On July 22nd 2010, Facebook officially announced that it had surpassed 500 million users around the world. This significant achievement represents a significant milestone for Zuckerberg and Co. as well as for social networking and more importantly for global societies overall.
To celebrate this achievement, Facebook released Facebook Stories, a new service to spotlight user stories from around the world and the impact Facebook has had on their lives... please read full article @ PR2.0
Showing posts with label Brian Solis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian Solis. Show all posts
Friday, July 23, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Brian Solis: The Last Mile: The Socialization of Business
I’m working on developing new ideas and wanted to share them here with you for your review and also to seek your feedback…
Everything begins with a shift in perspective from viewing stakeholders as a separate entity, “us vs. them,” to a singular view of “us ” as this enlivens a new era of community-focused marketing and engagement.
Social media introduces a new problem of sorts, one where the answer is lost in the politics and corresponding burrows of debate as to who owns social media within the organization. As brands venture into social networks, many are unwittingly contributing to the dilution of their brand image, value proposition, and mission amongst a new genre of social customers and influencers. The mission and vision statements of old no longer convey authority or inspire conviction in an era where the audiences to which we are trying to connect now possess audiences of their very own. The ability to connect with someone and inspire them to take meaningful action is in direct competition with the actions of social customers who are intentionally or indirectly building communities around their views and interests.
In my work, I’ve uncovered what I call the Last Mile or Last Kilometer of Social Media, a challenge that will face every business in the attempts to engage with consumers and influencers and impede the cultivation of dedicated and flourishing online communities.
The last mile is a term associated with the cable and internet provider industries, representing the final leg of delivering connectivity from a provider to a customer. It is symbolic of the human connection required to take a service from the connection hub in any given neighborhood to the home of the new customer...please continue reading in full here Brian Solis
Everything begins with a shift in perspective from viewing stakeholders as a separate entity, “us vs. them,” to a singular view of “us ” as this enlivens a new era of community-focused marketing and engagement.
Social media introduces a new problem of sorts, one where the answer is lost in the politics and corresponding burrows of debate as to who owns social media within the organization. As brands venture into social networks, many are unwittingly contributing to the dilution of their brand image, value proposition, and mission amongst a new genre of social customers and influencers. The mission and vision statements of old no longer convey authority or inspire conviction in an era where the audiences to which we are trying to connect now possess audiences of their very own. The ability to connect with someone and inspire them to take meaningful action is in direct competition with the actions of social customers who are intentionally or indirectly building communities around their views and interests.
In my work, I’ve uncovered what I call the Last Mile or Last Kilometer of Social Media, a challenge that will face every business in the attempts to engage with consumers and influencers and impede the cultivation of dedicated and flourishing online communities.
The last mile is a term associated with the cable and internet provider industries, representing the final leg of delivering connectivity from a provider to a customer. It is symbolic of the human connection required to take a service from the connection hub in any given neighborhood to the home of the new customer...please continue reading in full here Brian Solis
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Online Marketing Blog: Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context
Companies are realizing the value in “brands as publishers” and are making real commitments to the creation of content in their online marketing mix. It’s no longer enough to provide fundamental features and benefits information about products and services to succeed competitively online. Consumers and of course, business buyers, seek additional information, resources and others to connect with on the topics of interest to them. Some companies choose a pure creation strategy and find it to be a formidable undertaking, especially creating unique and valuable content over a long period of time.
Within the field of content marketing, curation is becoming a popular topic of discussion. Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content. Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Content curation can provide the best of both.
As I am prone to do with topics of interest, I reached out to a few industry thought leaders to get their take on defining content curation and where it fits within the mix in an online marketing program:
Rebecca Lieb – @lieblink
Vice President, North America at Econsultancy and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
As an editor, journalist and marketer….what a great question!
Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting and social media – often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels.
Content curation can takes many forms: feeds, “channels” (such as on YouTube), it can appear on blogs, or even be the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form content curation does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message or persona of the person, brand or company that has created the particular channel or source of content.
Why bother? Tons of reasons. It’s a big web out there. More and more, people rely on trusted sources: friends, family, brands, companies, experts, you-name-it, to help keep them informed, educated and even amused. Need proof? Take bOINGbOING.net, one of the web’s most popular blogs whose traffic often exceeds that of NYTimes.com. This group blog is nothing more (or less), that curated content; items its contributors and often its readers find and share with others.
Channels of content can be as specific as bee keeping equipment, or as amorphous as “what’s cool.” But they all serve multiple purposes, ranging from informing to engaging to entertaining. In an era where marketing is supplanting advertising and storytelling is an ever-more essential part of the marketing message, carefully curated content – well presented – is an immense brand asset, be it to a humble, over-caffeinated individual blogger or a Fortune 100 company.
David Meerman Scott @dmscott
Author, New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave
I’ve been working with what I call syndication for 25 years. My first job when I got out of school was a bond trading desk and right after that started working with companies in the financial information space. I worked with Knight Ridder for 6 years and at a company at News Edge for 6 years as president of marketing. News Edge was the first, real serious aggregator of news in the corporate, financial and government spaces. So news syndication, news aggregation has been going on literally for decades.
What is Expedia, for example? It’s an aggregation of airline and hotel feeds that then get aggregated to create content. What’s Google? Google is an aggregation of a whole bunch of content.
I’m a fan of doing that but the challenge is how can you do it in a way that’s interesting. You have to make a decision: Do you let the machines do the aggregation and the selection or do you let humans do the selection. It’s a huge decision, humans or machines.
You also need to think about, how do you create the taxonomy and the folksonomy of how to turn that content into categories? That becomes a really big issue with content curation.
If you’re a big company and trying to do this, and you have a B2B section, a B2C section, 15 products in 25 markets, in 58 countries, what do we do? Do we have 58 feeds for each country, do we have 25 different things for each category? It really becomes a big issue.
I’m a huge fan of content syndication, great stuff. Been going on for decades. But the two challenges for people that want to embark on a strategy like that is A: Humans or Technology and B: What’s the taxonomy or folksonomy to put it together.
Brian Solis – @briansolis
President Future Works and Author of Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web & Co-Author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Marketing in general, which can be content marketing, public relations, communications. We have a tendency to try and automate things, to the point of obscurity or mediocrity. There is a value in curation and a value in creation. But when you start to think of things in terms of automation, I think that we’re just feeding the system for the sake of feeding the system.
Now I think there’s value in both and I believe that in order to garner some thought leadership you have to become a thought leader. You can’t do that through aggregating the thoughts and words and ideas of others.
Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re most likely in business. I need to hear about that. I need to understand why I should consider you as a partner or whatever it is you’ve created, something I can use, something I couldn’t do before I came into contact with you.
Now in terms of curation, where it gets really interesting is that those thoughts and words and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource, as a place or destination for information.
Ann Handley – @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and Co-Author of the upcoming book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Defined as it applies to online publishing: Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.
What role should it play:
All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins. Content curation isn’t necessarily anything new (finding the best stuff to share is what so many of us do on Twitter already, and what bloggers have long done, or what sites like Alltop or Digg have been doing). But recently, it’s getting a little more attention as an emerging field of its own.
It can fit into an organization’s content strategy nicely. How? It’s a way for organizations to further their role as a resource to their audience. Sifting through the mountain of web content and finding the tastiest, choicest bits for your readers is a great way to build trust and authority with them, and to become a valuable resource for them on any particular topic. What’s more, for organizations just getting into publishing online — for those just starting a blog, say, or a microsite — curated content can allow them to ramp up quickly, both from an SEO as well as content perspective.
That said, I have two cautionary pieces of advice:
1. Don’t rely exclusively on automated content curation services to feed your own belly (to fulfill your content needs). I see content services like HiveFire as providing an intelligent stream of curated stuff, but you still need a real, live human editor to pick and choose and order the best stuff for your own audience. Warm-blooded humans still required, in other words.
2. Mix curated content with original content, and don’t rely on the curated stuff alone. Content curating is a perfectly good way to extend the content of your own site, but only “in addition to” and not “instead of” your original content.
Joe Pulizzi – @juntajoe
Founder Junta42 and Content Marketing Institute, Co-Author of Get Content, Get Customers.
Content curation is editing on steroids. In actuality, content curation has been around since the dawn of the publishing industry. The job of the editor was to take the best information from around their industry and present that information in a manner that makes sense to readers.
The web’s first crack at this was content aggregation, or having computers pull the best links and information automatically to make the “reader’s” experience more fulfilling. But as we have learned, search is not perfect. Enter the content curation specialist.
As more content floods through all aspects of the web (as well as print and online), we’ll need more brands stepping up to make sense of what we really should be paying attention to. Content curation is as important in the content marketing toolbox as is creation. We need both…and curation doesn’t work without creation (much like Google trying to save the newspapers because they need great news to survive, but that is for another story). For some brands, curation may be enough. You can’t find the resources to develop the most valuable, most compelling content in your industry? Then just tap into your network that does, and package that content to present you as the trusted industry leader. It’s still a needed service, just a bit different from creation.
Where it will go, no one knows…but I’ve heard from smarter people than me that content curation is the future (even present) of media. I’d rather say curation and creation go together like Macaroni & Cheese…a splendid combination.
Paul Gillin – @pgillin
Consultant. Author of The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing
I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline will be absolutely essential to content marketing in the future because of changes in the media landscape.
Just a few years ago, audiences were starved for information and the role of media was to create it. Today, we are drowning in information and the emerging role for media is to filter and organize it.
This is being handled accomplished on an ad hoc basis by social news sites like Digg and Sphinn; social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Reddit; news aggregators like Drudge Report; link blogs like Metafilter and Slashdot; friends networks like Twitter and Facebook; and even self-curated RSS aggregations. In fact, much of what goes on in social media is various forms of content curation.
Marketers can build trust with their constituencies by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their constituents. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas and to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well.
Erik Qualman, @equalman
Author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business and MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School
Today, everyone is a potential media outlet. A curator understands their audience and is able to package created content in a digestible manner for them.
Creators need to view curators as distribution points for their content rather than as pirates. Content creators and curators that will thrive in this new world understand the importance of this symbiotic relationship. But is it symbiotic? In the end, almost every person is a little of both (creator & curator). After all, there is no such thing as a new idea and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. These clichés symbolize the irony of the topic being discussed.
Valeria Maltoni – @conversationage
Director of Strategy, Powered, Inc., Conversation Agent
Content curation is one of the keystones in a content marketing strategy. It’s like museum curation — harvesting, researching, tagging, organizing, and sharing — only two-way, because of the digital medium. Thanks to technology it also includes in an out feeds, and moderation and escalation, where necessary.
To maximize its impact, you want to integrate curation within a canvas of brand generated content and promotions in a forum that also highlights the best brand-related content from your own community of fans. The curator monitors conversations for opportunities to align the voice of the brand with the voice of the customer, to engage outside content creators, to highlight the best third party content within the brand’s sharing strategy, and inspire action.
Pawan Deshpande – @TweetsFromPawan
CEO, HiveFire (TopRank Client)
Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about a brand producing valuable content, and prospects being educated with that content. It’s valuable, it works and it’s not going away.
But the only problem is that day by day, it’s less effective as everyone produces more and more content. Brands are increasingly competing to get their content noticed. At the same time, prospects are increasingly spending more time searching for relevant content.
Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer. You will be navigating your prospects through this sea of content by leading them to the most relevant important information.
It’s already happened in the consumer world: Sites like Digg (social curation) which have little or no original content have become key resources for information. Similarly we are seeing leading businesses take a similar approach to become the experts for their respective areas.
Marc Meyer – @marc_meyer
Dir.of Social Media and Search, Principal at DRMG
Content today is not your father’s content… Hell, it’s not even the content from 10 years ago. It’s so much more now. So much so, it should be its own country. Curation for us, is part art and part science. At its core, it has as much to do with maintaining and preserving what has been digitally “created”-as it does in making sure that it lasts longer than a cup of coffee. And that’s the challenge.
Loosely defined, the curation of content is a company’s ability to create and then manifest digital assets that drive and maintain at the least, awareness. Content Curation holistically speaking, refers to a person’s or company’s ability to stay in front of the digital curve by managing those assets across the board.
Its role in a content marketing strategy is primary and cannot be downgraded to a perfunctory responsibility. Curation feeds the beast and thus it contributes greatly to a company’s overall digital strategy.
Have you added a curation component to your content marketing mix? If so, are you doing it manually, automatically or somewhere in between? Online Marketing Blog
Within the field of content marketing, curation is becoming a popular topic of discussion. Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content. Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Content curation can provide the best of both.
As I am prone to do with topics of interest, I reached out to a few industry thought leaders to get their take on defining content curation and where it fits within the mix in an online marketing program:
Rebecca Lieb – @lieblink
Vice President, North America at Econsultancy and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
As an editor, journalist and marketer….what a great question!
Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting and social media – often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels.
Content curation can takes many forms: feeds, “channels” (such as on YouTube), it can appear on blogs, or even be the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form content curation does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message or persona of the person, brand or company that has created the particular channel or source of content.
Why bother? Tons of reasons. It’s a big web out there. More and more, people rely on trusted sources: friends, family, brands, companies, experts, you-name-it, to help keep them informed, educated and even amused. Need proof? Take bOINGbOING.net, one of the web’s most popular blogs whose traffic often exceeds that of NYTimes.com. This group blog is nothing more (or less), that curated content; items its contributors and often its readers find and share with others.
Channels of content can be as specific as bee keeping equipment, or as amorphous as “what’s cool.” But they all serve multiple purposes, ranging from informing to engaging to entertaining. In an era where marketing is supplanting advertising and storytelling is an ever-more essential part of the marketing message, carefully curated content – well presented – is an immense brand asset, be it to a humble, over-caffeinated individual blogger or a Fortune 100 company.
David Meerman Scott @dmscott
Author, New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave
I’ve been working with what I call syndication for 25 years. My first job when I got out of school was a bond trading desk and right after that started working with companies in the financial information space. I worked with Knight Ridder for 6 years and at a company at News Edge for 6 years as president of marketing. News Edge was the first, real serious aggregator of news in the corporate, financial and government spaces. So news syndication, news aggregation has been going on literally for decades.
What is Expedia, for example? It’s an aggregation of airline and hotel feeds that then get aggregated to create content. What’s Google? Google is an aggregation of a whole bunch of content.
I’m a fan of doing that but the challenge is how can you do it in a way that’s interesting. You have to make a decision: Do you let the machines do the aggregation and the selection or do you let humans do the selection. It’s a huge decision, humans or machines.
You also need to think about, how do you create the taxonomy and the folksonomy of how to turn that content into categories? That becomes a really big issue with content curation.
If you’re a big company and trying to do this, and you have a B2B section, a B2C section, 15 products in 25 markets, in 58 countries, what do we do? Do we have 58 feeds for each country, do we have 25 different things for each category? It really becomes a big issue.
I’m a huge fan of content syndication, great stuff. Been going on for decades. But the two challenges for people that want to embark on a strategy like that is A: Humans or Technology and B: What’s the taxonomy or folksonomy to put it together.
Brian Solis – @briansolis
President Future Works and Author of Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web & Co-Author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Marketing in general, which can be content marketing, public relations, communications. We have a tendency to try and automate things, to the point of obscurity or mediocrity. There is a value in curation and a value in creation. But when you start to think of things in terms of automation, I think that we’re just feeding the system for the sake of feeding the system.
Now I think there’s value in both and I believe that in order to garner some thought leadership you have to become a thought leader. You can’t do that through aggregating the thoughts and words and ideas of others.
Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re most likely in business. I need to hear about that. I need to understand why I should consider you as a partner or whatever it is you’ve created, something I can use, something I couldn’t do before I came into contact with you.
Now in terms of curation, where it gets really interesting is that those thoughts and words and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource, as a place or destination for information.
Ann Handley – @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and Co-Author of the upcoming book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Defined as it applies to online publishing: Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.
What role should it play:
All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins. Content curation isn’t necessarily anything new (finding the best stuff to share is what so many of us do on Twitter already, and what bloggers have long done, or what sites like Alltop or Digg have been doing). But recently, it’s getting a little more attention as an emerging field of its own.
It can fit into an organization’s content strategy nicely. How? It’s a way for organizations to further their role as a resource to their audience. Sifting through the mountain of web content and finding the tastiest, choicest bits for your readers is a great way to build trust and authority with them, and to become a valuable resource for them on any particular topic. What’s more, for organizations just getting into publishing online — for those just starting a blog, say, or a microsite — curated content can allow them to ramp up quickly, both from an SEO as well as content perspective.
That said, I have two cautionary pieces of advice:
1. Don’t rely exclusively on automated content curation services to feed your own belly (to fulfill your content needs). I see content services like HiveFire as providing an intelligent stream of curated stuff, but you still need a real, live human editor to pick and choose and order the best stuff for your own audience. Warm-blooded humans still required, in other words.
2. Mix curated content with original content, and don’t rely on the curated stuff alone. Content curating is a perfectly good way to extend the content of your own site, but only “in addition to” and not “instead of” your original content.
Joe Pulizzi – @juntajoe
Founder Junta42 and Content Marketing Institute, Co-Author of Get Content, Get Customers.
Content curation is editing on steroids. In actuality, content curation has been around since the dawn of the publishing industry. The job of the editor was to take the best information from around their industry and present that information in a manner that makes sense to readers.
The web’s first crack at this was content aggregation, or having computers pull the best links and information automatically to make the “reader’s” experience more fulfilling. But as we have learned, search is not perfect. Enter the content curation specialist.
As more content floods through all aspects of the web (as well as print and online), we’ll need more brands stepping up to make sense of what we really should be paying attention to. Content curation is as important in the content marketing toolbox as is creation. We need both…and curation doesn’t work without creation (much like Google trying to save the newspapers because they need great news to survive, but that is for another story). For some brands, curation may be enough. You can’t find the resources to develop the most valuable, most compelling content in your industry? Then just tap into your network that does, and package that content to present you as the trusted industry leader. It’s still a needed service, just a bit different from creation.
Where it will go, no one knows…but I’ve heard from smarter people than me that content curation is the future (even present) of media. I’d rather say curation and creation go together like Macaroni & Cheese…a splendid combination.
Paul Gillin – @pgillin
Consultant. Author of The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing
I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline will be absolutely essential to content marketing in the future because of changes in the media landscape.
Just a few years ago, audiences were starved for information and the role of media was to create it. Today, we are drowning in information and the emerging role for media is to filter and organize it.
This is being handled accomplished on an ad hoc basis by social news sites like Digg and Sphinn; social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Reddit; news aggregators like Drudge Report; link blogs like Metafilter and Slashdot; friends networks like Twitter and Facebook; and even self-curated RSS aggregations. In fact, much of what goes on in social media is various forms of content curation.
Marketers can build trust with their constituencies by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their constituents. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas and to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well.
Erik Qualman, @equalman
Author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business and MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School
Today, everyone is a potential media outlet. A curator understands their audience and is able to package created content in a digestible manner for them.
Creators need to view curators as distribution points for their content rather than as pirates. Content creators and curators that will thrive in this new world understand the importance of this symbiotic relationship. But is it symbiotic? In the end, almost every person is a little of both (creator & curator). After all, there is no such thing as a new idea and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. These clichés symbolize the irony of the topic being discussed.
Valeria Maltoni – @conversationage
Director of Strategy, Powered, Inc., Conversation Agent
Content curation is one of the keystones in a content marketing strategy. It’s like museum curation — harvesting, researching, tagging, organizing, and sharing — only two-way, because of the digital medium. Thanks to technology it also includes in an out feeds, and moderation and escalation, where necessary.
To maximize its impact, you want to integrate curation within a canvas of brand generated content and promotions in a forum that also highlights the best brand-related content from your own community of fans. The curator monitors conversations for opportunities to align the voice of the brand with the voice of the customer, to engage outside content creators, to highlight the best third party content within the brand’s sharing strategy, and inspire action.
Pawan Deshpande – @TweetsFromPawan
CEO, HiveFire (TopRank Client)
Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about a brand producing valuable content, and prospects being educated with that content. It’s valuable, it works and it’s not going away.
But the only problem is that day by day, it’s less effective as everyone produces more and more content. Brands are increasingly competing to get their content noticed. At the same time, prospects are increasingly spending more time searching for relevant content.
Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer. You will be navigating your prospects through this sea of content by leading them to the most relevant important information.
It’s already happened in the consumer world: Sites like Digg (social curation) which have little or no original content have become key resources for information. Similarly we are seeing leading businesses take a similar approach to become the experts for their respective areas.
Marc Meyer – @marc_meyer
Dir.of Social Media and Search, Principal at DRMG
Content today is not your father’s content… Hell, it’s not even the content from 10 years ago. It’s so much more now. So much so, it should be its own country. Curation for us, is part art and part science. At its core, it has as much to do with maintaining and preserving what has been digitally “created”-as it does in making sure that it lasts longer than a cup of coffee. And that’s the challenge.
Loosely defined, the curation of content is a company’s ability to create and then manifest digital assets that drive and maintain at the least, awareness. Content Curation holistically speaking, refers to a person’s or company’s ability to stay in front of the digital curve by managing those assets across the board.
Its role in a content marketing strategy is primary and cannot be downgraded to a perfunctory responsibility. Curation feeds the beast and thus it contributes greatly to a company’s overall digital strategy.
Have you added a curation component to your content marketing mix? If so, are you doing it manually, automatically or somewhere in between? Online Marketing Blog
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Brian Solis: How Businesses Learn the Value and Impact of New Media: Uh-Oh vs. Aha Moments
In celebration of National Small Business Week…
This year, Social Media marketing will gain significant support in resources and investment across businesses of all shapes and sizes.
So what’s new?
Now, a line is being drawn between edglings and underlings. Where we choose to stand affects the presence of our brand and value in new markets and our ability to capture attention where and how it is focused – both online and in the real world,.
On one side of the commerce quandary, business owners will have either flirted with or grasped the new media landscape and how it fits in with conventional touchpoints. On the other side, we have everyone else, those who will witness the possibilities and importance of the social Web via a pivotal “Aha” or “Uh-Oh” moment.
Aha’s will arise when the “consumer” that lives dormant inside each one of us finally awakens. Yes, outside of our business focus, we actively search for products and services. We are, in addition to many other things, consumers as well. We ask friends for recommendations. We research options. We make purchases. And, we share our experiences. Yet, we tend to neglect this useful and invaluable perspective when we operate in business mode. Suddenly everything we see, hear, and say is filtered through the eyes, ears, and voice of someone with a bottom line, responsibilities, goals, and not necessarily purpose and resolve.
Consumers are taking to the social Web to seek and offer advice and direction. Businesses win and lose in those conversations every day and as such, decisions are made with or without us.
Now, the Uh-Oh moment on the other hand, is inevitable and with it, a sense of urgency is thrust upon its unsuspecting victims. This occurs when we suddenly realize that our competitors are unusually succeeding while our revenue flatlines or even worse, declines. Or, depending on circumstances, we suddenly face an eruption of negative commentary and reviews that propagate detrimental experiences or sentiment.
In both cases, new media provides us with the tools and lenses that allow us to find and steer experiences, transactions, and sentiment. It just requires acceptance and dedication to learning, participating, and tracking how the creation of these new social touchpoints contribute to customer acquisition and retention.
Even though we make an official investment in something that’s not only new and uncertain, we expect a return on time, money, and energy. While experimentation is part of the process, dedication to improving our bottom line is something that doesn’t lose significance – nor should it. Therefore, our efforts must be designed with intention, purpose, and value in mind. Everything is measurable and as such, what it is we want to measure must not only be defined, but also balanced with the interests of the communities in which we participate.
The dichotomy between intention and outcome is defined by our actions and words. Ergo, the experiences we induce are measured by the reactions of those we engage.
Once we decide to focus our efforts and ultimately how, when and where we socialize service, marketing, communications, sales, and community development, essentially, every part of our business, we begin the beginning of our future.
This is your time to become the expert you seek. By answering our own questions, we can participate in social networks in ways that boost visibility, attract customers, and empower a community of customers and advocates to create new business opportunities, improved customer service, and also a more valuable service offering as tuned by our stakeholders. Please read more @ Brian Solis
This year, Social Media marketing will gain significant support in resources and investment across businesses of all shapes and sizes.
So what’s new?
Now, a line is being drawn between edglings and underlings. Where we choose to stand affects the presence of our brand and value in new markets and our ability to capture attention where and how it is focused – both online and in the real world,.
On one side of the commerce quandary, business owners will have either flirted with or grasped the new media landscape and how it fits in with conventional touchpoints. On the other side, we have everyone else, those who will witness the possibilities and importance of the social Web via a pivotal “Aha” or “Uh-Oh” moment.
Aha’s will arise when the “consumer” that lives dormant inside each one of us finally awakens. Yes, outside of our business focus, we actively search for products and services. We are, in addition to many other things, consumers as well. We ask friends for recommendations. We research options. We make purchases. And, we share our experiences. Yet, we tend to neglect this useful and invaluable perspective when we operate in business mode. Suddenly everything we see, hear, and say is filtered through the eyes, ears, and voice of someone with a bottom line, responsibilities, goals, and not necessarily purpose and resolve.
Consumers are taking to the social Web to seek and offer advice and direction. Businesses win and lose in those conversations every day and as such, decisions are made with or without us.
Now, the Uh-Oh moment on the other hand, is inevitable and with it, a sense of urgency is thrust upon its unsuspecting victims. This occurs when we suddenly realize that our competitors are unusually succeeding while our revenue flatlines or even worse, declines. Or, depending on circumstances, we suddenly face an eruption of negative commentary and reviews that propagate detrimental experiences or sentiment.
In both cases, new media provides us with the tools and lenses that allow us to find and steer experiences, transactions, and sentiment. It just requires acceptance and dedication to learning, participating, and tracking how the creation of these new social touchpoints contribute to customer acquisition and retention.
Even though we make an official investment in something that’s not only new and uncertain, we expect a return on time, money, and energy. While experimentation is part of the process, dedication to improving our bottom line is something that doesn’t lose significance – nor should it. Therefore, our efforts must be designed with intention, purpose, and value in mind. Everything is measurable and as such, what it is we want to measure must not only be defined, but also balanced with the interests of the communities in which we participate.
The dichotomy between intention and outcome is defined by our actions and words. Ergo, the experiences we induce are measured by the reactions of those we engage.
Once we decide to focus our efforts and ultimately how, when and where we socialize service, marketing, communications, sales, and community development, essentially, every part of our business, we begin the beginning of our future.
This is your time to become the expert you seek. By answering our own questions, we can participate in social networks in ways that boost visibility, attract customers, and empower a community of customers and advocates to create new business opportunities, improved customer service, and also a more valuable service offering as tuned by our stakeholders. Please read more @ Brian Solis
Friday, April 30, 2010
Brian Solis: In Mobile, Women Rule Social Networking
Based on data collected and analyzed using Google Ad Planner, I recently discovered that in Social Media, women rule. Across almost every major social network, the balance was revealing and in some cases, profound. Read more @ Brian Solis
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
PR2.0: The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 2
As social media moves from the edge to the center of adoption and practice, the future of marketing hinges on the ability for brands to evolve from the broadcasting of one-to-many sales and marketing messages to an authentic media company that creates and publishes meaningful and timely content. In Part 1, we examined the idea that every company is a media company: EC=MC, the various forms of pervasive media in the social Web, the need for editorial calendars, and how through the creation and proliferation of social objects, businesses could earn awareness and presence.
In this Part 2, we’ll now examine the infrastructure necessary to create a fully-functional media team and channel and also how to optimize social objects to dramatically increase findability and shareability.
Read full article: PR2.0
In this Part 2, we’ll now examine the infrastructure necessary to create a fully-functional media team and channel and also how to optimize social objects to dramatically increase findability and shareability.
Read full article: PR2.0
Sunday, April 25, 2010
PR2.0: Can Social Media Help End Malaria? Let’s Find Out…
Sunday, April 25th is World Malaria Day and the United Nations is placing its hopes on you and the social graphs you’ve nurtured to finally end this deadly, yet preventable disease.
You see, every 30 seconds, a child in Africa dies from malaria and every 10 seconds, another case is diagnosed. That might not mean a lot to you…I’m sure where you are right now is probably the furthest away from Malaria and Africa. But even where you are, right now, you’re in a place to actually save a life…literally.
Please join the efforts to #endmalaria. All it takes is a $10 donation. Please click here to donate now. Or, text the word “NETS” to 864233, and a $10 donation will be charged directly to your cell phone bill.
100% of the proceeds will be given to UNICEF, used to buy treated mosquito nets, the lowest cost and most effective way to prevent malaria.
Once you’ve donated, please help spread the word using the #endmalaria banner.
To kick start the effort today, I reached out to good friend and one of my favorite artists, Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid). He designed an original piece (above) in the hopes of spreading awareness and support using art as a social object.
Please click here to continue reading and donate:
PR2.0 - World Malaria Day
You see, every 30 seconds, a child in Africa dies from malaria and every 10 seconds, another case is diagnosed. That might not mean a lot to you…I’m sure where you are right now is probably the furthest away from Malaria and Africa. But even where you are, right now, you’re in a place to actually save a life…literally.
Please join the efforts to #endmalaria. All it takes is a $10 donation. Please click here to donate now. Or, text the word “NETS” to 864233, and a $10 donation will be charged directly to your cell phone bill.
100% of the proceeds will be given to UNICEF, used to buy treated mosquito nets, the lowest cost and most effective way to prevent malaria.
Once you’ve donated, please help spread the word using the #endmalaria banner.
To kick start the effort today, I reached out to good friend and one of my favorite artists, Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid). He designed an original piece (above) in the hopes of spreading awareness and support using art as a social object.
Please click here to continue reading and donate:
PR2.0 - World Malaria Day
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Brian Solis: The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part Two
The influence and promise of Twitter is only now starting to materialize. Everything that occurred prior to Chirp has lead us to this moment and as such, is almost worthy of categorization as BC (Before Chirp). Everything that happens now, is almost symbolic of a new movement (AC, After Chirp) and as such, it essentially starts a new chapter in the evolution of Twitter.
To truly capture the State and Future of Twitter and all that was revealed during its first official conference, requires additional time and space. In Part One, we examined the sociological impact of Twitter on society, the true size of the network, as well as equally exploring its challenges and opportunities. In Part Two, we’ll review and interpret streams, interest graphs, and Twitters new advertising platform.
Streams Define the New Web
At the focal point of the entire event wasn’t just the developer community; the real beneficiary of all that was introduced, was us, as users as well as individuals soon to be introduced to Twitter. We took center stage as information and details of the “new” Twitter visualized new realities and brought the future of our experiences to life, today.
As Chris Messina, Kevin Marks, Stowe Boyd and others have long signaled, the Web is becoming less about pages and more about streams. Our behavior on the Web today places the power of content discovery and consumption firmly in our grasp. We decide who we follow. We choose which links are worthy of clicking. We determine the information that’s worth reading and more important, worthy of sharing.
The feeds to which we subscribe, channel activities of those we follow in our social graph funnel into the streams that flow through attention dashboards, TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, PeopleBrowsr, et al. The attention dashboard is how we learn. It introduces us to new discoveries. We’re gifted the insight to see what moves and inspires those we follow. It is also where we earn relevance and hopefully prominence, as what we share in turn, determines its visibility, engagement, and reaction within the attention dashboards and ultimately the streams of those who follow us and who follow them.
The Ties that Bind: Interest Graphs
Social networking is evolving beyond the mere connections to other individuals. We are forming contextual networks by linking to those we know as well as the people we’d like to know. These direct and indirect connections introduce value to our routines, aspirations, and missions from a distance. The most fascinating aspects of contextual relationships is that they mirror our patterns of behavior in real life, however, the interactions we form and cultivate online cast traceable imprints and they define our actions, interests, and alliances more effectively than we may realize.
As we are complex creatures, we are captivated by an incalculable amount of pursuits. While we may follow and are in turn followed by many, the inbound and outbound relevant networks we consciously and unknowingly cultivate expand, contract and reshape based on keywords of interest.
In the era of the real-time social Web, there are already tools in existence with many more to appear that can immediately analyze online activity to summarize your interests and the social graphs formed as a result.
As we learned at Chirp, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo refers to the idea of themed connections as an interest graph, the linkages of Twitter users who form connections and host conversations around common subjects. It is these inbound and outbound relevant networks that lay the foundation for Twitter’s monetization strategies.
Twitter’s Business Model: Relevance
Prior to the dawn of Chirp, Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets. Much like the ads that appear in Google Search, Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of Twitter search results and the company promises that they will be “useful to you.”
Among the first to adopt Promoted Tweets include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come.
Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as such, but their promise lies in the ability to look and act similar to regular Tweets, meaning that they retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting.
Perhaps the greatest value in Promoted Tweets is their ability to remain atop the stream of relevance. While each of the initial companies experimenting with Promoted Tweets maintain Twitter accounts, the volume of content flying through the attention dashboards of followers inherently buries the most attractive of offers posted by any business.
According to Twitter, Promoted Tweets will also be timely. As much of Twitter’s activity takes places outside of the dotcom, developers can choose whether or not Promoted Tweets are integrated in their apps.
As the company defines, the connection between Promoted Tweets and individual interests provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment, in real-time.
Brands aspire to earn attention and reactions in the streams of both social and interest graphs. If consumers share information related to the brand, earned media then becomes the word of mouth catalyst that then spreads the information across the Web. Organic Tweets that mention companies and their services, offers, value, etc., are considered earned media. Promoted Tweets create a hybrid of paid and earned media, something I refer to as sponsored media. Promoted Tweets begin as paid media and transform into earned media with every ReTweet.
Costolo shared the love, positioning the new revenue model as helping “the entire ecosystem making money.” Therefore, the company is splitting promoted tweets revenue 50-50 with distribution partners.
Relevance and Resonance
Promoted Tweets are perhaps less controversial than what the immediate future beholds. Today, Promoted Tweets will appear only in search results. Once the system and the culture of the community is tested and immersed, paid Tweets will then enter the streams that connect interest graphs to topics of interest. Again, the value to the advertiser is that these Tweets will appear in the streams of individuals who have repeatedly demonstrated and communicated their interests through their actions and reactions as representative in the Tweet history.
However, with opportunity, new challenges face advertisers. Promoted Tweets force relevance into their campaigns in order to trigger positive responses and ultimately word of mouth and measurable activity. Twitter is not only changing communications between users, it also represents the impetus for contextualizing and humanizing advertising, in real-time. Without the ability to connect to and inspire people, campaigns will fail miserably. Those that appeal to the emotions and interests of consumers will spark a social effect that reverberates across the social graph online and eventually into the real world.
Dick Costolo shared a tangible example, “If I tweet a lot about coffee, I could be a great target for Starbucks ads, for example.” And, it is Starbucks that appears to fully embrace the notion of the real-time interest graph.
Not only is Starbucks among the initial adopters of Promoted Tweets, the company is also running an innovative outreach program with influence measurement startup Klout. Klout provides everyday marketers with the ability to identify influencers who actively tweet about related topics and also maintain a level of measurable stature with Twitter. These influencers were recently offered a free sample of Starbucks Pike Place Roast because of their earned authority on the subject of coffee.
In many ways, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets mirrors this strategy, but now extends it from individual influencers to anyone interested in coffee, not necessary influential on the subject.
Two words that were repeated throughout the conference, resonance and relevance, underscored Twitter’s commitment to creating an advertising platform that would earn the support of the community.
As Costolo noted, “Tweets that don’t resonate with users will disappear.”
Resonance is the reinforcement or prolongation of social objects. A Tweet, whether it’s paid or earned, represents a social object as its introduction and exposure possesses the ability to spark conversations. The extent and volume however, are determined by relevance and the shareability of the social object however.
Chirp 2010 -
Twitter is using resonance as a metric as it measures all the different ways people engage with Tweets and as such, produces a resonance score that determines the effectiveness and overall lifespan of Promoted Tweets. Resonance examines the visibility of a Tweet and actions surrounding them including how often they’re retweeted, favorited, etc.
In addition to developers, Twitter seems to truly believe that the user experience is the source of Twitter’s past and future. As such, it is the experience that is also the inspiration behind Promoted Tweets. Initially these paid opportunities will be based on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or 1,000 qualified individuals exposed to the Tweet). What caught my attention however, is that as Twitter learns about the performance, accuracy, and possibilities orbiting resonance as a metric, the cost model will migrate from CPM to a ROI model…yes, Return on Investment. Details on the ROI model weren’t discussed, but I can assure you, anything that is introduced into the real-time Web triggers a response, even if that response is nothing. Advertisers will need to not only get creative, but also ensure that Promoted Tweets are both actionable, Retweetable, and, let me say that again, AND, advantageous.
Twitter’s metric could be applied to all forms of social media, from Twitter advertising to Tweets produced by its users to updates and postings across the entire social Web. Without relevance, we cannot trigger resonance, and without resonance, we cannot establish significance.
In social media, we earn the relationships, responses, and trust we deserve.Brian Solis
To truly capture the State and Future of Twitter and all that was revealed during its first official conference, requires additional time and space. In Part One, we examined the sociological impact of Twitter on society, the true size of the network, as well as equally exploring its challenges and opportunities. In Part Two, we’ll review and interpret streams, interest graphs, and Twitters new advertising platform.
Streams Define the New Web
At the focal point of the entire event wasn’t just the developer community; the real beneficiary of all that was introduced, was us, as users as well as individuals soon to be introduced to Twitter. We took center stage as information and details of the “new” Twitter visualized new realities and brought the future of our experiences to life, today.
As Chris Messina, Kevin Marks, Stowe Boyd and others have long signaled, the Web is becoming less about pages and more about streams. Our behavior on the Web today places the power of content discovery and consumption firmly in our grasp. We decide who we follow. We choose which links are worthy of clicking. We determine the information that’s worth reading and more important, worthy of sharing.
The feeds to which we subscribe, channel activities of those we follow in our social graph funnel into the streams that flow through attention dashboards, TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, PeopleBrowsr, et al. The attention dashboard is how we learn. It introduces us to new discoveries. We’re gifted the insight to see what moves and inspires those we follow. It is also where we earn relevance and hopefully prominence, as what we share in turn, determines its visibility, engagement, and reaction within the attention dashboards and ultimately the streams of those who follow us and who follow them.
The Ties that Bind: Interest Graphs
Social networking is evolving beyond the mere connections to other individuals. We are forming contextual networks by linking to those we know as well as the people we’d like to know. These direct and indirect connections introduce value to our routines, aspirations, and missions from a distance. The most fascinating aspects of contextual relationships is that they mirror our patterns of behavior in real life, however, the interactions we form and cultivate online cast traceable imprints and they define our actions, interests, and alliances more effectively than we may realize.
As we are complex creatures, we are captivated by an incalculable amount of pursuits. While we may follow and are in turn followed by many, the inbound and outbound relevant networks we consciously and unknowingly cultivate expand, contract and reshape based on keywords of interest.
In the era of the real-time social Web, there are already tools in existence with many more to appear that can immediately analyze online activity to summarize your interests and the social graphs formed as a result.
As we learned at Chirp, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo refers to the idea of themed connections as an interest graph, the linkages of Twitter users who form connections and host conversations around common subjects. It is these inbound and outbound relevant networks that lay the foundation for Twitter’s monetization strategies.
Twitter’s Business Model: Relevance
Prior to the dawn of Chirp, Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets. Much like the ads that appear in Google Search, Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of Twitter search results and the company promises that they will be “useful to you.”
Among the first to adopt Promoted Tweets include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come.
Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as such, but their promise lies in the ability to look and act similar to regular Tweets, meaning that they retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting.
Perhaps the greatest value in Promoted Tweets is their ability to remain atop the stream of relevance. While each of the initial companies experimenting with Promoted Tweets maintain Twitter accounts, the volume of content flying through the attention dashboards of followers inherently buries the most attractive of offers posted by any business.
According to Twitter, Promoted Tweets will also be timely. As much of Twitter’s activity takes places outside of the dotcom, developers can choose whether or not Promoted Tweets are integrated in their apps.
As the company defines, the connection between Promoted Tweets and individual interests provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment, in real-time.
Brands aspire to earn attention and reactions in the streams of both social and interest graphs. If consumers share information related to the brand, earned media then becomes the word of mouth catalyst that then spreads the information across the Web. Organic Tweets that mention companies and their services, offers, value, etc., are considered earned media. Promoted Tweets create a hybrid of paid and earned media, something I refer to as sponsored media. Promoted Tweets begin as paid media and transform into earned media with every ReTweet.
Costolo shared the love, positioning the new revenue model as helping “the entire ecosystem making money.” Therefore, the company is splitting promoted tweets revenue 50-50 with distribution partners.
Relevance and Resonance
Promoted Tweets are perhaps less controversial than what the immediate future beholds. Today, Promoted Tweets will appear only in search results. Once the system and the culture of the community is tested and immersed, paid Tweets will then enter the streams that connect interest graphs to topics of interest. Again, the value to the advertiser is that these Tweets will appear in the streams of individuals who have repeatedly demonstrated and communicated their interests through their actions and reactions as representative in the Tweet history.
However, with opportunity, new challenges face advertisers. Promoted Tweets force relevance into their campaigns in order to trigger positive responses and ultimately word of mouth and measurable activity. Twitter is not only changing communications between users, it also represents the impetus for contextualizing and humanizing advertising, in real-time. Without the ability to connect to and inspire people, campaigns will fail miserably. Those that appeal to the emotions and interests of consumers will spark a social effect that reverberates across the social graph online and eventually into the real world.
Dick Costolo shared a tangible example, “If I tweet a lot about coffee, I could be a great target for Starbucks ads, for example.” And, it is Starbucks that appears to fully embrace the notion of the real-time interest graph.
Not only is Starbucks among the initial adopters of Promoted Tweets, the company is also running an innovative outreach program with influence measurement startup Klout. Klout provides everyday marketers with the ability to identify influencers who actively tweet about related topics and also maintain a level of measurable stature with Twitter. These influencers were recently offered a free sample of Starbucks Pike Place Roast because of their earned authority on the subject of coffee.
In many ways, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets mirrors this strategy, but now extends it from individual influencers to anyone interested in coffee, not necessary influential on the subject.
Two words that were repeated throughout the conference, resonance and relevance, underscored Twitter’s commitment to creating an advertising platform that would earn the support of the community.
As Costolo noted, “Tweets that don’t resonate with users will disappear.”
Resonance is the reinforcement or prolongation of social objects. A Tweet, whether it’s paid or earned, represents a social object as its introduction and exposure possesses the ability to spark conversations. The extent and volume however, are determined by relevance and the shareability of the social object however.
Chirp 2010 -
Twitter is using resonance as a metric as it measures all the different ways people engage with Tweets and as such, produces a resonance score that determines the effectiveness and overall lifespan of Promoted Tweets. Resonance examines the visibility of a Tweet and actions surrounding them including how often they’re retweeted, favorited, etc.
In addition to developers, Twitter seems to truly believe that the user experience is the source of Twitter’s past and future. As such, it is the experience that is also the inspiration behind Promoted Tweets. Initially these paid opportunities will be based on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or 1,000 qualified individuals exposed to the Tweet). What caught my attention however, is that as Twitter learns about the performance, accuracy, and possibilities orbiting resonance as a metric, the cost model will migrate from CPM to a ROI model…yes, Return on Investment. Details on the ROI model weren’t discussed, but I can assure you, anything that is introduced into the real-time Web triggers a response, even if that response is nothing. Advertisers will need to not only get creative, but also ensure that Promoted Tweets are both actionable, Retweetable, and, let me say that again, AND, advantageous.
Twitter’s metric could be applied to all forms of social media, from Twitter advertising to Tweets produced by its users to updates and postings across the entire social Web. Without relevance, we cannot trigger resonance, and without resonance, we cannot establish significance.
In social media, we earn the relationships, responses, and trust we deserve.Brian Solis
Brian Solis: The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part One
The State and Future of Twitter was revealed to the world at the Chirp Conference. Developers, futurists, reporters, investors, stakeholders, and businesses convened at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, making the journey from all over the world to witness history in the making.
My experience at Chirp was in a word, profound. I sit here, right here, right now, attempting to distill all that I heard and learned and its true effect on the general public. The volume of ideas and insight is implausible to capture, analyze, and share in one post. Hence, what follows is Part One of The State and Future of Twitter, beginning with an answer to the question that Twitter never asked of us, “What moves you?” While some of what you’ll read addresses the initial question, “what are you doing” and also the current question, “what’s happening?”
Prior to the opening of the show, tensions arose between Twitter and the developer community following the news of Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie to become the official iPhone app for the company. Suddenly developers felt abandoned or threatened by an ominous competitor, Twitter itself.
On the eve of the conference, Twitter was faced with one additional objective for its monumental event. In addition to illustrating its future, Twitter now desperately needed to win back the support and dedication of its developer community.
“Twitter has always been about developers,” asserted Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Williams continued, “Twitter is the ecosystem much more than any other Web service that exists. You guys have not only made Twitter better, you’ve helped shape it, you’ve helped define what it is for us and millions of users.”
In truth, the stories and events that played out paint a brighter future for all involved, including consumers. What was clear, however, is that the days of straightforward and spiritless applications would no longer command the value and attention they once boasted. It was clear that Twitter is rapidly emerging as a sophisticated social operating system (OS) and its prospective is governed by the applications and the users who adopt them.
Follow Me on Twitter!
Since 2006, I’ve explored the promise and impact of Twitter on media, marketing and popular culture. At times I’ve openly questioned decisions or the lack thereof to diagnose complications with Twitter’s market position as compared to its promise. Reality eventually proved blinding. Consumers were and are unabashedly exposed to Twitter at almost unprecedented and incalculable conditions.
Follow us on Twitter…it’s suddenly everywhere. Whether you’re watching the evening news, your favorite program or the commercials that support them, the request is clear. However, what was unclear, especially for the everyday consumer, were the steps necessary to find meaning in the Twitter experience and direction in its personal application in a world where Facebook and other social networks offered far more definitive and self explaining advantages.
As Evan Wlliams demonstrated through a live Google search, it’s clear that they’re listening. Mainstream consumers do not understand Twitter.
“Getting users from awareness to engagement–this is something that we weren’t doing very well. This is a really tough problem because Twitter is different things for different people.”
Indeed.
Most importantly however, what it isn’t for most people, is clear in its day-to-day application and benefits for the investment one makes in learning, contributing, and overall engagement.
Twitter has tried, albeit incrementally as well as restricted and perhaps without clarity, to improve the experience.
In the last year, the company has…
1. Re-designed its home page twice to more effectively depict the value that lies beyond registration.
2. Created a series of guides designed to help businesses understand the potential rife within its ecosystem
3. Analyzed and published data to humanize the trends beyond the tweets
4. Continually spotlight the clever accounts finding success
At 175 employees, Twitter might now finally realize the strength in its own numbers.
Tweet by Numbers
It would take almost four years for me to witness the day that Twitter would convincingly recognize its calling in life and as a result, take the wheel of destiny to steer a historic, yet seemingly meandering movement toward relevance and prevalence.
On April 14th 2010, Twitter made history…again.
The news, ideas, and conversations erupting from the conference was positively overwhelming and promising, almost as if the team at Twitter suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to seize the revelation that presented its destiny, mission, and the course towards pervasiveness.
On the first day of its first official conference, Twitter intentionally positioned Chirp as its shot across the bow of skeptics and critics while simultaneously rekindling the flame of loyalists and luminaries.
A community once plagued by user acquisition and retention challenges, Twitter disclosed information absent since its debut in 2006, numbers.
It turns out, Twitter is much larger than many predicted. According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter maintains a user base of over 105 million. To be clear, registered and active users are two very different things. But even speculating at a 50% retention estimate, just over 50 million active accounts would warrant significant respect and attention.
Biz also shared that Twitter.com receives over 180 million monthly unique visitors with 75% of Twitter traffic sourcing from outside applications. Currently, Twitter is adding 300,000 new users daily, experiencing 1,500% growth over last year.
Twitter search is also becoming a contender in the overall market. While still far behind Google and even YouTube, Twitter is fielding over 600 million search queries with 3 billion calls to its application program interface (API) per day.
Snapshot:
- 105 million registered users
- 180 million monthly unique visitors
- 75% of traffic sourcing from outside applications
- Adding 300,000 new users daily
Twitter: A Cultural Catalyst
Over the last few years, Twitter users publicly explored and defined the role of the fledgling platform as a technology, a communications medium, and ultimately as a catalyst for societal evolution. At a minimum, Twitter has represented a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. While Twitter both spawned and symbolized the pulse of the real-time Web, Twitter itself emerged as a human seismograph, providing us with a window into the reverberating events, themes, and trends that captivate digital civilizations.
In March 2007, Twitter tasted mainstream attention when it earned the spotlight at SXSW.
In 2008, a journalist was arrested in Egypt and his Tweets that alerted followers to the event and broadcast his cry for help would ultimately serve as the key to his freedom.
Just over a year ago, Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a Twitter race to become the first person to reach 1,000,000 followers.
In June 2009, the Iran election and the following political unrest were globalized through Twitter.
From its inception to its current state is entwined through countless human experiences and events ranging from earthquakes to plane crashes to triumphs, losses, and everything in between.
The Twitterverse represents much more than a social network. It personified our aspirations, giving millions of people a stage for which to earn untapped recognition. Whereas YouTube inspired so many individuals willing to brave the lens of a Web cam and the resulting activities that ensured from friends and strangers online and in the real world, Twitter gifted a microphone, a stage, and a captive audience to those who could enchant our heats, minds, and attention in 140 character proclamations.
Twitter did not invent social networking. Nor did it create the @ or # signs that have become pervasive not only in Twitter and other social networks, but also in real life. What Twitter did however, seems to have a much more profound effect on humanity. As a noun and a verb, Tweets unlocked and emancipated our inner extrovert and social commentator, easing our concerns over privacy and consequence, instilling confidence through our participation and contribution with followers, responses, retweets, favorites, and ultimately a network of contacts that would prove invaluable in all things we do online and offline.
#Hashtags
I’ve spent countless hours analyzing how the “me” in Social Media affects us individually. And while many have criticized blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for fanning the flames of egotism and narcissism, I truly believe that Twitter empowered a new generation of individuals to listen, learn, and communicate with vigor, consciousness, and passion. And every time we update our status, we earn status at varying levels that reflects the caliber and breadth of our investment and intention. As such, we are encouraged and rewarded by the deliberate unfastening of”self” from self interest to play a part in producing a vibrant and enriching civilization that transcends its populace from denizens to bona fide benefactor and stakeholder.
Twitter is what it is because of us. And, where it is going and its true impact will too, be defined by us, the very people who form the democracy of Twitter. As good friend and digital raconteur Stowe Boyd observed, “It is our dancing the makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code.”
Twitter has flourished into a living and breathing organism whose characteristics are dictated and personified through our Tweets and the Tweets of those we follow. Its soul however, is defined by who we are and who we want to be. Twitter is becoming a part of our society and it is changing how we form relationships and introducing new patterns of communication that link us to one other.
It is no longer a question of “to Tweet or not to Tweet.” Tweets are now artifacts of our culture and as such, they symbolize a chapter in societal evolution.Brian Solis
My experience at Chirp was in a word, profound. I sit here, right here, right now, attempting to distill all that I heard and learned and its true effect on the general public. The volume of ideas and insight is implausible to capture, analyze, and share in one post. Hence, what follows is Part One of The State and Future of Twitter, beginning with an answer to the question that Twitter never asked of us, “What moves you?” While some of what you’ll read addresses the initial question, “what are you doing” and also the current question, “what’s happening?”
Prior to the opening of the show, tensions arose between Twitter and the developer community following the news of Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie to become the official iPhone app for the company. Suddenly developers felt abandoned or threatened by an ominous competitor, Twitter itself.
On the eve of the conference, Twitter was faced with one additional objective for its monumental event. In addition to illustrating its future, Twitter now desperately needed to win back the support and dedication of its developer community.
“Twitter has always been about developers,” asserted Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Williams continued, “Twitter is the ecosystem much more than any other Web service that exists. You guys have not only made Twitter better, you’ve helped shape it, you’ve helped define what it is for us and millions of users.”
In truth, the stories and events that played out paint a brighter future for all involved, including consumers. What was clear, however, is that the days of straightforward and spiritless applications would no longer command the value and attention they once boasted. It was clear that Twitter is rapidly emerging as a sophisticated social operating system (OS) and its prospective is governed by the applications and the users who adopt them.
Follow Me on Twitter!
Since 2006, I’ve explored the promise and impact of Twitter on media, marketing and popular culture. At times I’ve openly questioned decisions or the lack thereof to diagnose complications with Twitter’s market position as compared to its promise. Reality eventually proved blinding. Consumers were and are unabashedly exposed to Twitter at almost unprecedented and incalculable conditions.
Follow us on Twitter…it’s suddenly everywhere. Whether you’re watching the evening news, your favorite program or the commercials that support them, the request is clear. However, what was unclear, especially for the everyday consumer, were the steps necessary to find meaning in the Twitter experience and direction in its personal application in a world where Facebook and other social networks offered far more definitive and self explaining advantages.
As Evan Wlliams demonstrated through a live Google search, it’s clear that they’re listening. Mainstream consumers do not understand Twitter.
“Getting users from awareness to engagement–this is something that we weren’t doing very well. This is a really tough problem because Twitter is different things for different people.”
Indeed.
Most importantly however, what it isn’t for most people, is clear in its day-to-day application and benefits for the investment one makes in learning, contributing, and overall engagement.
Twitter has tried, albeit incrementally as well as restricted and perhaps without clarity, to improve the experience.
In the last year, the company has…
1. Re-designed its home page twice to more effectively depict the value that lies beyond registration.
2. Created a series of guides designed to help businesses understand the potential rife within its ecosystem
3. Analyzed and published data to humanize the trends beyond the tweets
4. Continually spotlight the clever accounts finding success
At 175 employees, Twitter might now finally realize the strength in its own numbers.
Tweet by Numbers
It would take almost four years for me to witness the day that Twitter would convincingly recognize its calling in life and as a result, take the wheel of destiny to steer a historic, yet seemingly meandering movement toward relevance and prevalence.
On April 14th 2010, Twitter made history…again.
The news, ideas, and conversations erupting from the conference was positively overwhelming and promising, almost as if the team at Twitter suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to seize the revelation that presented its destiny, mission, and the course towards pervasiveness.
On the first day of its first official conference, Twitter intentionally positioned Chirp as its shot across the bow of skeptics and critics while simultaneously rekindling the flame of loyalists and luminaries.
A community once plagued by user acquisition and retention challenges, Twitter disclosed information absent since its debut in 2006, numbers.
It turns out, Twitter is much larger than many predicted. According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter maintains a user base of over 105 million. To be clear, registered and active users are two very different things. But even speculating at a 50% retention estimate, just over 50 million active accounts would warrant significant respect and attention.
Biz also shared that Twitter.com receives over 180 million monthly unique visitors with 75% of Twitter traffic sourcing from outside applications. Currently, Twitter is adding 300,000 new users daily, experiencing 1,500% growth over last year.
Twitter search is also becoming a contender in the overall market. While still far behind Google and even YouTube, Twitter is fielding over 600 million search queries with 3 billion calls to its application program interface (API) per day.
Snapshot:
- 105 million registered users
- 180 million monthly unique visitors
- 75% of traffic sourcing from outside applications
- Adding 300,000 new users daily
Twitter: A Cultural Catalyst
Over the last few years, Twitter users publicly explored and defined the role of the fledgling platform as a technology, a communications medium, and ultimately as a catalyst for societal evolution. At a minimum, Twitter has represented a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. While Twitter both spawned and symbolized the pulse of the real-time Web, Twitter itself emerged as a human seismograph, providing us with a window into the reverberating events, themes, and trends that captivate digital civilizations.
In March 2007, Twitter tasted mainstream attention when it earned the spotlight at SXSW.
In 2008, a journalist was arrested in Egypt and his Tweets that alerted followers to the event and broadcast his cry for help would ultimately serve as the key to his freedom.
Just over a year ago, Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a Twitter race to become the first person to reach 1,000,000 followers.
In June 2009, the Iran election and the following political unrest were globalized through Twitter.
From its inception to its current state is entwined through countless human experiences and events ranging from earthquakes to plane crashes to triumphs, losses, and everything in between.
The Twitterverse represents much more than a social network. It personified our aspirations, giving millions of people a stage for which to earn untapped recognition. Whereas YouTube inspired so many individuals willing to brave the lens of a Web cam and the resulting activities that ensured from friends and strangers online and in the real world, Twitter gifted a microphone, a stage, and a captive audience to those who could enchant our heats, minds, and attention in 140 character proclamations.
Twitter did not invent social networking. Nor did it create the @ or # signs that have become pervasive not only in Twitter and other social networks, but also in real life. What Twitter did however, seems to have a much more profound effect on humanity. As a noun and a verb, Tweets unlocked and emancipated our inner extrovert and social commentator, easing our concerns over privacy and consequence, instilling confidence through our participation and contribution with followers, responses, retweets, favorites, and ultimately a network of contacts that would prove invaluable in all things we do online and offline.
#Hashtags
I’ve spent countless hours analyzing how the “me” in Social Media affects us individually. And while many have criticized blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for fanning the flames of egotism and narcissism, I truly believe that Twitter empowered a new generation of individuals to listen, learn, and communicate with vigor, consciousness, and passion. And every time we update our status, we earn status at varying levels that reflects the caliber and breadth of our investment and intention. As such, we are encouraged and rewarded by the deliberate unfastening of”self” from self interest to play a part in producing a vibrant and enriching civilization that transcends its populace from denizens to bona fide benefactor and stakeholder.
Twitter is what it is because of us. And, where it is going and its true impact will too, be defined by us, the very people who form the democracy of Twitter. As good friend and digital raconteur Stowe Boyd observed, “It is our dancing the makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code.”
Twitter has flourished into a living and breathing organism whose characteristics are dictated and personified through our Tweets and the Tweets of those we follow. Its soul however, is defined by who we are and who we want to be. Twitter is becoming a part of our society and it is changing how we form relationships and introducing new patterns of communication that link us to one other.
It is no longer a question of “to Tweet or not to Tweet.” Tweets are now artifacts of our culture and as such, they symbolize a chapter in societal evolution.Brian Solis
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