The New York Times reports on how they’ll work, saying:

Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

“When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.

According to Techcrunch, they’ll look like this:

You may be feeling somewhat underwhelmed by this news and wondering what all the fuss is about. I can understand why. Twitter Search is only a small part of the service and the use-case of people bothering to search for ‘Starbucks’ before they go for a coffee seems… shall we say… narrow.

On the other hand, people have been wondering how Twitter will manage to pay its way for a long time. Last September, the company accepted $100mn in VC funding, with the total standing at $160mn. That’s a lot of money, especially since, up till now, it only had one source of revenue – license money from allowing Google, Bing and Yahoo to index tweets.

Many of us believed that adverts were coming, though co-founder Biz Stone dismissed the idea last May – a position he has clearly reconsidered. Like a lot of Web 2.0-style sites, it has had no real problems with traffic since it started to hit the mainstream at the beginning of 2009: it records around 20mn unique visitors to twitter.com every month. Nor does it seem to have a lot of outgoings: no content producers; not much in the way of marketing; text messages only, so low bandwidth costs-per-user (compared to, say, YouTube). For some reason, it has a whopping 140 employees – well, I suppose they had to do something with all that money.

The move to advertising on Twitter is bound to upset some people: users who don’t like ads; twitter-advertising agencies like TweetUp (rather inauspiciously launched last week); social media agencies who’ve delved heavily into how to get links spread organically (what’s the point, if you can just pay for placement?) It may also be bad news for some of the 3rd party applications developers. If you were Twitter, and you wanted people to see adverts, would you give third-parties free access to your search capabilities? I’m not sure I would. In moves that look a lot like an attempt to control users’ experience of the service, the company has recently released its own Blackberry client, effectively burying rivals like Ubertwitter and Twixtreme. It bought the developers of the most popular iPhone client, Tweetie, last week. The makers of desktop Twitter clients like Tweetdeck must be in a strange place right now, waiting for either the rug to be pulled from under their feet or a very welcome phone call from Biz Stone.

I’d like to go back to the “users who don’t like ads” who may well be upset by this development, because I think it is significant. Twitter is quite clearly nervous about this. In the New York Times story, the company says it will withdraw adverts that people don’t respond to:

Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.

If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post.

You can’t really imagine a television company doing that, can you? There are a couple of reasons why. First, advertising on TV is an established practice, whereas Twitter is adding a layer of interruption to a previously unblemished space. Second, TV is a broadcast medium – we consume it – whereas Twitter is a communications platform – we make and interact with it. People don’t like or respond to advertising mixed with their communications. Look at the failure of Blyk, who offered free mobile phone calls in return for receiving adverts: people hated it so much that not even a free phone account was sufficient enticement. That’s why Twitter is not (yet) inserting paid placements into the message stream, only on the search results.

For me, then, advertising isn’t going to recoup $160mn – let alone an attractive exit for investors – very quickly: I’d suggest that charging for premium services would be a good start though. What sort of premium services? Well, maybe something like

• Enhanced search – find the originators and the influential passers-on of messages; sort by domain authority; sort by number of followers; sort by Klout.
• Charge for verification of accounts.
• Charge for brand-cleansing e.g. unofficial accounts; satirical accounts.
• Charge for SMS use: they don’t have a traffic problem, so why not?
• Enhanced tools for finding authorities.
• Management tools – find dropped followers; measure the impact of tweets.
• An ad-free version.
• Charge for better/cooler-looking profile pages – more links; layout control; give users ability to place their own ads.

Only poor MySpace has a greater proportion of slackers, while Facebook seems like a hive of communal activity in comparison, with a whopping half of the users there accounting for nearly all the time spent on the site. (sarcasm not intended, but may be enjoyed nonetheless).

[Nielsen invokes the ‘Pareto Principle’: the 80:20 ‘rule’ that’s so frequently mentioned nowadays. That 80% of the content/wealth/product/whatever is produced by 20% of the populace. Except, of course, it isn’t a rule. And if it was, it doesn’t apply here. On Twitter, it would actually be a 79:7 rule, which is totally different. And Facebook would have similar figure, which it doesn’t. And there wouldn’t have been a theatre group called 7:84, since 7% of Scotland’s population own 84% of the wealth.

In actual fact, the scientific term for this distribution is a coincidence.]

Moving on, the Times Technology Blog reports today on some research published at the end of January by RJMetrics. Surveying 50,000 users, the report found that most members of Twitter simply do not tweet. Here, around 80% of users have published fewer than ten updates since opening their account.

The issue is not, as you might have imagined, abandoned older accounts, but rather new users who simply never get started. Over the last six months, the likelihood of a new member tweeting in their second month on the site has declined to just 17%. The next graph shows your likelihood of tweeting this month against the date that you joined:

The network – from some perspectives – is also becoming less social, according to this research: “the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009”. The new users aren’t tweeting and aren’t connecting either (the two help to explain each other, of course). Around 80% of Twitter members have fewer than eleven followers, with the mega-stars inflating the average figure very considerably.

You might take this as a sign of Twitter’s figures being over-inflated, or of it being a fad of which people have already grown tired. The Times blog sees the figures as evidence that the site is vastly over-hyped and will soon disappear from the headlines, backing this up with its own ‘original’ reporting:

In an unscientific survey of my friends and business contacts here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter, I found that no one not using Twitter felt they were out of the loop. Only those who needed to get a message out there, usually for company reasons, were using it.

Even those in Tech PR are finding it nowhere near as useful as it once was. One told me: “We launched a social media platform for our client but after a few days, once the the spammers had cottoned on to us, it was pretty much a waste of time.”

I’d suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why newer users aren’t following or tweeting as much as older users, and neither of them are that Twitter is a fad or a failure. First, if you join Twitter now, it’s all rather odd and intimidating. Every other user is seemingly more popular and interesting than you are. There are no instructions about what to do – why would anyone be interested in what I’m doing right now? Even I’m not interested in that. Then a bunch of marketing bots will start following you. The people you know who are already on Twitter are following too many people already and, as nice as you are, don’t want more on their list. 

Second, and more importantly, there’s more than one Twitter. Here are four:

• there’s the one where geeks swap links and chat;
• there’s the one where people make thinly veiled boasts about their professional success;
• there’s the one where marketers and publishers spurt content blips at people;
• there’s the one where you read celebrities’ micro-blogs.

And there’s plenty of other use cases as well, and many people will probably fall into more than one category. In each case, the criteria for the site delivering a useful experience to its members is slightly different. If I joined Twitter because I am a devoted fan of Lindsay Lohan, then it’s more than likely that I am following one person, am followed by nobody and am saying nothing. It’s quite possible that I don’t even open my own account, preferring to bookmark Linday’s page like my other websites. I’m not a bad user or behind the curve: I’m using the site my way to achieve my aims. Twitter is represented in the press as a celebrity micro-blog site. There is a book about it. No, wait, there’s two. If the site is represented as an online companion to Hello magazine and reality TV shows, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a lot of people join in order to consume celebrity lifestyle information.

I think that this is why the usage figures are so different for Twitter and Facebook. Facebook tells you what to do on the site and then gives you multiple ways to do it. Twitter is a blank canvas in comparison: the way you use can be totally different to the way everyone else uses it. To many people, that’s an invitation to their creativity or to their egos; to others it’s an invitation to spend their time on a more obviously useful site.

It also shows us how meaningless averages and per-user figures are in social media. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to lump the Lohan fan in with the geek early adopters. It is a different site with different purposes.

The diagram was changed to add in users of Twitter and other ‘status-update’ applications, most notably Facebook. Author Josh Bernoff notes that this group has a different demographic make-up to others:

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

He also explains that people don’t just belong in one category. That’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100 — people take on a variety of roles at different times — the rungs are behaviours rather than groups. I’d argue that all of us are Spectators at least some of the time — people who continually contribute tend to be a bit annnoying, to say the least.

It’s clearly appropriate that Tweeters be included, and understandable that they weren’t perceived as a meaningful description two-and-a-half years ago when the chart was first published. But why are they placed higher than Joiners, Collectors and Critics? It surely doesn’t take any more commitment or engagement to publish an update than it does to join the site in the first place?

I guess the problem is that Twitterers are a broad church. Some people are using it as a microblog or lifestream; some use it to share or republish cool links; some just offer a daily ‘I’m doing this today’; some have conversations.

This was a problem with the ladder analogy in the first place: it’s a little too coarse. Owning a blog doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more ‘engaged’ or ‘participatory’ than someone who doesn’t.

picture credit: Anne Oedolfhirsch

When people were asked where they found out about news stories in a new Pew Research Center project, their answer was old media, predominantly newspapers. This is the headline table:

There are a number of potential flaws in this research (self-reporting, the selection of the stories monitored, the lack of distinction between news organisations’ online and offline presence, vested interests of the research organisation), but the gist of the results can’t be ignored. Even if these potential flaws meant new media was under-represented by 500%, it would still lag way behind print. People might find out about breaking stories online, but when they want more information, they don’t do a twitter search or find a relevant blog, they go to the old, trusted sources.

This might be expected to upset or disquiet a new media evangelist like myself. But it doesn’t. I am unsurprised by the figures. To me, it’s obvious:

• Online news is largely unfunded or underfunded or makes use of the resources put into creating offline products.
• Online is very good for niche topics that you won’t find in printed publications – badgers, anyone? Less good for generalist news, outside the online offerings provided by major news organisations as an adjunct to the main product.
• Online journalists don’t get the same access to sources or resources that established old media hacks do.

For most people, twitter and blog feeds, etc are a filter for news information – they point me towards interesting or important stories so I don’t have to do the heavy-lifting of reading all the stuff that isn’t relevant to me to find the nugget that is. That’s really valuable, but a different kind of value to that created by news organisations, a value that we’re still very cautious about putting a price on (hence the lack of investment, etc). Remember when that plane crashed into the Hudson river? And everyone marvelled at how the guy on an impromptu rescue ferry twitpiced his arrival on the scene? But, even if a re-tweet of that tweet was how you learned of the accident, what did you do then to find out more? I’m guessing here, but I don’t think it was a Google Blog Search.

picture credit: DRB62

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums — November 2009

Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will need to increase its page views forty times to beat the top contender. It will need an increase of 50% to beat Tagged. And when’s the last time you saw that network mentioned on the BBC (five mentions of Twitter in the last week) or featured in the broadsheet press?

I must admit to being surprised to the extent that the big three networks dominate the area. Like many, my impression was that there was much more of a struggle going on.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US-only data. Bebo is more popular than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, while the Google-owned network Orkut rules the roost in Brazil and much of South Asia. In China, meanwhile, 51.com, Xiaonei and QQ have resisted western decadence with home grown decadence of their own.

The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks:

The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers.

via FT.com / UK — Economist eyes social network cash boost.

It may come as a surprise to some that the magazine is interested in such things. In many respects, The Economist is the great hope for paid-for printed magazine media. The title sells more than 180,000 copies of the UK edition alone, according to the latest ABC report. I do not have advertising figures, but the interim annual report posts profits of slightly over £20mn for the first half of 2009, under the toughest advertising conditions for years.

The reasons for The Economist’s success where other news media have failed and flailed are fairly clear: its content cannot be obtained elsewhere online; consequently it’s of high value; plus its target demographic is one that doesn’t resent the need to pay a cover price. That’s a reaadership that, fortuitously, is also of great value to premium brand advertisers.

But no reason there to ignore the rich pickings potentially available online. Paid Content reported earlier this year:

Economist.com [viz. the online magazine] increased its advertising revenue by 29 percent year-on-year, while page views increased 53 percent.

For me, the interesting part of this story is the magazine’s acknowledgement of social networks as a key part of its marketing strategy, but not by just advertising on those sites — though I am sure that in the case of Facebook, ads will also form a part of the plan. The interesting bit is their embrace of the social aspects. To gain the figures that they aspire to, the site will need to offer more and more free content and market it cleverly. Gaining followers and fans depends upon making people willing to share your content. And for that to happen, it needs to be good.

A far cry from the paywall route currently touted by Rupert Murdoch and the Johnson Press chain of local papers in the UK. Or the free-for-all route followed by competitors for that matter — The Economist magazine’s print content will remain subscribers-only.

Perhaps if other media owners were more able to offer uniquely valuable content, rather than paying their reporters peanuts and reprinting press releases, they might be equally bullish about the opportunies offered by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

I’ve recently installed a relatively new WordPress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype.

This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps to give readers a sense of the whole debate, not just the point of view of people who manage to stop-by your site and leave a comment. It links to all its sources.

So why am I fretting?

In some ways, it feels like cheating. When people measure website engagement, the ratio of comments per post is a key indicator. Someone who gets 100 comments on every post is clearly more *cough* important than someone who gets 1 comment, when it comes to blogging and such.

My recent post on the #PRDebate event that we produced at NMK a couple of weeks ago ostensibly has 17 comments. Yet I know only a couple of those were from people who came to this site — the rest are collated from Twitter and other people’s blogs.

Have I stolen those comments in some way? In a way, I have. If other bloggers are competing to be the most popular, then they lose if they don’t use this plug-in. It seems like they’ve got less engagement than an entirely-equivalent-in-every-other-way blog that does use it. Which isn’t true and so that’s not really fair.

However, until people start complaining, I’m going to carry on. Conversations about blog posts are distributed nowadays – you’re more likely to get a reaction on Twitter than your own page; people reference your post on other people’s blogs. Blogs are less important as destinations as people dip into the flow rather than visit sites. Creating a resource, and multiple resources, to let people get the whole picture is a valuable thing. The engagement metric based on comments/posts is in some ways flawed since if people are discussing the post elsewhere, then that’s equally (more!) important than them discussing it on your own site.

Be delighted to hear others’ thoughts on this – comment below or via your own blog, twitter or anything else, it seems.

The user experience changes radically depending on the client you use:

• The twitter web page doesn’t automatically poll its source and change. Yet every time you hit Refresh, it’s different. It’s always a reminder that the world keeps turning no-matter what’s happening in your own little portion. As much as it lets you see into the world of the people in your network, it’s a reminder of your anonymity. At the same time, the prominence of the edit box at the top of the page is an invitation to poke the world; to let people know.
• ‘Pro’ clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl change the proposition substantially. You won’t miss that @ message or the mentions of your brand or interests. For this reason, they’ve become favourites among egocentrics and those with marketing or PR interests in the network. In these client applications, the edit box has less prominence. It’s dipping your head into a rushing river, but also checking to see if any of your fishing nets have reeled in a catch; and resetting the bait with another update. These clients automatically update every few seconds, you see the real time web rush past; but the nets into search terms and messages mean that the feeling of control is not so lost.
• The mobile experience is different again. You’re less likely to participate in some respects, because data entry on a phone is trickier than from a keyboard. You’re less likely to click a link because you know that your device has a 50% chance of timing-out or failing to render the resulting page properly. The mobile experience is thus likely to be more about observation: checking in on your network – the ambient intimacy of it all.

Where am I going with this? A couple of places.

1. Leaving Las Twitteros

First, it turns out that, contrary to the propaganda, Twitter is an enormous, blue FAIL WHALE when it comes to retention, Mashable reported yesterday. Most people leave after a month, it seems:

…growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months.

But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months “pre-Oprah”, retention rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month.

There is more than one explanation for the massive drop-off in the last paragraph. The statistics given only track web page usage. It’s reasonable to suppose that a substantial number of users graduate from using the web page to using a different client, like Tweetdeck. In the discussion of the article, author Pete Cashmore links to another showing that only 30% of updates come via. the page – the rest using other clients.

I don’t think that this explanation explains the Nielsen figures entirely, though. I know a lot of very articulate and intelligent people to whom Twitter simply does not appeal. They gave it a go and didn’t see the point. That’s OK. Saying that this is because they haven’t given it enough time and effort, as I’ve heard before, is an odd argument. It’s a bit like saying I could come to love self-flagellation if I put my back into it, and my nether regions.

The recent celebrity endorsements of Twitter which have led to such rapid growth won’t help matters. Listening to the prattle from @stephenfry & co is a less engaging experience than being in touch with people you really know and sharing with them, I would suggest. If you use Twitter in order to keep up with certain celebrities, it must be very frustrating when they’re getting on with their jobs rather than providing updates. I’m not saying there are right and wrong ways to use Twitter – there aren’t – but there are ways that are likely to lead to more engagement than others.

The rushing passage of stuff is fine in a 30-second commercial, but hardly everyone’s cup-of-tea when they actually come to use the Internet. Point One is that Twitter is quite important but is not and will never be the next generation of the web, etc. etc.

2. Whispers in the Wind

The second matter I wanted to briefly explore was the viability of Twitter as a publishing or attention mechanism for media owners and institutions. Nearly every publisher does this (including NMK and its Lords and Masters at the University of Westminster). Maybe you hand-craft your tweets or automate them – it’s easy, using twitterfeed from your RSS, but err… it’s not very good, is it?

Your institution or organisation will not produce that many updates a day. That’s good in some ways – people will quickly unsubscribe from feeds that talk too much – especially if they have a corporate or robotic feel. At the same time, because you don’t update so often, your reach is tiny compared to almost any other medium. It’s a nudge, a poke, a pebble tossed into the river, a piece of flotsam that people might nudge into from time to time. It’s worth doing only because it’s easy. But because the social media marketing experts are using Tweetdeck or something, then they get an illusionary experience of the impact of their posts – their net full of retweets and @s at the end of the day looks full even for a tiny organisation like the one for which I work. At the same time, when I dip my head into the live stream, I see scarcely any interaction with tweets from ‘official’ media or institutional feeds. And there’s another problem that augments this…

If you open up a new channel of communication in the social media space, then there needs to be an ear on the other end listening and responding to the feedback. Social media, by definition, is not about broadcasting, but is two-way. You start a blog, you need a comments person. You send an email; you need a reply-address that works. Carefully writing your Blog T&Cs or Twitter bio or Email newsletter subscript can allow you to redirect responses somewhere else, but by entering into a communications arena that is entirely two-way with a one-way methodology, you’re asking for problems. (Skittles and The Telegraph’s brave – you may have other words – experiments with posting unmoderated twitter feeds illustrate this handsomely). Point Two is that Twitter is for people, not things.

1. Send it to everyone you know.

2. Make a Google Maps mash-up out of the data.

Much of socialmedialand was rubbing its hands with glee this morning at the news that the British National Party’s membership list had been leaked on the Internet and was freely available for anyone to download. A lot of people were fairly unsympathetic, to say the least. One respected journalist said:

Oh look — there’s one down my road — I might go round for a punch-up [I’ll spare the author’s blushes. update: I was scanning and failed to recognise the irony in Scott’s remark. however, this was indicative of many other comments I’ve seen — use the search link for proof — I hesitate to name and shame for obvious reasons.]

The BNP is a Nationalist party which supports the repatriation of immigrants to the UK, especially ones that don’t have white skin. They are typically poor, ill-educated racists, in other words.

Revealing the names of members could have serious implications for their work, relationships and safety. There are apparently a number of police officers on the list, for example, and there are already calls for their dismissal. [I am not saying that is a bad thing].

Before long, one ingenious soul had created a Google Maps mash-up to show the locations of everyone on the list. (It’s now been taken down, since the author realised that though he’d made the locations imprecise, people were reading the map as pinpointing exact locations.)

I’ve got no truck with the BNP or any of its policies, but this is quite clearly a terrible idea.

Why?

Imagine if the boot was on the other foot. Imagine if one of the dozens of CD-ROMs routinely lost by the government was found and posted onto the Internet. Maybe including, say, your wage or any criminal convictions. You would be outraged and very worried (especially if you did have a conviction).

One definition of ethical behaviour, a very good one I think, is that when you legislate, you should do so as if you were legislating for everybody. If you say it’s OK to publish the names and addresses of people you disagree with or hate onto the Internet, you should recognise that you’re saying that that it would be OK for someone else to do the same thing to you. If you were behaving ethically.

I think most of us agree with the general principle that people have a right to privacy. We become very angry when CD-ROMs are lost or advertising networks are found to be collecting data about our browsing habits without permission.

It’s a good principle. So let’s stick to it.

The basic function of these sites is to show people you follow (receive updates from) who aren’t receiving your own updates.

So what’s the point of that, you ask?

Well, like a lot of social networks, on Twitter:

(a) the number and quality of followers you have is an indication of status in this rather insular social media world. (Let’s forget about the recent arrival of the UK’s current Stately Homo Stephen Fry onto the scene).

(b) following someone is an indication of like and respect. I care enough to hear what you’re up to.

So if you follow someone, and they don’t follow you back (you get sent an email to say X is following you), then it appears, sort of, that they don’t like or respect you very much.

You could do this quite easily before by clicking on the ‘followers’ link on your twitter home page, but these new sites make that information a lot easier to take in. A bit like in sites such as Facebook — you can see if someone hasn’t responded to your friendship request. But the thing is that Twitter itself has — historically — never shown any of that information in a way people could really take in and analyse. So it might come as a bit of a shock to some people that prominent twitizens (oh, yes) aren’t hanging on their every word.

People might get upset when they discover they are following people they thought had become friends (and probably are) but that those ‘friends’ are not following them.

However, there are a few other possibilities:

• they are already following 200 other people and the noise from that is enough, thank you very much.
• Dunbar’s Number — more than 150 people is more people than they can maintain stable relationships with. There are already 150 or more people they are paying attention to. It’s a psychological impossibility to take on someone else, no matter who.
• they like you very much, but going in and following you and dropping someone else is too much trouble.
• they auto-delete ‘new follower’ emails. A strong temptation if you get more than one a day.
• they forgot.
• they don’t care nearly as much about Twitter as you.
• they have already linked to you on Linked-In, friended you on Facebook and subscribed to your RSS. That is enough.
• they have a million far more important things to do that affect their ability to carry on working.

Elsewhere: Paul Walsh on the damaging effect of this and Charles Arthur on (slightly disputed) best practice.