Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The true value of Social Media properties like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and millions of other websites & services dedicated to connecting people has been a question lingering out there since the term “Social Media” was created. Yes some of these websites drive millions upon million of visitors on a daily basis, but very few actually have put together a comprehensive (and successful) monetization strategy. I have wrote a few blog posts on this topic and have had numerous conversations that usually end up with people agreeing to disagree.  However, over the past couple months I have seen the power (and value) of Social Media first hand - starting with an ad on Facebook.com.

What I have listed below in chronological order is how Social Media has directly impacted a music band and how a cheap click on Facebook resulted in countless new fans.

• A few months ago I saw a Facebook ad for a band called “One Day as a Lion” - the Facebook Ad was targeted directly based on me listing Rage Against the Machine as one of my favorite bands in my profile…the lead singer of ODaaL is Zack de la Rocha the former / current lead singer of RATM. Having never heard of ODaaL I clicked on the ad - which probably cost the advertiser $.10 as Facebook ads are dirt cheap.
• After finding out more info on the band and listening to a couple of their songs I went to iTunes and bought all 5 songs on their new album ( 5 x $.99 = $4.95 - $.10 CPC =  $4.85 “profit” on click).
• The day I bought the songs I mentioned what I was listening to on both Twitter and Facebook. I freely promoted the band with a link to their site and my approval to a direct audience of 1,200+ people (# based on Twitter followers and Facebook friends). The tweet / update was also seen on a various other blogs / RSS feeds.
• Based off of that Social Media messaging I received 15 Twitter replies, 5 Twitter direct messages, 8  Facebook comments, 4 Facebook emails and 6 emails. 1 click on a $.10 ad resulted in the band being part of a social conversation consisting of at least 38 people who never heard of them before.
• Of the people I talked to about the band through Social Media methods, 6 of them subscribed to the bands mailing list and 54 total songs were purchased.
• So do the math - that one click resulted in an unknown (but decent) amount of people being exposed to the band, at least 7 people who are now directly engaged with the band through email and a total of 59 song purchases on iTunes. This example also only takes into account my one tweet / status update but I mentioned that I was listening to the band on numerous occasions and I know of other Social Media conversations that took place based on my “approval”.

Granted the above example works very well for the music genre, however there are many elements that companies of all shapes and sizes could take advantage of. At its core Social Media is about connecting with people and in the end isn’t that the goal?

Back in February Yahoo launched their social voting / bookmarking with only a handful of hand-picked publishers. Well finally Yahoo Buzz is now open to the public…let the spamming and widget adding begin.

Yahoo Buzz basically operates like Digg, or similar sites, where users vote for the stories that interest them. The more times a story is “Buzz’d” the higher up in the results they show. There is one key difference between Yahoo Buzz and other social sites - Yahoo allows “editorial discretion” when it comes to headlines in order to prevent serious gaming.

Here is how Yahoo describes the Yahoo Buzz process: “First, we determine the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! Then, we showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.”

So what is the big deal? Who really wants to add another social widget to their website / blog? Bottom line is that the top Yahoo Buzz stories get pushed to the Yahoo.com homepage - this link would obvioulsy generate a serious amount of traffic to the linked website. If it wasn’t for the possibility of stories hitting Yahoo.com I would be ho-hum on this.

I would obviously recommend adding a Yahoo Buzz widget to any blog / website under the category of “why not”. However, I am not sold on the traffic impact for the 99.999% of stories that don’t get to the Yahoo homepage.  Yahoo Buzz definitely deserves some monitoring in terms of  how stories get ranked and what kind of traffic it generates.

I will post a follow-up story once I have gathered enough information.

Social bookmarking web service Del.icio.us has just launched their much anticipated version 2.0 and has officially rebranded themselves as Delicious (sans dots). The relaunch of the best social bookmarking site out there brings a slicker user-interface, enhanced performance and upgraded search capabilities.

The team over at Delicious describes the changes as…”just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.” Sounds like a decent upgrade to me.

Here is a little more detail on the 3 major changes with the new Delicious.com.

• Speed: New site infrastructure focuses on loading pages faster now and as the website continues to grow past its 5 million current users.
• Search: Delicious site search is completely overhauled with a focus on speed and relevancy. As any Del.icio.us user can attest to, doing a internal search was a tedious process that usually took awhile to load results. Not any more - search is now instantaneous and more relevant.  The new site search expands into other areas when returning results, including not just a users tags but also other bookmarks and outside social networks.
• Design: Obviously this is the first thing you notice when you hit Delicious.com. The new design focuses on improved usability and enhancement of the new features.  Here are just a few of the changes that went live: new navigational organization, auto complete and sorting functionality, new bookmark layout, top 10 tags and new bundles.

So bottom line…what do I think? I like it. The new UI is solid and they didn’t go overboard with changes. For me, nothing is worse then when a highly used service goes through a complete redesign that confuses users. When it comes to the new enhancements I haven’t spent to much time going through them all, but from what I see (especially with search) the new features are great. Job well done, to bad it took you so long to get it live.

In what was no shock to anyone, Twitter officially announced their purchase of search engine Summize for roughly a few million in cash and Twitter stock (hearing different numbers from different sources). Rumors of the purchase have been floating around the internet for over a week now and most people were just waiting for the official announcement. Today we saw what was once Summize.com now direct you to Twitter Search (Search.Twitter.com),which is the same Summize user-interface but with Twitter branding.

Summize was always the best Twitter search application around, I regularly used it to not only monitor specific keywords but my own name. Summize gained a great deal of traction and traffic when Twitter was having their technical issues the past couple of months. Twitter users flocked to Summize and other search services to make sure they caught all of their @replies and friends messages. I, like many others, never stopped using it once Twitter (sort of) got their act together.

On the surface the purchase of Summize drastically improves the internal search functionality of Twitter. But, as I have discussed in previous Twitter Monetization posts, this acquisition is another step in bringing in actual revenue. How? First, they can sell ads on the Twitter Search results pages. This is the easiest and most logical immediate step as everyone would be up in arms over any sort of advertisements within the main Twitter interface and Tweets. Secondly, Twitter can license out the Summize API to other micro-blogging / Web 2.0 services to power their own internal site-search, in this scenario they can either get paid for the use or have a rev-share deal in place.

The great thing about this deal is that it is a win-win for Twitter. They have improved the user-experience, brought in some top engineers and maybe created a much needed revenue model.

Now if only they can get rid of the “Fail Whale”…

Is there a day that goes by where some new micro-blogging “Twitter Killer” isn’t launched? Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, FriendFeed…the list goes on and on. Each comes out the gate promising to be the next big thing and outside of a few earlier adopters they usually fizzle into social media purgatory - some good user numbers but nothing to get that excited over.

The latest entry into the micro-blogging field is Identi.ca and the buzz around them is of course very loud. So what is the big deal? Well, first they copy the Twitter minimalist approach in terms of user-experience. They avoid cluttering the site with other features / content and stay away from displaying content in a new way (e.g. Plurk) - Identi.ca sticks to the basics. However, the key differentiation is that while other micro-blogging services are looking to capitalize on Twitters technical issues (Fail Whale anyone?) Identi.ca actually tries to solve it. Identi.ca has made its code open-sourced and encourages users to host Identi.ca on their own servers - this approach would distribute the load if the service became extremely popular and theoretically avoid the downtime that plagues Twitter.

So why wont Identi.ca, or any other micro-blogging service, take down Twitter? The answer is simple, long-term user adoption. There is a difference between just signing up & updating a few times and actually contributing on a regular basis. For micro-blogging the power is in the conversation and right now Twitter wins hands-down. During Twitters technical issues, where it seemed like it was down more than it was up, many people tried out other services, however the majority of users have always come back to Twitter in some capacity. It is true that some other services, like FriendFeed, have better features but if you look at the traffic (see graph below) Twitter has too big of a head start in terms of users and conversations. Any other micro-blogging service who launches is automacially put behing the 8-ball and must play serious catch-up and face, in my opinion, insurmountable odds.

Right now, FriendFeed is probably the biggest Twitter competitor in terms of functionality and industry buzz.  All of the big social media players are users and some (like Jason Calacanis) have become fans and have threatened to start migrating all of their conversations to FriendFeed and away from Twitter. However, the success of a micro-blogging service has to do more than just having Calacanis, Arrington, Scoble, Israel, etc, use it - I already read their blogs and subsribe to their feeds so really how is that providing new content discovery? It isnt.

On top of users and conversations, Twitter also has two other areas where they are killing the competition: their API and mobile strategy. Just about every Web 2.0 service offers their API’s - Twitter is no different. However, because of the volume of traffic Twitter generates, numerous third-party developers have built applications that truly enhance the Twitter experience - Summize, Twellow, TwitterVision, Twirl, the list goes on and on. Granted every other micro-blogging service can replicate each of these applications, but again it comes down to users and Twitter just blows everyone else away.  In regards to mobile, Twitter has gotten this right from day one. Micro-blogging is about sending quick updates and the ability to do that from your mobile phone via text message or applications (e.g. TwitterBerry) adds another layer of ease to the conversation.

At the end of the day micro-blogging comes down to two things - users and conversations, and you cant have one without the other. Twitter has both. Twitter does need to overcome its technical hurdles and there are definite improvements to be made to the user-interface but in the end Twitter is the only micro-blogging service that doesnt have to be perfect to succeed.