Twitteronomics : Twitter and Business

Dell's Stephanie Nelson blogged on the official blog claiming that Dell had raked in more than $3 million of sales through its Twitter presence over the past couple of years. With more than 6 lakh followers on Twitter, Dell was able to reach out to its customers in better ways and strike attractive deals with its followers. ChubbyBrain, an organisation that brings together start-ups and investors has reported that an estimated $23.3 million has flown into Twitter-based start-ups. Pepsi Co released its Pepsi Raw Can with its Twitter URL on it. Well Twitter has opened up a whole new world of social media whose potentials are still not sufficiently known.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site developed by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone based on a model of a instant messaging service they used for internal communication in their company. Twitter allows a tweeter to post 140 keystroke long updates which can be followed by his followers. Further it allows access through mobile phone devices. With more than $55 million of venture capital funding and a lot of Twitter-based apps and start-ups hiting the markets, things augur well for the emergence of Twitteronomics.

Twitter is a place where brands and corporations can meet customers hear from them and also talk to them. For instance right now Apple has launched a huge promotional campaigne over Twitter for its new iPhone. Corporations like Starbucks, SouthWest Airlines and WholeFoods have been able to boost their toplines by engaging their customers on Twitter. So even before Twitter made any dime for itself it has helped grand corporations earn millions.

New Media Advisor Andrew Grill said ' Two years ago if a customer faces a problem he can probably tell a few but now with Twitter he can tell to millions of users that too in real time. Many brands I work with aren't aware that people are talking about them on Twitter. Companies need to know what people say about them in such fora'. Thus Twitter is a place where marketers and PR professionals can get access to invaluable customer experience snippets. A good product manager can mobilise his potential and current customers to tweet about a product or feature. This is nothing but a focus group discussion done in real-time. The insights and data pouring in are no longer sample data but real data. Job seekers and head hunters have also taken notice of Twitter as the place talent hunt. The ability to network easily makes Twitter a cool place to hunt both jobs and talent.

But not all are rosy for Twitter. A recent Harvard Survey has found that 90% of the content on Twitter is generated by 10 % of users. Median tweets per day per user is just one while the 75th percentile mark is about four. A whopping 30% users donot have any followers at all. This has made critics to brand Twitter as a one-way one-to-many communication station. Also a survey conducted by Participatory Marketing Networks shows that only about 22% of the gen-Y use Twitter but 99% of the surveyed use one or the other social networking sites. The survey concludes that there are few technical snags in the design that is not conducive for gen-Y embrace.

But in the recent times Twitter has shot to the top popularity which can be seen from its burgeoning user base. But the most important challenge for Twitter is about monetising its business model. A business that doesn't earn would soon be out of business. With growing popularity Twitter has enormous profit potential and whole ripened field for it to reap.

Tweet me @T_Karthikeyan

References

Twitter earns brands millions for free

ChubbyBrains post regarding Twitter-based startups

HBR Survey of Twitter users

Social Media : Coming of Age

Social Media's WOW moment is just underway for everyone of us to witness. Social media includes Web2.0 portals like blogs, social networking sites, file and photo sharing networks et cetera. Iranian presidential election triggered the present wow moment. When people took to the streets denouncing the incumbent Ahmedinejad's landslide, the Iranian government tried to gag the public protest by switching off mobile phone networks, kicking out journalists and blocking access to sites like Google, Facebook etc. The government sponsored information black-out failed miserably while the world continued to peep at Tehran's streets through the keyhole called Twitter. And how did all this happen..

The government's gag operation failed to take notice of a rather hip-hop microblogging site called the Twitter. Consequently Twitter emerged the epicenter of Iranian Election Reporting. Many of the agitated Iranians accessed their Twitter accounts to update about the events happening in ground zero. The reporting was almost real-time such that even before a reader could finish off one 140 keystroke update another thousand or two turned up for review. Iranian news broadcast on Twitter was simply overwhelming.Trendrr, a social media trend tracker puts that there were between 10000 and 50000 tweets any hour about Iran and this figure reached a peak of 221,774 on June 16, the day when Twitter was supposed go down for maintenance.

In fact blogs moved even quicker than Twitter with a host of Iranian bloggers coming up with excellent blog posts with live and real news snippets from across the streets of Tehran. Trenderr puts the number of blogposts discussing Iran in some fashion at 19 million. About 2.25 million posts are estimated to have been blogged on June 16 alone. Youtube and Flickr did their role to perfection. Thousands of protest videos and pictures were uploaded to these sites which enabled the world to get a glimpse of the democratic vibrancy of Iran. Trendrr estimates around that 184,500 videos have been uploaded on the Youtube. Many of the mainstream print and electronic media were happy to reproduce the citizen journalists' videos and images.

The highpoint in the story came when the US Department of State reportedly asked Twitter to reschedule its scheduled maintenance outage so that tweets from Iran may flow unhindered. Twitter's Biz Stone was quick to distance his company from this news. CNN's blog speculated that Twitter's executives could have themselves postponed the outage just to enable Iranian tweets. Nevertheless it has underscored an important idea that social media have definitely come of age. No longer can anyone dismiss them as frivolous and non-serious websites meant only for chit-chatting.

Social media score the brownie point for impartial reportage over organised mainstream media. Organised media houses always have the editorial control over the news they beam. So there is good chance that they may be cooking up public opinions by choosing or omitting certain news articles. On the otherhand social media have independent users recording their views. Though these bloggers and twitters may be biased and selective, a user would have unbridled access to all such bloggers and twitters. Thus the user can, at least theoretically, get to know all the prespectives of an issue.

One blogger posted saying ' when civil disobedience joins hands with social networking it means death to despotism '. This is particularly true with Iran. The top cleric of Iran has asked the government for a re-count of votes while the runner-up Mr.Mousavi's supporters take out a rally in the national capital. I do believe that democracy will soon see the light of the day in Tehran. When the triumphant day dawns surely Twitter and rest of the social media outfits would carry a sizeable share of credit for victory.

References

US Department of State and Twitter

Discussion on Trendrr's Statistics

How to track Iran Election News on Social Media

Being Google Friendly

Global Language Monitor recently declared that Web2.0 is the millionth word to join the English lexicon. The significance , apart from linguisitic one, is the fact that Web2.0 which hitherto remained a technology jargon has now found a spot in the mainstream language. This has happened owing to the revolution Web2.0 has unleashed in this information age. Knowing Web2.0 and making one's presence felt in it is as important for survival as survival itself. This should probably apply well to business/non-business organisations/individuals. Just being out there will serve no purpose. One's presence should make some noise so that it grabs attention. It is here that search engines come to the rescue of online publishers. In the process search engines have engendered what is called search marketing.

With exploding web page population, Internet is getting more cluttered with every passing day. Search engines are quickly becoming the gateways of information. Web users more often use a search engine to reach a desired page. Thus, he shall be the winner who gets a favourable search engine endorsement - meaning being in the top 20 results in a search engine result page. Being Google-friendly or search-engine-friendly is extremely crucial for the success of any online offering.

Web2.0

Web2.0 loosely refers to a new generation of online content. Internet has long before ceased to be a plain repository from where people fetched information. Now it has become a place where anybody can generate content. This has been rendered possible by Push-button publishing where online publishing is a quick and easy process. Social networking websites like the Orkut, Twitter etc have made things further simpler. Thus today each and every netizen is a potential publisher. This opens up a unique opportunity for marketing products, ideas and people.

Web2.0 and Marketing

In a competitive world there is need for each and everyone to market oneself. Be it an individual or an organisation the rule is sell or succumb. One might wonder why should an individual ever market oneself. Let me take an example of a MBA student aspiring to join banking sector. Services sector is a knowledge economy where professionals are hired for the knowledge and expertise they possess. Gone are the days when a person joins a company, works for it the whole life and one fine day retire with social security packages.

A professional's life has started to move away from a 'settled' lifestyle to a 'corporate nomadic' lifestyle. Every few years the knowledge professional hops from one company to another. When this is the lifestyle there is a need to have something that can reflect a person's personality on a sustained basis. Web2.0 is an excellent tool just for that. A weblog can serve the purpose of establishing an online presence and can be strategically used to build reputation (meaning visitor base). Reputation so built can help the corporate nomad in moving from one lush patch to another. The said MBA student can build a reputation through his blog for interesting and innovative write-ups. Even one article that shows the discernment and innovativeness of the student can help her land-up in her dream job. It is an open secret that HR executives of top companies always research their candidates on the net.

Though a blog or any other social medium offer lucrative opportunities, there is one potential brick wall. The Internet is just flooded with web pages. The number of web pages online is in terms of billions. This has made a majority of netizens rely on search engines to help them get to the page they need. Thus if at all one needs a potential visitor to know that one's blog exist then it should pop up on a search engine's result page. That too in top 20 or 30 links. This has opened a new arena in marketing called search engine marketing or search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO might sound like Greek to many professionals and students of marketing. But it is nothing different from the marketing that Kotler taught us. Search Engine Marketing is all about positioning a web page so that it appears as a favourable choice in the eyes of a search engine. Just like any other positioning strategy, SEO involves understanding the demographics and behaviour of the target customers ie, search engines.

Search engines typically employ a three step process to offer the search service. Firstly it sends out web-bots or crawlers which crawl over the net and fetch web pages. Secondly the pages are indexed based on the content found on them. Finally when a user types a search string, relevant pages are identified from its massive databases and presented in the form of a result page. So from a marketer's point of view the task is two-folded. First the page should be accessible to the crawler and secondly when the indexer reads through the page it should be able to index the page just for the desired keywords.

Search Engine Behaviour:

Positioning requires understanding the behaviour of the customer. Google, being the most widely used search engine, is invariably considered as the biggest and often the only customer. The most important aspect of Google's search behaviour is how it identifies the relevance of a particular web page for a particular keyword. Google states that it follows a complex proprietary PageRank algorithm to do this job. The algorithm uses more than 500 million variables and 2 billion statement to identify the relevance. One of the most important part of this procedure is the way the indexer treats 'inbound' links. Every inbound links( ie links in other pages pointing to our page) is considered a vote or a citation for that page. Thus among two pages with 100 and 50 links from pages with identical page ranks, the former will rank higher than the latter. Further it also uses what is called hyper-text matching procedure. Suppose for a search string like "heart disease", the indexer looks at all pages containing these two terms, the distance between these terms in the page, their font size etc before deciding the relevance of any page.

Thus if a marketer wants his page to be relevant then it has to Google-friendly. SEO is all about making the content of the page appear more desirable from the eyes of the search engine. Thus it involves a lot of job which a webmaster (website designer) should do. There are elaborate guides that help webmasters in white hat optimisation techniques.

But there are more to the idea of SEO where Web2.0 plays a crucial role. One essential tool for SEO is back-links management. A back-link is nothing but an inbound link. In the era of Web 1.0 getting back-links was really tough. But now with the emergence of weblogs and other social media, it is in fact easier to get back-links. For instance many Web2.0 users can actually publish posts, comment on them, create profiles etc. These are the opportunities where they can promote their blogs. Emergence of what is called as vertical search engines and online directories again have made the job of getting back links a fairly easier job.

(More about vertical search engines in a later post).

At the end of the day all search engine optimisation techniques drill down to the idea of creating content that is valuable from the target user point of view and such a content is laid out effectively in the form of web pages or blogs. SEO can go a long way in building the traffic for a website/blog. Online advertisement, lead generation, permission-based database marketing are just a few avenues that are thrown open by generating online reputation. With more and more users coming under the clouds of internet, search marketing is all set to boom.

References :

1) Google's guide to SEO

2) SEO articles can be found here

Race to the Bottom in Down Under

It all started with Shravan. The Indian student community in Australia was galvanised to direct action when four Indian students were allegedly attacked by Aussie youngsters. The issue quickly picked up racial overtones. Several events like the Aussie PM condemning the attack and the Big B turning down an Aussie university's honour added shrill to the issue. Given Aussie's track record on racial matters, foul play could not be discounted and the Indian students are justifiably outraged. This post tries to sympathise with the student sentiments and comment on what they need to do.

Racism emanates from a belief that racial differences like colour etc render one race inherently superior to others. While globally the war against racism has come to an end with the fall of apartheid, still its vestiges are found in a few parts of the world. Australia has been home to racism in the past when the aborigines were abused and suppressed. The 1901 Constitution of Australia provides for the obnoxious 'races power' section which permits the government to discriminate against people based on their race. As this provision does not explicitly provide that discrimination could only be positive, negative discrimination is also possible within its meaning. This piece of legislation still remains intact with a few cosmetic amendments.

In the past 100 years a sea change has happened in the mindset of Australia vis-a-vis racial matters. The country has emerged as the favoured destination for student community. The education export industry in Australia is valued at over USD 15 billion. The Indian student community is more than 1100 strong and is growing with every passing year.

In the recent times there has been a spate of attacks on Indian students specially in the state of Victoria. Students allege that it is racism that is the driving the series of attacks. In the last week of May a group of four Indian students was attacked by unknown perpetrators. Shravan, one among the four victims, got seriously injured. Aussie PM condoned the act of violence and apologised to the student community. This incident happened to be the last straw breaking the patience of Indian student community who took to streets. The student movement was bolstered by a series of events like prominent Indians sympathising with the students and the alleged high-handed behaviour of the police officials.

Now it has reached a stage where the students have started organising vigilante groups and indulging in near-vandalism. Although the student protesters claim that they demonstrate peacefully, things seem to veer in the opposite direction. It is clear that the student community is suffering from lack of vision and leadership. Their end is valid and noble but the means they seem to deploy appears foul. This can jeopardise their quest for justice.

There is a need for the student community to exercise restraint and make sure that they do not give way to violence or vandalism. The student community is ill-equipped to face the might of the police or the government. Their strategy should be one that appeals to the better sense of the people and Government of Australia. They need to ensure that the affected are suitably compensated and the safety of the student community is protected. There is an urgent need for the students to demonstrate the bonafide of their protests and maintain their actions within the boundaries of law.

The stake of Aussie government is high in this issue. It is risking a huge source of revenue and its image in the international arena. Good sense shall definitely prevail in Canberra and the issue would be suitably addressed. But this would be possible, if and only if the students conduct themselves in democratically acceptable fashion. If things take turn to violence and vandalism then it is going to be a race to the bottom leaving the student community severely battered.

References

1) Australian Constitution and Racism

2) Racist attack - Australian Media's Report