Mike MacLeod

Leaders Discuss Future of Social Media

// February 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

During Social Media Week 2009, Abrams Research surveyed over 200 social media leaders from across North America. Here are some interesting – but not terribly surprising – results.

• A whopping 40% of respondents picked Twitter as the number one social media service for businesses. LinkedIn came in a distant second (21.3%), followed by YouTube (18.8%), with Facebook an even more distant fourth at 15.3%.
• When asked which social media service they’d be most likely to pay for, 32.2% chose Facebook – followed by 29.7% choosing business networking site LinkedIn. The contrast of Facebook’s bells-and-whistles features (photos, status updates, newsfeed, tagging) with the bare-bones networking functionality of LinkedIn suggests that many people find social networking most valuable for making professional connections. Twitter – the top pick for business use – came in third, with 21.8%.
• A paltry 1.5% said they would pay for MySpace – in a category where Facebook was the runaway winner – and only 2% said they’d recommend it for business. It came dead last in both categories – where it used to be the runaway leader.

You can see the full results of the survey here.  In the meantime, here are my personal responses to the questions:

1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?

LinkedIn. Facebook would be a close second but I believe that a very large percentage of Facebook users would move elswhere if it became a pay service.  LinkedIn would maintain a much higher percentage of users.

2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?

Twitter. The intmacy that can be gainedwith users (customers) is unmatched.

3. Which social media service will be the first to die?

Bebo.com.  Actually, it’s impassible to pick the death of any such sites.  I can’t believe anyone still uses MySpace, yet they still have millions of active users.  Bebo however just seems to want to be a little bit of everyone (facebook, YouTube) but they aren’t as good and don’t have any differentiators. But they will likely still be around several years from now.

4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?

Burger King.  Even though facebook quashed it, their plan to give away free Whoppers in exchange for the sacrifice of  friends was pure genious.

5. What’s the best way to monetize social media?

“Freemium” use, i.e. a free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options (i.e. storage, analytics).  The “free level” maximizes the size of the universe and also gets the die-hards hooked, wanting more that they are willing to pay for.

6. What’s the biggest challenge facing social networking services?

Developing something that is new (niche, application, technology) and keep things fresher than the eventual copycats.

7. What social networking feature is the most critical for everyday users?

Tie – Status / Newsfeed.  I guess technically, status updates are part of the newsfeed.

Why Twitter Followers Don’t Matter

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Twitter is not a broadcast medium.  So, there is no need to make an effort to gather as many followers as possible.

If you try to broadcast your marketing message via Twitter, a few things happen:

• Only a small percentage of your followers will see an individual message.
• Some of those will be turned off and stop following you.
• To account for the above, you could broadcast more marketing messages and increase the frequency.
• You’ll reach some more followers and some of them will again be turned off.
• You will be seen as a 24/7 commercial. Followers will see less benefit in following you and stop.

Twitter is best used as a conversation agent. As in any conversation, it’s better to listen than to speak. You learn more that way.

Use Twitter to gather information. To do this, you will need to focus on following, not gaining followers.

Use Twitter to share useful information. “Buy my product” is not useful.

If you do this, followers will come on their own (I REALLY wanted to use a “build it and they will come” quote here, but deemed it too cliche) and your ego can be satiated.

Twitterize Your Market Research

// January 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) has reached out to Twitter users to get a quick assessment of his new ad spots.

Should this replace the formal ad testing that most companies perform? Of course not.

But it will give Barry a pretty good estimate of what’s good and bad.  If a specific ad gets a brutal response from the Twitterverse (ugh, that’s a bad term. I promise to come up with something better) then he could save some research dough by trashing it early.

Use all the information you have available to you – especially if it can be obtained quickly and cheaply.

SocialToo Protects Me From Itself

// January 4th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

SocialToo was one of the first Twitter apps I used.  As a Twitter noob, I wanted to grow my followers as much as possible. Following the advice of Scoble and Kawasaki, I used the service to automatically follow anyone that followed me.

But I ended up following too many spammers. I still follow most people that follow me, but I do so manually to ensure that I don’t fill my signal with offers to make millions in my underwear.

I also used SocialToo to automatically send a direct message to anyone that follows me. I thought it would be nice to tell my new followers that they were my newest, most favorite Twitter friend.

Then I started receiving the same type of messages and realized that they come across as very impersonal and generally offer no value. So, I stopped using that service too.

Now SocialToo offers the ability to refuse auto messages from any other SocialToo user. This is awesome!

Everyone else can send and receive auto-messages if they like – but I’m not going to get any. At least not from SocialToo.

I recommend you join SocialToo even if it is only to block messages from their robots.

Thanks SocialToo!

Twitter Isn’t Growing As Fast As You Think

// January 4th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Everyone is talking about Twitter and how rapidly it is growing. But in the 12 months ending in November ‘08, Ning is growing at a faster clip.

Ning has grown 667% compared to Twitter’s 640%.

Most Popular Links on Twitter

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Twitturly is a service that tracks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter. The site displays the 100 most popular links within the past 24 hours.

Users can use TinyURL, Snipurl (snurl), or link directly to the final URL in their tweets. Each time a link is sent on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it. The more times a link is sent, the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page. As the links increase, it gets displayed higher up the home page.

Find the Twitter User Down the Street

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

TwellowHood provides a list of Twitter users within specific geographies.  Using a map-based platform, TwellowHood can provide a list of Twitter users within a specific state/province or municipality.  The service currently only lists users that indicate Canada or USA as their home.

There are currently 71 users listed as being from Scranton, PA.  Not surprisingly, a large percentage of those are employed by Dunder Mifflin.

On Demand Sports Stats from Twitter

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

StatTweets is a service that allows Twitter users to pull statistics from sports service, StatSheet.com. When the #StatMe tag is sent to any one of StatTweets’ team accounts, a return tweet is sent with a variety of team stats.

When I sent the tweet @PennStateFB #StatMe, I got the following in return:

@MikeMacLeod PPG 40.2, YPG 452.2, TDs 60, Pass% 58.7, PassYdsPG 240.6, RushYdsPG 211.6, RecYdsPG 240.6, FGMade 20, FGAtt 24

StatTweets currently provides stats for the NBA, NFL, and college football and basketball.

There are also a number of options that can be included. By adding additional variables to the initial tweet, users can request rankings, splits, and future schedules. The stats for the previous or next opponent can also be requested.

Individual player stats are coming soon.

What are People Saying About You?

// December 21st, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Who is talking about your company or your brand? Or better yet, who is talking about you? And what are they saying?

Startup SamePoint plans to provide just that information by aggregating results from social networks, Twitter and blogs. It also attempts to hilight positive and negative discussion about a topic by identifying complimentary and critical words.

User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint converts these discussions into permalinks and organizes them within a tag cloud.

Displayed here are some results from a search on WPP, who has had a lot of press lately about their acquisition of TNS.

SamePoint has a long way to go in features and aesthetics. However, this type on social media data mining is on the verge of exploding.