Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

As a business, we sometimes find ourselves slipping into bad behavior, so we came up with this Twitter code of conduct. We aspire to the code, but don’t always succeed. Please let us know if we are falling short.

twitter.com/twooctobers

Oh, and here is our formula for Twitter success: there is no formula, see 1. above.

And these are some of the fine people who’ve taught us about good twitizenship: @alizasherman, @boulderrunner, @clearviewwater, and @timeforcake

With Internet trends, it can be hard to tell when hype is merited and when it isn’t. Below is my attempt to answer this question for some sites of interest to local businesses. The metric traffic-to-hype ratio measures the proportion of actual traffic to how often a site gets talked about. A high ratio means there’s more steak than sizzle, a low ratio means there’s more sizzle than steak.

So what?

I ran these numbers mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. At Two Octobers, we help businesses get found, and we like to focus on what will drive real results. Sheer volume of traffic is certainly a part of that, but there is also merit to looking for under-recognized opportunities. Anecdotally, I find that the ratio of marketers to non-marketers on Twitter is very high. Given the traffic-to-hype ratio of Twitter, that should come as no surprise. It may still be worth marketing on Twitter, but you will have to work pretty hard to stand out. Yelp, on the other hand, isn’t getting a lot of hype but it is getting decent usage, so you should be able to stand out with less effort. And the very unsexy Internet yellow pages also get good traffic and very little hype.

I also think the YouTube number is interesting – YouTube gets a lot of hype, but it also gets A LOT of usage. I’m going to be thinking more about how to leverage YouTube for local businesses after writing this post.

Where does the data come from?

The visits numbers come from Compete.com September 2010 U.S. visit statistics. Search results are based on a Google query for the site name without the “.com”, excluding results on the site itself. The search results were also filtered to only show pages that were indexed in September, 2010.

example of Google search query

The traffic-to-hype ratio is simply the ratio of the two. I recognize that there are some flaws to this methodology, for example most of these sites also have mobile applications that aren’t represented in the Compete statistics. Twitter and Foursquare in particular are affected by this problem. But all have web interfaces that account for a significant percentage of usage and I don’t know of a good source to account for application visits. If you do, please let me know!

And I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.

I was having lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Chandler who sells advertising at an online publisher and the topic of Twitter advertising came up. His personal viewpoint on Twitter is similar to one I’ve heard quite a bit recently: “I tried it out, but I didn’t get much out of it.” He said it tentatively, as if I might be offended, or exclaim some secret to extracting value from Twitter that had escaped him. But I have found myself questioning the value of Twitter recently as well. Our conversation evolved to this: there’s a lot of talking on Twitter and not much listening. As an advertising medium Twitter appears to have decent reach, but is reach meaningful if people aren’t really paying attention? Further, I have noticed that many of my recent followers look like this:

Notice the thousands of followers and the clear commercial agenda. What seems to be in vogue now is to follow thousands of people, then drop the ones that don’t follow back, then follow thousands more, and so on. Having lots of followers creates the impression that people give a crap, but it turns out that on Twitter, followers don’t equal influence.

My lunchtime conversation with Chandler concluded with the supposition that Twitter users must be getting more selective about who they actually listen to, if they are listening at all. An increase in advertising on Twitter will only heighten the need to filter out the signal from the noise, which means that advertisers will be putting a lot of effort in to marketing to the void.

I’ve been researching this topic and mulling it over since my conversation with Chandler, then got this email today from another friend:

It’s hard not to agree!
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=3679
Hal

The link describes the story of Leo Laporte, a well-known technology journalist who stopped Tweeting for a few weeks only to find that nobody seemed to notice. In Leo’s words, “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

Laporte has nicely phrased what Chandler and I were trying to articulate, but my intervening research tells me that we had it at least partially wrong. I didn’t find any data trending people’s propensity to listen. A few things I did find:

• Only 7% of Americans actively use Twitter, but those 7% are more affluent, more educated and tend to be early technology adopters in comparison to the online population as a whole. They also seek and give brand and product advice using Twitter. Source: Edison Research
• 300,000 new users are signing up for Twitter every day. Source: Huffington Post
• Globally, Twitter use has exploded.Worldwide traffic to Twitter.com has more than doubled in the past year. Source: Comscore

With that kind of growth, it is too soon to say what Twitter is or isn’t. The way people are using Twitter is bound to be evolving. And anecdotally I know several local businesses that are finding new customers through their Twitter accounts. I still believe that broadcast advertising will fail on Twitter, but I don’t think we can extrapolate from our own personal experiences to say that Twitter is not an effective marketing medium. It may take work to get people to pay attention, but the payoff is a fast-growing, affluent population. If you are an SMB with limited time and resources, you should gauge the effort versus the return. If your target market is well-to-do, educated early-adopters, it is probably worth it. If you are a plumber or a dry cleaner, you should give it an honest try and see if you enjoy tweeting. If you find it a chore, your time is better spent elsewhere. At least for now.

And if you are looking for more tweets to ignore, mine are as good as any  @nicobrx

I generally write here about topics related to online marketing with the goal of being useful to local businesses. This is a bit different, apologies in advance for my transgression.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer who was also for a time the Director of the National Public Library of Argentina. He mostly wrote short stories, and his stories were often explorations of the quest for knowledge in the face of overwhelming quantities of information. That he wrote about this subject before the advent of computers and digitized information gives him a unique perspective on an area that I struggle with constantly.

One story in particular has been on my mind quite a bit recently, “Funes the Memorious.” The story describes a boy who fell from a horse and acquired a perfect memory, the ability to remember every sensory detail of everything he had ever experienced. The story is written from the point of view of Borges, who ends up spending a night in conversation with Funes. At the beginning of the conversation the reader feels awe and even envy at the boy’s talents. He learned Latin in a matter of days, and said of his life before the fall that he “looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”

Of late I feel like I am capsized in a whitewater of media. I find myself wanting to comb through it all, to find fragments of knowledge and moments of human contact. Twitter epitomizes this for me. In Facebook I am mostly connected to people I already know. I use it to keep in touch, and to engage in casual interaction. In Twitter I am struck by the stark contrast between the torrents of repeated chatter and the occasional bit of insight making its way downstream. I learn new things and make new friends, but I also find myself wishing I were more like Funes. Where I find myself dragged under by the turbulence, Funes would find it as calm as a reflecting pool. Funes could follow a thousand twitterers and give every one due attention, even a thousand thousand.

But to be Funes is not a thing to wish for. Borges describes his plight:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the shaply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)

Borges further explains that “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Another way of looking at it is that ideas are given meaning by the spaces in between. If we think of everything that is called a “dog” as an individual entity without generalizing, it becomes difficult to tell where dogs end and jackals or wolves begin. This is the problem I have with media today. It affords me no spaces in which to build archetypes or even to let one individual stand out from the next. Sometimes I find it difficult to sleep, difficult to turn my mind from the stream.

I like to solve problems, but I can’t say as I’ve made much progress with this one. I think we are all suffering the plight of Funes to some extent. Some solve it by shutting off all of the streams, but that is not the right solution for me. I like meeting new people and learning new things, and to shut myself off from media would be to exclude myself from the prevailing currents of culture. Borges saw the coming challenges of an information society but he did not turn away from them, he faced them head on. We will find ways to bridge differences and make abstractions that allow us to be infinitely connected and yet sleep peacefully. In my own small way I hope to be part of that.

Social networking tools that combine location with a status update have been around for a few years. Among them, Gowalla and Foursquare have gained some traction among the uber-connected. Both of these tools broadcast “this is where I am right now” to other users in some way, shape or form. Collectively, such systems are called “location based services” (LBS). Twitter also recently announced support for location-based tweets, prompting some analysts to predict the demise of the aforementioned tools. But if Twitter was going to kill them, Facebook will for sure.

Ad Age reported today that Facebook is getting ready to release location-based status updates. But the reason I am writing about this is not to report another Goliath-kills-David story. It is because both Gowalla and Foursquare employed a marketing strategy which is effective, but risky. And now they face the business end of that risk, so to speak. They both focused their marketing efforts on digital hipsters, in particular choosing the super-cool SXSW conference as a launching pad and battleground for the attention of social mavens. The strategy worked, and both reported significant adoption in 2009 and growth in 2010.

The risk of this strategy? Hipsters are fickle. Being hip is about knowing what’s next, not doing what your neighbors do. Sometimes, hipsters can skyrocket a product or brand into the mainstream, as when Corona beer went from super-cool to mainstream import. But if a big, well-known brand copies a hip product before it goes mainstream, all you are left with is a bunch of hipsters who are eager to turn their backs on you and get on to the next new thing.

Will all of my friends who spend time on Facebook switch to Foursquare or Gowalla for location-based services? I don’t think so, and according to Ad Age, big brand marketers don’t think so either. Will Foursquare and Gowalla’s current users bring mainstream users into those services? Nope. That’s not what hipsters do.