November 13th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Can I get an amen?
That’s good news. I wasn’t looking forward to selling little USB drives at our book launch if the actual books got held up in customs.
They smell a little odd, if you stick your nose right in them (as I always do with pretty much everything). That’s probably just because they came fresh and direct from the printer.
October 22nd, 2009, No Comments »
In our UBC course last Monday, we wanted to teach the students a lesson about real-time collaboration. We divided them into groups of four and assigned them the following tasks:
It went surprisingly well–we achieved five apparently tenable (and all vegetarian, as it happens) soup recipes. Here’s what they came up with:
I can’t really vouch for the quality of the recipes, but I thought I’d share nonetheless.
September 8th, 2009, 5 Comments »
We’ve been doing a lot of speaking and workshops lately. At these events, people inevitably ask us “what’s the Next Big Thing?” I’m incredibly poor at predictions, but my best guess lately has been Foursquare. The buzz for this location-based social network among the early adopters mimics that of Twitter, Flickr and other tools.
Here’s a great Mashable article on what Foursquare is, and why it’s more compelling than the other location-based social networks such as BrightKite and Google Latitude:
Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.
As the article points out, the killer feature of Foursquare is the gaming component. In Foursquare, you earn points every time you ‘check in’ to a particular location. The point system is slightly more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. If you check in frequently at a particular location, you can become ‘the mayor’ of that location. What does that imply? Nothing really, it’s just classic useless online cred, as old as arcade games. But I suspect that it’ll be highly addictive.
Foursquare strikes me as one of the first practical tools to have a powerful and direct connection between the web and the real world. It blends the real-time nature of something like Twitter with the physicality of the real world. It takes Twitter’s question of “what am I doing right now?” , adds “where am I doing it?” and turns the whole process into a game.
I also like that Foursquare reflects the social swarming behaviour that text-happy teens exhibit. It feels like a logical extension of this behaviour.
We’ve been mentioning Foursquare in some recent workshops, and I’ve been showing this photo from San Francisco’s Marsh Cafe (click to embiggen):
Talk about an enticement to frequent visit this cafe, eh? I’m not sure what they are yet, but I can imagine that there will be all sorts of creative applications for real-world businesses. Consider, for example, a restaurant where each subsequent check-in in the same week gets you an additional 10% off? It feels like a game-changer for local businesses who haven’t necessarily seen the point of having a robust web presence.
Normal Humans tend to get seriously creeped out by location-based social networks. It’s not a surprising response, but I remind them of the fears they’ve probably already overcome as they adopted blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. They may find that, in six months, Foursquare feels totally ordinary to them. Or not–I’m incredibly bad at predicting the success of these things.
In any case (thanks mostly to Chris Briekss, I gather), Foursquare has arrived in Vancouver–the first Canadian city. I won’t be able to try it out in person until I return from my pan-Canadian voyage next week, but here’s my account.
I’m not sure how (or even if) I’m going to use Foursquare. However, I’m going to try to only ‘friend’ Foursquare users who I know and have met in real life (and probably people who I’ve come to know well online). Sharing my physical location with strangers, even only occasionally, feels like a bridge too far.
UPDATE: Here’s another symptom of Foursquare’s real-world connectedness: there won’t be the same compulsive friend-counting that occurs in Facebook or Twitter. What’s the upside of having 1000 Foursquare friends? That doesn’t scale very well if you’re just trying to get some work done at Starbucks.
July 9th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Last month, I wrote about what sort of clickthrough rate you could expect from links shared on Twitter. I rewrote and expanded that post over on Mashable. Thanks to those who commented on my original post–your thoughts informed my rewriting.
I hoped that the Mashable post would enable me to expand the survey I ran, so that I could gather a more consequential amount of data. I was a little surprised to only gather another 80 or so data points, but that did move the numbers a little bit.
Working with about 140 responses who collectively have 333,000 folllowers, I found that the average clickthrough rate was 1.7%. The trend of more followers equaling a lower click through rate has definitely held true, though. For those respondents with more than 5000 followers, the click through rate is a mere 0.9%. For those with less than 5000 followers, it’s 3.5%. For those with less than 1000 followers, it’s 6%. This scatter graph hopefully illustrates that trend. That’s followers on the x-axis, and CTRs on the y-axis. To make the diagram more readable, I excluded a couple of the really big follower counts (click for the largess):
A recent FriendFeed comment from Tim O’Reilly also bears this out. He’s discussing the huge boost in followers he’s received since being added to Twitter’s Suggested Users List:
I had about 60K twitter followers when I went on the SUL; my peak click through-rate has perhaps doubled now that I have 10 times as many. Organic followers are what matters, except, as I say, for the media credibility that you get from people who don’t know any better.
As I mentioned on Mashable, I’m not a statistician, so take this kind of analysis with a big salt lick. I also mentioned several other mitigating factors. I’m uncertain about what impact bots spidering Twitter and following links are having on these results. I welcome any insights you might have on that, or any aspect of my sketchy math. Another consideration is that when a URL gets retweeted, you’re adding the retweeting user’s followers to the mix. Lastly, I asked those who completed the survey to pick an ‘average’ number of clicks, so that depends on each respondent’s potentially unscientific estimate.
June 3rd, 2009, 8 Comments »
On Monday, I asked Twitter users to complete a very short survey. They answered questions about how many followers they had, and how many clicks a link received when they shared it using a service like Bit.ly.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense of the clickthrough rate for links shared on Twitter. I received about 45 responses. Not enough to qualify as statistically significant, but a good start nonetheless.
To get the average clickthrough rate, I just divide the total number of clicks reported (1656) by the total number of followers reported (46973). That gives us a rate of 3.5%. This means that, on average, a link shared on Twitter will be clicked by 3.5% of your followers.
As you might expect, there’s a relationship between the total number of followers and the clickthrough rate. For those with less than 800 followers, the clickthrough rate is 8.6%. For those with more than 800 followers, the rate falls to just 2.5%. This make sense. If you have a small group of followers, you probably have a closer relationship, on average, with each of them. They’re likelier to click links that you share.
Thanks to those who participated in the survey. If you’d still like to contribute, take 18 seconds and do so.
June 2nd, 2009, 5 Comments »
In my speaking and consulting work, I frequently hear from marketers who speak triumphantly about creating their latest social media release. For the uninitiated, here’s a little description from Brian Solis:
A Social Media Release should contain everything necessary to share and discover a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent; but, the difference is, how they find it and the tools they use to share and broadcast.
They’re basically standard media releases, but augmented by audio, video, photos, social bookmarking links and other social web widgets. Here are a couple of randomly selected examples:
Social media releases are a crutch for old school marketers. They’re a familiar lens through which communicators can examine this new social web. All they’re really doing is putting some chrome and new mag wheels on a bog-standard media release. And that clearly isn’t good enough.
The social media release encourages marketers to pretty up their traditional releases and check the ’social meda’ box as done. It’s methadone to the traditional release’s heroin. A little healthier, but still not a good idea.
Besides, let’s go back and look at the definition of a social media release. An announcement or story, augmented by rich media and conversational tools. That sounds like a blog post, doesn’t it?
My skepticism about the social media release isn’t helped by my general disenchantment with wire services. We don’t write releases often, and it’s even rarer than we put them on wire services. In the past five years, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve gotten quality feature articles strictly out of a release ‘on the wire’. Crafting a personalized pitch and targeting specific journalists has much, much better results.
Yes, there are some minor SEO benefits from posting releases, but I’ve never found them overwhelming. For one client (at their behest) we’ve put 10 old-school releases on PRWeb over the last two years, using a paid level of service. Collectively, those releases have driven all of 343 visitors to the client’s site. That represents 0.04% of all the visitors to that site. They cost an average of US $100 each to distribute, so that’s a rather dear $3 per visitor. Add in the time we spent writing, editing and preparing them for distribution, and that expense gets considerably greater. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, but those releases would have to perform at least 10 times better to be worthwhile efforts.
Of course, the wire services are all over this social media release business. They’ve been marketing them aggressively over in the past couple of years. Such releases cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to build and distribute.
Do these newfangled releases actually reflect the new more conversational, genuine ethos of the web in 2009? To put it simply, do they reduce the bollocks factor? For an answer, check out Marketwire’s 2008 social media release about their social media release offering:
Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry’s Most Authentic Social Media Product
Marketwire, a full-service newswire and communications workflow solutions provider, today introduces Social Media 2.0, the industry’s most authentic and comprehensive social media newswire product. Social Media 2.0 advances today’s press release format, offers public relations professionals a multitude of content options, and distributes news in a variety of mediums to distribution channels beyond traditional media distribution networks.
The title says it all, doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t, that first paragraph feels pretty old-school.
Any remotely capable marketer ought to be able to build a web page or blog post instead. They just embed some video from YouTube, photos from Flickr and some sharing widgets and they’re good to go. Cost? Zero dollars.
The gesture behind the social media release–to be more conversational, to eschew the corporate language of the traditional release, to use rich media more effectively–is right-minded. Unfortunately, the resulting releases often call to mind lipstick and a pig.
May 29th, 2009, 7 Comments »
On this day, two years ago, I generated this chart using tweetVolume. It shows how frequently each of these words occurs in Twitter conversations:
Here’s what that same chart looks like today:
It’s somewhat biased by the current NHL playoffs, but it’s interesting to see how the term ‘php’ still dwarfs the other terms. Not particularly scientific, but does it indicate that Twitter’s audience still skews geeky? Or maybe it just shows that the Twitter power users are a nerdy bunch?
May 19th, 2009, 13 Comments »
It’s become commonplace for responsible bloggers to disclose their allegiances, investments and interests. For example, Tim Bray does it all the time, and here’s Jennifer Leggio’s disclosure statement.
On this site, I prefix client-related stuff with ‘Client Plug’, or indicate something similar in the opening paragraph. I also try to make it clear that I was invited to an event for free or received something for review. This whole blogger disclosure discussion became particularly important with the advent of sponsored posts and links.
But what about Twitter? There are plenty of reasons to like the 140 character limit, but it hardly encourages transparency. There’s rarely enough space to disclose one’s interests. On more than one occasion, I’ve witnessed people tweeting about projects with which they’re affiliated without making that association obvious. The most common scenario is when Person A tweets about something, and Person B replies with “wow, that’s a fantastic thing, good luck with that thing” when Person A and Person B in fact work together.
I’m certainly guilty of retweeting client projects without disclosure. Here’s an example from today:
As I mentioned, we’re working with ActiveState on a new project. And you’d see their name on our client page on our company site. Yet a casual Twitter follower might have no idea of the formal, financial connection between myself and ActiveState.
A common solution here might be a hash tag, such as #clientplug or #disclosurepending or something. That would do, I guess, though it already takes up a fair number of characters. If you’re interesting in seeing a message spread, then space is already at a premium.
Here’s a silly idea. What if there were a generally accepted unicode character that you could add to tweets to imply that you had a personal stake in the message? A kind of disclosure shorthand that people could follow up on if they had questions. Maybe it’s ☍, as in “I have strong connections here”? Or maybe ☝, as in “I’m promoting this organization”? Or maybe just ♟, as in “I’m a tiny pawn in this giant corporation”?
What do you think? Does disclosure on Twitter even matter?
May 5th, 2009, 1 Comment »
In my Social Media Marketing 101 talk, I begin by reviewing seven fundamental shifts in media culture over the past decade. One of them is that old nugget of ‘conversation’, and how news consumers can talk back to news creators. My favourite example of this is the CBC News home page, which advertises its conversational aspect after every headline. On top of the whole two-way conversation business, the number of times a story has been recommended and commented upon is useful metadata for visitors.
Yesterday, I wondered aloud why so many blogs on mainstream media sites have so few comments. Consider, for example, the Global TV News blog. Most posts have no comments, and the most talked about recent post has all of four. I randomly picked a couple of blogs on The Province’s site, and the results are similar. It’s interesting to note how few comments Lisa Bettany’s blog on The Province site has compared to her personal blog, where she’s got lots.
There are exceptions, but most mainstream media blogs experience the same lack of conversation as, well, the average blog. The difference, of course, is that Global or The Province has a big built-in audience (both online and off) which they can direct at their blog content. When mainstream media sites like the CBC or The Province permit comments on stories, there tends to be torrents of discussion. One would think that the more informal blog posts would attract more interaction, but they don’t seem too. Maybe they’re simply too buried in the site?
Obviously, the lines between ‘a blog post’ and ‘an article’ are blurring everywhere, including on TV and newspaper sites. I don’t have any obvious answers for why mainstream media blogs attract so few comments. Maybe they’re just really under-read? What do you think?
I asked this question on Friendfeed and Twitter. Here are the Friendfeed responses, and I’ll embed the Twitter answers below, after the jump.
April 15th, 2009, 8 Comments »
Every time I hear Clay Shirky speak or read something he’s written, I think to myself “he’s an order of magnitude smarter than everybody else in the room”. Today’s blog post, on the fallout of the #AmazonFail business, is just the latest example:
Here’s how stupid that belief made me. I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books.
From the moment this particular controversy broke, it felt like Motrin Moms 2.0. Just as Twitter enables us to rapidly raise money and inspire positive action, it’s also exceptionally good at fostering reactionary fury. As Shirky writes, Amazon unquestionably got some stuff wrong, but they’re not nearly as guilty as the web was making them out to be.
Speaking as an occasional lynch mob member (and as someone put it a while back, a friend of the gays), we need to moderate our furious impulse to propagate scornful messages until we have enough of the facts. It’s only going to get easier and easier to direct angry online attention at something, so we need to get better and better at thinking before we retweet with vengeance.