how you choose to engage with your users and also knowing how they want to engage with you. Therefore by first and foremost Listening and Learning it will enable you to formulate a 360 degree approach towards your engagement strategy, as you’ll have a solid handle on what people want from you and also what you can expect with them.

With this being said, the following are a few key components to any engagement strategy and how listening to and learning from the conversation can impact them.

*** Building Your Fan/Friend/Follower Base ***
For many social media programs, this is what success is often measured against…the ability to build your social community. This of course is very important and therefore, warrants very specific attention.

Understanding why someone would want to engage and become a friend/fan/follower is very important. Therefore incorporating elements of the conversation within your branded social environment in the form of content, updates and more will help you to readily build your Fan/Friend/Follower base as they will see you as understanding their needs and most importantly relevant.

*** Outreach ***
Social media also affords you with the opportunity to reach out to particular “influencers” as a means to extend the reach of your social media communications. This is particularly true in the case of Blogs, as identifying bloggers who focus on particular topics and have a decent following is a great way to further extend your message and get others, besides yourself ,to talk about your offerings.

Therefore having an understanding of what’s being discussed in the Blogosphere, can help you to offer and put forth content that will garner interest from them. This can in turn lead to long term and important relationships with a very influential circle of tastemakers and evangelists.

*** Integration ***
Engaging your audience via social media does not only have to happen within your social media properties, but it can also happen on your branded web properties as well. The act of installing chiclets throughout your site or by integrating Facebook Connect makes it possible for users on your site to engage in a way that enables your website content to be propagated as social content.

Therefore, listening to the conversation can provide insight in how and where you should place chiclets and what kind of content might likely get propagated into the social environment. This is particularly important as your website is where many of your key evangelists are residing and giving them the ability to propagate content into the social networks can play a huge role in helping your overall channel to grow.

*** Applications ***
While there have been far more misses than hits with applications, what they do afford is an opportunity to create a branded social engagement within a user’s personal social environment. Therefore, applications make it so a user does not have to come to you to socially engage; rather they are able to incorporate your brand into their environment.

Additionally, I personally believe that also by deploying a “Listen & Learn” strategy as it applies to application development can fundamentally change how they are perceived and adopted. The reason I say this is that by basing your application development decisions on the conversation that's happening within the broader social media environment ensures that you are fulfilling a definitive, versus a perceived, need with what is built and deployed.

Conclusion
I believe that the four steps outlined in the proceeding paragraphs provide a solid road map to success in this new and evolving medium. The key takeaway here is that by deploying a Listen >> Learn >> Build >> Engage strategy is that it’s based first and foremost on understanding the environment and who’s participating within it.

The fact is, social media can not be approached with a “Build It and They Will Come” mentality; rather success lies first and foremost in an “Understand and They Will Engage” approach. For its only you are able understand who you are talking to and what’s being said, will users then socialize with what has been built and success ultimately realized.

Labels: Application Development, Blog Outreach, Brand Awareness, Facebook, online marketing, Online Monitoring, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Twitter, web 2.0, Widgets, YouTube

Social Media Weekly Buzz

Labels: Facebook, online marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, YouTube

Social Media Weekly Buzz

Labels: Facebook, Google, Industry, Landing Pages, online marketing, Online Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Video, web 2.0, Yahoo, YouTube

Great Free Media Planning Tools

Labels: ClickZ, online marketing, Online Media