Archive for the ‘MicroMedia’ Category

Misjudgment or Transparency? How a Single Tweet Caused a Stir With a Client

Categories: MicroMedia, PRPosted on January 24th, 2009

It’s entertaining to watch how the PR industry self-spins, in this latest dust up regarding a tweet by James Andrews, an executive who works at Ketchum, a well known PR agency.

James is accused of bad form, and his company had to backtrack when he posted this tweet on the way to visit his client Fedex: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say “I would die if I h ad to live here!” it caused angst with the ‘location sensitive’ client, and they issued this comment, apparently on this blog (update: this may have been an email from Fedex to Ketchum), after it was run up the Fedex flagpole. (via David, and Peter)

Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write.

Not knowing exactly what prompted your comments, I will admit the area around our airport is a bit of an eyesore, not without crime, prostitution, commercial decay, and a few potholes. But there is a major political, community, religious, and business effort underway, that includes FedEx, to transform that area. We’re hopeful that over time, our city will have a better “face” to present to visitors.

James, everyone participating in today’s event, including those in the auditorium with you this morning, just received their first paycheck of 2009 containing a 5% pay cut… which we wholeheartedly support because it continued the tradition established by Mr. Smith of doing whatever it takes to protect jobs.

Considering that we just entered the second year of a U.S. recession, and we are experiencing significant business loss due to the global economic downturn, many of my peers and I question the expense of paying Ketchum to produce the video open for today’s event; work that could have been achieved by internal, award-winning professionals with decades of experience in television production.

Additionally Mr. Andrews, with all due respect, to continue the context of your post; true confession: many of my peers and I don’t see much relevance between your presentation this morning and the work we do in Employee Communications.

(Signed as a personal message by a member of the FedEx Corporate Communications team)

Apparently, some took offense, and tweeted and an interesting exchange started to happen, as the conversation ensued also on twitter. James then stood by his guns, explained his stance and apologized and helped explain what happened on this own blog (followed by a post by his own wife).

A few takeaways

While showing a bit of misjudgment, (there are many other ways he could have expressed his opinion) I’d rather hire someone who was honest and transparent first. Gawker agrees

Fedex employees need to have some fun with the online conversation, the reaction was a brutal and excessive, but it’s clear that this was a trigger for other axes to grind.

Personal opinions must be kept in check when it involves clients and customers.

Twitter is often taken out of context, it’s happened to me. Intent isn’t always clear.

The PR industry likes to spin it’s own top, and I’m adding to it right now.

James Andrews is better off for this, and I admire him for weathering this storm.

Rule of thumb: (fitting, if you tweet from a mobile device). When you tweet, you’re publishing, don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and assume that your current and future boss, wife, and mother are reading it.

Thanks to Jennifer Doctor (update: who calls for context of the situation) for spurring me along to comment on this topic.

UJpdate: I like Eric’s take on this, and suggests that James didn’t represent himself well as a PR professional, regardless of anyone who should have an opinion.

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20 days off from Twitter: A View From The Outside

Categories: MicroMedia, RuminationsPosted on January 12th, 2009

I’ve returned to Twitter last week, after taking 20 days off, and I’m getting a lot of questions from people asking about the “outside world”. There’s a condition known by prisoners that get comfortable with conditions that return even after they are released, I’m sure they go back to tell the other inmates of “life on the outside”. It’s true my friends, there’s a very large world out there that the digital obsessed forget about.

During my time away, I focused more on blogging, a blog redesign project I’m working on, am working on a communtiy project to help people understand how to get jobs, spent time trying other tools like Friendfeed, spent time on Facebook and shared with my friends and family, and spent more time unplugged during the Holidays. When I watched what was happening on twitter from afar, I realized more than ever how much of the data that was created was pure noise, so instead, I created a Friendfeed room where I segmented out the voices of just a few people over the thousands.

I won’t be tweeting as aggressively as before, in fact according to follow cost, my daily average was 30 tweets, which has now been significantly reduced. I encourage you to back off from the social tools (life goes on) and information got to me anyways, that I realized that we’re not as dependent on these tools as you may think. I can’t step away from Twitter forever, as my clients are there, and this is a tool that I cover as an analyst, but I encourage you to try stepping away, refresh your mind, and come back more focused, I sure did.

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Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement, Web UsagePosted on January 6th, 2009

I used to promote my blog posts on Twitter, then when I left Twitter, noticed a significant loss in traffic. Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, being on a Twitter hiatus gives a unique opportunity to try out some experiments.

By the numbers:
Here’s the stats from the experiment: In the last 24 hours, 199 folks tweeted these words “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” within 24 hours.

Although not all of them used the snipurl I created, there were 2,000 clicks and unique clicks 1,280. This means that the average tweet that linked to the post generated 10 clicks, and about 6.4 unique clicks per person.

There were 145 new followers to my twitter account, the daily average is new daily followers 88. This is a lift in follower increase of 60% beyond the daily average.

Google Web Analytics showed that to be the top viewed page in last 24 hours, with 954 views, the graph below indicates that traffic returned to patterns before I took my Twitter hiatus.

Above Graph: Last 30 days visitors according to Google Analytics to my blog, notice the dip when I started the hiatus on Jan 20th, also coupled by the holidays. On Dec 5th the twitter experiment started and brought visitors back up to normal levels.

Above Graph: Twitter was the top referrer of traffic over the last 24 hours.

This means that:

My experiment on ‘energizing’ (word of mouth) was successful from blog to twitter, learn about my goals.

You don’t need to be on Twitter.com as an active user to gain traffic to your site.

Since my twitter account wasn’t involved, the number of Twitter followers doesn’t matter as much as we once thought.

If you have compelling content, and make it easy for people to share, they will, and then it will rapidly spread through the twitter WOM network.

While I do have a good sized blog readership, a marketer with advertising budget could easily generate eyeballs to a blog with less subscribers, and potentially get similar results.

If you read the comments, there were several vendors that are going to offer a tweet icon at the bottom of your blog post, or wordpress plugin, so expect to see more of these.

This experiment isn’t completely scientifically done, if this were for an official Forrester report, that I’d have several control groups, sample with a variety of different websites, blogs, and twitter accounts to find a pattern. The one conclusion is that I don’t need to tweet to get twitter traffic.

Helpful? Copy, Paste, then Tweet it!

Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter http://snipurl.com/9k5xy

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How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets

Categories: MicroMedia, Word of MouthPosted on January 5th, 2009

I’m on a Twitter hiatus and am not tweeting for a while, instead, I’m focusing on what Forrester calls energizing, what others may refer to as “word of mouth’. So instead, I’m going to conduct experiments to help my clients understand how to best use social tools to allow content to spread for person to person.

While social media ‘chicklets’ already exist that make it easy to make blog posts diggable, tagged on delicious, or emailed to others, we’ve often forgotten to recognize one of the most powerful behaviors: the retweet.

As a result, every single one of my future blog posts will have easy-to-use, copy and paste content that is designed to be rapidly tweeted to your followers –or until a technology emerges that makes it easier.

I’m not going to tweet this post, but want you to spread it to your twitter followers by copying and pasting this code into twitter and share with others

If You Read This, Tweet This to your Followers:

How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets http://snipurl.com/9ii28

What are you waiting for? copy the above sentence, put it into the twitter form bar and share it! Let’s spread the word how bloggers can easily benefit from viral sharing by making it easy for blog posts to be retweeted. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that take off, so I’ll write a wrap up post measuring the impacts of this experiment. (Update: The findings are now live, see the data after 24 hours)

So How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets? Make it easy for their readers to tweet it, by creating simple copy and a shortened URL and include it at the bottom of each blog post. Thanks for tweeting, and retweeting this.

(Update: you can track the tweets here, here, here and here)

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About My Twitter Hiatus

Categories: MicroMediaPosted on January 3rd, 2009

Despite my heavy usage, I’m on Twitter Hiatus
I’m known for being a very active twitter user, recent applications have tracked my daily usage from being 20-30 tweets on average. I’m not like other twitter users, as I have a very specific method in which I use the tool. However, two weeks ago today, I stopped using twitter, and announced that I’m on temporary Twitter hiatus.

Twitter shows its weaknesses
Why? I’m recalibrating my media plan, and trying to shift and shake things up. First of all, there’s a few things that have caused me to evaluate my media strategy: 1) the lack of context in 140 characters, 2) unthreaded discussions makes it difficult to track conversations in one place, and 3) unsymmetrical networks, meaning if you’re not following someone, what they say creates gaps in the conversation. All of these reasons create challenges on making twitter an effective conversation tool. Perhaps most sadly, I’ve observed the cracks getting deeper during crisis and incidents like motrin moms, sponsored blog posts, and mumbai attacks.

Now at the end of the year, I spent more time in the real world with friends and family, and have had an opportunity to step back and think things through. As a result, I’m finding solace in tools that allow for greater context like this blog, and on Friendfeed.

Time to Refocus
Next, I’m trying to focus more on energizing(word of mouth) and supporting (community) this year, rather than just publishing, in an effort to be more efficient, and to help the community during this troublesome economy. Shel Israel has noticed that despite my inactivity in Twitter (which I still monitor, of course) that the community around me continues to grow. I’m not sure why or how that is happening, but it’s an interesting phenomenon.

You should evaluate how you spend your time
I encourage you during this downtime to evaluate and rethink how you use these social technologies. You should think about the following questions: how has the environment around you changed? how was technology changed? what’s your goal? Are you using the tools in the right way to meet these three questions? You have limited inventory (time) and the world is always changing, are you sure you’re investing your resources in the right way? There’s nearly unlimited tools out there, take the time to think it through.

Stay tuned, I have a new project launching
What to expect from me in the future? With my time saved on not interacting as much in the conversation, I’ve been focusing my efforts on a resource that will help people understand the skills needed during a recession, and how to get jobs –stay tuned people.

Update: How 20 days off did me good.

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Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web UsagePosted on December 8th, 2008

Left: The famed HP Labs think tank in Palo Alto.

A few months ago, I spent an entire day with the HP Labs group in Palo Alto, they’re responsible for the R&D and innovation that goes into their thousands of technology products on the market. I was pleased to see this deep dive scientific research on Twitter by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu.

You can read the free Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope (PDF). Written in an academic style, it’s a bit dense for the casual reader. I write for a business audience and I’ll strip out the most important findings, and add my own insight to what I think matters. As always you’re welcome to chime in the comments.

Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research:
If you just need a summary, I wrote this in a way that you can just read the bolded elements to get a sense of the report. I hope this saved you some time.

Most users have a smaller inner circle they communicate with: Within a social network, it was found that most only frequently communicate with a small segment of users –even if one has a large community. Makes sense, everyone has an ‘inner circle’. Finding the true network that an individual has (even if they have thousands of “friends”) is what’s really important. Although Scoble solicits imput from thousands of contacts, he leans on a smaller subset of folks to trust above all others.

HP Labs Sample Size is @ 6% of the Twittersphere: HP Labs took a random sample set of Twitter users, for a base of number of 309,740 users. According to my social network stats tracking page, Twitter’s total universe is somewhere between 4-5 million (still very small). I’ll value the network on the 5 mil side, so that’s sample size of about 6%, which is pretty healthy.

On average, most had 85 followers: They found that the average user has 85 followers in their network, this number seems reasonable when averaged out across the network.

On average, most had 80 friends: Most users followed back 80 others, which is close to the actual follower number. Perhaps some weren’t following spam bots, or people that follow everyone. James Governor has been discussing asymmetrical networks, but it appears that on the average, most are symmetrical.

Tweet Frequency? About one a day: On average, these users had posted 255 tweets, and since the average users has been around for nearly 7 months, thats about 36 tweets per month, or little bit over one a day.

68%: are active users Social networking stats are almost always flawed, as the vendors don’t disclose how many are truly active. I define active user base as logged in and completed an activity in the last 30 days. Among the 309,740 users only 211,024 posted. It’s unknown if this filtered out spam tweets, although nearly 2/3rds of users have returned (site stickyness. That’s a pretty good return to site rate.

Most members have been on twitter nearly 7 months: The research showed that the average person (from first to last post) was active for 206 days. This means that June 2008 (report written in Dec) has become somewhat of a trigger point, perhaps where a growth curve started to point upwards. I noticed an influx of users on April 2008, two months before HPs findings, see comment #579

A quarter of tweets (@) are directed at other users: The report showed that Around 25.4% of all posts are directed, by using the “@user” which is responding to others. This could suggest that the other 75% of tweets are updating their network of what users think is interesting or discussing ‘what they are doing’

The more followers, the more they tweet –up until a point: Figure 1 indicates frequently in posting the more followers they have, right up until about 500 followers where the frequency starts to level out (if the graph were smoothed). The data around number of friends suggests a similar graph, although there’s no saturation point (see figure 2). I’ll suggest the more connections a user has, the more value they have, and therefore are more active.

Despite having large networks, a smaller circle is maintained: For users with a high number of followers, they actually only still communicate with a smaller subset of users. This rule remains constant see figure 4.

Where’s the value? within the hidden network: To find out the real value of a twitter user and their network, finding out their true network of folks they communicate with on a regular basis will show their trusted network. Finding out who the Scobles’ communicate with the most will determine will help find out how he is influenced.

Business Opportunity for Measurement Vendors
If you’re a social media measurement company, and can find out the true influence model of who people really trust above all other users by looking at actual “@” behavior and follow behavior, be sure to leave a comment below showing how you can do this. Then, conducting this by topic, will find out the true influencers by market segment within the Twitterpshere.

Brand Opportunity
As we know, traditional advertising doesn’t work well in social networks, ‘carpet bombing’ isn’t effective. However, conversational marketing is also costly, as you have to spend great resources on labor to communicate with influencers. Therefore brands who want to be effective with their resources should find out who is an influencer in their market and focus their conversational marketing primarily on them.

Thanks to the HP labs team who did a great report and really helped to further understanding Twitter better, when you have time, invite me over for lunch, I’m in the area.

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Don’t get BrandJacked: Confirming Your Corporate Twitter Account

Categories: MicroMediaPosted on December 4th, 2008

I’m hearing of more and more brands starting to venture into the Twittersphere to listen, influence, and support customers. In fact, I’ve had 3-4 inquiry (client calls) at Forrester asking about Twitter for marketing.

Challenge: Anyone can Create an Twitter Account and Cause BrandJacking
A few months ago, many (myself included) were fooled by a brandjacking of “Janet” from Exxon Mobile, (see examples of others brands who were punk’d) who in reality wasn’t who she said she was. I’ve also heard from other brands that name squatters were taking corporate names and registering them, and some are saying negative things. Slow brands are often behind, and as a result have to deal with cleanup.

I’ve heard from some brands that if you contact Twitter, they will disallow anyone from registering your corporate name, but I can’t confirm this is true, if someone from Twitter wants to discuss with me how brands can best work with the microblogging tool, please let me know.

If your brand is planning on venturing into the twittersphere, after you develop a strategy based on the POST methodology, you should then confirm your twitter address so your customers and community can confirm it’s really you. Until we get a single sign on and identity verification process across the whole web, we need a way to confirm twitter accounts.

Solution: Confirm tour Corporate Twitter Account

1) Link to your twitter profile from your corporate website: Since no but official employees can edit your corporate website, this is an ‘official’ way of confirming identity. If your corporate site is Hitachi, then perhaps on the Hitachi news site, or official Hitachi blog (providing you have one) link to the Twitter account.

2) Cross link from your Twitter profile page to corporate site: Since most won’t know of the link from your corporate site, you now must update your Twitter profile (where you describe yourself) and point back to the corporate webpage that mentions the twitter account. This is called a “cross-link” and will confirm that the twitter account is official.

Are you a Twitter user? Require confirmation from brands before engaging. Anyone in the Twitter community who runs into a corporate twitter account, should point brands to this very blog post, and ask them to confirm their identity, if they don’t, ignore them. Hope this tip helps brands, consumers, and the twittersphere. Good luck all.

Update: The reason I did this post as I engaged in a conversation with Bissell, yup the vacuum company, as I was recently discussing getting a steam cleaner to deal with puppy Rumba’s number 1 spots. They approached me on Twitter (@wemeanclean) and suggested a product to me (the SpotBot), and I suggested that they confirm their identity, they have, and now have linked to their twitter account from the footer of their corporate homepage at bissel.com. Well done, you’ve now taken one more step closer to earning my trust, and I’m more likely to engage in conversation and take a closer look at your products.

Now, about those steam cleaners… I am in the market…

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Retweet: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement, Word of MouthPosted on November 23rd, 2008

Word of Mouth, the Holy Grail of Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is one of the most desirable activities to brands, why? Because research on trust shows that consumers (folks like you and me) trust the opinions of people we know more than anyone else. It makes sense of course, think about the next time you’re going to buy a car, who’s opinion are you going to trust, those of your friends or the opinion of the sales guy representing the product?

[Information within Microblogging communities like Twitter encourage rapid word of mouth --of both positive and negative content]

Twitter, Although Small, Continues to Demonstrate Influence
Twitter, which I’m seeing informal stats of around 5 million users, has continued to show it’s viral capabilities, with last week’s Motrin mom’s brand punking of an advertisement to news being spread about natural disasters faster than traditional news, this toolset allows content to spread faster and farther than we’ve ever seen. Watching how Al Gore’s Current TV integrated tweets live on their TV broadcast and how CNN and CSPAN mentioned this microblogging service during the election months is a nod to it’s power. In some ways, long form blog posts like this seem so much slower and plodding compared to how quickly information can come and go in Twitter.

[Within the Twitter community a "Retweet" is a social gesture indicating endorsement of an idea]

The “Retweet” How Information Quickly Spreads
As a result, the most powerful activity within Twitter is to watch the “Retweet” phenomeneon. A retweet is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network –causing it to spread from one community to the next –retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading. Early research from Peter Kim indicates that twitter users are brand sensitive, and spread information. Since content can be shared, consumed on mobile devices, this information can rapidly spread faster than any other infectious technology we’ve ever seen.

How to Measure and Monitor the Coveted Retweets
Expect to see social media measurement tools appear that measure the spread of retweets, URLs, and other commonly repeated content to look for how information is passed from a source to a node, to an entire community. In fact, in a very primitive way, you can see those that are repeating the content of others, for example Tim O’Reilly’s content. See this search query showing “Retweet @timorielly“, or “RT @timoreilly” (an abbreviated version).

You should do the same query for your brand, products, and those of your competitors, start with this query “retweet yourbrand“, and change out yourbrand. At some point we can expect a service to appear that will track a tweet from a single source, then track how it is retweeted, then by who (and their number of followers) then to create a numerical value of the velocity of that single original tweet as it cascades through a community.

Impacts to Users, Brands and Vendors

Twitter Users: If someone retweets your content, be and feel honored, it means that your content was so important or interesting to them they are willing to share it with their own trusted network. If you need some guidelines on how to retweet, read this handy guide.

Brands: Companies should pay close attention to how information spreads and should do searches on their product and brand to learn what type of information is being spread by who.

Vendors: Social media measurement companies like Cymfony, Buzzmetrics, Radian 6, Buzzlogic, and others should start tracking the retweet stream around a brand and product to monitor and map out community and content hotspots. It’s possible to create some type of “Digg” or “Delicious” tool that maps the social voting and bookmarking based off the data gleaned from Retweets and TinyURLs.

I’ll echo Shel Israel who posted similar thoughts that retweeting is the most powerful single aspect of Twitter.

Update: some stats are starting to appear about retweeting, see the Retweetist.

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Why Magpie’s Advertising System Is Self-Diminishing

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media, Web AdvertisingPosted on November 21st, 2008

Testing a Twitter Advertising System
I tested out Magpie, an advertising system that creates tweets in my tweet stream, from third party advertisers then pays me.

Some have already blogged about their opposing thoughts on it, and some are publicaly open that they are now Magpies. For me, it was just a test that I’ve now ceased.

Part of my job as an analyst covering social media is to use the very tools in which I cover. I use this knowledge to write reports, help clients, and make suggestions to the vendors themselves. You can expect brands to ask me “how should we engage in Twitter” and I’ll point them to this very post.

There was quite the vitriolic reaction from some, others didn’t seem to mind, a few were acceptable of it. If there was anyone to test it, it makes sense for me, it’s part of my job, and I have a large enough follower base to average reactions.

I’m also going to measure the amount of folks that may have unsubscribed with TweepleTwak, hopefully they’ll realize it’s not permanent and return.

The Test
I setup the system a few days ago, and set it for every 10th tweet there would be an ad, the system is supposed to line up ads with content related to what I talk about. Either there was no brands related to what I talk about, or the system felt I talked about magpie enough, it tweeted this:

“#magpie startups give magpie a try! they’ve got a total reach of 500,000 followers. campaigns starting at EUR 10. http://rubyurl.com/k98e”

Immediately after, I let my followers know it was a test, and tweeted the following:

“That last tweet was my first test of Magpie, It was auto generated by them. I’m testing this as a social media analyst. What do you think? “

Here are the 48 reactions, which I’ve sorted by sentiment:
Responses came in over 60 minutes.

Successful or Accepted: 7 Responses

findchris: @jowyang Not so bad as long as the #magpie tag is used.

gahlord: Also, fwiw, I don’t care that much if @jowyang uses Magpie (I put up with a lot of noise for Guy, why not for Owyang?)

nateritter: @jowyang at least it was relevant. Probably first thing I’ve clicked on in your stream in a while actually. It interests me.

mediamanx: @jowyang the magpie ad seems relevant – though self promoting to magpie. will be interesteing to see what follows & how frequent they run

davidkspencer: @jowyang I wouldn’t mind it if the #magpie tag somehow stood out. It blends in, easy to miss. That’s an issue with app, not business model.

DavidBrim: @jowyang #magpie sounds cool, but I don’t think a CPM model will be as effective as a CPC or CPA model. http://tinyurl.com/6cvgzo

KevinUrie: @jowyang it will work for you, and you will not loose many followers. But for most it will be a death sentence. Saying test, ruins the test

Unsure, Neutral or Conditional: 14 Responses

ewantoo: @jowyang I think it will all depend on the adverts carried, an ad to buy herbal viagra is going to get you or anyone else blocked

jasonlog: @jowyang should think of twit copywriting

gahlord: @jowyang Will you have to give a disclaimer about potential profit motives when writing about Magpie?

john_mcgann: @ jowyang If early adopters are important to the advertiser then advertwitting could actually *damage* a brand… IMHO

jusx: @jowyang i wouldn’t mind magpie if it labels it’s tweets with “SPONSOR” or “ADVERTISEMENT”. Yes in caps. It’s a bit deceiving IMHO.

fritzpw: @jowyang I got a message advertising magpie. Was that the intent?

sawinkler: @jakemarsh @jowyang just had the same exact tweets. did I just see magpie in action?

JoeSeale: @jowyang IMHO magpie gives a certain opaqueness to the term transparency. Where’s the disclaimer that you didn’t *actually* post that info?

A_F: @jowyang they need to disclose in the tweet that it is a “sponsored” tweet, else = FAIL

JoeSeale: @jowyang I suppose I missed the #magpie. Does that count as a disclaimer?

techpr: @jowyang auto-generated by magpie (not clear) and they refer to themselves in third person. lame. twitter is about transparency, no?

NoOneYouKnow: @jowyang Magpie site http://be-a-magpie.com/ is a little confusing – is it pay for tweet? ad network?

fbpda: @jowyang I don’t think that #magpie is going to annoy me but if it bothers one of my followers then it’s a no-go for me.

jasona: @jowyang It was a big, blatant billboard on the side of a nice, quite, untouched country road.

Negative Reaction: 20 Responses

GrantGriffiths: @jowyang What do I think. I think #Mappie is a bunch of BS that twitter doesn’t need.

WBkilburn: @jowyang To me, it diminishes your credibility. Advert is in your voice – on blog ads, there’s a distinction between autor and advertiser.

bloodandmilk: @jowyang It made me wonder why you were running an ad, and I doubted your judgement a little.

laser: @jowyang I wish that the magpie tweets came across as ads rather than personal announcements. Seems kind of misleading.

t_de_baillon: @jowyang Magpie means more noise for less signal. I never thought diluting a message was a good marketing strategy

WellTold: @jowyang re magpie, I’d rather eat my foot than use that. Ads on twitter – leave me alione!!!!!

kerry_anne: @jowyang I blogged my reasons for disliking #magpie a few weeks ago: http://is.gd/6hD8 (expand)

durjoy: @jowyang I think it’s noise pollution

jonesabi: @jowyang The trust I feel when I think of you plummeted.

gilliatt: @jowyang I think be-a-magpie.com is making http://magpie.net glad they rebranded earlier. Twitter spam will not make friends.

thehartworker: @jowyang as much as I know I cannot influence at all what magpie twitters in my name – therefore: no way I will use it

kellytirman: @jowyang I am not feeling it. There must be a better solution to monetize Twitter, if at all.

PatrickCourtney: @jowyang there’s no real barrier between ad and content. To me it weakens credibility – like pay per post for blogs.

dtd: @jowyang I think no. The Magpie “message” seems to be coming directly from you.

seanodotcom: @jowyang spammy.

zolierdos: @jowyang Jeremiah, you gotta be kidding, this is spam

theregoesdave: @jowyang i think magpie is paying for your credibility, but you don’t get it back when they’re done #magpie

brentnau: @jowyang I really believe that if the tweets do not pass the sniff test followers wiil revolt. Escpecially if used too often.

AndySwan: @jowyang please don’t. #magpie is NO DIFFERENT than accepting $$ to send your friends spam emails or intterupt their real convos with pitch

Benderelly: @jowyang I think you’re cashing in – I ain’t clicking on it.

Unfollow: The worst reaction: 7 Responses

quietrevolution: @jowyang I like folks promoting themselves/their biz etc. I would delete you from my followers & anyone else that uses it. No value to me.

ericagee: @jowyang Yeah, I hatethe idea of Magpie and agree with Joe – I’d unfollow anyone who started using it regularly.

ninjarunner: @jowyang i have told myself that i will unfollow people who use #magpie. Love your tweets, at a cross-roads if you use it…

adarowski: @jowyang I can’t really think of any cases where magpie ≠ unfollow.

JoeCascio: @jowyang Dude, you have to be kidding. Anybody that spams me thru Magpie gets an automatic un-follow. 4reelz.

wnourse: @jowyang Don’t like it – I may stop following if people start using it

mark2100: @jowyang @JessicaKnows I’m unfollowing you because of Magpie, it’s nothing personal but tweeter users need to take a stand against spam.

Findings
Positive Reactions 7, or 14%
Unsure Reactions 14, or 29%
Negative Reactions: 20, or 41%
Unfollow (very negative) 7, or 14%

As you can see, the majority of responses were negative (20), some downright annoyed or angry and ready to leave (7), that means that 56% of respondents had negative reactions. Many were confused (14), or had conditions on why it could be successful, and finally a few were actually ok with it (7) a mere 14%. Given the weight of the majority of negative responses, this system is not ready.

Magpie not ready –and will self implode
In the end, Magpie (or any Twitter advertising system) is going to need some fixes to be successful. The ads need to be clearly identified as ads, the content relevant enough so followers would accept them, and a disclosure made by the tweeter to their followers what’s being done. Perhaps some alternative marketing methods would be developing ads when using the search tools, or on background screens (this has already happened).

Brands often don’t know how to engage in conversational marketing, we’ve seen quite a few brands create Twitter accounts, but are unsure what to do, some spit out press releases and links to blog posts alone, and others create personas like Popeye’s chicken that some are unsure how to react to.

Yet advertising in social media is already well accepted
One thing is for sure, just as we saw with the once “pure” blogs, marketers follow crowds, in fact, I remember in 2005 many bloggers would revolt against blogs having ads, my recent count showed that there are 4 on scobleizer, 12 on RWW, 14 on Techcrunch, and 21 ads on Mashable. (note, sometimes its hard to tell what’s an ad and what’s not). In fact, there are 1.5 million subscribers to Techcrunch’s RSS feed, which contains ads instream at the bottom of each post –ads are an acceptable part of opt-in content.

There’s also Glam Media, Federated Media, Google Ad sense and others, in fact, one of my favorite podcasts, For Immediate Release is sponsored by Ragan communications and other vendors, and I have no problem with this as the signal is high, and the ads are related to my interests.

Risks, Money, and Experiments
Yes, I took a risk losing some followers by doing this test, yet I’ve since stop the magpie service. Now that the test is over, and will be meeting with the Magpie team for a phone briefing if we can coordinate since the team is in Germany.

What about the money? It calculates the number of followers I have, (plus some other factors I believe) and Magpie let me know I earned a few euros, €32.87 which equates $41.39. I won’t be collecting the money, since they only cash out for 50 euros, and if they mail me a check, I’ll donate it to the Red Cross, my favorite charity.

Love to hear your reactions to this experiment.

Update: Just like Tivo, Ad blocking software and email spam filters appeared as a response to ads, a Magpie Blocking script has appeared which auto filters all messages that contain those messages in them.

Posted in MicroMedia, Social Media, Web Advertising | Comments

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The Motrin Moms Backlash by the Numbers

Categories: Groundswell, MicroMedia, Social Media, Web UsagePosted on November 17th, 2008

If you weren’t following what was happening online this weekend (yes, yes, ok you’ve got a life) there was a Groundswell against Motrin’s latest viral advertisement that was rejected by mothers in Twitter, spread to blogs, and YouTube. I’m not a mom, so at first glance I didn’t understand the offense, but apparently, it was condescending to moms who perceived wearing babies in a sling as ‘fashionable’ accessory, and who didn’t wanted to be labeled as an ‘official mom’. The original video, which was trying to lean on the light side, took to many generalizations with mothers and resulted in a revolt capped by this backlash video.

To learn more about the story, read Laura Fitton’s summary, Dave Knox of P&G is taking note, has made it to the NY Times Parenting Blog, and the VP of Marketing representing Motrin has apparently responded (I can’t confirm this). Update: Motrin has now apologized on their site (see screenshot below) and there’s MSM pickup by Scientific American and Computerworld (of all places)

As much as I’m interested in what folks are saying, allow me to provide an aspect that most others aren’t: short term numerical numbers. (it’s the analyst in me)

The Motrin Moms Backlash by the Numbers
I watch the twitter storm start on Saturday (thanks zsazsa), and watched it carry on through the weekend, I’ve taken snapshots of various analytics and social media tools now on Monday morning.

Above Screentshot: Twitter stats indicate bump in mentions of “motrin” and “motrinmoms”

Above Screentshot: Twitscoop’s Twitter Analytics shows peak for “motrin” notice there’s no mention before the ad.

Above Screentshot: Twitscoop’s Twitter Analytics shows peak for “motrinmoms”

Above Screentshot: 6,000 views on Youtube Video: Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad

Above Screentshot: As a result, 3rd result for “Motrin” in Youtube is to the mother video

Above Screentshot: Although there are only a few tags for “motrin” on delicious, most point to brand backlash

Above Screentshot: The Motrin.com website is down, likely they are removing the ad and reverting to a previous website

Above Screentshot: Google search results for “Motrin Mother” (I found an adjacent term to measure the impacts) are mainly to brand backlash

Above Screentshot: Brand backlash has not impacted Google search results for “motrin”

Update: Nov 20th, It’s finally hit the search results pages of google for “Motrin”, the 9th link down is to the NYT times blog.

Above Screenshot: The Motrin.com site is back up on Monday 11am PST, after being down for a few hours, with the public apology –which I think is handled well

Conclusion: It’s not as bad as it looks…yet
In summary, there were some major blips in social networking tools like Twitter, (it was the top trending topic over the weekend, meaning many saw it that weren’t directly involved) however it’s not likely to cause enough of impact search engine results for “motrin”, be a mainstream press story, or cause damage to stock price.

Overtime, these search results may fade away, depending on how Motrin reacts, and how mothers decide to press the situation.

Although brand backlash certainly wasn’t intention, I’m sure that some at advertising firm who created the campaign will chalk this up as a success (it got influencers talking about the brand –who previously weren’t), although the PR group certainly has been dealing with this firestorm all weekend.

Lessons Learned

Always test your campaign with a small segment first

Always have staff on hand to be prepared to respond during the weekend

Don’t launch a campaign right before the weekend unless you’re prepared to respond

The participants have the power, so participate

For better or for worse, more influencers are talking about Motrin than ever before

I’d love to hear your comments on the fiasco, what short term and long term impacts does this have to the brand? Update: more stats from Freshtakes

Posted in Groundswell, MicroMedia, Social Media, Web Usage | Comments

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Why does Comcast care about Twitter? (Video)

Categories: Interview, MicroMedia, Social Media, VideoPosted on October 30th, 2008

I was pleased to see Frank Eliason (he just launched his blog) from Comcast cares join us at Forrester ’s Consumer Forum this week. In fact, I talked to many of the world’s largest brands about social media marketing during my 1 on 1 sessions with clients (almost 14 of them), it was really the common theme throughout many discussions.

If you don’t know the story of Comcast Cares, well they’ve a pretty disliked reputation for service and support (see sleeping technician), but are trying to turn a new leaf by responding and supporting customers using Comcast Cares on twitter. I had to use this a few months ago, as my bandwidth was extremely slow at home, and they responded within a few minutes.

Frank has become somewhat of a a celebrity, they are frequently mentioned in presentations (mine included) and while many companies are now supporting customers on Twitter, the reason why they get so much attention is because, just like Microsoft and Dell did, the tarnished brands get extra community kudos when they stick out and try to connect with customers.

I polled my twitter followers (twitter is my social computer) to pose some questions for Frank, and I found these ones to be interesting, tune in to find out his responses.

seacatz: @jowyang what’s the most surprising customer experience or story he’s encountered so far?

davefleet: @jowyang does he have the power within Comcast to actually get issues addressed? Is there substance to the engagement or just words?

williamu: @jowyang Ask him how SM doesn’t short circuit p2p/community groups that are Comcast focused. Is it competition or collaboration?

Tabz: @jowyang Whose idea was @comcastcares to begin with – was there resistance from the Powers that be? How did he overcome it?

Despite this outreach on twitter and other websites, what’s going to matter if Comcast actually makes changes to improve their products and service –not just be responsive to problems as they occur. I’ll be watching.

Action Items for your Brand:

Monitor your brand (or your clients) on Twitter using search tools

Secure your company names

Develop a roles, policy, procedure to respond

Before you respond, be prepared to make actionable changes, not just providing lip service

Posted in Interview, MicroMedia, Social Media, Video | Comments

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Recap on the Tweetdebate experiment

Categories: MicroMedia, PoliticsPosted on September 27th, 2008

A graph indicating the frequency of the term “#tweetdebate”

Last night’s debate was truly an interactive experience for all. Although I setup some guidelines to score the candidates, things quickly took on a life of their own as the group formerly known as the audience assigned their own scoring –and the #tweetdebate tag was used for a variety of observations. Current TV overlayed tweets live on their TV station (see these pics of Al Gore) which I found interesting at first –then extremely distracting as the letters floating near the chins of the candidates and I eventually switched back to CNN.

The Tweetdebate game morphed and evolved to something far bigger and greater than I intended, and although the graph above shows a real spike in activity, it’s truly organic in how it was used. I think for the next three debates we can continue to use the tag, but I won’t be doing anything as formal.

We should expect to see advanced sentiment monitoring tools by the next election that will track opinions, tone, and attitudes in real time from microblogging, social networks, and whatever comes next.

The bottom line? TV is no longer a lonely experience –anyone with a cell phone or internet connection can now participate and those that listen can benefit from learning, adapting, and in some cases, appeasing.

(…and yes, if you’re not from the United States, we’re an interesting culture)

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Twitter Presidential Debates: Sept 26

Categories: MicroMedia, Politics, Social MediaPosted on September 21st, 2008

UPDATE: McCain has committed to join.

Why: Why let the media pundits and political analysts have all the fun? You can now be an armchair critic, all you need is a twitter account, a TV, and internet access.

[On the first Presidential Debate on Sept 26, 2008, YOU get to be the armchair political analyst and use Twitter to score the candidates]

What is it: With the success of the previous Twitter SuperBowl ads rating last Jan, let’s repeat this community based voting event for the upcoming presidential debates, this time, you’re in charge.

When:
9PM Eastern. September 26, 2008: Presidential debate with domestic policy focus, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS. More details available from the commission of Presidential Debate.

Rules:
You’re the judge! In your opinion, score points to the two candidates and tweet it

A) Score the candidates ability to debate
Using twitter, you can score the candidates with this handy scoring guide.

-3 for a personal attack
-2 for a false statement
-1 for avoiding the issue, or not answering the question
+1 for a successful assertion
+2 for a successful counterpoint to opponents assertion
+3 Quotable sound bite

B) Use Twitter to tell the world (use the hash tag)

Example: A proper tweet is: “Mccain +1 for articulating his energy policy #tweetdebate”

Example: A proper tweet is: “Obama -3 for calling McCain an old fart #tweetdebate”

Example: A proper tweet is: “Mccain +3 for great line: “It’s the economy stupid” #tweetdebate”

C) See what everyone else is saying

A good practice is to open another tab on your browser, and watch what others are saying on twitter search, tagged with the keyword #tweetdebate.

D) After the Debate, Tally your score, then leave a comment
At the end of the debate, count up your score, your twitter handle, then leave a comment on this post.
Tip: Enter your score into a spreadsheet in real time, saving you time to tally.

Example:
My twitter handle is http://twitter.com/jowyang

Obama scored a total +25 and McCain scored a total of +26

Then create a percentage: Obama scored 49% and Mccain 51%

Then soak in your glory of being a true armchair political analyst (and argue the scoring of the other twitter pundits)

Future Debates: Come back to this site for discussions

October 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate, Washington University, St. Louis, MO

October 7, 2008: Presidential debate in a town hall format, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

October 15, 2008:Presidential debate with foreign policy focus, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY

Despite that I work at a research firm, this event is entirely for entertainment, and some education, and won’t be used in any formal studies –have fun.

Input from Zack Reiss-Davis

Post Event Findings:
The game started out with folks scoring as suggested above, but soon, the scoring became pretty lax, then many just used it as a way to track conversations. Current TV was showing tweets live on TV, which at one point, overwhelmed their system, resulting in no tweets showing. Twitter’s infrastructure withstood the onslought –I think they’re finally starting to see their opportunity as a major communication device.

We started out strong scoring the sound bytes and assertions, but soon the threshold to score became too difficult. I suspect folks were also interested in Current TV, The Drinking Game, the Friendfeed debate room, or just used the tweetdebate tag to track all their responses. In any case it was all good –watching any event is no longer a lonely event –we participate and mainstream media is watching and adopting.

A graph indicating the frequency of the term “#tweetdebate”

Posted in MicroMedia, Politics, Social Media | Comments

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Should Analysts use Twitter?

Categories: Analyst, MicroMediaPosted on September 10th, 2008

I was recently asked this by a fellow analyst: “I don’t get Twitter, should I use it?” Well first of all, the mechanics of the tool are pretty simple to use, you simply share with others like you would in a chat room. In fact, despite my heavy volume, I’m strategic in my usage, see how I use Twitter.

Often, analysis do a great job of analyzing and researching their assigned market, they forget to look inwards, this guide should help.

Survey your environment
Since you’ll never understand microblogging till you try it, to truly understand, you’ll have to dive in. Since analysts tend to be calculated in their ways (understatement) here are three questions to answer that will help you make your decision to dive in, add one point if you say yes to any of the following three criteria:

1) Is your research market using microblogging tools? For example, at Forrester, we’re role based research, this means I’m conducting research for the Interactive Marketer, and others may be researching for the Enterprise Architect, or the Security & Risk professional. For those that are industry focused (see twitter packs), you’ll have to conduct a survey (or use the search tools) to find out who’s using them. BusinessWeek reports that the CEOs of Mzinga and SocialText (companies in my space) are connected with me.

2) Are your clients using microblogging tools? If your customers (those that buy your reports or services) are using these tools, then as a responsible product manager you’d best understand your customers by listening to them, conversing with them, and understanding their needs. For example, I know my clients (interactive marketers) at tech companies here in Silicon Valley are using twitter, and it’s spreading to other industries. In fact, I’ve made it a habit to ask at my inquiries if folks are using twitter, and for now, after asking 20 clients, the rate is over 75% (estimate)

3) Is it your job to analyze communication technologies or their impacts? If your job as an analyst is to understand and measure the impacts of technologies on communication, then you’d better add a point to this assessment. My job is to cover social technologies and how they impact business and relationships with customers so there really is no question.

The simple scorecard
Twitter is simple, and so shall this scorecard:

If you scored one point, then you should experiment with these tools, perhaps create an account that doesn’t reflect your full name and experiment with the mechanics.

If you scored two points, you should do the previous experimentation, then begin a trial period of at least 30 days to test the tool out. Add folks in your market to follow, and start to converse.

If you scored three points, you should take a proactive approach and plan on integrating this tool within your work life. This isn’t suggesting that you tweet 20 times a day, but you should at least take an active approach on monitoring and observing the market you cover –and those that are buying your research and services from.

Caveat
Despite having a base of 11k followers, I never use Twitter for quantitative research, instead, I rely on Forrester’s survey methodology. Read more about how I use –and don’t use– social technologies for my own research.

See this list by Carter Lusher, a list of analysts that Tweet. It would be helpful if Carter had another column for the analysts coverage area.

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List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet

Categories: Enterprise Web, Industry Index, MicroMediaPosted on September 8th, 2008

With the popularity to Twitter and other Microblogging tools, we should expect to see a flurry of simliar tools for project and program mangaement for the enterprises.

Stemming from commodity technology, I’m sure I’ll have a hard time keeping this list up to date over a few months –expect IM vendors, blogging vendors, community platforms, enterprise 2.0 vendors, and a flurry of startups to offer similiar features, first read up on the pros and cons as well as some potential use cases.

It’s interesting to see the need to justify enterprise needs of such tools that are already being adopted by consumers, typical of enterprise settings (I’m a former enterprise intranet manager). With that said, let’s start the definitive list.

List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools
I’ll be making lots of updates to this post as comments come in.

Prologue, by Automatic, makers of Wordpress
Announced in Jan 08, Prologue allows users to, “…can post short messages about what they’re doing”, even in a secured environment GigaOm has adopted it for his news network, recently covered by Venturebeat.

Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME)
This pet project which was given birth by the “Demo Jam” at SAP labs (This is an SDN Community Project initiated by SAP Mentors, not part of SAP), was recently covered by Read Write Web.

Yammer
Simply detailed as: “What’s happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers.” recently reviewed by webware. This in depth review answers many questions. Launched in Sept 08.

SocialCast
A friendfeed and twitter tools for the enterprise, this has been covered by Webware.

Laconica – The Open Microblogging Tool
This open source application can be installed on servers and potentially used within the firewall. Link via Nick Cowie via comments.

Status
“Status is part of a new trend of LIGHTER communication tools. When you need to get up to date with your group, a single screen shows what everyone is doing and where they are. This means you can stay in touch on your own terms, without using heavy attention-stealing tools like email.” link via Frank. added Sept 9, 08.

Trillr
“Trillr is a service for co-workers, partners and customers to communicate and thus stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What’s on your mind”. By CoreMedia. Link via Pistachio Consulting (focused on Micromedia), added Sept 9, 08.

I Did Work
This task based update tool provides teams with abiity to leave status messages. “The work log that shares Keep a history of your work, and share it with your team” Link via Ralf via comments.

OraTweet -Oracle
Oracle’s launching a Microblogging tool internally, then for external clients: “…OraTweet is seeing companies, universities, and organizations running their own OraTweet instance, allowing them to keep their information private yet strengthening their own internal communities. It should be the same way we do email and instant messaging: We manage our own information, which allows us to broadcast messages safely in our own microcosm.” Added Sept 9, 08.

Joint Contact
This collaboration suite has microblogging features, and hooks into titter: “…A better way to Twitter. As a small business owner you’ve added micro blogging to your list of daily marketing activities. In the past few months you’ve come to appreciate how easy and effective tools like Twitter can be to communicate project status and to inform followers of upcoming events. You currently manage your postings using a desktop Twitter client. It would be great if you could somehow link your “Tweets” with your project management system.” Added Sept 9, 08.

BlueTwit-IBM
An internal only twitter client has been deployed for some time, and has been providing some colleagues with relief from email flare-ups. It was recently covered in BusinessWeek (link via pistachio) –BlueTwit has been around since 2007.

Present.ly
“Present.ly is a micro-update communications tool for your company. Give your employees the ability to instantly communicate their current status, ask questions, post media, and more.” Via comments of Pistachio, added Sept 11, 08.

Mixin
Spanning both the internal and external worlds, Mixin: “… lets you share your daily activities and intentions
to get together more often with your friends”

Headmix
“HeadMix has powerful messaging and social networking features that promote the capture, sharing and discovery of the knowledge trapped inside employees’ heads.”

I’ll stop managing this list after a few weeks, I know an onslaught of features will appear in just about every imaginable software package, you can leave comments below, as always, if someone creates and index, I’ll point to it.

See this list of opensource twitter vendors. Also, Laura “Pistachio” has now started a form to populate her database of vendors. She’s now published a spreadsheet on mashable.

Also, I should add that Forrester is watching this space, aside from our CEO and many employees using these tool, we’ve a report with data showing use of microblogging tools.

Have you deployed this at your company?
Rafe of Webware and I would love to know, please contact me if you have, my email is on my contact page.

I already know of a some community platforms that are experimenting with similar tools, expect this to be a bolt of feature that many will provide in the next few moons.

If you know of others, leave a comment below, oh and if you like this list, you’ll love these.

Posted in Enterprise Web, Industry Index, MicroMedia | Comments

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Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on August 18th, 2008

Last week, I listed out 9 reasons Why Brands Are Unsuccessful In Twitter, and other microblogging technologies. Companies are caught between the minutia of the discussions and their willingness to be human or add value to the conversations. Although a one-sided view of what’s going wrong, now let’s focus on what’s going right.

I’m watching –and talking– to many brands that are choosing to engage with this seemingly endless stream of personal thoughts, updates, and conversations within Twitter.

Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter

Babysteps:

First, identifying if this is the right marketplace
Brands need to first evaluate if the community members within Twitter are the audience they’re trying to reach. Although we’ve yet to see any formal survey produced from Obvious corporation, most could identify these members are technology early adopters, media fiends, social media practitioners, and those interested in future communications.

Next: Listening to glean insight
Some brands are using the somewhat accurate search tools formerly known as Summize, or even Twitscoop to track graphing of potential terms, or to find influencers. Companies like Visible Technologies are mapping out the discussion in Twitter for tech giants like Dell –they’re likely going to provide a list of influencers and detractors in order to determine who’s the best way to approach them. In the case of the New York Times, Twitter is yet another opportunity to source stories, and potentially find out about breaking news or emergencies. Not only is this key for determining what’s being said by customers, prospects, and competitors, but to ensure rogue employees aren’t speaking on your behalf and potentially causing brand damage.

Registering the namesake
Once a company has figured out the conversation in their marketplace (assuming this is one for them) they should next secure the key domains related to their brand. There has been some impromptu indexes that show that many companies don’t have ownership over their individual brand on Twitter. Since registration is limited to one account per real email address, and companies will never be able to register every potential variant, the process is still limiting.

Walking:

Decide on persona: corporate and/or individual
Brands will next need to decide on their online personas, and how they want to be perceived to the world. There are only a few variations and among them include: 1) A branded approach, void of personal interactions. In many cases, brands are unsure how to approach this conversation and most speak on behalf of the company, void of a personal reference of the publisher. Companies like Popeye’s chicken don’t readily indicate who’s behind the account, although they are very engaging conversing with others. 2) Some brands indicate who the user is, and go so far as to encourage individuals to represent the brand, RichardatDell takes this on with ease, as he both engages in personal interests as well as evangelizes and defends the Dell brand. See the NYT’s Communication department as they list out the personal contacts right on their twitter page. It’s assumed that brands that have engaged in option 2, also have corporate accounts listed in type 1.

Decide on method of engagement
Next comes the interesting part, how brands will actually publish, interact and communicate with others. There are three major options that brands can use: 1) Publish content in a ‘push’ style. Marketers, corp comm, PR folks and media companies can choose to use Twitter as a publishing system, as those who opt-in to follow can now receive updates from the latest story, press release or update. 2) Dialog: Some employees engage in relationship building with community members by responding, answering, and asking questions of those around them, see this large list of Oracle employees who are using these tools. or the ‘classic’ case example of Comcast Cares and Zappos shoes interacting and supporting customers 3) As we’ve indicate above, some may use these tools to glean insight –mainly listening rather than talking.

Examine the digital communications policy
Often known as ethics policies, blogging policies, or communications policies, the world of online publications continues to grow and brands must be prepared for these changes. Brands that have employees using social media (that would be just about all) must ratify their communications policy to: 1) Define what’s an official representation or have acceptance in the gray area of online communications 2) Define what the difference is between someone who is a company spokesperson and someone who’s acting and represents the company. Last week, at a client meeting, some employees at a enterprise IT networking company expressed concerns of employees who were on Twitter would talk about their personal beliefs around politics, culture, or preferences. Potentially some of these expressions would negatively impact other partners or customers in other regions or cultures, and didn’t know where the definitive line was between work and personal was.

Running:

Integration with other tools
Seeminly rare, most brands don’t integrate these tools with their other social media or even traditional website. With the recent case of brands being brandjacked by twitter domain registrars a new need came up of brands wanting to validate their twitter accounts. In fact, some have sent me emails from their corporate account asking me to confirm they are ‘real’ accounts. Of course, the most effective way to overcome validation from third parties and to enhance other tools is to cross link from various web properties, which Tyson foods has recently done. Take for example Dell, which has listed out many of their twitter accounts on their corporate website, now segmented out by verticals, products and regions. Brands should cross link their twitter account from their corporate blogs, traditionally websites, and vice versa.

Aggregation and joining conversations
The next step in this evolution is to watch how the conversations will fragment, spread, and be aggregated on different websites. The conversation isn’t going to be limited to Twitter, it’s search clients, but will start to aggregate on other websites. Take for example Get Satisifaction a ‘universal’ support site that is aggregating twitter conversations on their page, in this instance, Comcast. The conversation about the brand has now spread off the site, and will sputter off new threads of discussions on other websites. Brands like Dell will aggregate those same conversations right on their mainstream site –bringing the engaged audience closer to their site.

What’s next
Although we’re still far from seeing this implement, I expect to see a tie with location aware devices that will integrate twitter with marketing, communication, and support. For example, as one approaches a product, or store where that product is, alerts, the ability to ask questions or receive special offers could automatically trigger to a customers account (most will be opt in, savvy marketers will figure around it). Expect savvy companies to further monitor discussions and respond to support or help questions using these micromedia tools.

While there are many variations and some companies skip from step to step, these are the major evolutionary phases of how I see companies adopting micromedia tools like Twitter. I’d love to hear your feedback on what you’re seeing, and where it’s all headed.

Update: Dawn Foster has a great actionable plan for brands on Twitter, as does Tara Hunt, read, and bookmark both.

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Press Releases: Content Formatting in the Age of 140 Characters

Categories: MicroMedia, PRPosted on August 16th, 2008

Yesterday morning, I sent over an email to Todd Defren and Brian Solis, champions of the Social Media Press Release (which I’ve critiqued in the past) offering some suggestions.

Recently, I’ve been receiving some press releases where the real important news isn’t in the leading paragraph. I had to hunt and read through the rest of the content (maybe that was their strategy) to find out what was really important. I sent an email back to the PR firm, suggesting that they get their writing funnel’ tightened up, I don’t have a lot of time, and most press releases get a quick scan –few get a deep read.

If a PR firms is representing a company in the social media space, then they really need to make sure content is formatted to the medium where information is spreading fastest –for today, that would be Twitter. Twitter limits messages to just a short sentence, 140 characters to be exact, and encourages people to be on point and succinct. Go over to Todd’s blog to read more of his thoughts on the topic.

Takeaway: If your market is in the social media space, press releases should have content summarized for 122 characters, and leave enough space for is.gd (a “tiny url” that’s composed of exactly 18 characters)

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Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter

Categories: Challenges, MicroMedia, Social MediaPosted on August 13th, 2008

Rodney Rumford bluntly points out in this latest post about 33 Brands That Suck on Twitter (be sure to read the comments for more color). Most of them have been “Hijacked” (their corporate name scooped by an individual) and many remain dormant. Having a successful brand in Twitter is few and far in between, and here’s why.

Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter:

Brands are slow to the party
Who knew that Twitter would become a phenomenon –esp among the social media circles and media? Most brands are too late to come and squat on their names, some savvy individual had the foresight to get the name (either deviously, or out of brand passion) brands like @disney, @marlboro are already reserved by individuals.

Corporate domain: “out for lunch”
As Rodney points out, some of the brands have registered their domains, but choose not to participate, they’ve just quietly reserved it, unsure about how to wield this slippery conversational tool.

Not personal enough
If a brand is lucky enough to have parked their domain, they’re now ready for the next challenge: producing relevant content that resonates with the audience. What should they tweet about? Obviously there ’s a business driver, so announcements, re-echoing blog posts, and responding to direct (but safe) questions make the best bet. In many cases, there is no individual tied to the account (listed or picture) and no one knows if they’re talking to an intern, or the CMO.

Too personal for you
Yet brands have another challenge? Do they get into the minutia of the daily life as many Twitter users do: “updating my brand guidelines to include twitter rules of engagement”, or “attending marcom meeting about next week’s big acquisition”? Brands are at risk to either alienating followers –or just looking well, fake.

Campy persona wears thin
Some brands may take their brand too far, acting out the brand persona with pro-brand content that after awhile sounds like a trite recording of “want to feel better @jowyang, buy our product for relief” -soap style messages.

Big brother is watching
Some brands have started to ‘follow’ other members, hopefully to increase the rate of them following back. While complete normal protocol in Twitterville, many users get ‘freaked out’ when a brand follows them.

Hybrid brands of personal and corporate won’t last
In the case of both Oracle and Dell (and others I’m sure) many of their employees straddle both their personal sharing, as well as representing their brand (rather well actually). They choose names like @OracleJulio or @RichardatDELL, and really add to the conversation, both being personal, and promoting the attributes of the company. Unfortuantly for @OracleJulio’s situation, he moved on to greener pastures, and had to somehow get a name change, he’s now @socialjulio.

ROI unclear
What’s the ROI from Twitter? A very difficult question to answer, yet you’ll find the solution if you can also measure: “Whats the ROI of a conversation in real life”. Since many brands have an objective (return profit to shareholders or owners) ensuring this is a high priority task will be difficult for many corporations. (read more on broadstuff)

No one gives a care
Some brands, regardless of how they use twitter, their profile pictures, or what they talk about, no one will care. Either their product isn’t known, or not releavnt, or the brand hasn’t done due diligence to first find out if their market is even in Twitter, as a result, tweets go unheard in the forest, yet no one minds. (Update: I’ve added this one a few hours later)

Despite these many challenges, there are a few brands that are doing it right, take a look at ComcastCares, one who’s received press attention for responding to angry twitter community members. Of course, the real challenge is if they can make real long term changes to company’s products –or are they just a mouthpiece to dampen the social media amplifiers.

Got other reasons why it’s a challenge? Or have solutions? Leave a comment…

Posted in Challenges, MicroMedia, Social Media | Comments

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How “Janet” Fooled the Twittersphere (and me) She’s the Voice of Exxon Mobil

Categories: Case Study, MicroMedia, Web MarketingPosted on August 1st, 2008

The game is up, “Janet” is not an official Exxon representative
A few days ago, the Twittersphere was curious, interested, and excited to see a member of Exxon Mobil’s employee ranks to join the twitter conversation and engage in conversation…sadly, she’s not a real employee. You can see the fake Twitter account called ExxonMobilCorp

The mystery unraveled –in 3 days
Shel Holtz was one of the first to discover this (update: he’s posted this thoughts), as he commended Exxon for their efforts, their response was “It’s not us”. The mystery continued to unravel as I received an email from the Houston Chronicle Press wanting to talk to me about what I knew (Update: The Chronicle’s story is now live) –the word hit mainstream analysts and press in three days, secrets don’t remain secrets for long in internet speed.

“Janet” has been posing as an Exxon employee, answering questions about the direction of the company, where philanthropy resources are being spent, and even responding (a few, which were very off-tone) about the Exxon Valdez.

A real conversation with Exxon
I spoke to Alan Jeffers, Spokesperson of Exxon Mobil a few minutes ago to get his side of the story, and to offer some words of wisdom, which I’ll share below. First of all, Exxon has been “brand jacked”, (and will now make the official punk’d list), they were caught off guard because they were not monitoring and responding to their own online brand.

Alan was forthcoming, honest, and appears to want to do the right thing, I posed a few questions to him, his responses in quotes:

What if this was an employee in a remote arm of the company, would it then be ok?

“It’s not really relevant, there are only people that are authorized and not-authorized, even people with the best intentions, may not know what the appropriate position is or the facts, we think that there’s a problem, as we don’t want to be misleading people and there’s a lot of errors what the person is posting even if it was something that had the best of intentions could be misleading.

It’s our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust, it’s important that they become forthcoming about who they represent”

This is slap hands on everyone’s hands, Exxon hasn’t really done anything wrong, they were just caught unaware. In fact, the whole Twitter community (myself included, see my write up) has been fooled including this list of brands on twitter.

What message do you want to give to Janet the supposed company representative?

“Be forth-coming about who you are, it’s ok to be in support for or against something, but you should be forth-coming about your identity”

What lessons have you learned about monitoring your brands in social networks?

“We need to be diligent about what is being said about you, by you, and those pretending to be you”

I see a lot of opportunities for Exxon here, it’s clear the community wants to talk to you, you can roll with this by coming face forward:

“We’re going to examine what is going on, and if indeed if there is anything to do, I want to underscore we’re not trying to prevent anyone from going out. There’s lots of opportunities, we want to speak to people, and to learn what people think”

Alan and Exxon employees have a big opportunity at hand –once they’re ready.

Options for Janet
It’s also interesting that Janet tweeted this, just a few hours ago: “btw, @jowyang , thanks for that wonderful piece: http://tinyurl.com/6nol2e”. Janet, I highly recommend that you do one of the following: 1) Turn over the Twitter ID keys to Exxon, 2) indicate that you’re not an official representative. I see that you’re attempting to preserve the brand, but you can be a brand advocate to Exxon without attempting to pretend to be an employee –in fact, you may be hurting the brand. (Update: Aug 3, Janet has deleted that tweet thanking me and continues to pose as an official Exxon representative)

Key Takeaways

Lack of identity confirmation continues to plague the web
Identity is a serious issue on the web, we’ve no great way of confirming true profiles, therefore, going forward, before we can conclude a blog or twitter or Facebook account is official, we need to see trackbacks coming from the corporate site, or contact info and get confirmation.

Companies must monitor their brand
Brands should be monitoring the discussion and instances of their keywords in social networks –failure to do so results in becoming case studies.

An opportunity for the real Exxon to step forward
The power has shifted to those that participate, so while Janet may have achieved momentum by participating, further opportunity lies within Exxon when they’re ready to come forward.

The community (myself included) need to first validate identities
This fourth one, I just added. It was too easy for someone to assume a brand’s identity and we all fell for it, myself obviously. We need to first determine if these are the real employees and validate. I’m exploring some ways to do this, we’ll revisit this topic soon.

Legal and Trademark issues complicate
Update 12 hours later: It’s become clear that even more issues are bubbling up from comments, and the social media club dlist, which I’m part of. For example, in UK there are clear laws (not just guidelines) about being transparent about buzz marketing campaigns, and some are suggesting that Twitter be responsible for being a brand cop, while some say brands should be accountable. Some are suggesting that Janet become the “Scoble” of Exxon while Marshall Kirkpatrick says Exxon should walk completely away from Twitter.

Corporations should have internal social media policies
Update August 8: Zdnet has additional coverage on this bizarre case, Janet, in a recent tweet suggests she’s an actual employee, that’s standing by her employer. Zdnet suggests that companies should have internal social media policies, dictating where the guidelines are, a good point.

Note: I incorrectly had Dallas Chronicle, and have subsequently changed it to Houston Chronicle.

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Twitter as a platform

Categories: MicroMediaPosted on July 31st, 2008

Yesterday, on my own twitter network, I announced a contest for a giveaway of a Nokia internet device I’ve been reviewing (I never keep any device I receive from to review) and asked participants to tell where they thought twitter would be in two years. Andrew Finkle gave a great answer about how Twitter would become an open platform, which make sense –providing they can keep their infrastructure up. I got a chance to speak with Andrew, he’s a former software guy who’s moving into the social space, real nice guy, thanks for participating.

I was hoping to see an answer that not only involved Twitter as a platform but also a software that gets picked up by some mobile carriers and ties into GPS positioning. I hope you read the 50 other answers from folks, lots of great ideas from geo-location tagging, to definitive groups and permissions. Thanks everyone for participating.

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