What Happens When Twitter Gets Mainstream Attention

What Happens When Twitter Gets Mainstream Attention


Twitter is getting a tremendous amount of buzz from brands, celebrities, media, politicians, and athletes. Despite the hype, it’s still a very small social networking site (likely under 10mm), compared to the social giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and MySpace (150-300mm), see my stats page to learn more. I assert that mainstream attention is different than mainstream usage.

Even respected analyst firm Gartner suggests that the backlash may start as this microblogging tool gets mainstream attention, although I’ll suggest we haven’t even begun to see the upcoming revolt, as the pivot point is dependent on mainstream usage.

Here’s what we should expect to happen over the next few months:

Mainstream media and celebrities to flood Twitter
The tool, having received attention from the elections and political media engines has slowly gained the attention of local based TV news and talk show hosts. It’s hard to listen to a talk show, or watch local news without hearing a self-pitch to follow their Twitter account. With several celebrities jumping on board and playing the ratings game (first to a million) we should expect this to be a wake up call to the rest of celebrities and mainstream.

Most media and celebrities will use as a broadcast tool
Being world famous comes with challenges, it’s hard to tell who your friends are, and as a result, they will likely use these tools to communicate with each other, or talk about their personal insights. We shouldn’t expect them to engage in individual conversations with their community. These stars simple can’t scale, are busy, and well, have better things to do. Expect some to hire community managers (Britney does this) that interact with their followers and post up one-way information. As a result, expect this to primarily be used as an insiders tool among the elite, but primarily as a broadcast tool, which is what they do best.

Empowered, celebrities will fend off tabloids
Ashton gets self-empowerment from social media, in fact, he commented that he’s now got the power of a large media network, despite being a single individual. As a result, expect celebs to bypass intermediaries like tabloids, instead they will directly speak to the people using these self-publishing tools. Celebs are now more empowered than ever before.

Increase in brands listening then they’ll join Twitter
Brands, in an ever quest to follow communities and customers are quickly launching Twitter accounts, or dealing with those that have taken over their own namesakes. Now with mainstream attention, expect more brands to jump on board, and within a few months, it’ll be an account grabbing experience, much like we saw in late 90s when companies were registering domains. I’m waiting to see some celebrities promote brands right on Twitter “I drink @coke, don’t you?”

Users get new experience with mainstream –yet many will revolt
The conversation with Twitter has always felt personal, with the exception of the elite ‘A-lister’ community. Now, many people will be excited about the chance to interact with celebrities and get to know their personal experiences, but after a while, the excitement will wane, and people will move back to connecting with their true friends.

The geek ‘A-List’ early adopters seek a new stage
The ‘A-Listers’ are now just ‘B-Listers’ again, in fact, this list of the most popular twitter users has dramatically shifted to mainstream media. We’re already starting to see some early adopter geeks, those that first experimented and evangelize the tool to seek other communities to join that aren’t saturated. I was one of those early adopters in early 2007, but I embrace the mainstream media in this media, it’s validating, although I expect many of them to approach it without fully understanding. Expect the early adopters to shift back to blogs, Friendfeed, or put up stronger filters in Twitter. The power is shifting back, and the bruised egos will force them to move on.

Celebrities will monetize faster than Twitter themselves…
Twitter has only experimented with different ways to monetize such as this sponsored aggregation campaign, but we should expect that celebs will cascade their sponsorships to Twitter, promote their latest work, or benefit from word of mouth marketing. Collectively, celebs have likely generated more revenue from Twitter than Twitter themselves.

Yet expect Twitter to monetize brands, media and celebrities
Twitter has indicated that they plan to offer features and tools that help brands (whether it be corporate, media, or celeb) to help them manage their own accounts and information. Expect them to launch new platforms that involve sponsorship, advertising, and potentially lead management (like CRM).

More Hay and less Needles
This increase in people, and brands of all sorts joining Twitter will cause more noise and content to be created. We haven’t even seen the half of it, as devices like your car, laptop, can start auto-emitting signals that could become tweets. As a result, expect more filtering tools and analysis by humans to matter more and more.

I’m having breakfast with Steve Rubel tomorrow morning, he says he thinks Twitter will never be the same, I’ll update this post linking to his followup.

Love to hear from you in the comments, has Twitter reached a tipping point? (update: or perhaps, “Twipping Point“) If so, what happens next? How does this change your experience? Are you using Twitter to follow friends? get news? or interact with celebs?

Five Phases of Social Media Marketing

I've been creating and executing social media marketing strategies for the past couple of years for clients. The crowds are swarming, and interest - in the days when program dollars are being cut to save jobs - is growing from all sorts of organizations. I hear some very common questions from a wide swath of interested parties, and would like to clarify how to approach social media.

We need to start by recognizing that social media marketing is not free.

BusinessWeek, in their excellent February article called Debunking Six Social Media Myths, exposed this brilliantly as Myth #1, and stated that $50,000 is a beginning point for a two- to three-month social media campaign. In my experience, I believe that's about right. In spite of the free tools out there, every brand needs a strategic approach to social media in order to gain any traction.

In my experience, a strategic approach to social media success takes five phases:

Phase 1 - Discovery

In this phase, we explore three variables:

1. People: Who are your prospects and customers, and how do they feel about your brand, service and products? Are they talking about you online? If so, what is your online reputation? (Positive, negative, neutral?)
2. Competition: What are your competitors doing online? Where can we leapfrog them? What is their online reputation?
3. Spiders: How easy is it for you to be found by an average searcher who may be searching for your products online? (Keywords, site optimization, Search Engine Optimization [SEO], etc. come into play here.)

Phase 2 - Strategy

In this phase, we explore the opportunities and establish the objectives of a social media plan - based on the lessons we've learned in the Discovery phase. Questions include:

• What do you want your prospects and customers to think of you, and how do you want them to experience you, once you've begun your dialogue?
• How is this different from their current perception?
• How might we further pay off your brand promise, and distinguish your customer experience from competitors?
• and many more

This Phase is usually highly collaborative; and involves key players from around an organization, not just the marketing folks.

Phase 3 - Skills

Once we have developed a Strategy, we?ll review an organization's internal resources to identify gaps. Whose skills need building? How might we best train participants? And to what extent would it be wise to train the employee base about what to expect?

(Hint: I always recommend getting everyone up to speed on any social media program - when I was at Marqui, that turned out to be one of the most valuable things we did in support of, and preparation for, one of the most controversial, viral programs I've ever managed.)

In my experience, getting your employees up to speed on social media marketing usually requires a couple of training sessions held on-site. These are generally in-depth training sessions tailored to select audiences in the company ? e.g. your marketing and PR teams, your customer service folks, your executives and the entire organization.

Phase 4 - Execution

As we prepare to implement our strategy, we determine which tools to use, how they interface with your existing infrastructure, and ensure the processes and platforms are properly tied together. We explore the following:

• Are your systems all operating together as desired?
• Is there a crisis communications plan in place? Do participants know what it is?
• Are your company policies updated for blogging, texting and IM and other social media tools?
• Are your employees aware of your policies? If not, do we need to train them?
• Will your CRM system interface with your social media tools? How will you move people into your sales process? etc.

Phase 5 - Maintenance

After the launch, Maintenance becomes key. In this phase, I make myself available for whatever comes up; checking in weekly with the team, make suggestions on content, make reminders for activities, and generally ensure the organization is thriving online.

Any experienced social media expert (and we're crawling out of the woodwork these days, believe me) will have a stepped approach and methodology to launching an organization safely into the social realm.

The 9 Step Guide to Get Some Structure Into Your PPC Life

This blog was written to advise advertisers of the best practices for deciding the why, what and how of re-structuring your adCenter campaigns. We hope this gives you the foundations for moving your campaigns into a more efficient structure leading to improved key performance indicators (KPIs) over time.

Why would I consider a re-structure?

Have you ever found yourself contemplating either of the following?

- I need to set up a new campaign/account, where do I even start?

- My current campaign just isn’t working the way I want it to even after several optimisations. What could I do?

If you have, then don’t despair, we might have the answer... a re-structure.

What is re-structuring all about?

Re-structuring basically means starting your campaign/s from scratch..."a daunting thought" you may be thinking, however, it can have limitless wins for your business and is not something that should be shrugged off lightly. Re-structures can help to lower your CPCs whilst increasing your CTR long-term due to positive changes being made on your account.

As a Media Specialist, I have re-structured some client’s accounts with amazing affects and clients have been delighted with the results. If you’re still not convinced, I would recommend that you try a test re-structure by pausing one of your campaigns and creating a new test campaign following the guidelines I set below in my 9 step guide:

How? - The 9 Step Guide to Restructuring...

1) Develop Your Structure

Firstly you need to decide what you want your structure to look like. You may want it one of 2 ways;

- Break up your campaigns according to product/service

- Break up your campaigns by match-types if you want to monitor your match-types closely.

For this article, I will be concentrating on re-structuring by breaking campaigns out by product/service as this is typically what works best for our clients.

2) Review your landing page to ensure your new structure will be highly relevant.

Decide what the main products/services you wish to advertise are and ensure you have web pages dedicated to those products/services. If you are a travel company and offer holidays to various locations, you might want to create several campaigns for various holiday locations. From there you could advertise the different holiday types under those location names, e.g. if your campaign was Paris, your ad group names could include Last Minute Breaks, Disneyland Breaks, Luxury Holidays, Romantic breaks etc.

If you are a company selling a product, e.g. home furniture, you could break it down by furniture type and have campaigns named Sofas, Kitchen Tables, Chairs, etc. and then break the campaigns’ ad groups down further and include branding ad groups or whichever you would like.

A Sample Structure For A Travel Company:

I’m not saying this is definitely the structure for all travel companies so play around and find out what structure works best for you. Remember wherever possible to add in as many specific ad groups as possible to each campaign. I recommend that you add in very targeted keywords to each ad group as well as at least 3 ads with different selling points to ensure you reach all audiences. Doing this will ensure that your ads/keywords are highly targeted and also enables you to evaluate what product/service performs best for you.

3) Only Include Relevant Keywords/Ads

Once you have your structure set, you need to associate very relevant, targeted keywords and ads to your Ad Groups. To find suitable keywords, you can do some research through adCenter (the "Research" tab) or via adLabs. My colleague Shefali wrote a great checklist for keyword research which is available here and this should help your research too. Don’t ever be tempted to add irrelevant keywords to your account just to boost traffic. It will have a negative effect on your campaign over time and could possibly lead to lower CTR and higher CPCs. Always remember to add negative keywords to avoid any unwanted traffic.

The key to success is to ensure that your ads always go to relevant landing pages so don’t create an ad group for Last Minute Breaks if you don’t have a landing page for last minute breaks in Florida.

When adding new ads to your new ad groups, always ensure that they include the following;

- Mention any offers/”hot deals” you have going on at present e.g. warranty, shipping, low prices etc.

- Try to include dynamic text in your ad titles/descriptions where-ever possible -- it makes such a difference!

- If you have a well-known brand, use it! Make sure the brand name is included in the ad title or description, or even better, both! Also, if you’re an official site of the brand, also mention this.

- People are always conscious of safe online shopping so if you have secure ordering, mention this.

- Use your high-performing keywords in your adcopy.

4) Include Seasonality Campaigns

If there is a seasonal event coming up which you think could boost your sales, include seasonality campaigns. If you are a chocolate company, include an Easter campaign with Easter Chocolates ad groups. The benefit of having these created is that you can pause these campaigns and then resume them the following year.

5) Include Branding Campaigns

As mentioned above, if you have a big brand, consider adding a campaign which contains only branding ad groups. This will help you to analyze how your brand is doing.

6) Consider Match-Types

At adCenter, we always recommend using all 3 match-types however there are some circumstances where we may recommend not doing this;

- If you had an account which wasn’t working for you and you are creating a re-structured account to help your CTR, I would recommend that you start off using Exact & Phrase match-types only as these match-types tend to boost your CTR.

- If you find that you tend to spend a lot on high-spending keywords on all match-types, then only include Exact & Phrase match.

- If you have found that 1 or 2 match-types just haven’t worked well for you in the past, then either a) only use the match-types which do perform well for you or b) increase bids for those match-types which perform best for you.

7) Set Good Bids

Always set the max bid you are willing to pay for keywords. PPC is an auction and the highest bidder wins therefore if you’re not in, you can’t win. You can always reduce the bid after a while once your CPC drops due to good performance. When starting off however, it is key to start off with good bids so that you keep a good history.

8) Set your new structure live

Set your new structure live and watch it succeed!

9) Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate...

Once you’ve created your new structure, you’re not finished. You need to make sure that you check it, at least for the first few weeks, so you can correct anything which may not be working well. This may include deleting under-performing ads/keywords, adding new negative keywords, fixing match-types, updating bids, adding new products services, adding/pausing seasonal campaigns etc. Remember to use adCenter reporting (ad/keyword performance reports etc) when evaluating the success of your re-structure.

The evaluation phase is really critical as once you have completed that; your campaigns will be in good order long term. You obviously need to check in every so often to ensure bids etc are set correctly but other than that, things should tick along well for you.

To summarise;

- Develop Your Structure

- Review your landing page to ensure your new structure will be highly relevant

- Only Include Relevant Keywords/Ads

- Include Seasonality Campaigns

- Include Branding Campaigns

- Consider Match-Types

- Set Good Bids

- Set your new structure live

- Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate...

If you found this re-structuring guide useful & if you have any successes from your re-structures, we’d love to hear your story.

Here’s to low CPCs and high CTR & Conversion rates...

Happy Re-Structuring!

All Technology predictions for 2009, and beyond

• A.J. Kohn, 2009 Internet and Technology Predictions on Blind Five Year Old
• 1. Facebook Becomes A Portal
• 2. Identity Systems Fail
• 3. Video Advertising Succeeds
• 4. Microformats Go Mainstream
• 5. Banner CTR Becomes Obsolete
• 6. RSS Adoption Spikes
• 7. Kindle 2.0 Flops
• 8. Google Search Share Stalls
• 9. FriendFeed Surpasses Twitter
• 10. Someone ‘Dies’
• Jo Best, Five tech predictions for 2009 on Silicon.com
• 1. The rise of 'free as in beer' software
• 2. iPlayer ushers in the death of the TV licence
• 3. Big boys feel the pain
• 4. Google reveals another surprise
• 5. Mobile broadband beats fixed
• Jeremy Liew, Consumer Internet predictions for 2009 on Vator
• 1. Consumers seek cheap thrills
• 2. Trading real money for virtual goods
• 3. Web 2.0 leaders pull further away from the pack
• 4. on line ad prices continue to fall, alternatives help make up some of the ground
• 5. Getting serious about monetizing non U.S. traffic
• Dion Hinchcliffe, The Top Internet Predictions for 2009 on Social Computing Magazine
• 1. Site mergers/acquisitions for some of the weaker social network platforms
• 2. Stronger push towards identity portability and friend (social graph) portability.
• 3. The future of social media is user's owning their data, deciding who to send it to.
• 4. Companies finally building for revenue in the social and any other space on line.
• 5. Social Media will cease to be such an 'experimental' field in marketing and will start to become part of the main core of good campaigns.
• 6. The opening of social networks so that they can exchange profiles, social relationships, and applications.
• 7. Social media in 2009 becoming more and more accessible to mainstream audiences.
• 8. Much richer integration of location-aware services with a variety of devices.
• 9. Collaborative mapping - people working together with friends and colleagues to build shared maps of places they care about.
• 10. Location based services will proliferate and become more useful to the end user.
• 11. We'll see the tech take shape and make more money in 2009.
• 12. Aggregation services will change from just drinking from the fire hose to become very specific aggregation tools, perhaps with very specific use cases.
• 13. The pace of evolution may really slow down by comparison, but the user experience will be far better.
• Ori Fishler, Top 5 Web Technology Trends for 2009 on Edgewater Technology Weblog
• 1. Actionable Web Analytics as part of Enterprise BI and Dashboards.
• 2. Phone Browser Compatibility
• 3. Location based services
• 4. Increased reliance on open source infrastructure products and technologies
• 5. Free is always a powerful word. Strong and reliable open source environments allow
• Richard MacManus et al., 2009 Web Predictions on ReadWriteWeb (added 2008-12-31)
• 1. Twitter announces they have a plan to make money.
• 2. New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more.
• 3. Professional twitterer becomes a real job.
• 4. Twitter will start to embed advertising into its users streams.
• 5. Twitter will be acquired (probably by Facebook).
• 6. Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is going to see further decline.
• 7. Facebook signs up to OpenSocial.
• 8. Facebook will continue to surprise.
• 9. Big companies will have incentive to give OpenID more support because of Facebook's domination.
• 10. Facebook Connect becomes new de facto way to login to web sites.
• 11. Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method.
• 12. Facebook has one security incident too many, leading to a decline in popularity.
• 13. Microsoft will double-down on its Facebook investment, garnering more control of the company - and more access to the data.
• 14. Microsoft resurrects WebTV after buying out Netflix.
• 15. Microsoft will launch a competing platform with Apple's App Store.
• 16. Microsoft releases a cool online version of Office, but then Google releases an amazing new version of Google Docs.
• 17. Gmail will be the de facto login credential on the Web.
• 18. Google Reader gets themes.
• 19. The browser wars will further heat up.
• 20. Google Chrome adds plugins....
• 21. Google backlash begins.
• 22. Google will finally offer a comprehensive online storage solution and some kind of travel product.
• 23. Google loses goodwill, Yahoo gains.
• 24. Yahoo sells to a big media company, but it won't be Microsoft.
• 25. Amazon will further strengthen its position in the cloud computing market.
• 26. eBay oscillates between break-up and acquisition; it will eventually be acquired by Amazon.
• 27. The usual suspects will remain unacquired in '09: Digg, Twitter, Technorati. The one that does get bought is FriendFeed - by Google probably.
• 28. Lifestreams will continue to evolve.
• 29. iTunes adds social networking features; but it's still a closed development system.
• 30. If Apple finally enables its push server, mobile social networks and geolocation enabled apps will become a major topic.
• 31. New iPods released...now with VOIP app built-in.
• 32. New iPhone is released with video recording capabilities.
• 33. One of the major gaming platform companies will acquire iPhone development shops to corner the market on iPhone gaming.
• 34. Under pressure from iPhone, Android, Symbian, and RIM; Windows Mobile will attempt to reinvent itself.
• 35. Digg still not acquired by anyone.
• 36. Lifestreaming apps like FriendFeed will remain niche products.
• 37. Mixx concentrates on usability and starts gaining ground on Digg.
• 38. LinkedIn will grow in the public's consciousness and grow their revenue dramatically.
• 39. Apps that do filtering, inferring and recommendation have a great year.
• 40. The value of data portability and single sign-in becomes unmistakable after a privacy breach.
• 41. Consumer and regulatory backlash make online privacy into a key differentiator for major players.
• 42. Have cake and eat it too solutions will emerge as a strong option.
• 43. Exciting new open source projects will emerge and grow.
• 44. More contextual browsing technologies will hit the market.
• 45. Streaming web video to the living room will go mainstream.
• 46. P2P shows value for reducing cost of server farms.
• 47. VCs jump onto the SAAS bandwagon, but most ventures don't need the cash.
• 48. 2009 will be like 2002 for raising money or exiting.
• 49. More Indian start-ups go global with price-smashing strategy.
• 50. Health web apps start getting attention from mainstream people and media.
• 51. Netbooks stay hot...get lighter, faster, thinner, line between notebooks and netbooks blurs.
• 52. Media properties prominently experiment with different and innovative types of online advertising.
• 53. One or two interface developments will blow us away.
• 54. Out of work journalists band together and create some killer blogs.
• 10 Predictions for the Internet for 2009 on Trade Radar (added 01-01-2009)
• 1. More blogs!
• 2. Google will continue to dominate.
• 3. Linked-In will soar as waves of unemployed try to bolster their personal networks.
• 4. Amazon will take its place beside Google as one of the two technology leaders on the Internet.
• 5. Facebook will surpass MySpace in unique traffic and begin to pull away.
• 6. E*Trade will be acquired.
• 7. Advertisers will push publishers to accept CPA versus CPC.
• 8. With location awareness becoming ubiquitous, anonymity on the web will be degraded.
• 9. Monetization of certain popular sites will stall.
• 10. Yahoo will sell its search capability to Microsoft and Google will buy what's left.
• Ryan Lawler, Contentinople's Top 10 Predictions for 2009 on Contentinople (added 2009-01-03)
• 1. Hulu will hit 1 billion streams worldwide
• 2. Online video ad units will look more like broadcast units
• 3. Users will start to ditch pay TV for broadband
• 4. Behavioral ads will be 'targeted' by Congress
• 5. CDN consolidation will begin in earnest
• 6. Digital 3-D will go mainstream
• 7. Twitter will pull in 'significant' revenue
• 8. Online ad spend will start catching up to eyeballs
• 9. Royalty issues will kill streaming music sites
• 10. Internet video will be stuck on PCs - for now
• Mary Meeker,Technology / Internet Trends [PDF] on MorganStanley.com (added 2008-01-05)
• 1. Undermonetized Internet Usage Growth Drivers – Video + Social Networking + VoIP + Payments
• 2. Broadband + Mobile + Internet = Especially High Global Growers
• 3. Lots of Retail Share to Gain Amazon.com Should Continue to Gain Share USA; Online Penetration = 6% and Rising
• 4. Lots of Ad Share to Gain $288 Per Home vs. $818 for Newspapers Implies Upside
• 5. Search Should Continue to Become More Important
• 6. While CPMs / CPCs May be Under Near-Term Pressure, If Targeting / ROI
• 7. Continue to Improve (as they should) There Should Be Long-Term Upside
• 8. Best News = History Proves That Ads Follow Eyeballs, It Just Takes Time
• Sharon Besser, One 2009 Prediction you can count on on Imperva Blog (added 2008-01-05)
• 1. Companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value should survive / thrive
• Stanley Tang, 5 Internet Marketing & Social Media Predictions For 2009 on Stanleytang.com
• 1. Twitter Will Get Bought Out
• 2. Mobile Applications Will Take-Off
• 3. A New Tool To Help Us With Organization
• 4. Videos - Interactive And Live Streaming
• 5. Social Media Continues To Grow
• Jeff Nolan, 2009 Predictions on MyVenturePad (added 01-01-2009)
• 1. Consumers re-evaluate the notion of value.
• 2. Word of mouth marketing increases in importance.
• 3. A major American city will be without a daily newspaper.
• 4. Advertising as a primary business model for consumer web services will be abandoned.
• 5. Enterprise software nuclear winter
• 6. What SMB gives, SMB takes away
• 7. Role of government in business
• 8. Younger employees will simply be thankful to have a job
• Adam Weinroth, Nine E-Commerce Predictions for 2009 on Shop.org
• 1. Real-Time Customer Service
• 2. Communal Conversion
• 3. TWOM = Trusted Word of Mouth
• 4. E-Commerce Sovereignty
• 5. Focus on Per-Customer Value
• 6. Widespread UGC
• 7. Growth Through Accountability
• 8. International Intensity
• 9. User Experience Innovation
• What’s coming in on line retail and technology on Guidance.com
• 1. Mobile will NOT be the killer app for eCommerce…
• 2. The lines between on line and offline shopping will blur
• 3. Consumers will create their own personal shopping malls
• 4. “Smart” retail sites will treat shoppers as individuals
• 5. Commerce will become even more collaborative
• 6. The next wave for video? Customer reviews
• 7. Configuration: beyond the product, configure the entire purchase
• 8. Use tweets to capitalize on buzz
• 9. Corporations will “become” social
• 10. People might increasingly turn to social networks
• 11. Retailers will need to have someone (or a team) designated to be the “personality” of the company on line