Tag Archives: Twitter

To Business Plan or Not To Business Plan

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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 with near constant updates on her fascinating life.

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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Twitter is the eye of the needle

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if your Bible reading is a little rusty, you may not remember the eye of the needle quotation. It reads as follows:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)
For the last two centuries it has been common teaching in Sunday School that there is a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle through which a camel could not pass unless it stooped and first had all its baggage first removed. After dark, when the main gates were shut, travellers or merchants would have to use this smaller gate, through which the camel could only enter unencumbered and crawling on its knees! Great sermon material, with the parallels of coming to God on our knees without all our baggage.

As the text goes on to say, it is a lovely story and an excellent parable for preaching but unfortunately unfounded!

Nevertheless the quotation came to mind on hearing that GasPedal is presenting the BlogWell Seminar on How Big Companies Use Social Media – October 28th, 2008. The seminar features Cisco Systems, Graco, The Home Depot, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Wells Fargo and Walmart.

Twitter is perhaps the epitome of a social system. It is simple and direct and with only 140 characters and spaces, you have got to keep your message simple. It struck me that this is an extension of the process set in hand by the ClueTrain Manifesto. That leveled the playing field and has meant that consumers have much greater power relative to suppliers in this Internet age. Of course the suppliers could arrange to have very complete websites to try to wow the customers. It’s much more difficult to do that in 140 characters and spaces. That is how the Internet is evolving. It is all about two-way communication rather than one-sided monologues.

BlogCouncil

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the Blog Council.

The Blog Council is a forum for the heads of corporate blogging and social media at the largest corporations in the world. The Blog Council brings together all of these people to explore issues and share best practices with one another in a productive and private environment.

With the increasing democratization of the Internet through all of these social media, those heads of corporate blogging and social media have quite a challenge on their hands.

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Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?

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Brevity is the soul of wit – Oscar Wilde

A surprising number of people, and indeed some surprising people, are now using Twitter to give status reports on what is happening in their corner of the universe. The strict imposition of no more than 140 characters and spaces seems to concentrate the mind most effectively. Tweats are of course produced by human writers. Twitter can certainly be rated a success.

Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps it’s time for Google to re-examine its snippets reasoning, because it is questionable how successful it is.

If you believed the Google documentation, you might believe that Web page Descriptions would be a key summary of the content of Web pages in their keyword search results:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

They even go so far as to encourage you to Improve snippets with a meta description makeover:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

In practice it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You need to choose very carefully the exact words of your Descriptions if they are to be used at all, as you can see in (You Must) SEO Those Descriptions For More Google Visitors.

A post by William Slawski suggests why this is happening. It relates to Google’s fixation on inlinks to a Web page. So they may well Use Anchor Text to Determine the Relevance of a Web Page. In such a case, perhaps they wish to justify their reasoning by including it in the Snippet they construct to show the item is Relevant. Bill’s advice if this is affecting your Google appearances runs as follows:

If you run a web site, you may have visitors coming to your pages based upon the content anchor text in links pointing to your pages instead of the text upon your pages themselves. If the term is one that you want to be found for, you may want to consider adding some text to the page, if possible, using that query term, to provide a more persuasive snippet for the search results.

Perhaps if you put that persuasive language in the Description, it has a better chance of surviving that snippet creation process.

Standing well back, you might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by a wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. Why else would you add in text taken from other related Web pages? The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

So do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps your comments here could trigger some rethinking.

Related: How to Optimize your Search Engine Snippets – Michael D Jensen

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I Twitter Therefore I Am

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The 2008 version of “I think therefore I am”

René Descartes felt that the proof of his existence was that he thought from time to time. Quite a number of people, including Richard Ziade, Richard Buchanan, Charles Rhyne, Graham Chastney among many others, are now confirming their existence by twittering.

It’s been around for some time although some of us were initially reluctant to twitter. Not so for many professionals who apparently have been using twitter extensively for some time. Now over the past few weeks it seems to have entered an explosive growth phase like so many other social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter

Twitter is disarmingly simple. You can tweat or receive tweats on your cell phone via instant messaging. 140 characters to tell whoever is listening whatever you feel like telling them. It can be almost like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. Sometimes you hear a splash. Sometimes you don’t. The Twitter FAQ gives a few more details but there is very little more to tell. It’s completely free and there are now a number of widgets (Apps) that simplify the process of twittering.

Twittering is now being used more extensively as an additional channel in Internet marketing. Lee Odden has provided a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, while Darren Rowse sets out some Tips for Bloggers. Clearly we’ve only seen the beginning of all this twittering activity.

So what will be the future of this new method of communication. Although it’s free it should not be difficult to monetize Twitter given the huge volume of traffic. The key concern must be whether this will become an increasingly noisy tower of Babel. Will the bandwidth be available to carry all the tweats? Twitter was overloaded apparently when Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at MacWorld 2008. It was again down this morning for a time. Twitter means instant communication. It can only work if instant always means instant.

Related:
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter – Plus 27 More just in Case

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To Twitter Or Not To Twitter

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That’s the question that Koolio and Joe Duck and many, many thousands of other people are asking. Twitter won the SXSW Web Award this week and that’s partly to blame. However before that it was spreading like wildfire, .. or not depending on what is important to you.

 
Twitter is not just something birds do.

The name is one of the most apt I’ve seen. The Dictionary tells us that twitter means uttering successive chirping noises, talking in a chattering fashion or trembling with agitation. It’s most often seen in birds. Twitter now is a software whereby you can tell whoever wants to know exactly what you’re doing at this very moment. To some that’s a big yawn: to others apparently it’s almost addictive.

Kathy Sierra back in December 2006 highlighted the potential problems with her Asymptotic Twitter Curve. That clearly in no way slowed down the explosive growth. Mitch Joel echoed the thoughts of many others in saying that Twitter Is To Blogging What Post-It Notes Are To Notebooks. More recently he has again affirmed his support in asking whether you can apply Twitter in your Company or your Podcast.

 
Perhaps Twitter is addictive.

Kathy Sierra now seems to be getting to the heart of the matter with her recent post, Is Twitter TOO good? Twitter is perhaps a singularly addictive example of the social media that everyone is talking about. It may have similarities to that other powerful and time-consuming ‘world’, Second Life. In both cases, if you really want to make your involvement useful and rich, then you’ll have to devote significant time to it. For many like me, there’s enough to do in the First Life without trying to cyber-exist elsewhere.

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