Twitter’s App Nest Is Big and Growing
At the LeWeb conference in Paris Twitter is busy making sure that all the developments in the real-time search and social media world aren’t just coming from the Googleplex. Maybe it’s the end of the year rush or it’s the need to create excitement going into 2010 since 2009 was a rough year for many. Whatever the reason the news is fast and furious inthe space in general.
Twitter’s busy letting the world in on the sheer volume of apps that have been developed for the service and how they are going to help foster more growth in the near future. TechCrunch is convering the event and tells us
Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at LeWeb a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem.
He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs.
The roadmap ahead:
Transparency: “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions”
Communication: “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on”
Utility: “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive”
Profitability: “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010)
Of course, since this is Twitter most people will laser in on the P word (profitability). Some of the significant ‘details’ around these areas is that everyone will have full access to the data stream in 2010 (what that actually means is TBD). Look for a new website for developers with dashboards and the like for the development community.
Also, as a sign that the development of apps is truly a big deal there will be a Twitter developer conference in 2010 called Chirp in San Francisco next year
The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010).
So Twitter continues to flourish and develop to try to handle the continued growth despite some concern about visitor fall off recently. I suspect that some of the developers are the very reason for this ‘concern’ as many people access Twitter through third party apps to begin with and those growing numbers are not tracked by these number crunching entities.
Looks like 2010 is going to be another big year for Twitter.
Social Media and Content Discovery: A Growing Relationship
While the commercial Internet age is in its teens according to linear age it has some difficulty focusing. Just when users are getting used to a world that is search engine centric there comes along the social web or social media or social networking or social (insert your word here) to truly change how people make sense of the sheer volume of data on the Internet. This change or movement toward the social web is happening at an ever increasing rate and creates opportunities as well as difficulties for those who are trying to harness this power for business.
Nielsen reports at its blog in a post from Jon Gibbs, VP Media Analytics
In the beginning there were ISPs, which then gave way to portals ― aggregators of content and links ― which then led to the rise of “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media.
We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?
Nielsen goes on to categorize people as either ‘searchers’ who primarily get their data from search engines, ‘portalists’ who use a portal site to access data and ‘socializers’ who use, you guessed it, social media to get their information. As this last group grows there could be some significant implications moving forward for everyone who is using the Internet for business.
As a result the socializer group actually feels that there is too much information on the Internet. Much more so than those who simply use search engines. Think about it. A search engine user takes it on faith (the vast majority of the time) that the entire Internet for a keyword or key phrase is boiled down to just 10 best results. Of course, if they only take their online sophistication that far then the Internet does appear to be easy to manage. Socializers, on the other hand, spend a lot more time online and hear / see a lot more than regular Internet users. It can become very noisy very quickly.
So how do they manage this? Through their online social network of buddies, of course. At this point, now the real recommendations and buying decisions are happening based on what other people, not an impersonal engine says. Hopefully, they are giving actual experience to help their online connections make more informed purchasing decisions. That’s the theory at least. Take a look at the significant differences in how socializers and searchers use various formats for information. Why Wikipedia is even part of the discussion baffles me but what do I know?
So what are you? Searcher? Portalist? Socializer? A little of all of them. Will social media displace search engines as a primary source of information in the near future? What does it mean to you TODAY as an Internet marketer? Share your thoughts and let’s learn from each other.
CMO Summit Outlines Challenges and Opportunities
Over the next day or so I will be giving you some information that I have been gathering while at the CMO Summit in San Francisco. The even is put on by the Aberdeen Group and thus far has been incredibly informative. I write that with a bit of surprise because unfortunately events often sound so interesting in the promotion but fizzle in the execution. Not thus far with this event. Here’s a quick recap of the first day.
Mike Linton, former CMO of eBay and Best Buy, Columnist for Forbes
As you might expect from someone who has this kind of experience there was plenty to discuss on the topic of ‘CMO Calculus: Balancing Innovation and Results’. My head was actually spinning after this one. Like most of the information that you get at these shows it’s not really a surprise because most of it makes sense when you hear it. What is interesting , however, is the sheer volume of things to consider.
Linton spoke about how if you are doing everything in your marketing efforts from a defensive position you will lose. Being on the marketing defensive is the result of no innovation. Marketing on the defensive kills growth while making stagnation and mediocrity common. In other words, if you are not pushing and innovating you are in what could be called the death throes of marketing. Note to self: Avoid this at all costs.
As for innovation he made it clear not to confuse actions (like price cutting) with innovating. It may look like a new approach but it is not innovation. According to Linton
Marketing innovation is trying something truly new designed to change the behavior of customers in a way that benefits the innovator.
The next presenter, Ken Wirt, VP Consumer Marketing of Cisco Systems took the audience through his experience of taking one of the most recognized brands in the technology world and associating the performance of the brand with consumer benefits using consumer generated media. I spoke with him after his talk and he said that many consumers don’t know that Cisco is involved in their lives but that the brand enables a lot of what they do every day.
While traditional Cisco customers care about technology, the average person setting up a home network is thinking about what it provides them with. They care about the benefits and not the features. They desire freedom and Cisco products can give that to them with the same brand that is integral to the inner workings of the Internet as a whole with its products like routers, switches and more.
The resulting consumer generated videos using students to make them, told those kinds of stories in a way that made Cisco the enabler of freedom and choice for people like Tim Ferris. This presentation had followed an attendee poll where 74% of the people in attendance felt that consumers telling their stories in their words was the most effective way to reach a customer. Timely indeed.
One caution offered by Wirt that it is best to provide some boundaries for the structure of CGM campaigns. People respond more when given direction as evidenced by the amount of video Cisco received, which was a lot. The folks on the other side of the Cisco ledger, the true technical users, tried the same idea but gave no guidance on how to put together the videos and received only 5 entries. People like direction but just enough to get them started with restricting them.
Summarizing these presentations is tough because there is a ton of great insights from the people that you don’t hear from which are the guys and gals at the top of the marketing food chain with all the responsibility and pressure that today’s marketing environment can bring. With the average CMO lifespan at 23 months, it can’t be easy.
Social Media, Your Brand and Your Employees
It looks like there may be a new hiring criteria in the future if Steve Rubel’s thoughts expressed at the Mediabistro Circus are on target and there is evidence that they are. Internetnews.com reports that Rubel’s talk to this group centered on how brands are moving away from the company and more toward people who are the face of the company, i.e. social media front facers who speak on behalf their employer.
Branding is about people, not company names, according to Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital director of insights, Web PR veteran, and author of the Micro Persuasion blog
Some of the highlights include
- E-mail losing its effectiveness – Press releases sent by e-mail are just part of the e-mail clutter that exists due to sheer volume received and the other outlets that people have like Twitter, texting, RSS etc., etc. He then asked
“How many of you have experienced ‘e-mail bankruptcy,’ where you delete all unread e-mails and assume that if any message was important, the person will contact you again?”
- Websites are not the answer – The expectation that people will flock to your web site for information is one that many hold on to but it’s simply not as common as marketers want it to be. It’s likely that a similar ‘information overload’ scenario is playing out there as well.
People are the new brand – Here’s where the rubber meets the road. In a study conducted by Edelman it was found that the most trusted information from a company comes from:
Stock or industry analyst reports – 47%
Articles in business magazines – 44%
Conversations with your friends and peers – 40%
Conversations with company employees – 40%
A company’s own web site – 24%
Corporate or product advertising – 13%
Across the board trust about corporate information has dropped significantly from ’08 to ’09. The exception are those that weren’t measured last year including the conversations with company employees.
A personal experience here. I recently read about how GM is trying to reposition itself in the wake of all of this financial mess with a new ad campaign. The ads are on message with the music and the voiceover but the images actually detract from the experience. I don’t need to see the Pittsburgh Steeler’s QB in an ad about reinvention of a car company. Trouble is the campaign comes across as a “Meet the new boss, it’s the same as the old boss” (tip of the hat to The Who for that one).
My wife, who is not a Fortune 500 marketer asked regarding the GM push, “Wouldn’t it be more effective to have commercials that focus on the people whose jobs depend on turning the company around? Wouldn’t it be more impactful to hear about an assembly line worker who is working their tail off to make a better product, so people will buy the product and thus preserve their job?” I agree with her. Not because she’s wife but because that makes sense. Personally, I would pay attention to that message. This GM campaign is just more company speak and less personal speak. To me, they still don’t get it.
So back to the point of people being a brand. There are companies that are embracing this concept successfully. Comcast’s Frank Eliason and his team get a lot of attention for their work on behalf of their brand. QuickenLoans is doing it as well.
Rubel pointed to Eliason and others as the beginning of this trend. Another is “Kelly” @Quickenloans. Rubel noted an exchange between Kelly and a realtor called Jody Zink that started on May 22, with a tweet by Zink saying, “Just say no to Quicken Loans. There’s nothing QUICK about it” and ended with her tweeting “Thanks for your help, Kelly. We are closed!” on May 28.
“This isn’t customer service,” said Rubel. “This is branding.”
While there there is significant benefit from the customer service and customer retention side of the coin Rubel makes an interesting point
“All of this is seen by the gods of Google,” said Rubel. He noted that Comcast’s Eliason now ranks higher in Google search than a famous video titled A Comcast Technician Sleeping on my Couch that had over 1.3 million views at press time.
So what do companies do? Rubel’s final points for companies to be considering as social media morphs into the branding space
- Find your social media all-stars
- Connect your customers to the all-stars
- Give their all-stars independence
- Give them the equipment and support they need in order to do active listening on social media.
Lots to think about over the weekend, huh?
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