April, 2009 | a thousand cuts

Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Shaquille O’Neal and Britney Spears are not taking over Twitter. A well publicized event like Oprah tweeting on her show won’t help. Ashton vs. Larry King, in a contest to see which account, @aplusk (“a plus k”) or @cnnbrk can reach a million followers first is a publicity event that had lots of benefits for both in terms of building large networks, but they are not taking over. Any way you slice it, their efforts are futile. They can’t take over Twitter because of one simple fact: people choose who they follow.

Twitter is a social network that allows a member to choose who to follow, and followers choose whether they follow back. Follow who you are interested in. Ignore spammers or folks who don’t interest you. It’s that simple.

The major benefit of all the celebrity activity around Twitter is that more people will be drawn to use the service. For a concept that is so simple, Twitter is not the most intuitive network to navigate. Understanding how to start and join in a conversation online is a little outside of the comfort zone of many people. I’ve seen many people join Twitter and 6 months later they are following 10 people, no one is following back and the only post on their account is “Joined twitter, trying to figure this out.” Take a look for yourself.

I will still contend that Twitter is not for everybody, but as more people figure out how to build their own communities on the platform, the more valuable content and discussion will be aggregated. I like to think of the volume of content on Twitter as an unstructured Wikipedia – it’s not precisely accurate but directionally correct, and the more sources that contribute the better it gets.

Here’s an example. I had a conversation last night with someone who had just joined twitter and had trouble convincing a friend why it is valuable. I asked what that friend did for a living – the friend was a user experience designer, and very skeptical about Twitter. I pulled up search.twitter.com and searched for “UX” – and immediately found UX job listings, informative blogs of well known people in the industry and a lot of people talking about user experience design. I clicked through to a couple of twitter profiles and quickly identified the lead of user experience of AutoTrader.com. Within a few minutes I could identify a dozen valuable resources that would help that friend in his career.

I’ve been using Twitter for nearly two years, and the community has changed and evolved. I still keep to the core of interacting with folks who share common interests, whether it’s the Red Sox, social media or the fun of a lazy Saturday morning with the kids at home. I’ve come to heavily rely on Tweetdeck to manage groups of friends and contacts that I don’t want to lose in the sea of “tweets,” but I am also continuing to find value by identifying interesting people who have something valuable to share. With valuable contributors, searching Twitter has become an increasingly relevant way to get to content. Celebrities joining twitter can only bring more interesting people to follow right along with them.

Are you using Twitter? Do you think celebrities joining is positive or negative, and has it changed how you use Twitter? Feel free to reach out to me @adamcohen on Twitter to discuss, I’d love to hear from you.

Photo credit: Neon23 via flickr

Few marketers dispute PPC as an effective and measurable online channel. Social media, in contrast, is currently subject to dispute.

One of the more compelling arguments for pay-per-click search marketing is the ability to attribute web sales directly to clicks from search advertising. ROI can be measured to multiple decimal points tying the amount of spend invested in bidding on keywords to the direct revenue and conversion. When the conversation changes to social media, there are debates about ROI, a lack of proven approaches and many marketers still viewing social media as experimental. [“Conversion” for those not familiar with web analytics is defined as a visitor to a web property who completes a targeted action, including signing up for an email newsletter, adding a product to a shopping cart, or completing checkout.]

Skepticism Abounds

A way to address the skepticism marketers have about social media is to draw the same correlation to the purchase path as search marketing. Notice I did not suggest “the” way to address the skepticism — providing better metrics won’t give the complete picture of social media benefits, but it will start to quantify the role social media can play in a marketing strategy in terms that internet marketers deal with already. For example, today Webtrends and Radian6 made a joint product announcement tying traditional web analytics to social media monitoring, through Webtrends’ Open Exchange platform. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Establishing Credit

Traditional analytics tools give credit for conversion to the tracked marketing activity before the conversion takes place – a “last click” methodology. This could be a search query prior to a site visit, an ad clicked through on a search results page or a banner ad. Those in the SEM and Display Advertising industries would tell you that while these metrics are precisely measured, a major challenge is to quantify all the “other” touchpoints a consumer has prior to conversion. (Rosetta, my agency, has a differentiated approach to marketing analytics that does capture “view-thru” – tracking that a user saw a display ad days or even weeks prior to a conversion event).

Here is what I would like to see analytics vendors or social media monitoring platforms do to start to quantify the measurement:

Track participation in social technologies in similar fashion to traditional ecommerce sites (defined conversion events, page views, length of visit). A potential limitation is that brands may only be able to track measurements based on assets they control (hosted communities, hosted blogs, custom widgets, etc).
Tie search engine queries, organic search site visits and PPC ad clicks – and ultimately, conversion – back to whether the user had participated in a social technology, and measure typical length of visit/level of engagement both before and after conversion.
Provide in one dashboard the ability to identify the direct correlation between social marketing initiatives to conversion and revenue.

This level of data would help marketers more directly measure the success of social marketing initiaitves and make at least part of the intangible, tangible. Is that a lot to ask?

Photo credit: premasagar via flickr

a thousand cuts

adam cohen's blog :: interactive marketing, digital and social media

Month / April 2009