Where now for Twitter?

With the latest user numbers being announced for Social Media sites and Facebook reaching 500,000,000 members against twitter's 200,000,000 its interesting to think about where twitter is heading and when (and how) it will start to make money.
 
With the growth in its user numbers slowing its clear that Twitter is heading towards maturity and will start to have to consider where the money will come from.  One aspect of Twitter that makes it very different to its competitors/compatriots is that it is more like a service rather than a site. The majority of its users rarely actually go to www.twitter.com instead using third party applications like tweetdeck or smartphone apps.  This makes some of the obvious money making ventures such as sidebar and banner ads irrelevant but does open up a whole range of opportunities.
 
Essentially there are three ways a service like twitter can make money...
 

• Pay to Post
• Pay to Read
• Clickthrough fees

 
Pay to Post
 
Twitter has always said that membership will always be free and that it will be free for members to post but words and deeds can always change over time.  Though I doubt personal members will ever be charged to join or tweet the same may not always be the case for businesses.  This could take two forms...  Membership charges where businesses are charged to join and tweet or tweet insertion charges. 
 
The first is fairly simple and non-contentious but unlikely to earn a huge amount of money. The second however could earn huge amounts but would be a very tricky sell. 
 
Businesses could be charged on the basis that their tweets would be inserted into the stream of users say 1 tweet in every 50 in your stream would be an advert.  At the most basic level these could be shotgun tweets advertising everything from coffee to burgers but with a bit of clever search engine work it would be possible to envisage context sensitive tweets being inserted into your timeline based on the content and members you follow.  Google already do this with your googlemail account by analysing the content of the mail and sticking 'relevant' ads into the sidebar.
 
Would you object to one tweet in 50 or one in 100 being a 'relevant' advert? - how much would advertisers pay to have their ads viewed?  What kind of click through rate would be expected?  All these questions (and more) would need to be asked but this I think could be a major earner for Twitter. After all we accept ads on ITV and Channel 4 in return for 'free' programmes.  I'm sure google would be interested in being able to get its hands on the content of 200,000,000 timelines and insert tailored ads.
 
Pay to Read
 
Why on earth would people pay to read tweets? After all the vast majority of Twitter is pointless noise - surely nothing is worth paying for? 
 
Where this option has legs is the service not site nature of twitter.  Most twitter users use their mobile phones to access the service or use it as a background app on their desktop when they should be working and this gives an opportunity for paying to read.
 
If you're a football fan (of either flavour) or indeed any kind of sports fan.  What value would you put on having live score updates in your twitter timeline?  £1 a month? Less? More?  Travel updates? News streams? Financial Data? 
 
In fact anything which is short, and time sensitive could be seen to have a value and a system where you can subscribe to have this information sent out to you, aggregated via your twitter app (or even a specific app tailored to the data but plugged into the twitter service could have a market. Twitter then becomes a messaging platform for third party data.
 
Click Through Fees
 
A lot of tweets (both personal and increasingly business ones) are actually links to extenal data (images or other sites/services)  This again is a big difference between Twitter the service and Facebook the site.  Facebook is largely a destination site whereas Twitter is more of a portal to other content.  Of course where there are external links and external content there is the opportunity to earn click-through/referral fees.  Within the 140 character limit there is limited scope to insert the relevant tracking codes but this isn't insurmountable and again could generate significant fees - particularly from business accounts.
 
The benefit of all these income streams are that they play to Twitters strengths as a messaging platform and are not mutually exclusive. 
 
The next year could be a very interesting and possibly profitable time for Twitter
 
Karl Meyer
www.spice.co.uk
 

Sometimes its better to stay silent – Lessons from Gillian McKeith

 

Now that the twitter storm around Gillian McKeith has died down, it's probably a good time for Social Media experts to reflect on the lessons we can learn from the whole episode.

 

For fairly obvious reasons, we won't go into detail about the details of all the allegations and counter allegations but in summary this is what happened…

 

Someone said something about Gillian on Twitter – this was a fairly innocuous phrase  said by a private individual with only 50 followers

 

The person managing the @gillianmckeith account took exception to this and fired off a volley of messages insulting the original poster and accusing a well known journalist of lying.  At this point the messages came to wider attention.

 

Sensing that the @gillianmckeith messages may be seen in an unfortunate light they were not retracted but simply deleted then the account was disowned as not being the official Gillian McKeith account (despite being linked to from "official" websites and Facebook pages) These links were then erased.

 

In the end a single tweet from a very small twitterer resulted in Gillian McKeith trending behind only Raoul Moat on Twitter for a couple of days and a very large number of influential tweeters railing against her.

 

Hardly a glittering PR coup.

 

So what can we learn from this?

 

Silence can be Golden

 

Clearly whoever runs the @gillianmckeith account regularly monitors twitter for any mention of Gillian.  This makes perfect sense.  Any business needs to know what people are saying about their company or their brand.  However what doesn't make sense is reacting to every comment.

 

Firstly reading and responding to every comment would be too time consuming and at best irrelevant or at worst counter-productive.  Few people would like to know that major companies are tracking their every step on-line and being cyber-stalked is an uncomfortable experience (hardly likely to make you want to buy from the company stalking you is it?).

 

If you feel it's necessary to keep track of someone who is regularly talking about you then it may be worth following them just in case they stray from idle chatter into active complaints but be subtle.

 

When I first started in selling I was told "you have two ears, two eyes and one mouth. Use them in that proportion" and that applies equally for Social Media. 

Once anything is published on-line it can't be removed

 

Twitter has a delete button for any tweets, its handy if you've made a spelling mistake or put a broken link into a tweet but don't for a minute imagine it can magically turn back time on that huge mistake you made. Just like delete on a PC doesn't actually delete anything then deleting a tweet will leave traces of those messages in dozens of places.

 

After the storm hit, @gillianmckeith first deleted the tweets, then switched to third person writing (to presumably distance @gillianmckeith the account from Gillian McKeith the individual) then tried to delete any linkage between the account and the rest of the company.  With the benefit of Google Caching and some sixth form level HTML work all these activities were gleefully tracked and reported on - making the situation worse.

 

There is a reason it's called "quick and dirty"

 

The great thing about Twitter and Facebook is the immediacy of the medium. You can comment on (and follow other people's comments on) TV programmes whilst you are watching them – it's like having all your mates on the sofa simultaneously. 

 

But Business Marketing campaigns aren't like that.  They may start with a drunken chat around a pub table but before they see the light of day they have a lot of sober, considered planning. 

 

This sober filtering of the drunken brainstorming ensures that all the really daft and possibly illegal stuff is thrown away before the public sees anything (though looking at some campaigns you do often wonder!)

 

All this reminds me of that wonderful 1970's Green Cross Code – Before Crossing the Road.  Stop, Look and Listen.  For Social Media this should be

 

Before Posting a Message.  Look, Listen, then Stop (and Think)

 

Basically when using Social Media to promote your business there is a single maxim to follow…

 

Don't use Social Media for anything you wouldn't be prepared to print in a newspaper

 

If you follow that then hopefully your Social Media Marketing campaign won't fall off the rails!

 

Karl Meyer

Associate,  Spice

www.spice.co.uk

 

---

Get a new e-mail account with Hotmail – Free. Sign-up now.

Social Media - Never mind the quality, feel the quantity?

 

Social Media Marketing will probably become the buzzwords for 2010 for the majority of advertising agencies and many businesses without a 'social media strategy' will be seen as terribly 'last year' in their thinking.  Virtually all fashionable companies are gleefully announcing their entry into the social media scene with varying degrees of commitment and success.  So how do you succeed with Social Media?

 

Certainly Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to make sure you can proactively relate to your customers.  They give you the power to tailor your promotions on an hour by hour (or even minute by minute basis) depending on the trends that are emerging from your followers.

 

Many businesses see this immediacy as an opportunity to contribute (and benefit from) keeping up with the public. However unless it is done well it can backfire horribly.

 

New Promotion – Old News

 

If you are going to direct people to your website you need to make sure that not only is the message relevant and up-to-date but also that the content you are linking to is equally relevant and up-to-date.

 

As part of my job, I have the joy of following lots of business who are trying to use SM as a promotional tool and one of the worst problems I see is businesses who endlessly post exactly the same message and links to the same tired old content on their website.

 

Promoting your website then delivering the same old (literally) content time after time is not only pointless, it's counterproductive. Your followers rapidly get fed up and ignore your messages. Meaning when you do finally provide new stuff they'll ignore that too!

 

So the quality of the message is key - if you're going to try to speak to your customers then you need to make sure what you're saying is worth reading.

 

Identify your Audience

 

Some businesses seem to focus almost exclusively on the number of followers or friends they can sign up with little thought as to what to do with them.  Are 500 genuine followers better than 5000 idle button pushers?  The ease of following/friending makes a pure numbers game irrelevant.  This is similar to the early arguments in pay per click advertings.  Companies solely focused on capturing names with little clue about conversion will focus on to raw number, others who have a little more foresight will of course concentrate on conversion rate.  The true test of any marketing is working out how many people actually spend money with you.  Until a follower becomes a customer they have little or no value at all.

 

You also have to recognise what kind of people are following you.  Are they existing customers who you are trying to retain or are they new potential customers who you are trying to capture?  Just as in traditional marketing each group is different and needs handling differently.

 

Are you 'talking' to a small clique where jokes about the football or Big Brother would go down well or are you attempting to capture a more generic audience? The intimacy available through Social Media can be a double edged sword so treat your tweets with care. If you're running the campaign for a men's mag then twitpiccing your stag night exploits might work – do the same on the nappy Facebook page and you'll be in trouble!

 

Quality not Quantity is Key

 

Social Media in 2010 is rather like email in 1995. Its fashionable, quick, easy and most of all cheap but just like email it can be abused so its essential you moderate the sheer quantity of communications and make sure each one is really worthwhile. 

 

Users of Social Media sites are very savvy and in my experience extremely cynical so don't abuse them or the system. Remember whilst it only takes 10 seconds for a 'friend' to follow you it also only takes 10 seconds to unfollow you.

 

Never lose sight of the bottom line

 

As with all marketing, until a customer actually hands over their cash for your product they have very little real value but any Social Media campaign has real costs so make sure your SM is more than just vanity publishing.

 

Provided your messages are relevant, timely and useful to your audience then Social Media can be a great way to gain and retain customers but doing it badly is a great way to annoy potential customers and in this economic climate annoying customers is never a good idea!

 

 

Karl Meyer

Associate Spice.co.uk

karl@spice.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

Get a new e-mail account with Hotmail – Free. Sign-up now.

What Would Mary Do? Learning on-line lessons from the Queen of Shops

As a small business owner in retail I've been fascinated by the Mary Queen of Shops series on BBC2 and I'm sure many of you have too even if your business (like mine) is 100% on-line

 

But what can on-line businesses (not just retailers) learn from Mary? Well two common themes seem to run throughout all the programmes (excluding Ms Portas' appalling taste in tights)

 

• Mess
• Lack of Customer Focus

 

Mess

 

Almost all the shops were messy with years of neglect and 'make do and mend' patching up their tired layouts and facilities.  This is equally true of huge numbers of websites.  How many sites do you visit in January or even April which still have 'Last date for Christmas orders' displayed or comments about bad weather and strikes delaying the post?  (I saw one site last month apologising for snow causing delays in deliveries – Snow, in June?)

 

It's all too easy for a site to drift away from the designers vision with the owner deciding to save money by chucking up their own logos and pictures hacked together in MS Paint. After all why pay £100 for a decent update when I can do it from the comfort of my sofa in front of the footie.

 

It's always a good idea to take a long hard look at your site every couple of months to make sure its still as fresh and shiny as it was and if necessary get the pros in to have a tidy up and sort out for you.

 

Lack of Customer Focus

 

The second problem can afflict all sites all of the time and is the one where Mary really comes into her own and is simply caused by the owner thinking like an owner and not like a buyer.

 

All sites have customers. It doesn't matter if the site is an on-line store or a free social media site, all people who arrive are customers and the site needs to be set up and arranged to suit them rather than set up for the convenience of the owner.

 

This means that the simple conventions of navigation, checkouts, searching etc etc have to fall into line with the rest of the world.  It's no good shunting the checkout function to the very bottom right corner of the page because its "better for your design vision" if the customer is expecting it in the top right corner where it is on 95% of all sites.  It's pointless laying out your products alphabetically because "it makes stock checking easier" if your customer wants them grouped by age range because they're looking for baby toys.

 

Don't let your vision of how your site should look and be operated cloud the view your customer sees.  You use your site daily so you know its foibles and quirks, your customer sees it once and any quirks, foibles or unfriendliness are a recipe for them to get fed up and check out your competitor.

 

Whenever Mary goes into a business she asks the simple question

 

"What does the customer want?"

 

And this is something we should all ask ourselves all the time.

 

At Spice we have experts not only in developing beautiful design visions but can call upon experts who actually run on-line businesses for a living ensuring that we can make sure  that the answer to "What does the customer want?" is "your website".

 

---

Get a free e-mail account with Hotmail. Sign-up now.

Making sure you have content worth promoting – Why Content Management Systems are vital to your business

 

Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to make sure you can proactively relate to your customers.  They give you the power to tailor your promotions on an hour by hour (or even minute by minute basis) depending on the trends that are emerging from your followers.

 

Many businesses see this immediacy as an opportunity to contribute (and benefit from) keeping up with the public. However unless it is done well it can backfire horribly.

 

New Promotion – Old News

 

If you are going to direct people to your website you need to make sure that not only is the message relevant and up-to-date but also that the content you are linking to is equally relevant and up-to-date.

 

As part of my job, I have the joy of following lots of business who are trying to use SM as a promotional tool and one of the worst problems I see is businesses who endlessly post exactly the same message and links to the same tired old content on their website.

 

Promoting your website then delivering the same old (literally) content time after time is not only pointless, it's counterproductive. Your followers rapidly get fed up and ignore your messages. Meaning when you do finally provide new stuff they'll ignore that too!

 

How Content Management is Key

 

Of course generating new content is much harder than writing on a Facebook wall or posting a tweet. This is why a decent Content Management System (CMS) integrated into your site is virtually essential.

 

With the new immediacy of the Web it is vital that you can update and refresh your content in hours or even minutes rather than the days or weeks it can take with a 'web team'. CMS will allow you to keep the content fresh whilst removing the burden of layout, style and HTML from your day-to-day work.

 

This is where SPICE can help. By having both Social Media experts and web professionals in the one team we can deliver a total solution combining SM promotion with the tools to generate engaging new content quickly and easily. Ensuring your content is as good as your promotion which can only benefit your business.

---

Get a new e-mail account with Hotmail – Free. Sign-up now.

Integrating Content Management Systems with Social Media

Making sure you have content worth promoting – Why Content Management Systems are vital to your business.

 

Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to make sure you can proactively relate to your customers.  They give you the power to tailor your promotions on an hour by hour (or even minute by minute basis) depending on the trends that are emerging from your followers.

 

Many businesses see this immediacy as an opportunity to contribute (and benefit from) keeping up with the public. However unless it is done well it can backfire horribly.

 

New Promotion – Old News

 

If you are going to direct people to your website you need to make sure that not only is the message relevant and up-to-date but also that the content you are linking to is equally relevant and up-to-date.

 

As part of my job, I have the joy of following lots of business who are trying to use SM as a promotional tool and one of the worst problems I see is businesses who endlessly post exactly the same message and links to the same tired old content on their website.

 

Promoting your website then delivering the same old (literally) content time after time is not only pointless, it's counterproductive. Your followers rapidly get fed up and ignore your messages. Meaning when you do finally provide new stuff they'll ignore that too!

 

How Content Management is Key

 

Of course generating new content is much harder than writing on a Facebook wall or posting a tweet. This is why a decent Content Management System (CMS) integrated into your site is virtually essential.

 

With the new immediacy of the Web it is vital that you can update and refresh your content in hours or even minutes rather than the days or weeks it can take with a 'web team'. CMS will allow you to keep the content fresh whilst removing the burden of layout, style and HTML from your day-to-day work.

 

This is where SPICE can help. By having both Social Media experts and web professionals in the one team we can deliver a total solution combining SM promotion with the tools to generate engaging new content quickly and easily. Ensuring your content is as good as your promotion which can only benefit your business.

---

Get a new e-mail account with Hotmail – Free. Sign-up now.

Are Paywalls a step forward to a new dawn or a step backward to isolated content?

Content needs paying for but is a paywall the best solution?

 

With The Times' paywall coming down today, its an interesting time to see if 'paying for news' will pay for publishers.
 
At the moment there seem to be two camps...
 
In the red corner the journalists complaining about the free nature of the Internet which is removing the value (and money) from their profession.
 
In the blue corner (which seems to be quite a lot bigger) are readers who say - why should I pay someone when I can get news for free?
 
So in my role as being stuck in the middle here's my pennyworth.

 

It is very clear that if humans are spending their time and using their skills to produce something then they need to be paid.  A journalist cannot pop into Tescos and attempt to pay for the weeks shopping with a list of twitter followers and a few #ff mentions.  There needs to be a way of converting these ephemeral things into cold hard cash which means someone (i.e. me and you) are going to have to pay.

 

Therefore it makes sense for a newspaper which is used to charging for the production of its news in the physical world to want to start charging for news on-line.

 

We need to find a way to monetise the content of publishers so that they can continue to pay journalists, reporters and their entire empire of staff and so maintain production of this content.
   

If getting paid is the problem is having a paywall the solution?

The main problem I see is that of understanding what 'news' is. Just as not everything on the Internet is free, not everything in a newspaper is actually news.  Equally not a great deal of the 'news' bits of a paper are even written by that newspaper with lots being agency copy, or mildly rehashed copy from other places. In fact a large percentage of actual original copy in a paper isn't really 'news' at all it being columnist material and this is where the paywall arguments become interesting.

 

Articles written in-house by experts who understand their field provide 'exclusive' content but most of the content of your average paper is available from so many other places I can't see the point in paying for it.

 

So, if there are only  2-3  unique bits of The Times I want to read today and Mr Murdoch is going to charge £1 then each article is costing me 50p. The fact there are 100's of other bits 'available' is irrelevant. If I don't want them they are worthless.

 

 

So, has The Times got it right? 

 

In my view, no.   The problem with the paywall system is that it trying to impose the Newspaper model of selling onto the Internet.  The Times assumes that people want to buy the whole paper and read it cover to cover – just like they do with their normal daily paper.  But on the Internet everyone can be much more picky.  If we don't like Robert Peston's view on the economy we can find someone else we prefer. If we don't like A A Gill's reviews we can read someone else's. The Internet gives us the freedom to be promiscuous with our reading habits and The Times' paywall is trying to stop us.

 

Take for example the interview with Lady Ga Ga by Catlin Moran which was in The Times about a month ago.  My wife who is a big fan of both people decided to actually buy the entire paper (£1.50 I think) solely on the basis of this single article.  The vast majority of the paper was left unread (and indeed still folded). 

 

This is a huge waste of money and resources and the current paywall model seems to be trying to translate this waste onto the Internet.

 

So what is the solution?

 

I feel what we need is a system allowing us to pay on a per article basis (probably around 10-20p) per article and for us to get a nice monthly bill itemising what we had read and charging us accordingly – A bit like oh, our mobile phone bill!

 

Papers could then sell individual articles at 10% of the cost of the paper rather than try to sell an entire paper.  Given the reduction in manufacturing and distribution costs a consumer reading 2 articles at 10p will probably generate as much profit as the buyer of a whole paper.

 

The best analogy I can think of would be the 'Now that's what I call music' albums. Why on earth would you pay £9, £10 or even £5 for a 2 CD pack which had 4 tracks you wanted and 34 you couldn't care less about when you can already download the four tracks for 99p each from iTunes and leave the rest of the rubbish alone?

Journalists whose articles were sold in this way would be able to measure (and be measured on) how popular they are and how much they actually contribute to their paper. Maybe a meritocracy amongst journalists will be the result?
 

The main advantages I could see would be;
 
1) I can read one article from The Times, one from The Guardian and maybe one or two others for less than a single subscription to any one paper
 
2) The papers will know which of their contributors are paying their way
 
3) Contributors can promote their content on blogs, twitter or facebook and actually be helping themselves and their employers to earn a living.
 
4) If there was a referral system (like adsense or similar) then other sites and blogs would actually have incentives to link to the original content  rather than attempt to steal the content and republish it - If you make linking to content profitable then why steal it? Funnily enough this ability to link to content rather than have to duplicate it everywhere was the original point of the web protocols!

 

5) Just as iTunes has increased the number of tracks sold and the amount spent on music, then a pay per article system may actually increase the amount spent by consumers on news.
 
What about the poor 'news' team who's content is available anywhere and therefore 'worthless' 
 
Well it does seem strange that any pay-per-read system might actually switch the priorities around.  Instead of being news first and columnist padding second this system probably reflects a switch of priorities in supply and demand.  There are many ways to find out what the FTSE100 is doing but only one Jeremy Clarkson (thankfully) so the paper that 'owns' him has a commodity that no-one else can replicate.  Any paper needs both but instead of the news team subsidising expensive columnists it'll be the expensive columnists who'll be expected to draw readers towards the 'public service' news element.

 

Will The Times Succeed?

 

Well I hope not.  Not because I don't like Mr Murdoch or because I don't like paying for content but because I think the paywall system is bad in the long term for content payment in general and we need to find a model that best matches the way the Internet user  actually uses the Internet.

 

The paywall systems seem to me to be a step backward towards the old AOL, Compuserve models of private content and if the Internet shows us one thing it is that backwards is rarely the best direction to be heading.

 

 

 

---

Get a free e-mail account with Hotmail. Sign-up now.