Tweets for Sale! Buy your tweet here!
April 13, 2010
Twitter announced Tuesday that it’s allowing companies to pay to have their tweets show up first in searches on its site. The new advertising model is to be tested by Virgin, Best Buy and host of other companies.
The paid tweets will show up if you follow the advertiser or not, and if not retweeted they will “disappear” …
Enjoy the new business model, I can’t wait to get my new Geek Squad tweet offering the latest Windows based virus protection software for my linux machine.
Find another way to make money Twitter, this isn’t going to work as well as you think.
The major problem is that people are saying “I don’t want to hear about Best Buy” …. and the kicker… there is talk that twitter is considering an offer of “pay not to get ads”
That’s right if you don’t pay you get bombarded with ads…but if you shell out money you will get your tweets spam free! The source of that is close to the company and I can verify that was discussed at a recent meeting.
Enjoy the new reality.
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The next bubble…
March 29, 2010
Whilst perusing my IM contacts today… the Founder has this as his IM status at the moment…
“Looking for the next bubble”
So I IM’d him and let him know the next bubble is already upon us… the vaunted “social media” craze that currently exists (to which is readily agreed.)
My theory is built around a few undeniable facts:
1) There are shitloads of wankers, liars and bullshit artists selling themselves as “social media experts” - DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
If this is not a warning sign to all…perhaps you should recheck your prescription (optical and/or medicinal) because to become an expert should take the sane person all of a couple of hours to come up with the basics of what their potential company should be doing and why.
Most of the charlatans out there will tell you that you need to invest in a variety of platforms and this should be “organic growth” (or some other bullshit phrase or terminology that is the current word de jour.)
In the immortal words of my good friend Chuck D. of Public Enemy — “Don’t believe the hype”
Social media is just a very small sub-sect of something somewhat commonly referred to as “customer engagement” - and it is vastly more complicated than just being on Facebook, Twitter or another SN wankfest. (Most of that you can get accomplished in under a couple of hours — and with FB they offer all the analytics you need to make a ROI justification so you can do it as a self-service job if you have half a brain.)
If you have real customer engagement — well you have something both valuable & tangible — but trying to justify developing social media strategies as the lone component in the equation is like saying because you can throw a paper airplane, you should be able to guide that A-380 with 500+ passengers on-board to Tokyo next week with no problem.
I know people I have both hired & worked with a lot of people who market/sell themselves them as a “SN expert” these days…and even if they are great people and may be a excellent person to grab a beer and have a chat about the local sports team — they don’t really know shit about the anything about the scope beyond their own small world viewpoint — a world that I could teach you out of an online tutorial in under an hour.
To ask them to actually understand the needs of a multi-national corporation and the requirements that the people in the senior roles within these companies face on a daily basis — well let’s just say you are playing in the very shallow end of the business gene pool when it comes down to brass tacks.
It is the same problem that vexes the agency world these days — a lot of tosspots who know fuck all about nothing trying to sell something to clients that they apparently desperately need (if you are listening to the drivel of the tosspots that is.)
Now I can see why it is like this of course — several current digital agencies pray on their unknowing clients this way — jack them up for huge fees and inflate incredibly complex and lengthy timelines or something that if the client knew how easy it all actually was — well let’s say that the agency and client would soon be parting ways with a flurry of lawsuits soon to follow.
2) For the most part, SN destinations are built on the premise that one day they’ll make money and it is great to get in on the ground floor while the opportunity is there…
This is the Bernie Madoff scheme way of thinking… i.e. there are several large monuments to this type of theory if you happen to visit Egypt…
When is Twitter going to start making $$$ exactly? If you read the reports of Biz Stone’s unveiling of the “@anywhere” platform at SWSX a couple of weeks ago (an aside -what the fuck is that actually supposed to mean?) — well to be kind it vacillated between “floating like a lead balloon” to “re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” — which is something like one apparently feels when Martin Sorrell speaks on any subject too…
As the Founder has mentioned here a few times before on various stories that have crossed the wires over the past few months — there are shitloads of small start-ups who rely on platforms like Twitter to build out their platform — which is like building a business on false hope if nothing else.
My current favorite is Four Square (4sq.com for the hipsters here) — or as I have dubbed it “Let me rob you of your valuable possessions while you are out making a scene somewhere…” sure “location-based services” (another phrase du jour) will someday be important….but at the moment, there is no business model that supports the bloody thing — other than making you seem like a self-important douchebag for being the “mayor” of your living room or getting a badge like you are some super-efficient boy scout…
I will go further about this (as there are several additional points one could add to validate the argument) but I’m sure you have all resorted to giving me the international “hand job” hand motion (if you have made it this far) and written me off as a cranky bastard while cueing up my “wrap it up” awards ceremony music…so I’m off to develop something sustainable for my clients… check you later…
(and I’ll try and not make it a month-plus before my next post — but can you blame me — there is only so much shit you can stand to shovel and the agency world produces way too much in proportion to its actual impact on society)
Update:
In a delicious bit of both irony & hypocrisy (and what would the ad world be without massive heaps of both) — you can sign up for my twitter ramblings (lots of swearing and bashing ensue) here:
http://twitter.com/ondownlow
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@drudgerep - New Drudge Report Twitter Feed
February 11, 2010
I know others have created a twitter feed for the Drudge Report, but most of them were filled with bugs and I figured I would make a clean cut easy way for a reliable Drudge Report Twitter Feed located at http://twitter.com/drudgerep . Since the election season is around the corner, generally speaking that site tends to get more traffic and is useful, what’s not useful is being forced to visit the site every 10 minutes to find out what is breaking. So a Twitter feed is easy enough right?
Well it wasn’t that easy… See Matt Drudge is still posting to that site the same way he did in 1996, a single html file that it appears he manually FTP’s up. This isn’t wordpress or a CMS by any modern definition. Though he may have been the first Political Blogger, he’s clearly not caring about any modern conveniences that blogging now has.
That means that there is NO RSS feed, no Atom feed, no modern social media tools.
So I decided to start to code a scraper, a script that will literally just go though the HTML every x minutes and find the new links, then post them into an RSS feed.
Then I found a site that did this already.
http://www.drudgereportfeed.com/ The feed appears to then use a a Google owned product called FeedBurner.com .. fair enough. But now I have working RSS feed, but now I must take that RSS feed to put it into Twitter.
So I started reading into the Twitter API information to build a script that would allow for this.
I then found a site called twitterfeed.com and plugged in the credentials to the new twitter feed that I created, and working with Twitter’s API it worked. But I had to specify a URL shortner as most of the URLs that Matt posts are 1.5 million characters long.
I figured I would use bit.ly since it’s owned by the same investment company twitter is.
So after that was complete, I then realised.. I had to do zero coding and now I have a reliable twitter feed that updates almost in real time.
I love the Internet.
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Twitter is the new MySpace
February 7, 2010
Only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered that month. Which is down from more than 70% in early 2007 according to George Parker.
If this pattern holds, you’ll be looking at another MySpace within a matter of 2 years. You know, the social media site that no one goes to.
This is the typical rise and fall of any social media site in recent history, Facebook most likely will be following a similar pattern, though it’s rise wasn’t as quick as twitters, so the chances are it’s fall won’t be as fast either.
Yes the law of Gravity applies here.
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@billgates - congrats on your new twitter feed!
January 20, 2010
Bill Gates has joined twitter. His account, @billgates carries the verified account symbol
Bill Gates recently has been known more for social work and helping underprivileged individuals than the founder of Microsoft. The fact that he opened a Twitter account makes it helpful to get a direct feed into his thoughts and opinions.
Happy to see you online Mr. Gates
So we guess we shouldn’t post this anymore :)
He noted on his twitter post that there is more he wants to learn about the service, he’ll get the ropes soon enough. Twitter isn’t hard to use, we find it interesting the number of people he follows.. a whopping 40 of them.
I only wished he did that 15 years ago when he was running Microsoft, and Microsoft actually counted… yea I know.. twitter didn’t exist then…
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First Twitter Murder - Twitter blamed for murder
January 12, 2010
Clearly Twitter is at fault here, everyone knows that twitter is the real cause, not some lunatic… or the fact that the murderer used a shotgun to kill him. So the foxnews report says “twitter killed him” whereas someone else might say “we need gun laws because he was murdered by a gun”
How about this people, the idiot murdered someone and he needs to go to jail.
Twitter can be blamed for a bunch of things, such as epic levels of spam, waste of time, etc etc.. but to blame Twitter for murder? That report has to come from foxnews… oh wait.. it does. Because if the report came from MSNBC of course it would blame the gun.
Anyone ever blame the person that did it?
Twitter didn’t kill this person, the internet didn’t kill this person, the gun didn’t kill this person. The murderer killed this person.
/ end of rant.
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Advertising in Social Media for the Christmas Season
December 23, 2009
It’s rough out there. We have multiple reasons this is a difficult time to advertise in general, mostly because the volume is so loud. When a client hires an advertising agency and this season comes around, it’s a fight for B2C clients because they are trying to sell their products for the season. The amount of advertising, specials, TV ads, incredible bids for keywords on PPC, etc etc add up to the point where it just becomes a media channel fest in terms of noise.
It also becomes a nightmare for B2B businesses. This is where it is a difficult month and a half. See the biggest threat is vacation. Literally. So ad agencies have turned to social media… ping them on Twitter, update your facebook page… you can reach them on the internet when they are on vacation.
It becomes more and more problematic to reach the individuals when a large part of them are at home with their families on a rightly deserved vacation.
When is enough … enough? Even the volume of spam coming in has tripled.
So we get some of these type questions on or about this time of year.
“Why are our traffic numbers from the last 2 weeks in November lower than our last 2 weeks in December ?”
You’d think that this is self explanatory, perhaps giving the client a photograph or a home movie of a 4 year old staring at the fireplace waiting for Santa Claus to come crashing in. But it doesn’t sink in to many clients.
I never wanted to look at Christmas that way, I just wanted to see my 4 year old looking at the fireplace… but here we go… it’s the holiday season.
The point of this is simple… 48 hours before Christmas, and my twitter feed is full of specials, my facebook is littered with garbage… and nothing will get read or acted on until on or about the 27th… and then it will mostly be using the delete button.
Merry Christmas. Even Santa Claus is trying to get people to register on his website via Twitter.
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Lehigh University to allow Facebook and Twitter logins
November 30, 2009
Pretty cool, Lehigh.Me , the official Lehigh University (college of education) blog is allowing anyone with a Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! or any other various accounts to login to comment to the blog.
I think it’s It’s pretty nifty, considering I am the one that implemented it, that people don’t need to remember another login to comment. If you are already logged into Facebook or Twitter for example, you can comment without having to login at all.
Yey me! :)
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Ad Agency Publicis : You’re gonna have to pay for Hulu
November 17, 2009
Evidently Maurice Levy feels that there is not enough advertising dollars out there to support any real growth online. So he came to the stunning solution that people will actually have to pay for services rendered. Novel idea. Wonder where he got that… it’s only the general concept of economic activity for the past 10,000 years.
“Free content devalues everything in the food chain. It is disintermediating everything, including ad agencies and advertising revenues,” he said.
Really, and people want to spend money to see a guy falling off a donkey on Youtube shot by a cell phone camera?
What Maurice doesn’t understand however is that people don’t like to shell out money, the services online has to be compelling enough to make people feel the need to shell out their hard earned money during the great recession. Good luck with that. Mostly because there is an expectation that if I pay money for a service, I don’t want any of his services included.
Think about it, would you pay money for something if it was filled with advertising? I had no problem shelling out money for Modern Warfare 2, because I am not expecting to be see some unwanted advertising. So yes Maurice, I will pay for some online services, just as long as your services are not there. Also if you guys want to take a pot shot at me for stating this, feel free to attack me all you want.. my Xbox Live account username is “AdAgency”.
I’m fine with advertising on Hulu because it’s free… I’m not fine with advertising while playing Modern Warfare 2 because I paid for it. Understand the concept yet Maurice?
“Advertising cannot cover the cost of everything in the new digital media world. Other sources of generating revenues will have to be created, such as having consumers pay for some content. It cannot all be free or paid for with advertising,” Levy told me in a weekend interview at the Monaco Media Forum, co-sponsored by Publicis. Seeking Alpha is reporting
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Twitter Revenue Model Leaked - OMFG
November 5, 2009
Ok… this is JUST OFF the presses, it’s not verified… and until this rumor is either put down by Twitter and co.. or accepted you have to treat it as such.
We were TOLD …by a source close to the company .. that twitter is contemplating putting all external links though their own redirect service that is akin to the Digg Bar… meaning that it will have (this is what we were told) a retweet button on the left and advertising on the right hand side along with “close bar” and other “features” to the twitbar - twitterbar - revenue bar whatever you wanna call it.
Again this is unconfirmed… but any and every single link that goes though twitter will forced through their own redirect service.. IE: no more tinyurl … however it was discussed that bit.ly might actually be the vendor…. story is developing..
Someone confirm from Twitter if this is true?
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