Twitter: here is a business model for you

If I doubted Twitter before and became a recent convert, … well this week I became a Twitter lover.

What did it for me?

It was watching the tweets come across the ticker in real time on Tuesday while Google were announcing their new features at the emetrics conference in D.C., some 2,500 miles away from me.

It was like being there in person. Thanks to tweets, e.g. by @June_Li. What a great use of Twitter.

But Twitter has a problem:

It hasn’t found a business model.

And, famously, Twitter users also have a problem:

The vast majority of tweets are boring and a nuisance. And some tweeters tweet more often than they have interesting things to share.  It’s a new form of spam! There should really be a frequency crap. [Note on Oct 26th: oh oh, freudian slip, as Mike Keyes caught. That was meant to read "cap"]

Twitter could do everybody and themselves a big favor and solve both problems with a single strike.

I’d propose they should charge an increasing price for each tweet per person per day, e.g. as follows:

  • Your first tweet per day is free
  • 2nd tweet per day, you pay 50 cents
  • 3d, you pay $1
  • 4th, you pay $2
  • 5th, you pay $4
  • 6th, you pay $8

Surely, if something is worth saying to your followers you will spend a buck to do so. And if it isn’t worth a buck even to you, then, by all means, shut up.

Meanwhile, Twitter would leave it completely free to follow as many tweets as you like.

Twitter could forecast how much revenue they can expect from a move like this. Since they aren’t doing this, I presume they will have thought it through and probably concluded that there is a problem with this idea. The numbers might not add up to justify their current $1B valuation maybe.

Tags: Uncategorized by Akin
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Tune in to John Lovett on Next-Generation Web Analytics

Must-see webcast coming up by Forrester’s John Lovett on next-generation web analytics, Tuesday Oct 13, at 1 pm US ET.

This content comes at a very interesting time when many are wondering what the future holds for this little industry of ours:

  • Adobe acquired Omniture suggesting one direction into which things might evolve
  • Eric Peterson just authored a very interesting whitepaper with one of Unica’s competitors, SAS, on first, second, and third generation of web analytics. (Not sure if it is online but a preview was distributed at the Xchange conference.)
  • Unica has voiced a clear vision of how web analytics should evolve beyond just the traditional use.
  • And a whitepaper is available to webcast attendees with our view as to next-generation capabilities that everyone should expect from their web analytics solution today.

Without going into the above explicitly, John is going to share his research, experience and views on the past, current, and future of web analytics.

———-

Note: Link to recorded version is coming soon.

Tags: Web Analytics by Akin
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If a tree falls in a forest and no one Tweets it, did it happen?

In hindsight, my colleague @benmnorth saved our face at Unica’s annual customer conference, “MIS”, which was held in Paris last week.

Ben’s leadership aligned us behind a common hash tag (#unicamis) for the conference. A big screen station running TweetDeck was set up in the coffee break area. And, thanks for these, the conference “was tweeted”.

Now, I had admitted my own difficulty with saying anything useful in 140 characters earlier. And, I don’t know how much the marketing professionals in attendance gained from the tweets.

But the following small anecdote opened my eyes a bit.

A little Twitter success story

The closing keynote was by Forrester’s Christine Overby. She had many great comments during her presentation including the following that was irresistible to tweet:

“customer intelligence to become the molten core of marketing“.

So, this became my one “good tweed” done for the conference.

Next day, I am on the phone with Forrester’s John Lovett in far away New England to learn more about his upcoming webcast in regards to next generation web analytics.

And to my surprise …

He had already picked up his colleague’s quote from Twitter and found it to be a good fit to underline one of his points in his slides. Meanwhile, other industry observers from Boston to Singapore re-tweeted the quote as well.

From one person’s mouth to the twitterverse and back into the real world.

The moral

Of interest was not only the viral effect here.

But being that the re-tweeters were often industry influencers (e.g. analysts) themselves, this was just a small reminder that social media are no longer really a choice but a necessity.

In this case, tweets have become a metric for engagement.

Like all engagement metrics, volume and content of tweets are not a perfect measure.

But if there hadn’t been any tweets, worldwide industry observers would be excused to wonder whether the conference was not worth a Tweet, or attendees weren’t up to the Twitter.

When in fact, attendance was up 50% over last year, and many of the cutting edge customer presentations on online and offline integration had me sitting on the edge of my seat.

So, tweet it, just tweet it.

Thank you Ben!

Tags: Multichannel marketing metrics by Akin
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