Today social media tools dominate the landscape of business marketing. Why is that? Because online social media tools are usually easy to use, free, and can yield quick returns on relatively little personal investment.
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Almost any online service can be overrun by spam and Twitter is proving to be a lucrative field for such activities. Twitter Search that identifies Trending Topics is a major target here and very recent actions force the question: Should Twitter moderate Trending Tropics to prevent spamming?
This is the specific case that triggered this:
For the second time in a month, offensive terms have made it on to Twitter Trending Topics. In both cases, Twitter didn’t remove the offensive terms until after they spent some time at the top of Trending Topics. This time, the attack appears to have been carried out by the infamous 4chan group. ReadWriteWeb asks a legitimate question: Maybe Twitter Trends Shouldn’t Be Entirely Automated?
If you wish to do your bit in avoiding spam, then there is good general advice available on Avoiding Twitter Spam. If you suspect that a particular account is a spammer then you should report them to Spam Watch.
Saying no to Spam is even easier if you use the TweetDeck platform and use their spam button. With just one click, you can delete the message from view, block the user and report them to Twitter.
The tools for Avoiding Twitter Spammers are getting more effective all the time. Firstly, you can use Topify to give you more information on your followers, that will allow you to more quickly identify potential spammers. It is in beta at the moment so you will need to wait for an invite. Once you get the invite, Topify will ask for your e-mail and make sure it is you, then give you a new e-mail via Topify to enter on your Twitter account.
A more precise tool to identify spammers is TwitChuck. You simply fill in the name of the person you are wondering about, and TwitChuck goes through a surprisingly detailed list to arrive at their spam grade. Here is the information for bwelford:
Perhaps you should follow the TwitChuck recommendation and follow me.
I assure you TwitChuck has it right: I am not a spammer.
That thought provoking question came to mind after reading a UIE Brain Sparks SpoolCast entitled: Company Culture Meets Customer Experience with Brian Kalma of Zappos.
Brian Kalma is Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.
On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employee’s dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.
And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase.
That is really impressive. But think on those words in the quotation: For many companies, that would be a nightmare. If your company is one of those, you might ask yourself one of the following questions to determine why you dare not follow the Zappos example:
So many companies seem to need to closely control what their employees are allowed to say. The legal department may even rule on what outside communications are permissible. If you need to closely control what employees say, which of the three answers above is the reason for that. Whichever it is, it is an indictment of the management decisions that are being taken.
If control is exercised because it has always been that way, then you need to realize that the Internet has changed the way people and organizations interact. It’s time to move into the 21st century. If for no other reason, then do it to make more sales.
Keen readers of any of the SMM blogs will notice at the foot of the right sidebar a new feature. Each now has a Discussion ‘Wall’ provided by Google Friend Connect. This is Google’s attempt to get on to the Social Media plane. It has some serious catching up to do, given what Twitter and Facebook have achieved here.
Usually if a topic has developed a following, you will find some chit-chat on Twitter about it via a hashtag (#). The easiest way to check is via TweetChat. If you register there and check the FriendConnect room, you will find it is usually pretty quiet. If Google Friend Connect is to develop any traction, that is not a good sign.
Google is diligently working away on the Social Web and last week announced that you can Take your Google Contacts with you.
Too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts. Portable Contacts to the rescue! Portable Contacts (affectionately known as "PoCo") is an open standard that aims to make it easier to access "who-you-know" information in a secure way — this means sites don’t have to employ the "password anti-pattern" of scraping websites.
That just did not seem to get anyone’s attention. Google announced originally that Google Friend Connect is now available early in December. Shortly after they announced that Google Friend Connect was integrating with Twitter.
This means that when you join a Google Friend Connect-ed site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.
No one seemed to get the message. More recently, Google has announced an Improved help forum for Google Friend Connect. It just did not seem to get the headlines.
Jordan McCollum of Marketing Pilgrim suggested that although Google Reader Now Hosts Conversations, Google is not building a social network.
Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.
To an extent, that is confirmed in her mind by the way in which Google Friend Data Goes Portable. Clearly this does not in any way create a social network. All this does it to let you take all that shared information – including your list of contacts – and pass it among your peer group all over the web.
If Jordan McCollum is right, then these FriendConnect Discussion panels on the SMM blogs will never get used since they do not create social networks. It will be interesting to see what happens with them.
Twitter as Flashpoint for the Attention Economy is the title of an interesting blog post at Internet Evolution by Andrew Keen
"Attention Economy" was invented by the futurist Michael Goldhaber in December 1997 to describe a new arrangement in which the "flow of attention" replaced money as the currency of the Internet. Twitter Inc. – with its medieval-like armies of followers and followed – is a good example of how this new attention economy works. The value to us of Twitter is based on how many followers we have and thus how many people read our words. We all compete on Twitter for both attention and followers, of course, because time is finite, and there is only a certain number of people we can realistically follow and only a certain number of messages we have the bandwidth to read.
If you want to read more on the Attention Economy, then ReadWriteWeb has a good Overview.
As a pioneer of the Attention Economy, Twitter now is faced with the challenge of monetizing attention. For it to become a viable business, the VC-backed startup – which only just appointed a sales and business development team – needs to identify what it is, exactly, the company is selling.
Apparently Jason Calacanis with his 62,000+ fans is somewhat miffed that he does not appear on the Twitter suggested users list — a group of 20 A-list names given to all new Twitter users. So he has made a public offer of $250,000 to be included on the list for two years, thus suggesting a highly viable business model for the new attention economy.
Keen goes on to suggest that this is a radically more innovative business model for Twitter than trying to sell advertisements and sponsorships. I’m not so sure since I could not even find this A-list of 20 names. I could find some suggestions of others I might wish to follow in the Searching for People section. The following list of 115 such suggestions includes some of the A-list but again not Mr. Jason Calacanis.
There are other places where those who Twitter can try to be visible, for example Twitter Grader has its Twitter Elite Top Users list. It notes that these have earned respect and admiration for having the highest Twitter Grade. Their power and reach in the Twitter community is truly awesome. .. and that list does include Jason Calacanis. That is a free listing so perhaps this Attention Economy is not as monetizable as it might first appear.
Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? is a paper by John Borthwick, a former top executive at AOL, who should know whereof he speaks. He recounts how Clay Christensen, the inventor of the concept of Disruptive Technology, suggested to a senior group at AOL that they should be concerned about other disruptive influences that might well spell eventual disaster for AOL in the years to come. .. and it did come to happen.
Now Borthwick is suggesting the Twitter phenomenon may point to a similar sign of trouble for Google. He sees search as fragmenting and believes that Twitter search will do to Google what broadband did to AOL.
Opinions on this seem to be mixed. Vaibhav Domkundwar comes out flatly and says that Google Will Not Be A Victim Of Twitter and Believes Borthwick’s Theory Is Flawed. He bases this principally on the argument that Twitter covers only a fraction of what he calls the Now Web and that Google can easily expand into this space.
Others are less emphatic. Kara Swisher seems more open to the idea, while Lew Moorman feels there may be more to the Twitter threat than people are acknowledging.
I’m with Lew Moorman on this one. The essence of a disruptive technology is that it cannot be countered by edging out from the existing technology. Usually there is something much more fundamental that means there is a severe disjunction between the old and the new. As Borthwick said, the AOL people just could not get their minds around what would be a disruptive technology for them. They believed they were the disrupters.
To shake up ideas a little I have suggested elsewhere the notion of the NOW Web. This is a term used by Vaibhav Domkundwar but I have expanded the space it covers. It includes the World Wide Web but in addition all other packets of information that travel "online".
Of course some of these are travelling within cell phone systems, some are on other wireless interfaces and others are on the traditional Web. I have used the term Instants as the name of these information packets. A Twitter status message is an example of such an Instant. The reason why this is of interest is that it may start off as a text message on a cell phone before being integrated within a web page.
The experts will undoubtedly find fault with this over-simple explanation but hopefully it helps to explain a reality. Such Instants may sometimes have an associated URI since they exist within the World Wide Web and sometimes not if they exist elsewhere in the NOW Web. Of course if there is no URI for a given Instant, then there can be no ‘back link’ to that Instant. The fundamental information that Google uses in its search algorithms is just not available for all these Instants. Collapse of stout party as they used to say.
If finding the information that people want involves somehow assimilating all these Instants in some way that does not involve going through the traditional URIs, then there may be space for a Google-killer. Perhaps this picture is flawed just as Domkundwar suggested that Borthwick’s theory is flawed. The difficulty is that it is always tough to forecast what format the disruptive technology will take. I look forward to seeing comments on whether this simple explanation may have any possible credence.
Related: The NOW Web Is Not The Mobile Web
I was moved to write this blog post after seeing the Search Engine Watch item by Nathania Johnson entitled 50 Most Memorable Moments in Search for 2008.
It was one heck of a year for the search industry. The convergence of outside economic forces, a wild presidential election and the 2008 Beijing Olympics were all signs of an industry becoming more and more mainstream and global. Here’s a look at the completely subjective biggest stories in search from 2008.
I am a strong believer in the KISS principle and my favorite quotation is: I am sorry this letter is so long. I did not have time to write a shorter one. Some say that Mark Twain was the author, although the more literate suggest that it was originally written in French by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
I presume there must be two groups of people in the world. There are those who like long lists. And there are those who like short lists. I am very much in the second group. My preferred list has three items in it. I guess with any less it could hardly be called a list. However once it goes beyond three, then it is unlikely anyone will really remember all the elements of the list.
For search articles an additional reason for short lists is that with fewer links under the PageRank approach each link receives more authority. With a list of 50 items each link receives only a miniscule proportion of the PageRank of the original article. This does of course assume that the links have not been nofollow-ed.
For more general reasons short lists are better. Long lists are tough to argue with. Indeed after three days my comment was the first to be added to that article. With only three items in my list of memorable moments, it is unlikely that everyone will agree. Since conversations are what the Internet is all about, short lists therefore feed this process better.
From Nathania’s long list I believe the following three items are really the most memorable. As it happens two of them are not even links, but clearly had to be included since they are very important.
2. Search Advertising Plays Major Role in Elections From the primaries to the general presidential election, it appeared that whoever outspent their competitor headed to the next step. Barack Obama, with his arsenal of cash, went on an online advertising shopping spree and will be inaugurated in a mere 21 days.
6. Twitter Becomes Agent of Search Whether you deem it a micro-blogging tool or a mass chat client, Twitter went mainstream this year and the search industry was smack dab in the mix of things. Many users found Twitter useful for the actual conducting of searches, while others found it useful in networking.
11. G1, the First Google Android Phone, Released Through T-mobile
Are these the three most memorable moments in search for 2008 for you? Please leave a comment and let us know what you think about all this.
The recent US Presidential election was a stunning demonstration of the power of social media as now supported via the Internet. Indeed social media such as Twitter may now be the principal medium of communication if one measures the ‘bandwidth’, interpreted loosely, that goes into such twittering.
Now the dreadful incidents in Mumbai provide another far-too shocking example. That prompts Tim Malbon to ask a fundamental question: Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?
When news of the ‘terrorist outrage’ broke yesterday evening several people mailed and messaged me with links to the coverage on Twitter. I was awestruck by the live feeds provided at #Mumbai and others (such as Twitter Grid). Having looked around elsewhere, my initial reaction was that the main old-school news agencies like Reuters, CNN and the BBC just weren’t providing the coverage, in contrast to the truly MASSIVE volume of tweeting going on.
However as the evening continued, he become somewhat disillusioned about the chaotic nature of the torrent of information that was being generated
There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must have been a comfort. But very few were on the ground. Most participants were far away. There needs to be some way of working out who in a situation like this has more authority than someone else. … Last night scared me. We’re like kids playing with things that we still don’t understand. A human tragedy became “something to follow”.
Crowdsourcing is of course an attempt to bring some order to the chaos. Cloud computing in Africa, for example, can help aid workers to better identify what is really happening in major crises. As one aid worker has noted:
Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be liberating information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have of necessity safeguarded information release for self-preservation.
Another and perhaps better way of marshaling all this data is to consider online surveys. Of course cell phones can be used merely to indicate who you think should be the next American Idol. However as we all become more at ease in the digital world, we may well be more inclined to make sure our opinions are known.
Courtesy www.PeggyDuncan.com
This morning, I became acquainted with what Jay Deragon has been writing on social media and suddenly the light came on. As he said:
There is Friendfeed, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and a host of other platforms and tools for social conversations and user generated content. To say the least the space is very confusing and crowded if not overwhelming for those just entering and trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. While all these conversations stir interest, few focus on the critical elements required to effectively leverage the art and science of social media for specific gains.
That passage is taken from his article, Is Social Media An Art? He goes on to say that the four driving factors are:
He summarizes that in another article, Is SM ROI Really Important? which is when the light bulb moment occurred.
The more business people I talk to about all this social stuff the consistent response I get is “Show me how to make money with it”.
Any good sales person will tell you their number one objective is building relationships over time. Yet few if any company bothers to measure the cost of building relationships rather they measure the results of relationships. Measuring the results doesn’t tell you “how to build effective relations” or “which methods create the best relations.”
Relationships come from human experiences, not corporate spin and hyped promises. Human relationships are measured by trust, sincerity and common values. If you want a return on social media, then focus on conversations that build lasting relationships based on value exchanged and create great experiences.
There you have the crux of the matter. Your company should measure how well it is working with social media by evaluating the relationships the company is creating with its customers and its prospects. Unless worthwhile relationships are created, then efforts in social media will be ineffective and may even be without value.
As we suggested in MRN Marketing Right Now – The Plan, having no plan at all may be hazardous. Mark Evans expressed that sentiment in writing RIP Twitter.
Gone are the days when you could start, grow and finance a business based on the notion that if we build it, they (consumers and advertisers) will come…and then somewhere along the way we – just like Google did – will find a viable business model to make it work.
Perhaps the shareholders of Twitter are beginning to see the light. Chris Snyder noted that Twitter to Get Down to Business in 2009, Investors Say
Major leadership changes Thursday at Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects — was the replacement of CEO Jack Dorsey by fellow co-founder Evan Williams a shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic?
But today VC backers of the microblogging service interviewed by wired.com Friday insisted they remain bullish, and Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Twitter backer Spark Capital, revealed that new revenue models will be unveiled in the first half of next year.
Perhaps at least if Twitter had taken our suggestion to do a NUB report, they would be in better shape. Knowing more precisely the niche they were targeting, what they offered that was special and how they would make that into a survivable bottom line might well keep even the Titanic afloat.
But perhaps there is a savior. OMG Britney! On Twitter!
I’d like to welcome Britney Spears to our world. She (or rather her people) have launched both a Twitter account
and a bloggy sort of site
This is solid gold for Twitter. A few more of these and it will be hard to argue that it isn’t going mainstream.
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