Why You Should Get Excited About Twitter

Posted June 26th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

After months dismissing Twitter as a fad, I jumped in earlier this year and quickly discovered a whole new social media community… and a new perspective on the business impact of social media in the future. Twitter may be the purest form of social media and the change in web behavior that Twitter represents may be may become one of the most exciting opportunities for marketers on the web.

Social media is all about candid conversations and developing relationships. Blogs started it all by giving people a new voice, but that voice is still largely a one-way conversation. Most posts don’t have many comments, especially when you eliminate all the simple “great post” or “thanks for mentioning me/my company” entries. Sure you’ll see a few high profile blogs with hundreds of posts debating the issues and building on the points of the blog, but once you get beyond Technorati’s top 100 that level of interaction is rare.

Forums and discussion boards are a step up and many communities have deep and insightful conversations on very niche topics. The problem is you often have to look pretty hard to find these groups and you often see many people shouting at each other hiding behind anonymous usernames.

Twitter is different. The culture of Twitter is very open and personal. People are identified by their real names and their picture appears next to their name whenever they participate. A click on your name brings you to a profile page with a history of your tweets and links to your blog or website. Conversation occurs is real-time so whatever is on people’s minds at home and at work is represented here, as it happens. As you can imagine, that includes many discussions about brands and product experiences.

There is certainly a lot of noise here, but that is what monitoring tools like Radian6 and specialty search engines like Summize are for. As with any type of social media, the sheer volume of conversations requires that you use smart tools to organize the data and apply metrics to understand the trends.

Companies are involved now. For example, Comcast has been widely praised for the way they are using Twitter. Service reps are monitoring tweets about the brand and reaching out personally to get their service problems solved. Customers love to see that their voice matters and companies are taking them seriously.

The funny thing is that the opportunity here isn’t necessarily about Twitter. Twitter itself may not even be a big part of this trend in the future – unless they get bought. Twitter is a private, understaffed organization struggling to find a way to make money…and they have a lot of shortcomings. I see the “fail whale” more than I see my kids in a typical day. What’s important here is that Twitter is a great innovation that started a new type of consumer behavior.

Thanks to Twitter, people are now comfortable making frequent posts about what they are doing and what they are thinking throughout the day. Aggregators like Friendfeed make this even more interesting. They collect your “tweets” and then add many of your other online activities - like shared news items from your RSS reader, Facebook updates, and product reviews submitted - and make them all available in a single “lifestream” that is published online.

Not only does this lifestream change the way people present themselves online, it encourages them to share more. Google talked about this at the Supernova conference recently. They say people have been reluctant to share a lot of their lives because they don’t want to feel like they are interrupting and spamming their friends. In this new lifestreaming environment, sharing is encouraged since friends can subscribe to your news feed and view your pictures, stories, product reviews and commentary when they want to see them. People are now motivated to share more of their life as they grow their network and shape their online image.

As the information in these profiles become richer it becomes even easier to get advice and recommendations on purchase decisions from your extended online social network. This pushes the influence of corporate marketing and advertising messages even further away from the consumer.

But this is where social media marketing gets interesting. Lifestreaming facilitates the power of consumer-to-consumer influence making it even more important for companies to be actively involved in social media. These profiles are a new window into the lives of the advocates and critics surrounding your brand. You can learn a lot more about what they like or dislike and track the impact of their influence all across the web so you can engage with them on a more personal level and participate in their lifestream.

I use Twitter to communicate and share interesting interactive and social media news and issues. If you find that interesting, follow me here.

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From an Attention Crash to a “Cognitive Surplus”

Posted May 29th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently that we are risking an attention crash with all the demands and pressures of an always-on social media world.

On Micropersuasion.com, Steve Rubel writes:

“By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed. Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.”

He’s right. What balance I once had has now been ruined with my new found love for Twitter.

Clay Shirky, NYU professior and author of the new book “Here Comes Everybody” offers another perspective. In this presentation from last month’s Web 2.0 conference, Clay makes the case that Americans actually have a tremendous “cognitive surplus” from hours of TV viewing that can be applied to participation activities online.

To illustrate the scale of this surplus, Clay estimates that the entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. That my sound staggering until you realize that Americans spend about that much time every weekend just watching TV ads. According to Clay, the 200 billion hours that Americans spend watching television each year represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects. That is per year.

Nobody is implying that behavior will shift that dramatically, but just a 1% shift of American’s time from TV to participation online would amount to 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

So while the social media savvy may feel over saturated with information, we have to remember that a majority of the population still haven’t joined the party.

Here’s the video of the presentation. Also, the full text transcription is on his blog.

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Discussion on the Evolution of Rich Media Content

Posted May 29th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

In this week’s episode of Market Edge on WebmasterRadio.fm, Larry Weber interviews Akamai CEO Paul Sagan about the evolution of rich media content on the web.

In this interview, Paul describes the dramatic shift in consumer behavior from TV viewing to computer browsing. But with so much of today’s market dollars still dedicated toward TV a tectonic pressure is building that will soon cause a huge change in the business model of television in the next couple years.

Enjoy the interview and feel free to add your comments on this issues here.

Webmaster Radio
Web Content Technology Akamai CEO Paul Sagan profiles his companys work in web content technology developed so that end users can easily access web content with the help of thousands of servers , plus he discuss the evolution of delivering rich media content Show Host: Larry Weber Show: Market Edge Channel: Internet Marketing

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Déjà vu Mobile Web

Posted January 22nd, 2008 by admin

I vividly remember a day back in 1997 sitting in front of my computer coding the GUI for a Web-based corporate research portal. It annoyed me that I had to find a way to package so much information into a 640 x 480 parcel of techno-real-estate. And as I longed for more square footage, I could taste my dreams as bigger and bigger monitors propelled me into a world of designing for an 800 x 600 screen resolution. I was in pixel heaven – and then came the Mobile Web.

11 years later, with a good 30-40 percent of my online time spent via my Motorola Q and iPod Touch mobile devices, I’ve got a persistent “déjà vu” feeling that takes me back to the “old days” of the Web.

• HTML Emails: The corner has finally turned on being able to send out graphically-formatted HTML emails as a standard. It’s not easy to consume HTML formatted emails on my Q – at times it’s nearly impossible and I lose out on that particular communication.
• Heavy Graphics/Formatting: Broadband internet access finally beat out turtle slow dialup and websites became a rich-media experience. These same websites are usually a mess on a mobile browser.
• Screen Resolution: Forget 640 x 480 pixels – a good Mobile GUI has to fit on a fraction of that real-estate.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a HUGE fan of portable content – I just find it fascinating that as mobile technology continues to evolve, we are finding ourselves solving problems that we thought we already solved.

While I’m sure I’ll continue to get a sense of déjà vu, I’m glad we now have a collective set of lessons learned which means only good things for our mobile web user experiences.

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