Why It’s Great!

One of the big challenges brands face when joining Twitter is growing a solid base of followers. The high follower count along with the positive and engaged community is usually the dream scenario. With Promoted Accounts and the right suggestion algorithm, brands will have an easier time gaining quality followers. It should be targeting followers who are fans of the brand or might be fans of the brand. This would make it easier for brands to connect with an audience who will listen and pay attention to what they have to say without using promotional giveaways and retweet contests, which usually brings in a crowd of people only there for moment.

Early Results

Since Twitter announced Promoted Accounts on their blog (10/4), Microsoft’s @Xbox account has jumped from around 23,000 followers to just over 31,000 followers in four days. The “Promoted Effect” is better illustrated here at TwitterCounter, where we can see @Xbox’s growth rate steadily climb for the past 30 days or so and then make some really impressive gains in the last few days (I just refreshed the page after an hour and there are 400+ new followers). It would be very interesting to see how many of these new users came from Promoted Accounts, but judging from their previous growth rate I’m assuming quite a large portion.

Looking Ahead

As long as Twitter’s user base grows and their suggestion algorithm continues to improve and target the right people, Promoted Accounts will be an excellent launching pad for brands getting into the social scene. Twitter is a great place for brands and consumers to connect, and this can help streamline the process. Promoted Accounts can provide a substantial boost for brands looking to gain quality followers and also provide value for new and current users to continue discovering interesting accounts.

What do you think about Promoted Accounts?

That’s all well & good, but what about those of us who want branded pages? What do we do now? What does VaynerMedia tell our clients to do? No longer can we fit the amount of branded information we previously could – there just is not enough space. Take a look:

My Twitter profile when viewed through old Twitter:

My Twitter profile when viewed through new Twitter:

It’s quite clear that the branded backgrounds we created for our Twitter profiles last year are no longer effective or attractive with the new layout. And the backgrounds we’ve created for clients won’t work either. So what do we do? It’s not quite as simple as when Facebook resized their pages from 760px to 520px.

We’re not sure what we’ll do in light of Twitter’s layout changes and we’re not sure what we’ll recommend for our clients. But either way, it does not make sense to make background changes until the new layout has been rolled out to everyone. So, there’s still some time left on the clock. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks to see what we do (possible follow-up post to come)!

What are your thoughts? Are you planning on changing your background? What would you recommend brands do with the limited space they still have left?

Note: Overall, the new Twitter is a good move for brands, both consumer and personal. The changes will keep more users on Twitter.com rather than on third party applications. Search is easier. Trending topics are easier to see. But, I haven’t had a chance to mess around with it too much yet, so “New Twitter’s Implications for Brands” will have to wait till another day.

The most interesting aspect of this thought is that Twitter essentially used the API and the outside developers as research. These developers created great products, and now Twitter is simply picking and choosing the best implementations of the API for their own product with #newtwitter. Twitter was able to see what worked and what didn’t work without wasting any resources… interesting.

Kanye has been creating buzz ever since he joined Twitter. He’s just that kind of a person. He speaks his mind, but not in a ranting, nonsensical kind of way. Kanye uses Twitter as an outlet, as a bit of a venting mechanism. The result? We get a glimpse into the mind and thought process of one of the most gifted and creative musicians of our time. That’s not to say his tweets are always newsworthy, but from, “Yo I ain’t gone lie… the diamond teeth be looking crazy dope with tux jackets. The juxtaposition is what I live for,” to “Just wrapped for the day… been shooting 16 hour days … I’m so excited … it’s like a child’s delusions become reality!,” Twitter has given Kanye a place to just say what he wants. And on this particular Saturday morning, Kanye wanted to say a lot.

Kanye West was apologizing to Taylor Swift, and to all the world, for stepping on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and interrupting her acceptance speech for ‘Best Female Video.’ More than that, he was giving us specific insights into how the incident impacted his life, and how that moment had affected him as a person. He was truly remorseful, it seemed. Around 10:30AM EST on Saturday morning, he said it:

Throughout Kanye’s Saturday morning discussion, he talked about larger issues: racism, the entertainment industry, ego (at one point, he called himself a 32 year-old child), the media. It was all quite thoughtful, intellectual, open and honest. I tweeted, “Love what @KanyeWest is doing on Twitter right now. Honest. Raw. Emotional. Public. Follow along.” And the majority agreed. Everyone was talking about Kanye on Saturday morning. He could not have picked a better platform to deliver his apology, and he knew it. Kanye chose a platform over which he had complete control. There would be no interruptions, no secondary agenda. Twitter was the place where he could say what he wanted, when he wanted, and without the bells and whistles of say, a TV special. It was perfect.

I’m not saying that just anybody can deliver a short novel and get away with it, but the lessons are there for all to see. Honesty and transparency win. Those characteristics are attractive, more today than ever before, in an age where everyone has, or is capable of having, a public voice.

Reports are indicating that Lebron plans on announcing his decision via a 1-hour special on ESPN tomorrow night. That’s all well and good (and will surely generate massive ratings), but I think it would be far more interesting if Lebron would make the subtle move of boosting his “following” count for 0 to 1, with the 1 being the team he plans on playing for in the coming years.

I understand that this concept is far less mainstream than a 1-hour special, but wouldn’t it be amazing if Lebron took over the news by simply clicking a single “follow” button?

Recently, I went searching for a Twitter application that would allow me to see how many of my followers were also following any given account.  Luckily for me, my search was short as the ever-resourceful Shaun Chapman pointed me toward Overlapr.com.  After using Overlapr to meet my needs, I realized that an application which gives me exact user names would be even more valuable, but that’s besides the point of this post.

Listening to the interests of your followers is beneficial for many reasons.  I’ve included a few of these reasons below, as well as a quick real life example for each.

Monitoring Current Campaigns:

Are you promoting a new website, a favorite artist, or just telling everyone you know that your cousin is new to Twitter?  Why not check to see how many of your followers actually decided to follow that website, artist, or Twitter newbie?  If you look at the numbers, you may find out that your current promotions are failing and decide to re-work your tweet strategy.

Make A Product Your Consumer Enjoys:

If a musician is trying to narrow down a list of possible collaborations, he or she can quickly see which artists on the list have the biggest support from his or her existing Twitter following.  While this may not necessarily produce the best song, it should help the musician find a collaboration with great Retweet value!

Catering Tweets To Your Audience:

Have you ever wondered why people don’t click your funny links?  Maybe they don’t find your sense of humor amusing!  By figuring out which comedians your followers are engaging with on Twitter, you can learn to better tune your jokes.

Choose The Right Endorsements:

If the delicious Rita’s Italian Ice finds out that a majority of their Twitter followers are also avid fans of Taylor Swift, they can engage more with Taylor on Twitter to pique fan interest.  Rita’s may even want to explore an online marketing campaign involving the country music star.

In the end, knowing who your Twitter audience is and making a conscious effort to communicate specifically with those followers will lead to better engagement.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” – Bill Cosby

This Fall, there was a lot of hype around the fact that Twitter was selling the big search engines access to its firehose of data. The implication was that real-time data would massively improve the relevance of search results. There’s obviously a lot of potential here but it seems to me that neither Google or Bing has really nailed it yet. And perhaps another player will emerge.

Take for example something something that happened yesterday in sports. No, nothing to do with soccer or tennis! Jason Giambi of the Colorado Rockies hit a dramatic walk-off homerun off his former nemesis Jonathan Papelbon to win a (baseball) game against the Boston Red Sox. Suppose I want to see a video of that homerun today–where should I look? I went to search.twitter and found a link to it in about 6 seconds on mlb.com.

How about traditional search? A Bing search provided some interesting content, including Giambi’s box score line from last night’s game, but nothing that screams of influence from real-time feedback:

Yes, at the bottom there is a “News” feed which contains the link to an article describing yesterday’s game. You can also click on recent tweets, which showed me 3 relevant Tweets. 2 were identical tweets by different users sharing an article from MSNBC. No trace of the video.

Next I tried Bing’s video search. There’s a lot of video content on the web related to Jason Giambi. But I didn’t find last night’s video in their pages of results. They certainly aren’t customizing the user experience based on a recent event.

My experience on Google was slightly better. I did find the video footage of the homerun as posted on espn.com by navigating to Google News and sorting by latest. And that’s not unreasonable, but I think they are only scratching the surface of capitalizing on breaking news and delivering the most relevant search results. I do think there is huge potential in integration of crowd-sourced information into traditional online search. Here’s a well written article by Jolie O’Dell last Fall that considered some of the possibilities and implications.

Obviously, it’s a monumental task to tailor the user search experience based upon real-time information. For my money, to date nothing trumps good old Twitter search.

In reality, my first Twitter-versary was back on April 6th.  I was just a bit preoccupied breaking the next billion-dollar company at the time, and couldn’t properly celebrate.

Yes, Twitter itself is almost 4-years old now, so I did arrive fashionably tardy to the party.  After signing up for Facebook, I got too comfortable, and became a relatively late adopter with most of the social media platforms that followed, including Twitter and LinkedIn.  Sure, I was acutely aware of Twitter’s presence last Spring, but everyone was by that point.  My professors were probably retweeting Shaq before I even created an account (bear in mind, when I first joined VaynerMedia, I got called out for using my cell phone’s most advanced feature, the built-in voice memo app).

Just like everyone else, my early tweets were self-centered and uninspired, but thankfully, my recent exposure to Twitter and social media in general has given me a greater perspective on its environment and functions.  The rest of this post will be comprised of quick observations and things I’ve learned over the past 13 months, regarding everyone’s favorite real-time micro-blogging platform.  In the spirit of the theme, no bullet will be longer than 140 characters.

• Follower counts don’t always tell the whole story. The follower-following ratio is a much better predictor of a quality tweeter… or spam

• My favorite thing about Twitter is that it forces you to be succinct – whether or not this will make kids better writers tomorrow remains to be seen

• Twitpic or it didn’t happen! Photo-included tweets are the best – it’s like I’m there, or something

• Ubertwitter and Tweetphoto links open in my browser instead of in my desktop client – I hate that and will be less inclined to click

• Yes, there’s a character limit, but don’t abbreviate everything – most will be able to decipher, but why make it so much harder to read?

• If it’s a little long, use 2 Tweets =)  Longer than that?  Write a real blog post!

• Having said that, please refrain from tweeting in rapid succession… for your followers’ sanity’s sake

• Twitter’s Trending Topics seem a little too easily gamed – is it a representation of Twitter’s pulse as much as it is a celebrity obituary tracker?

• While it’s a Twitter staple, and great in theory, I’m skeptical of how sticky #FF endorsements really are – personally, I don’t love ‘em

• Hashtags can add value to your tweets, especially for gatherings. Sometimes they’re overused but at the very least, they’re a pleasant #changeofpace

• Protecting your tweets will limit your experience on the platform – fewer people will follow you and your posts won’t show up in search.twitter

• Twitter won’t make you rich automatically, or find you customers, or create brand equity.  You do that.  All it can do is help

It’s been a blazing fast first year, and though it took a few months to get my feet under me, I’ve gradually become comfortable incorporating Twitter into my day-to-day routine.  What are some things that you’ve noticed about the Twitterverse?  I’m sure some of you will disagree with a couple of my points, but seeing as how it’s my birthday, I plan to simply ignore them (whoops that’s Facebook).

Content Availability

The first roadblock limiting social media’s influence on blockbuster media is the actual content created by traditional media powerhouses – currently it just isn’t easily consumed online.  This is a battle on two fronts.  The first is purely technological; the speed of data transfer over the Internet still makes consuming long-form content difficult for most users.

Thankfully, this is an issue that seems to be on its way out.  Out of all long-form content, movies are perhaps the most data intensive, and there have already been enough advances for Netflix to be comfortable shifting the focus of their service into the streaming business.  Not only are movies being streamed more frequently, but we’re also moving closer and closer to reaching a level of image quality that gives physical formats a serious run for their money.  Additionally, Google’s recent announcement that it will be implementing a trial high-speed network indicates that we may see serious speed improvements from ISPs in the near future.

The ability to retrieve content, however, is only half the battle; there also needs to be content worthy of retrieving.  This is where things get a little tricky.  Traditional content creators have been extremely tentative on releasing their most valuable content over the Internet, and perhaps for good reason.  The fact is there isn’t yet a system for monetizing content that has convinced these businesses to fully embrace the Internet for distribution.  While this is definitely an issue, and will continue to be a major debate in the coming years, it seems likely that the irreversible tide of Internet distribution combined with the financial opportunities available to whoever solves this issue will ultimately lead to an acceptable solution in the near future.

Increased Adoption

As I mentioned in my blog post concerning the demographic issues of social media platforms, we’re not yet living in a world where social media interactions can truly come close to replicating the interactions in most social circles.  Even if most of your friends are on Facebook, they probably don’t communicate on it enough to provide the social experience necessary to amplify the enjoyment of mass media at the magnitude that I’m speaking of.

That’s not to say that social media doesn’t already provide any boost to this content, however.  I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the rebound in ratings for the Grammy’s coincided with major discussion on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.  The Grammy’s are fine to watch on your own, but when you can discuss what’s happening with hundreds of people both in real-time and after the show, it becomes a much more enjoyable experience.

Integration

For social media to truly begin driving mainstream content consumption, there needs to exist a greater integration of its communication tools with the content consumption vehicle.  Socially consuming content on the Internet has been around for a long time, but what’s going to be a major turning point in this media revolution will be finding a platform that optimizes the experience.

Eventually, a current or future platform will be able to balance the filtering elements of forums and chat clients with the abundance of content created on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, creating an ideal viewing companion.  Furthermore, as televisions and computers become more integrated, the separation between the platforms that exist on the computer and content that exists on other vehicles will diminish.

Conclusion

The result of these factors is a world in which content becomes increasingly enjoyable as its viewership increases.  Not a huge American Idol fan?  You may still watch because you follow a list of 30 people whose commentary makes it enjoyable.  Convenience won’t be an issue because you’ll be streaming the show with communication integrated seamlessly on a sidebar, making it easy to follow while not intruding on the actual viewing experience.

Content has always had a bandwagon effect; with people choosing to consume the most popular content for no reason other than that everyone else is doing it.  Social media has the ability to take that mindset and capitalize on it, amplifying its effects.  As technology and business models catch up to the platform’s potential, we’re going to see a golden age for mainstream blockbuster media.

An example of a hip hop artist building a community on Twitter is Young Money’s Nicki Minaj. Nicki’s followers have been growing rapidly over the past few months, bringing her to the current count of 530,150. Having not yet released an official album, the large Twitter following is very impressive.

What’s more important than the half a million followers she has, is their loyalty. When Nicki tweets, they listen, and that is the real point of Twitter. Last fall, Joe Budden and Wale, both known within the hip hop community as social media enthusiasts, had a hilarious talk with Nicki about Twitter. The whole premise of the conversation was to try to figure out why Nicki has such a cult following online. If you cut to the 1:10 mark, you can hear her give great advice which Wale and Budden quickly write off, ha!

Aside from loving her fans, Nicki Minaj makes it fun to be following her. She responds to random @Replys from time to time and finds unique ways to interact with her online Harajuku Barbies. Just last week, she decided to “sign” her fans’ breasts via re-tweets (showing her stamp of approval), needless to say, the Twitpics came rolling in!

Twitter has become a way for artists to connect with fans quickly and on a personal level – most artists don’t get as personal as Nicki did there, however.

Followers stay glued to Nicki’s updates for frequent Twitpics that give a glimpse into her life, and playful tweets like the one below:

That Tweet is great because unlike most users who would simply write “I’m going to be on Letterman tonight,” Nicki turned it into a game.

Artists who are looking to sell more concert tickets, achieve higher first week album sales, or simply cultivate more die-hard fans can learn from Nicki Minaj’s online actions. Having said that, who better to learn from Nicki’s ways than her labelmate, and good friend, Drake. Surprisingly, the Canadian TV star-turned-hip hop phenomenon, who received two Grammy nominations despite having no album, has less followers than Miss Minaj.

Taking a look at his timeline, we can see that Drake is not completely inactive, yet he’s nowhere near as engaging as Nicki. Imagine how ecstatic Drake’s fans would be if he reached out to them individually. Using a simple Twitter Search, he can locate fans down to a specific city, thank them for their support, ask them about their favorite lines, or simply retweet some flattering messages. These are quick updates that all artists should be sending.

Another rapper whose Twitter following doesn’t mirror his hip hop presence is the increasingly popular Gucci Mane. It’s embarrassing to be named #6 on MTV’s Hottest MC’s list and only have 110,000 followers on Twitter. Now obviously the man can’t tweet from inside his jail cell, but even before Radric Davis went behind bars, his account was run by someone else. Hopefully upon being released from prison, Gucci’s camp can educate him on an easy to use Twitter phone app, because I know he’d have a huge following in no-time. His seemingly endless supply of hilarious sayings and ad libs (i.e. #BURR!) would be going nuts on the Trending Topics!

Artists who think Twitter isn’t for everyone need to realize the power of the platform. The game is constantly changing and social media offers the independent artist yet another way to build a fan base.

If an account is on the SUL, then the account should also be verified. When I browse the SUL and put my “new user hat” on, the first thing that pops into my head is why is Wyclef Jean a verified user and Armin van Buuren not? Does this mean that the Armin van Buuren account is fake? Does this mean Wyclef is better than Armin in regards to Twitter usage?

Long story short, if the user is worth suggesting, I would have to imagine the user is worth verifying. New users are most certainly shying away from certain twitter users in fear of following a fake or worthless account.

Thoughts?

However, I was surprised to learn when I visited their Olympics site that NBC actually has a great deal of social media integration. In fact, they are doing a lot of things right. What’s good and what’s bad? In the screen cap below, check out the neat “Olympic Pulse” box, featuring revolving recent tweets from various Olympic athletes and commentators.

Clicking through on Olympic Pulse takes you to a dedicated Twitter page with pulldown lists of athletes and journalists that tweet, sorted by name or by sport. You can see those individuals’ twitter streams embedded on the page. Clicking on an athlete’s name takes you to their profile page, with not only their tweets, but a brief bio and tabs linking to even more content. It was not immediately obvious to me how to follow that person on Twitter, but they do have a small follow button to the right of the profile. Ideally, that button should be much more prominent beneath the athlete’s name to expand the user’s experience beyond their singular visit to this page.

In addition, on the right side of these pages (though you have to dig pretty deep to find them on the actual home page), there are buttons for the general @NBCOlympics Twitter account, a Facebook application, mobile alerts, RSS, and widgets. They do not link to a Facebook fan page, which is a surprising choice, and the application has no activity (so far). I suspect they’ll use it to publish updates during the Games, but a fan page would afford them more versatility and greater reach.

The general Twitter account features a diverse stream of useful information about athletes, Vancouver, US qualifying rounds, etc. They also smartly use the Twitter Lists feature to make it easy to find other Olympic-relevant Twitter accounts. What’s missing is the interaction. Some of the tweets invite participation via comments on the NBC Olympics blog, but NBC could take better advantage of the social nature of Twitter (and Facebook) by keeping these discussions there, thereby capturing the attention of other users. Then, the ultimate move to engage with viewers would be to ask which athletes people would like to learn more about, or which events merit more coverage, and adjust not only their online content but potentially the actual television broadcasts in response to public opinion.

Overall, NBC is providing a lot of content and making it easy to learn about these athletes if you happen to find your way to their site. They could be using social media more effectively to drive more traffic and spread the word, but it’s a decent start. I’ll be monitoring how all this continues to play out as the Games begin in a few weeks. It will be interesting to see how viewers respond and interact with the network once this unique sporting event gets underway.

I feel like much of the social media community suffers from infomercial-syndrome, reaching for benefits where they don’t exist.  Slap-chop may keep me from having “boring” tuna but it probably won’t keep me from having a boring life.  Like it or not, the promises being made by many “social media gurus” don’t sound all that different from Vince’s promises of a better life through chopping egg salad.

In the rush for everyone to establish themselves as rock stars and brand themselves as the go-to social media voices, people are losing perspective on the very tool that they claim to have mastered.  In order to truly master something, you need to accept both its strengths and weaknesses.  Understanding the benefits of a tool is necessary for determining its applications, but understanding how to complement the tool in order to achieve the greatest overall benefit is just as important.

There are an incredible amount of benefits inherent within social media and it’s absolutely a valuable business tool, but the concept that you can get an accurate read on public opinion, or even your own customer base, from solely relying on social media is flat out wrong in most cases.  Let’s look at some of the issues with social media data in order to better understand how to account for them when crafting a social media strategy.

Self-Selection Bias

There’s no social media mandate that forces people to join Twitter and Facebook; it’s a completely voluntary action.  This is how it should be, of course, but it leads to certain segments of the population being disproportionately represented.

Even Facebook, the most ubiquitous of all social media platforms, exhibits major deviations from the general population in its user base.  Facebook’s female population for US users is seven percent higher than the actual proportion of female residents in the US, a major difference when discussing such a large demographic.  There are even major differences at the regional level, with the amount of Facebook users in the New York City area nearly 40% greater than an in the US population.

We’re seeing a great example of this right now with the Jay Leno/Conan O’ Brien Tonight Show battle going down in the news.  There’s been some analysis done on the Twitter response, and it looks pretty bad for Leno.  However, if you search #teamconan (Twitter’s pro-Conan hash tag) and just glance at the pictures of the people posting Conan’s rallying cry, you’ll see exactly what I mean.  I just did, and I saw a picture of Bender from Futurama, a few throwback Super Nintendo characters, and a whole bunch of 20-somethings who may or may not be this guy.

You know what?  These people weren’t watching Leno anyway.  It just so happens that the Twitter community skews towards young, tech-savvy adults and as such, their voice is disproportionally represented.  That’s why, despite the seemingly overwhelming opinion on Twitter being pro-Conan, NBC made the decision they did. In the long run, sacrificing this demographic may prove to be a bad move, but  Leno’s fan base probably won’t be as immediately devastated as the numbers would suggest.

Self-Selection Bias Part II

Realistically, your business probably isn’t combing through Twitter’s user database, randomly selecting users, and asking for their opinions on your product.  Instead, you’re probably monitoring search.twitter and reacting to what you see. Ultimately, the issue is that social media relies on personal initiative to create data.  This wouldn’t matter if all users created an equal amount of content, but anyone with a Twitter account following a reasonable number of people knows that the 80/20 rule applies heavily, with 20% of people you’re following creating 80% of the tweets.  As a business, you have to be careful not to let a vocal minority skew your perception of customer sentiment.

Squeaky Wheel Syndrome

Unintended consequences have long been the bane of policy makers, leading to well thought out initiatives negatively impacting the very same people they’re meant to help.  Unfortunately, it’s possible that the social media revolution is bringing that headache to customer service.

One of the greatest benefits of social media is the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to customer complaints.  This has led to customer service becoming a much larger priority for many social-savvy businesses, and justifiably so.  The potential unintended consequence, however, is that the ease of voicing an opinion combined with this renewed customer service vigor has created too large of an incentive for voicing negative opinions.

Very rarely does an unsolicited positive sentiment about a product garner anything more than a “thank you” from the brand, whereas a complaint can result in free or discounted products and services in an attempt to salvage the relationship.  This uneven relationship means that rational consumers will be more likely to voice negative opinions than positive ones.  Businesses need to be cognizant that the tone of conversation revolving around its brand is influenced by the incentives it dictates to its customer-base.

What Does This All Mean?

Social media platforms are still incredible tools for understanding customer sentiment.  It is completely insane that Zangief McDonkey, a social media consultant working with Kellogg’s, can not only find hundreds of opinions on Cheez-Its in 15 minutes, but do it for free.  When you add the realization that he can also communicate with those Cheez-It consumers quickly and at no cost, it’s understandable why Zangief would get pretty excited.

The key to Mr. McDonkey doing something truly great with these capabilities, however, lies in his ability to accentuate all the benefits that social media can provide while pursuing complementary initiatives that mask the weaknesses.  Only after he recognizes the weaknesses of the data he’s collecting will he be able to craft a strategy that delivers actual results for Kellogg’s.  Maybe when he goes home he can celebrate by purchasing a George Foreman Grill and cook up a burger to go with his slap-chopped salad.