When will Twitter make money…

Recent rumours and an article sent to me by James Neill, suggest that MSN might have just bought Facebook at the right time to extend their search reach. The Facebook search tool seems to be getting more intelligent, although we all laughed in the silliness at the $240m for the 1.6%. However, is this becoming more of a sensible decision. Only time will really tell, but it could be heading in the right direction. This made me wonder about Twitter…

Again rumours abound, Google will buy Twitter, Microsoft will buy Twitter, even Facebook want to buy Twitter. Hell, even I have put in a bid for Twitter, but they are yet to phone me back. I will wait though, its a pretty good offer. Especially considering that no one really knows what Twitter’s future potential is for earning income.

There are plans to launch a search box on the homepage. Firstly, this will make life alot easier for the user – I currently use twitter search in my browser toolbar. Secondly, if this is done in the right way then it could become a nice little earner. There don’t seem to be any potential valuation on this although I am sure this is why they have been able to raise additional funding through Benchmark and IVP. Search will enable Twitter to give some clarity to its quickfire updates, which can by all accounts get pretty confusing. Just ask Skittles… What search will do is give a massively social aspect to searches, tailoring it to recent brand results and chatter. Something that could be deeply interesting to brands. The challenge is to deliver this in a way that doesn’t push their audience away.

The other option is to go for a “paid profile” route similar to a Facebook Sponsored Page or a YouTube Branded Channel. Some brands who have really gone a step further than anyone else may find this slightly annoying and in practice I’m not entirely sure how it could work. Zappos for one probably think they are supporting the whole Twitter brand platform already with their smashing profile. If only all brands were doing something this smart.

The other option is branded apps. TweetDeck seems prime for this. Movies, Entertainment clients could offer themes, TweetDeck packages for users. Potentially this could also attract a younger demographic who are into this customisation. The T-Mobile Tweet Deck perhaps, a magenta version of the traditionally black bird and deck.

Anyway, thats it for now.
M

Six free tools for a good brand overview

I know these sorts of lists get posted all the time, so thought I would post them myself and give comment.

HowSociable? - pretty good tool, if perhaps a little basic and confusing to use. Some posts appear a few times, so makes it difficult to really guage. However, good for a quick overview. http://www.howsociable.com/orange

Addictomatic – clearly created by someone who smokes alot of the harder stuff. Inhale the web? anyone. Gives an interesting outline of news stories and gives some really good breadth in terms of selection. Debatable depth. http://addictomatic.com/topic/orange
socialmention – A social search tool really. Enabling you to pre-select what areas you want to search before progressing. Searches don’t seem to return completely accurate results but UI is good and searches will improve the more the tool gets used. http://socialmention.com/search?q=orange&t=blogs&btnG=Search
Vitrue – They love to make advertising social apparently. They have even created their own top 10, of which Apple (yawn) tops the list. Their fab little tool allows you to compare two brand names which is useful as a really quick guide. And I love them because T-Mobile smashes Orange for mentions! whoop. http://vitrue.com/smi/?q1=orange&q2=t-mobile&x=26&y=14
Sitevolume – Recent winner of a MashUp award. Congratulations. Gives you the option of 5 sites: Digg, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to search for brands, names etc on. I think therefore its a bit limited in that respect. T-Mobile kicks arse on Twitter incidentally…. Graphs are ok, but a bit basic. Would love to see this expand to multiple sites. http://www.sitevolume.com/index.php
Techrigy – SM2. Reports from Mashable are good, so i will take their word for it. However, this is a really good tool. Not as simple as the others, but still powerful all the same. 1,000 searches available for free, so a pretty chunky starting point as well. http://sm2.techrigy.com/main/signup.aspx

Social Media Gurus

When David Ogilvy passed away, he was reffered to The Advertising Guru by those in India. A pretty strong support of character and contribution to advertising. For Indians the Guru is looked upon as a god, so Ogilvy would have loved this sort of comparison. However, it seems that Guru has now become a self-suggested term to describe one’s knowledge.

In many cases I would be embarassed to find someone bestow a guru title on me unless I had justified it through a life of great knowledge, wisdom, and authority. The guru is there to educate and to impart his wise words across his “students”. The “life of greatness” is clearly the benchmark for becoming a guru.

Therefore it amazes me that there are people out there calling themselves Social Media Gurus. Given the short amount of time Social Media has been around, lets call the launch of Freindster the starting point, it suprises me how quickly some people have nominated themselves as Gurus.

Perhaps collectively we need to create some “social media guru” rules.

1) Thou is only a social media guru if you were conceived in social media

2) Thou shall never call yourself a social media guru. You know who you are. Stop it.

3) Thou shall only be called a social media guru once you have passed away and contributed as much to social media advertising as Ogilvy did to advertising.

4) Thou shalt be allowed social media genius. But never guru.

5) But thou should prefer social media expert. But never, ever guru.

Incidentally, you may wonder where this anti-guru came from. Well, its only because I was speaking to someone who called himself “somewhat of a social media guru”. However, he didn’t have a blog, had heard of Twitter but didn’t use it or see the point of it, hadn’t uploaded content to YouTube, and had not heard of FriendFeed. Guru indeed. Ogilvy would be most upset.

I think thats it.
MBB

Shambolic use of “Priority” by O2 for MJ tickets

Well done O2. In one foul swoop you have managed to shatter my wife’s dreams of going to see Michael Jackson at the O2. A new customer to O2 she was pulled in by the offer of the iPhone and your much lauded Priority tickets to the O2. The first time she used this service was for pre-ordering/getting a password for MJ@The O2. You sent her a password. We waited for 7am this morning to use……

On entering the code it now doesn’t work. Your site keeps crashing. There is nobody answering calls on your customer service line. What is a girl (and her husband) suppose to do? It seemed like a golden opportunity for O2 to do something well and prove itself different to other operators, however, as always are hopes are dashed at a new horizon as O2 has simply proved itself as incapable as Orange and Vodafone.

Thank God for T-Mobile who I have never had any issues with.

O2 you are a joke, thanks for the password that doesn’t work. Well done. Hats-off. Pat on the back for the big priority con.

A lighter way to enjoy pizza

I picked this up from PSFK last week and only realised how interesting I found it this morning. Basically Pizzeria Delfina has given its staff t-shirts baring poor reviews taken from Yelp.  There aren’t actually that many so it makes the wearing and baring of these reviews all the more interesting. Consumer transparency at its very best if you like.

It is certainly an interesting talking point for the customers at the restaurant, although rumours of it becoming real time, t-shirts being available for voting on, and reviews being printed on toilet paper probably aren’t true.

Original story here:

http://www.psfk.com/2009/03/wearing-1-star-yelp-reviews-proudly.html

A disappointing attempt at transparency from Cadburys

So Cadburys have gone Fairtrade, the bothered-o-meter swings downtowards zero, but I praise them for at least making the effort to appear a bit greener, globallly caring etc. Its not actually this that has disappointed me because this is a really good thing.

What has really riled me is the fact that Cadbury’s have a blog which appears to have been set-up specifically for this Fairtrade announcement. All good so far, however, what they have decided to do is take all the comments off and only post the ones which they deem to be popular.

Those who read this blog know I like post-moderation and I really believe Cadburys have missed a massive trick by just going with what they thought relevant. There is no ability therefore to see what the original sets of questions were, they just tell you had one or two questions about x.

Disappointing. Massively disappointing.

http://cadburydairymilk.typepad.com/fairtrade/

Skittles – a new point of reference

Much has been written about the Skittles launch over the last few days. Notably alot of criticism has been levelled at them for being too open, not really understand social media, not thinking deeply enough in their experiment.

However, its this last word that I really believe Skittles should be using as their reference point. Experiment. This really is something that alot of brands, I feel, do not do now. They don’t take the time out of their marketing campaigns to say “tell you what, we have no idea whats going to happen, but lets go with it anyway”. Skittles have really taken a leap of faith to see what would happen and I believe have reacted quickly to the abuse that the Twitter stream unfortunately received.

Its very easy to be critical of something new and experimental, but I think we should be praising Skittles for trying something different which has got them more PR miles than they could have wished for. How Skittles now react is critical.
Personally, I would have focused alot more on not just the use of these technologies but how content was going to be seeded in, and also how moderation should have been done. Creating unique content for this would have really opened up the experiment but it seems the experiment was enough for Skittles.

Perhaps Facebook should have taken a more Humana approach..

From PSFK….

Humana recently held a meeting bringing together leaders from around the company to determine how best to shape their social media policy. What we found interesting was that before the discussion even got underway, a decision was made to host the high points of the meeting on Twitter – essentially creating a digital archive of minutes

Facebook took a totally different top-down approach to management of issues, in this case their TOS. Not only did this cause outrage amongst 90% of the Facebook audience, it also meant Mark Z had to make a backtrack on what they thought a valid policy. Alot of blogs have covered this so, I’m not about to in more detail.

However, perhaps Facebook could have let all of us know this is what they were thinking but did the Facebook audience have any more ideas about what they could do. Instead, they took a totally non-social approach to a business decision. Shame really as you would expect more.

Hats off to Humana though…

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23hcoc

laters

Why I am starting to get in to Twitter…

I have used Twitter off and on for the last year. Yet never really found my niche within it, never really understood why its become such a phenomenon, and didn’t get it I guess.
However, over the last week I have really started to see a benefit in it from a purely inquisitive viewpoint. Not alot of my friends are on it admittedly, which I am sure applies to 95% of the Twitter userbase. However, I am enjoying studying other people’s usages of it.

Much of it is personal PR – work related, insight led. This seems to get the biggest traction especially from an expertise perspective. I am sure one could become an overnight expert if using Twitter correctly, but there is a danger of also being a one-hit wonder with it.

Alot of it is drivel, utter drivel. People going to the shops. People going to get on a plane. The twitter equivalent of YouTube’s Cat’s on Skateboards/Dogs and frisbees etc.

Would be interesting to see if anyone had any real stats on private (social) and public (work) related to usage. In fact, I’m going to try to find out through a bit of research.

What Mandelson should have done…

You may have seen Peter Mandelson’s poetic and eloquent attempts to respond to UK market criticism by the head of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. What does he know eh? Probably more than you think Peter. Anyway, Mr.Mandleson’s comments turned into a four-letter rant:

Asked about his biggest concerns, Schultz said: “Unemployment, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, particularly in the UK, and I think consumer confidence, particularly in the UK, is very, very poor.”

Mandelson hit back on the same channel, saying Britain was “not spiralling, although I’ve noticed Starbucks is in a great deal of trouble – but that might be because of their over-expansion, given the state of the market.”

Later, at a drinks reception, he escalated the rhetoric when he was overheard saying in what was intended as one of his trademark off-the-record asides: “Why should I have this guy running down the country? Who the fuck is he? How the hell are they [Starbucks] doing?”

Perhaps he should have just posted his comments on Starbucks Ideas. I have requested a Peter Mandelson mug be created as a limited edition and am hoping to see it in the post in the near future.