On March 9th, we announced 140 | The Twitter Conference, scheduled for May 26th and 27th in Mountain View, CA. Yes, it’s a full two-day conference about Twitter, and we think it’s going to be fantastic.
The session grid is already looking really cool. My favorite session so far:
Best Practices Panel: I am a Twitter God and So Can You
The Twitterati are masters at gaining followers, driving conversation, and assimilating the tsunami of commentary and links that stream to them on a daily basis. In this session, our panel of experts will discuss what strategies, tactics, and tools have taken them to the top of the twitosphere.
Writing Tweets that get attention and retweeted * Services and utilities you can’t live without * Smart followership — knowing who (and how many) to follow * The best devices and software for mobile posting * Timing your Tweets
For a brief period, we’re offering seats to the full two days for $199.00. This bargain price is available only to the next 14 registrations as of this post (they’ve already started disappearing).
After the early bird seats sell out, the two-day event will cost a whopping $249. On May 15, any remaining seats will go up to $395. So make sure to grab yours now.
Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about “an increase in Twitter spam” wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.
Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”
The Financial Times points out today the growing disruptive force that Social Media is becoming for advertising agencies around the world. The more media comes to be dominated by non-traditional publishing space, the less these ad agencies are going to be able to rely on traditional ad work to keep them up and running.
There are a couple of genius ads, of course, like the Cadbury Gorilla one mentioned in the article, but:
not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world, the IPA warned. In its worst-case scenario, the resulting decline in paid-for advertising space could see £16m ($23m) of revenues lost by the industry by 2016, if agencies fail to create new products and services to cater to the social media world.
The good news is that this is a problem on both ends: advertisers are looking to create new advertising products that work in a social media setting (and make them money), while at the same time social networks like Facebook are going to be scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their pageviews.
It seems likely that they’ll end up finding some answers in the middle, out of necessity if nothing else.
As I’m sure all you web aficionados are already aware, there’s been plenty of web play in the recent violence between Israel and Hamas. It’s an interesting real world follow up to the whole terrorist tweeting thing from November.
There’s a good roundup of the web tactics from both sides on Ars Technica (link found here, and the really interesting point in the piece is that there is such a marketing battle being fought between the two online.
Apparently the opinion of the digerati is important even in determining the justness of war.
The good thing about all the stir that the WSJ has created is that Network Neutrality is going to gain a little more public traction, especially if the “unsubstantiated” rumors about shifting interests at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google turn out to be true.
I believe that a lot of innovation on the web comes from the fact that it is built on “dumb pipes,” and it’s also this fact that creates an economy of abundance instead of an economy of scarcity.
Throughout history, though, the big money has been made with an economy of scarcity. I’m surprised there are any corporate interests that support the idea of network neutrality. It upsets all the classic business rules and *gasp* makes life better for the consumer, the innovator, and the small business.
In my mind, it is not enough to offer high-level “access” to business at the same price, because not all businesses have access to the same funds. I see little to no difference between Lessig’s position and one that allows large businesses to easily maintain monopolies in their market by quashing competitors.
It’s been very cool to see innovative social media strategies emanating from the head of the US government. Looks like that’s not going to stop yet.
I just got an e-mail from David Plouffe—and I’m guessing most people who read this blog probably got the same one—talking about a really cool initiative to boost civic engagement that, and here is the key component, utilizes online tools to coordinate offline interactions.
Check it out:
I just recorded a special video message — from a place you might recognize — about this weekend’s Change is Coming house meetings, and why you should join tens of thousands of your fellow supporters.
Watch the video and find a Change is Coming house meeting near you. Or host one yourself and invite your friends, family, and neighbors.
At the house meetings, you’ll reflect on our campaign, discuss the future of this movement, and identify some ways to get involved in your community.
Meeting hosts will report back, and your feedback will be instrumental in guiding this movement through some important and unprecedented territory.
This grassroots organization has always been about more than an election. It’s about transforming our country — and we’ve only just begun.
Peter Kim wisely warns us: ROI is a term with a real definition. And it’s starting to get thrown around more and more, as some social media types are beginning to look for ways to justify their existence.
In tougher economic times, it’s harder to get away with experimental marketing, especially if it’s hard to quantify:
Calculating ROI from social media efforts is no different. If ROI doesn’t apply to social media marketing, then social media should not be used for marketing.
But I think this is a failure of data analysis, not a failure of marketing. The real questions is: How do we start to quantify and standardize the results of social media marketing campaigns?
PaidContent reports that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe has said that he is “cautiously optomistic” about ad revenue in 2009—in other words, the behemoth of a social network is still not looking at a blockbuster business model based on ads.
The good news, according to the source article, is that online ad spending isn’t supposed to take a big dive the way traditional ad spending is expected to. The bad news is that social networks have never been the fertile ground for advertising the way that search has been.
I wouldn’t be surprised if MySpace actually showed a growth in online ad revenue next year, but I think that the real revenue model for social networks is going to be elsewhere. Facilitating user transactions, for example, would be a great source of revenue.
I had the pleasure to present at the excellent Marketing & Online Communities Conference hosted by Forum One Communications a few weeks back, and got a chance to sit down with social media guru Bryan Person, who asked me some probing questions about how companies can stay on top of the buzz surrounding their brand.
It’s worth clicking through just to see the hideous algorithmically determined opening sample frame, where I appear to be poised to hurl. Note that I finally got a haircut last week.
…might be overplayed. I ran across this video today over at Blogoscoped, where an ominous-sounding narrator explains why Google reading my e-mails to serve ads is a dangerous violation to privacy.
On one level it sounds a little ridiculous. “Oooh! Google is reading your e-mail!”
But on another level I think there are some real and valid points in here that ought to be thought about.
Let’s face it, the Obama Presidential campaign was one of the most successful social media marketing efforts in the history of the internet. I can count on my fingers the number of major US companies that understand new media the way the Obama campaign did.
(Incidentally, how long do you think it will take Firefox to put “Obama” in their spell-check dictionary?)
This is really not that surprising, given the involvement of people like Chris Hughes, one of the founding fathers of Facebook, as Obama’s online organizing coordinator. It also explains why Obama’s web site looks freakishly close to Facebook in design.
So what can we learn about social media marketing from the Obama campaign?
Kristen Foster and John Bell have decided to share their slideshow from the “Twitter Bootcamp for PR” webinar they did yesterday.
In their words:
we wanted to share a copy of our presentation deck with our readers, which includes more than 60 sides featuring the basics of Twitter, key strategies, PR best practices, and real life case studies.
Sounds like a win to me. I clicked through the deck on SlideShare and it is a good resource for business that are either thinking about getting into twitter or wondering why they should.
Don’t believe me? Check out the slideshow for yourself:
Do you live under a rock? If you do, you might not have heard of the Pickens Plan yet, which is former “oil tycoon” T. Boone Pickens’ roadmap to oil independence: alternative energy resources.
What’s interesting is that Pickens is being progressive not only in his message but in how he is delivering it. I think the term “powerful lobbyist” is going to start changing as people realize how easy the internet makes it to gather thousands or even millions of people behind a particular policy initiative. That’s where the real leverage comes from, after all.
If you check out their web site, they have a whole “community” section that offers the standard range of community functions: profile creation, groups, events, images, and forum interaction.
If you’re over 50, all new technologies are used only for evil. Have you noticed the story on MSN about how Terrorists might use Twitter in part of an attack:
A U.S. Army intelligence report sent the media into overdrive the last few days with its pronouncement that terrorists might “Tweet” their way through an attack using the microblogging site Twitter. The Army says it “red-teamed” the possible use of Twitter, which means that a team of soldiers or analysts used Twitter to see if they could find weaknesses with the Army’s battle readiness.
Using Twitter to coordinate group efforts is not a new concept. Tweet-ups are a basic form of coordinated group action.
The obvious downside to planning your terrorist actions on Twitter are: they’re public. The obvious caveat: don’t believe everything you see on Twitter.
As an open platform, Twitter works as a two-edged sword. The best way to prepare the US Army for possible Terrorist Twitter use is to get very good ad using it themselves.
Last night we held the Blog Bling Mixer at Thinkspace in Redmond for a pretty good crowd. Peter took some good photos and put them up on the official Thinkspace blog.
Plenty of cool people turned up, and I think we struck a good balance of structured and unstructured time at the event.
Steve and I presented some quick tips at the beginning, just to kick things off, and then we had volunteers present the two “most-requested” blog tips over the projector to the group at large.
After that, we broke out into smaller groups where people could ask questions or share any kind of tips they wanted to. I wasn’t part of every conversation but it seemed to work out pretty well for everyone there.
All in all, it was a good event. Thanks Peter for letting us host it in such a nice office space.
