Tag: twitter

A plus cases on Twitter

Last week, @aplusk beat @CNNbrk in the race for one million followers. In plain English, Ashton Kutcher, an actor, challenged CNN on Larry King Live – who would get to a million followers first – to prove a point that an individual could have a reach equal to a large network on Twitter. Twitter joined in the fun, because unlike the norm, users couldn’t unfollow either of the parties, of course smart tweeps found a way out anyway. Point taken, AsKu, though the irony was that until a week back, the CNN account was not run by them, though for sometime they’ve been managing the account through the person who created it.

For more than two years, the CNNBrk account (for breaking news) had been created, maintained and run by a 25-year-old British Web developer who just wanted a way to beam short news alerts to his cellphone.

And that’s the beauty of this user driven service. Something that I fear might change with the ‘mainstream’ spotlight and the rush of real celebrities. Its only a matter of time before a new celebrity thinks of a new stunt. But it is to be noted that Kutcher is donating 10000 mosquito nets worth $100000 to a charity. In fact, one week before that, I’d read about Hugh Jackman’s donating AUS $100,000 to charity via Twitter, the charity to be selected via Twitter pitches.

Now, I’ve always maintained that users should figure their own comfort levels and use the service accordingly. But I also feel that a sudden influx of people with no intent other than rooting for a celebrity might be the kind of inorganic growth that will work against the service and its more regular users. This could range from a disruption of the service due to the load to a change in the ‘culture’ of the service.

Kutcher’s point was about getting a reach higher than a media giant. I’ve always had a problem with numbers – followers, updates etc as a means of measurement on Twitter. I find it a paradox for a place which became popular because of a qualitative measure – conversations. CNN will deliver breaking news regularly, and (as someone suggested on Twitter) Kutcher followers will just have to wait for those occasional Demi photos. Reach has been an index to sell traditional media space, is that the benchmark Twitter wants to take forward?

There was a very interesting post on Tech Crunch on whether Twitter should remove its follower count. Like I tweeted, I’d agree. Once upon a time, it was a medium to share an instant – something you thought/read/saw/felt to make others smile/think/share their own expressions. With growth came the ‘how a tweet might cost you a job’ and ‘5 ways to increase sales with Twitter’ theses, and the instant was lost. Perhaps you will ignore that as a subjective grumble. But think of the times you see the ‘need 5 more followers to get 500. please RT’ and what you feel then. What happens when that’s the norm and the service changes to accommodate and encourage that culture because that’s what helps them make money. [Note: I’d love for Twitter to make money, but I’m sure they’ll find better ways]

While on celebrities and Twitter, closer home Gul Panag has been quite active on Twitter the last few days. The Twitterverse has had its share of imposters and has been trying to ensure there’s no ‘identity crisis’ this time, so much that poor GulP might have one soon. This tweet of hers caught my attention. (Oh, okay the dimples too!!)

Spicy Jet news. Poor them. It reminded me of a post I’d written sometime back on ‘Social Ambassadors‘ – what would happen when the transparency of social media met celebrity bloggers? In this case, micro bloggers. In fact, micro blogging is even more ‘dangerous’ since the interaction is real time, and not like a PR draft that can be posted on ths site, and replies given in a few hours or even days. This becomes all the more important if celebrities use social media as a personal broadcast medium to their fans. Of course, brands can use the media to their benefit too – for example, create conversations between celebrities (a Twitter conversation between Aamir and Gul basis their Tata Sky TVC would be fun), use celebrities to communicate beyond the obvious advertisement etc.

The challenge is for celebrities too. Perhaps it will also make celebrities more responsible when making endorsement choices. (It would be fun to ask SRK/Aamir why they switched soft drink brands in between.) Also, can celebrities retain their ‘interestingness’ when they are in touch with the fans all the time, unlike a traditional system when news about them was less abundant?

On an aside, when celebrities move to direct-to-crowd platforms, what happens to the go-between media for whom they were the news makers, and we were the news consumers? And what happens to the micro celebrities on Twitter? 🙂

until next time, when twitter streams meet mainstream

April 23, 2009
The brand…behind the scene

The advantages that social media has to offer are best derived by participating. When brands understand that, we get to see Facebook pages (or profiles) and twitter accounts. While these might display the brand name, the interactivity of social media makes it seem like communicating to a person. As far as social media tools go, compared to Facebook pages/ a YouTube account, a Twitter account is perhaps more difficult to handle, thanks to the real time interaction required (though it’s possible on Facebook too now). That perhaps explains the rising instances of ghost twittering – where a personality or a brand pays someone else to tweet on their behalf. While many examples have been cited, from Obama to Britney and 50 cent, I’ll focus on the companies/brands.

In these early days of social media, there are very few companies which have an organised social media strategy. (a good global list, and the Indian version of brands on Twitter) In the global list, it can be seen that the organisations are represented by their own employees, and in many cases they belong to the marketing function. But what’s interesting are the handles – some use the brand name, some use the person’s name and some others use a combination of both.

In my last post (partly) on this topic, I had supported the usage of the brand name with the account being handled by “multi functional teams which can communicate with consumers on different aspects with authority and domain knowledge”, but it’s obvious that no ‘one size fits all’ policy works in social media, especially when people value dealing with other people more than impersonal brand logos.

I am still not sure of the person representing a brand with his/her own name, since I wonder how both the personal and brand personas can coexist in one account, especially if they have differing personalities. Also, like I’ve said earlier, one also has to wonder how long the employee will stay in the organisation and when he/she leaves, who owns the equity generated thus far. (even in the absence of a social media strategy, there is always the typical case of the lone enthusiast bringing his brand on to twitter only for the account to lose steam after he/she leaves) In a one to one marketing scenario, will marketers’ personal brand equity on services like Twitter also be of value to future employers? I quite like the idea of a combo handle (person and company). It allows a whole lot of customising – different people for different domains within the organisation, replacing users etc, while still giving the human touch to the account.

The other scenario which interests me is an agency handling the brand’s social media strategy. Would they handle the twitter account after disclosing that they are only speaking for the brand? What impact does that have on the one-to-one conversations that the brand is supposed to have with its consumers on social media? Does it make a case for agencies to stop at monitoring and ensuring that the spokesperson is still an employee of the brand?

All of this is keeping in mind that a twitter account is only a part of the social media strategy and thus the role of an agency could possibly be justified for many other reasons. But at a broader level, if a lot of social media is going to be one-on-one marketing, it would make sense for organisations to figure out who would be the “one” representing them, and how much he/she/they would be empowered. Of course, it also makes sense to figure out whether they should be on Twitter at all.

until next time, handle it

Update: Just saw a term for this – Brandividuals

April 20, 2009
More delicious stuff on the horizon?

Social Median has been a pending site in my things-to-do list for such a long time that guilt no longer describes the feeling enough 🙁

I’ve liked the concept of the site a lot, and while I’ve been following developments there, and have added the bookmarklet to the browser, and though I’ve started several groups (example) I’ve just not managed to become a regular user. The SM bookmarklet has been idle. But more importantly, while the site sends me updates every single day, I rarely manage more than a cursory look at the shared items.

Why am I so bothered about my non usage? To put it as simply as possibly – it brings together the link sharing capabilities of Delicious, the voting of Digg, topic based groups in which you can add sources and stories get pulled automatically, commenting on shared stories, ranking keywords and topics, and most importantly uses collaborative filtering through people with similar interests to serve you content you should read. A compelling proposition and I don’t have a logical explanation for my non usage.

So, what’s the context? A few days back, I got a mail stating that Social Median has implemented Facebook Connect, and I feel that’s really big news. It essentially means that you can sign up for Social Median with your Facebook account and share the stuff with your Facebook contacts!! While I do admit that the newsfeed is a complete mess after the redesign, I’m also looking at the enormous data of user preferences that Facebook will now gain, and how Facebook can leverage itself as a news sharing source much more now. In future, this could reveal tons of data on news consumption patterns and interests. Facebook Connect’s importance is something I’ve been stressing on for quite sometime now, and this strengthens that thought. I wonder what this does to Digg’s Facebook Connect plans though.

Another ‘link’ based service – Google Reader (okay, feed based), one which I use a lot, has also done a small tweaking and added a commenting feature, though its utility The debate on that is still on. There is a feeling that it will become the place of conversation and take comments away from the source (blog/site). Also, as The Inquisitr mentions rightly, the implementation is quite clunky, and if a full feed is published it takes away most of the reasons for the reader to visit the site. I hope that at least a plugin similar to the Friendfeed one (where the conversation is synicated back to the original source) will be developed soon, but since there’s been no API release, they’d have to do it themselves. Doubtful.

Friendfeed has been around for sometime now, and though its a perfect place to have threaded conversations based on links shared from practically anywhere on the social web, it is still deemed to be a geek service. I wonder if a tags feature to categorise all imported data makes sense. Speaking of Friendfeed, I also read about a new service launched recently called Streamy. According to TechCrunch, “Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.” Streamy does boast of an extremely good interface and suggests interesting stories to you, which you can then share with friends on supporting networks from Streamy itself. And its implementing Facebook Connect. So, a package with potential. (RWW has a comprehensive post on the service)

Now the social bookmarking service I use regularly is Delicious, though its via the browser add on, and its been ages since I visited the site. But while they were one of the pioneers of social bookmarking, they really haven’t developed further. They could easily build conversations around the links shared by different people, make it easier to create communities around topics of interest – all the stuff that Social Median is doing, and definitely make it easier to share the links on say, Twitter – the reverse traffic of Twitticious, like what Krumlr is doing. I think enabling BOSS to pull stuff (history and top tags) from Delicious is a good step in the right direction. I have just started using a Firefox plugin called tweecious. What it does is go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. Pretty neat, though it would help if it gave me more control over what data needs to be transferred to delicious. (eg: I tweet a lot of posts from my blog, and perhaps some topical news from news sites, I wouldn’t want that on delicious, so a feature to ignore links from a particular domain?)

Reports indicate that Twine, another service which i have not used much, (despite L Bhat sending me an invite and taking pains to explain it 🙁 ) could soon challenge Delicious, in terms of unique visitors, and with the kind of work it seems to be doing in the semantic web space, would easily become a more useful tool. I also got a mail a few days back announcing a Twine bookmarklet, with which you add content to Twine as well as tweet it to Twitter!!

until next time, linking in

PS. While on links, check out the following too

BackTweets, a very useful resource to see who’s tweeted links to a site

OneRiot, a new Twitter search engine which shows the links shared on a particular keyword (instead of tweets)

Twazzup – another Twitter search engine which shows the regular search results as well as trends , popular tweets and links, with more visual appeal

Fleck, a social bookmarking service, which has a bookmarklet for FF and IE, it also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers and delicious, and gives you the option to share links on twitter

ambiently, which calls itself the web’s first discovery engine. – it’s a search mechanism with a bookmarklet, which you can add to your browser. Now, when you’re on a particular page, and you click the bookmarklet, it opens up an ambient page that lists web links related to the page you’re currently in.

PPS. The post feels a bit incomplete without Digg. Since I’m not a regular user of the service, I have not attempted to draw comparisons. However I do know that the latest on that front is the Diggbar. You can catch the action here.

April 16, 2009
@having Maggi

A couple of days back, I happened to see the TVC made as part of Maggi’s 25 years in India celebrations, and the association with the brand was so strong that I had to check it out and write a post on it.

Right from school, when I used to exchange part of my lunch gladly for a classmate’s Maggi, until a little more than a year back, when Sunfeast Pasta replaced it, Maggi noodles used to rule the category. And even now, it makes its presence felt in the household, in the form of sauces and soups.

The TVC has been well made and features the Maggi moments in the lives of different consumers – “camping wali maggi”, “first impression maggi”, “hostel ki maggi” etc, and even a “mumbai flood maggi”. I hunted for the TVC on YouTube, couldn’t find it, but thankfully remembered the site url from the ad. So you can take a look at it here – meandmeri.in – unfortunately no permalink, so click on the watch, and then ‘Currently on air’.

From a consumer’s perspective, Maggi has built its entire equity based on a great product (they actually lost market share when they tried to change the product taste) . From a marketer’s perspective, the positioning has been awesome, they’ve created some memorable campaigns (most of us would still remember the Maggi jingle), and all of this has led to much emotional connect. There are a million Maggi stories waiting to be told. So, to me, the web provided some great opportunity for the brand to connect with its consumers.

I wanted to start with this urban legend(?) of a research which I have heard in B school, about how market research had predicted that Maggi would bomb as a product in India. It was often cited as THE example to ridicule the MR loyalists. I couldn’t find it online, but what I did find were some very cool notes. For those interested in Nestle’s brand strategy, positioning etc, here are a few links – Growth Strategy, an interview with the Nestle India MD (2007), and a case analysis.

So, what are they doing online? I checked out the Nestle India corporate site and couldn’t see any mention there on the campaign or the microsite. Thankfully I remembered the microsite url, though I wonder why Maggi does not figure in it. The microsite is built on the concept of consumers sharing their Maggi stories, pictures, videos, and even recipes. The interface for that is decent. But what I liked best was the Maggi time machine, which shows ads from years back!! I wonder what prevented them from enabling comments on them!! So, in essence, except for a few ‘stories’, I couldn’t find a lot of conversations there.

Later in the day, I was on Twitter, and lo and behold – Maggi conversations.

(click to enlarge)

I also got to know from @additiyom that there was a Facebook fan page too. While I did get a couple of Maggi pages with 5 figure fan followings, they were the international versions, and I thought this one (found on page 3 of search) with close to 300 fans was the desi version. There are many Maggi groups on Orkut, one with almost 40000 members, and 4 others with more than 5000 members. In the first group, there are about 160 responses for ‘which maggi flavor do you like most?’

It made me think once again, of how brands make a website and forget about the internet strategy. I’d have loved to see a more well thought out web campaign – with the microsite also serving as an aggregator of content from places where the conversation is happening, for starters. By all means use mass media and promote the site, but if the idea is about getting in touch with consumers, it definitely helps to seed and maintain conversations over at the usual suspects – Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and even Twitter. The audience is already there.

until next time, 2 minutes definitely makes sense in real time 😉

PS: Remember the old Maggi joke when Sourav Ganguly was out of form? 🙂

April 9, 2009
“What will you do when the money goes?”

Even as stories abound about a Google acquisition of Twitter, Adage had a story on how Google is already making money out of tweets. According to the article, Google is offering ad units that display the client’s five most recent tweets across the AdSense network. The link leads straight to the client’s twitter account, and the campaign is measurable by the increase in follower count. One could say that Twitter gets some publicity out of this, but its obviously not getting any money.

The ad network Federated Media recently launched ExecTweets, a site that aggregates tweets from business executives. The site is sponsored by Microsoft. With a twitter account, you can join the conversation, receive tweets from the community and vote for tweets and execs. At least on this one, Twitter will make some money.

Since we have mentioned two biggies, might as well mention the third too, though what they’re doing is different from the above. Sideline is the desktop app from Yahoo, that runs via the AdobeAIR platform. It can do custom search groups, advanced queries and auto refreshes by pulling in data from tweets. There are other services that offer similar features, but maybe there’s more coming. And it does promise 20% more awesomeness. 🙂 On a tangent, a service called Say Tweet, which I have used in my personal blog to display my Twitter status, does give a sense of what Yahoo could do with Flickr and Twitter.

In addition to the biggies above who’re using Twitter, there are numerous applications and services being built based on Twitter, and several others inspired by Twitter. A few examples. Tinker, from advertising and publishing network Glam Media, allows users to track real time conversations (from facebook and Twitter) happening around TV shows, entertainment events, conferences, and so on. It gives information on events by showing most followed and most discussed streams, popular events, and on trends with charts and historical data. It also has embeddable widgets, which can be used to view a feed as well as update. They already have advertising and featured events and have further monetisation plans. iList Micro, from the iList service that alllows you to broadcast your listing to friends across networks, is the Twitter version and uses the hashtags #ihave and #iwant to create a simple process of classifieds. I have already mentoned Yammer (which now offers integration with Twitter), and Blellow in earlier posts, which are renditions of Twitter for more niche/enterprise uses, there’s also status.net arriving in a couple of months time.

In spite of the several ways in which business are using Twitter, and the potential, I actually get worried when such services pop up on a regular basis, because I fear that when each service figures out a revenue model, one door could possibly be closing for Twitter itself. For instance, recently Jeremiah Owyang had a good post on social CRM being the future of Twitter, and within a few days, I read about Salesforce adding Twitter analytics to its CRM offering, and about CoTweet, a part marketing-part CRM tool.

Twitter hasn’t been idle. From experimenting with advertising on profile pages (for third party and own apps, free for now) to tweaking title tags for better Google results, to hiring a concierge for celebrities (yes, really!) a lot is being done. And there’s also a new homepage design (limited roll out) which gives more prominence for the search function and increases homepage stickiness. It will also display popular trending topics (like in the current search homepage). (Hmm, perhaps one ad every 5 items, I wouldn’t mind that when i search)

With the new funding, perhaps they have enough money in the bank to wait, watch new services, and incorporate the popular ones into their own functionality, in order to provide a diverse and robust service to all kinds of users. Twitter is so open ended that it is different things to different people, but I wonder if identifying a few areas that they’d want to develop for revenues is of prime importance now. What I’m worried about is other services staking out potential revenue models, and whether addition of features towards no particular intent might result in everyone else but them making money out of these very features. But hey, maybe they have a plan. 🙂

until next time, tweet dreams

PS. the lyrics of the song mentioned in the title 🙂

April 6, 2009