Tag: Yammer

  • For a few dollars more…

    This won’t be the first time I’ve written about Twitter’s revenue model, and I suspect it won’t be the last. In fact, the last time I wrote about it, it was in the context of the deal that almost happened between Facebook and Twitter. Its been a couple of months, so I thought its a good time to check what both have been upto on the subject of revenues.

    There was a scare recently on how Facebook is going to make money by selling users’ data, but that turned out just to be misinterpreted statements, based on a demo that they did at Davos to show real time crowd insights, and had nothing to do with the Engagement Advertising model. Facebook has been growing very fast, (stats) and though this is claimed to be a demo, real time insights (permission based) from the exact target audience could indeed add a lot of value to brands, and any other entity that could be interested in data. Market research firms should actually be working with Facebook and starting to develop pools specific to their client’s audiences. With Facebook implementing the Friendfeed style ‘Like’ feature, the tools are becoming as simple as possible.

    Meanwhile, I also wonder about the data that could come from the sites that have been tied through Facebook Connect, especially since there are some big names in their respective fields. This could reveal a lot more about the individual’s interests – basis his interaction with the other sites, and that data would be easier to handle since in many cases the site’s content would dictate the context, unlike the generic data that could be picked up on Facebook itself. This would be an interesting space to watch, and that’s an understatement.

    A simple yet possibly history making story of how Twitter was made. And in another simple yet profound statement, Seth Godin described it as a protocol. And yet another good one which describes it as a social experiment. Which then raises the question of how a revenue model can be made for this protocol or experiment. As someone once said, “Twitter is what you make it to be”. There are pains too. Twitter’s humble origins and the scale envisioned may not have made a vision mandatory then, and there is also talk that Twitter could ‘go for years’ without earning, but to survive in the long term, Twitter does need a vision, one that’d then give some direction for its revenue model.

    There have been many entities trying to use the stream for transmitting ads, adCause and TwitterHawk, being the latest, but honestly, it does seem like a force fit. But I’ll admit that the location+context based approach of TwitterHawk does seem very interesting. In fact, there have been many apps built around Twitter, some of which require the user to give the Twitter password to use the service, and there have been security problems thanks to that too. Hopefully that’ll get sorted out once OAuth is implemented, perhaps we’ll see a new generation of mashups too, leading Twitter towards a revenue model. Here are some very interesting thoughts on Twitter, including searching conversations based on category, and a marketplace around conversations and real products. Its interesting to note that brands have already begun experimenting with Twitter, and with tangible expectations, as the recent Dell promo of exclusive deals shows.  More likely to follow that model with the launch of TwtQpon. In this context, check out CheapTweet too. Meanwhile, here’s a good set of thoughts for Twitter revenue.

    Twitter Contest-Denuology Entry94 Update

     

    With enterprise versions (Yammer)and even college versions (Wiggio), Twitter needs to hurry, if it does not want to lose out segments altogether. This story about Twitter thinking about charging brands is turning out to be true. I can imagine those social media evangelists within organisations groaning already!! But all the best, and we await the Business Product Manager. 🙂

    While Twitter scores on the real time aspect (my opinion since I use both) Facebook offers a lot more easily available data on an individual’s demographics, interests etc. The other parameter is that while Facebook is being adopted by the masses easily, Twitter does require a bit of getting used to. Facebook might have to sweat a bit to crack real time, and Twitter would have to do many things – consider scaling up groups to other regions, have better ways of segregating conversations and data mining.  But in the end, it all does seem to boil down to using real time information of potential/existing consumers, with precise demographics and interests based targeting.

    We keep saying that social media and its tools are all about the human touch, and the personalisation. And brands utilising these platforms should understand that. I wonder if the same applies to revenue models too, and whether this extreme customisation will mean that both these networks will find it difficult to conceptualise and then implement, revenue templates, that will fit all.

    until next time, money makes the social world go around 😐

  • Corporate Talk

    I’ve always maintained that social media has this uncanny way of stripping the veneer of most entities – be it people, products or organisations.

    At one point of time, Mouthshut used to be my preferred destination for user reviews. All the ads, all the DMs, and all the brand ambassadors would be collectively shown the door, if the user reviews declared the product a failure. Although, niche portals have taken away quite a bit of my dependence, I am still a user and so, was pleasantly surprised to know about the new section called Employers. (via AlooTechie) Yep, Mouthshut now allows users to review organisations that they’ve worked in, something like what Jobsnetwork.in has been doing, though that’s more a discussion board. Criticat seems to be doing this very well, though.

    But they’re not the only guys with this agenda. I also came across a site called Jobeehive, whose proposition is “Before making your next decision, see company reviews, salary and advice given directly by employee”.I wonder why a service like LinkedIn (hey, they got more funding recently) hasn’t gotten into this, though. It could be the social angle to the networking relationships that are the problem. The typical user would be connected with his ex-boss on the network, and would hesitate before giving a negative review of work conditions/ salaries/ experiences etc. Everyone loves un-burnt bridges, social media be damned!! 😉 Shine, the career portal from HT, also limited itself to salary tools, and hasn’t built a review feature. I guess there are somethings people don’t want to share, for everything else there’s social media. 🙂

    However, I live on the hope that transparency – in employees, and employers, will eventually become a reality. I read about a new service called BeenVerified, which helps employers verify candidate backgrounds. (via CenterNetworks) Meanwhile, in the last couple of months, the enterprise tools based on popular social media tools like Twitter have also been seen in the market. I’d written about Yammer earlier, the winner at TC50, and its premise of ‘Twitter for business’, and about a similar service, Present.ly. Later, Yammer also introduced Yammermail, you can read about it here. I also read about Co-op recently, which adds time tracking and project management to the ‘what are you working on’ feature. Smibsnet, seems to be on the same premise.

    But the most interesting service I came across has to be SocialText 3.0, which “applies next-generation Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses”. It seems to be a mashup of several web 2.0 entities like wikis, microblogging, Facebook, Friendfeed..and Twitter (as SocialText Signals) So it allows people to describe themselves, subscribe to others’ activity streams, edit information streams, and all of these get updated on a dashboard, which would help users in organising and using data better. By using the collaborative properties of all these tools, SocialText does seem to have gained an edge over other enterprise services in this genre.

    The tools are definitely being built. It remains to be seen though, whether/how much organisations are willing to use them. Such tools would also dispel concerns about social media being just a productivity reducing mechanism.

    until next time, organisational chats

  • Twitter – the official version

    There were some pretty interesting new things that came out at TechCrunch50 last week. TC50 was a conference that took place from September 8-10, 2008 where 52 of the ‘best’ startups were launched in front of an audience that consisted of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, and press. I guess that would be bleeding edge. I followed it, thanks to some excellent coverage by StartupMeme. And that’s where I read about Yammer.

    Yammer intrigued me because of its utterly simple premise of ‘Twitter for business’. Where Twitter asks ‘What are you doing’, Yammer asks ‘what are you working on?’ I was even more intrigued because that’s a question LinkedIn has been asking for sometime now.  While the premise is simple, it does create some interesting new propositions – it only allows logins through official mail ids, making it quite secure, it lets users start their company network, invite people, and then serves as a database with individual profiles and conversations. For any user, it would be like a Twitter limited to his colleagues. All this is free, and if the organisation wants to play admin, it has to pay. Yammer already has Blackberry and iPhone apps. Apparently its demand was such that about 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

    And then Yammer just went ahead and won TC50. Chris Brogan smartly notes that the Twhirl client + a laconi.ca backend would amount to the same thing, with the added advantage that Twhirl also allows tabs of Twitter and Friendfeed. RWW just ripped the Yammer model threadbare.

    Now, I see some contradiction in all this. Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity, and a quite transparent way of communicating, and sharing. There is no officiating, there is nobody looking over your shoulder. To me, Yammer sounds a lot like Intranet 2.0, and assuming that organisations do allow it, later, if the organisation takes admin charge, I don’t know how many employees will still be comfortable using it. And why would organisations want control in the first place, if the idea is conversation? I’m wondering whether the existence of Yammer will make a Twitter enterprise solution irrelevant.

    There’s been some stuff happening over at Twitter too. The recent coverage of a funeral via Twitter led to questions about privacy issues. (via RWW) My take is that in a social environment, you avoid people whose conversations you don’t like, just like in the real world. In the long term, it will help people decide what they talk about and how. I’d mentioned two tools in my last Twitter post. A cool tool for marketeers – Twitterise, and Twiggit, a good mashup of Twitter and Digg. I came across two more tools – Tweetburner, a sort of feedburner for Twitter which could be a great tracking tool for brand and PR guys. Read more about it here, and Dwigger, another Twitter+Digg tool, but different from the earlier one i mentioned. In this you can paste a twitter message URL, or a new Dwigger only message, all in the by now familiar 140 characters, and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. Hmm, more on that here. I also found a personally useful tool, which gives an analysis of your Twitter usage. They have done it using Yahoo Pipes, and rendered it using the Google Chart API. Very interesting. Check it out here. Meanwhile, Mashable has just posted their review on Fidj.it, ‘a micro-blogging service that’s like a Twitter and Pownce mashup.’ Shall check it out soon.

    To conclude, there are more and more twitter tools being developed for different user needs. If Yammer actually becomes a huge success, through some radically fresh employer attitude, I’d like to see a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users. It could be quite an awesome combination.

    until next time, feeling fidgety already?