PIXEL MAVERICK

It has been about a month now since Twitter launched their new advertising model …and for the life of me I am still having some trouble figuring out the value of it to a company/ brand.

This is not a Twitter hater post.  I have found Twitter to be extremely useful and keep my Tweetdeck open pretty much all day checking it as regular as Facebook.

But why would a brand pay money for the new ad model which seems to produce units that have the same type of information & customer value that a brand could create on their own for free with their own tweet.

According to Twitter the ad model works as follows.

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.  Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

OK, so “promoted tweets” is pretty much the same thing as the “sponsored results” that are part of Google’s advertising model.  For Google that makes sense since Google = Search.  For Google it works because the sponsored results are interwoven within the primary content that I am engaged with when using the best of Google (i.e. Search).

That is not the case for Twitter, and here is why.

The primary reason I use the service is NOT for it’s search capabilities.  I use Twitter to stay connected, and to share and receive information and links to great articles that I consider pre-filtered since I know they came from a network of people that I selected to follow based on similar interests to mine.  Sure the twitter search feature is nice and accessing it with Open API has led to some really cool and useful real-time feeds, but I do not spend the majority of my time on Twitter engaged with it’s search function.  If I had to guess I would say I spend less than 5% of my time engaged with Twitter on a search.

If I am not ever using the search feature, then I am not seeing the promoted tweets.  If I am never seeing promoted tweets then what good are they?

Assume that most people are using Twitter in a similar fashion to what I described and are using Twitter search less than 5% of the time they are engaged on Twitter.  Now factor in that only 7% of Twitter accounts are even active.

So, I will repeat my question …what is in this for companies & why should they pay for this?

Google recently introduced a new search tool that leverages the open API from Twitter to allow you to find Tweeps that have similar interests.  You type in your @ Twitter handle and it returns a search results page that offers up a list of recommended users that have similar areas of interest to you.

A little creepy that Twitter knows so much about me, but it was pretty accurate.

All of the friends that it recommended are related to advertising, and if you were to look back at 99% of my tweets you would probably find that they are all about advertising or some other form of Ad Geekness.

As for this being useful, not really.  Up to this point I have been fairly diligent about only following people who are somehow associated with advertising in order to keep my Twitter stream relevant to my interests.  So, while I am happy to report that Google’s friend finder search tool is accurate …it accurately produced a list of people that I already follow.

If a company is worth Billion(s) it should not have technical issues so frequently.

Oh wait, nevermind …

I love the InterWEBs.

And I love people who have the time to put together amazingly cool visual expressions of what would normally look like boring stats.

I found this via Twitter from @BBHLabs >> The Next Web >> but the real thanks goes to whoever OnlineEducation.net is for putting this together.  Love it.

Created by OnlineEducation.net

Recently AddToAny, makers of one of the most popular sharing widgets, published a report on the status of sharing on the Internet today.  Some of the results are pretty interesting — not a shocker that Facebook leads the pack with 24%, but I was a little surprised to see that Twitter was only at 10.8% & that Digg and Reddit were under 5%.  See the full graph below.

These are definitely interesting stats, but another stat that I would have liked to have seen is how much sharing has grown over the past 1 – 2 years.  In addition, I would like to see a stat that isolates the AddToAny widget and compares the amount of sharing from pages/sites that have the widget vs. those that only have the “share via email” feature.  I think you would see a massive drop in sharing activity (probably a massive drop in the growth rate of Facebook and Twitter too).

Let’s face it, if it takes more than 1-click to complete an action online the conversion rate for that action drops significantly.  In other words, we are very very very lazy.

So, let’s give some credit where it is due.  Little widgets like AddToAny are a HUGE part of the reason we are sharing so much these days.  I think Mark Zuckerberg should send the AddToAny creators a few million bucks (wunderkind chump change) in thank you money.

If you are not using TweetDeck or some other twitter organizer like it, then you either are not very active on twitter or you are driving yourself insane trying to follow the massive stream of information.  I installed TweetDeck on my laptop and home computer, and while I had been very happy with the stream filtering …as my follows grew it became more and more cumbersome to keep updating it.  I would have dumped it for a better app, but the term switching cost definitely applied for me since I had already invested so much time updating the filters that there was no way in hell I was switching and starting all that crap over.

This week they released the latest version and THANK GOD they took care of my two biggest frustrations with the previous version.

If you do use TweetDeck then you probably already know the two updates I am referring to since they were pissing you off just as much as me.

1. Central Stored Backup Allowing Reconciliation – Finally I can stop trying to manually reconcile the stream filters for laptop & home
2. Real Name – Try browsing through just funky twitter names all day trying to figure out who the heck @myspiraldownward is and if he is your friend or someone who has good tweets or is just a lame TweetSpammer that you have been meaning to unfollow anyway.

Big thanks to TweetDeck for the upgrade.  You still have me hooked on the whole switching cost thing, but at least my tweetday is a little easier.

My ongoing XtraNormal webisode series of my cartoon alter ego discusing online topics with various characters continues with this latest directorial masterpiece.  In this episode, I discuss the interesting benefits of using online trending metrics such as Twitter and Google trends as predictive tools for advertising.

My co-stars in this digital short are the infamous Edward from England, and his sweet sweet mustache Mr. Bristles.

I am anxiously awaiting the call from Hollywood to leave advertising and follow my true calling as a webisode director that specializes in advertising-geek humor and storylines that include clowns, ninjas, and mustaches.

Waaay back in early May (2009) Twitter announced that it was making several updates, and one of them was a reputation ranking system.  Since then I have not heard anything about this.  At least leak some of the details on how you see this working, maybe put them out there to the community perhaps and let them improve upon it.

Pardon the impatience Twitter, but you brought that on yourself by helping make an already speedy world to practically instantaneous.  There are already numerous applications out there that claim to provide a Twitter ranking, but all of the ones that I have found only cover a particular 1 – 2 metrics at most so unless you can mash them all together (…hey app guys, do that) then all we have is a fragmented ranking system that does us no good.

I guess in the meantime I will just make assumptions on what will go into this ranking system and kill time by making some recommendations on what the system should include.

I think it is a given that the ranking system will largely based on an algorithm that relies on quantitative data.  The following seem like logical metrics to incorporate for this (ranked in order of importance & therefore order of weight allocated to it in the algorithm):

• # of Followers
• # of Original Tweets
• # of RTs of your Original Tweets
• # of Blocks against you
• # of Original Tweets that get Favorited
• # of Click-Thrus on Original Tweets w/ links
• # of #Hashtags associated with you
• # of Original #Hashtags you create
• …handful of other quant that trail off

I seriously HOPE that part of the logic that makes up the system will somehow rely on the community for some qualitative aspect of the ranking.  Some of the things I would like to see in this area are:

• Thumbs Up/ Thumbs Down style of community voting per tweet – I know you can “Favorite” but what if I think a tweet is lame …I should be able to vote that as such
• Whether the user produces content (blog, site, facebook, etc) other than tweets – No offense to those that just tweet, but it seems logical that the people who are part of the 1% of Internet that actually produces original content should be given a bump in their credibility/rep
• Google the user – If you can google the user’s name and they (or some content asset they produced or are mentioned in) come up in the top 20 search results they should get a rep boost
• Reviews – People should be able to post reviews of a particular twitter user.  Sort of like Mr. Tweet, Yelp, etc.

If Twitter can figure out how to make the qualitative tools I mentioned (and/or other ideas smarter than mine) into a simple tool that a user can turn to when they are considering following someone, it will greatly improve upon what the ranking system could yield with just quantitative metrics.

….Still waiting Twitter.  Hurry the heck up already.

• MSFT Bing sounds like a brilliant search solution. Existing search result expectation/reaction may kill them though. http://bit.ly/124XRe #
• Sergey Brin talks about where he thinks search is going – good stuff http://bit.ly/3saHY4 #
• Cool video that shows the features/ benefits of MSFT’s new search BING http://bit.ly/6eHCj #
• Kudos to Wolfram Alpha for adding in a few easter eggs http://bit.ly/uKnnZ #
• Check out my XtraNormal conversation with Ninja Steve about Google Wave http://bit.ly/YdiM2 #
• I just wounded @evenflowdave in an assassination attempt. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #
• Spymaster >> pretty cool game using twitter as the platform for the game. I suck as an assassin apparently. http://bit.ly/Zq7m6 #
• @missinglink no kidding….I get the feeling unless I want to spam my followers I will suck at this game. Cool game though in reply to missinglink #
• I just reached level 2. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #
• I just reached level 3. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #
• I just reached level 4. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #
• RT @mccubcakes: Reading: Strategic Approach to using Twitter – http://unhub.com/6V9n >> great visual, thx for sharing Val #
• Are you an Agency? Have you ever been a victim of AGENCY ABUSE by a Client ? (Don’t Lie) Here is some humor-therapy. http://bit.ly/YdiM2 #
• RT @jolieodell: Ten Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed http://ff.im/-3v9kl >> great article!! #
• Now I can update my FB status and shoot an alien in the face at the same time (…finally) http://bit.ly/18Qq9v #
• Johnny Lee explaining Natal and some demos. Totally amazing (and will be outdated/lame in a year) http://bit.ly/wCtPI http://bit.ly/wCtPI #
• @joshpai …LMAO; either that or get interrupted every 5 seconds to let me know that Bill Whothefuck (a friend apparently) is also playing in reply to joshpai #
• @cr_is_tobal thx for the RT >> that video is awesome. in reply to cr_is_tobal #
• I just wounded @aprilini in an assassination attempt. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #
• I just wounded @Mother_Tongue in an assassination attempt. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy #

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