Sunday, March 27, 2011

Are you a #twit when you #tweet? Measuring #Influence

Good article courtesy of NY Times David Leonhardt...follow the path to Twitalyzer.com to determine how much time you're actually wasting vs. actually influencing by tweeting.

A Better Way to Measure Twitter Influence

Illustrations by La Tigre

Whether you’re a Twitter user like Lady Gaga (millions and millions of followers) or, say, me (2,600 and growing!), you’re always aware of roughly how many people follow you. It’s just how people keep score on the site and compare themselves with friends and colleagues.

But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point to me recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.

So who are the most influential people on Twitter? We asked the people at Twitalyzer, an independent research firm, to study the question, and they came back with something called the Influence Index. It counts the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including retweets, which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). The Influence Index doesn’t merely measure who’s talking on Twitter, but it also measures how much someone is affecting the conversation. Look below at how low Lady Gaga’s influence score is, for example.

Among the discoveries: It helps to come from one of the four countries where Twitter is most popular — the United States, Brazil, England and Canada. That may explain why there are three unfamiliar names, at least to most Americans, in the Top 10: Stephen Fry (a British actor), Luciano Huck (a Brazilian television star) and Rafinha Bastos (a Brazilian comedian).

Eric T. Peterson, the chief executive of Twitalyzer, points out that some of the most influential users also make a big effort to respond to much less famous people with personal messages. Kim Kardashian falls into this category. President Obama, as you may have guessed, does not.

One last thing: Twitalyzer’s public Web site doesn’t let people calculate their own influence scores. But you can get your impact score, which is a 0-to-100 index that combines influence, number of followers and frequency of message writing. To calculate that, type your Twitter name into the box here.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

A Brands Best Spokesperson Is...

As noted by marcom advisory JLC Group , happy employees (and not necessarily your sales execs), followed by satisfied customers, are a brand's two most powerful torch carriers when it comes to promoting your brand.

Consistent with that erudite observation, WSJ's Sarah Nassauer's headline story in today's paper "A New Sales Model:Employees" might not be a new revelation per se, but her story profiles several companies (Zappos & J.Crew) leveraging that theory, with one of today's most powerful branding applications; both of these companies are producing [hopefully viral] online videos that profile employees either modeling or demonstrating their companies' products/services. This strategy completely conforms to ad industry's scientific theory that "real people", as opposed to actors or celebrity spokesmodels prove to be a brand's best influencers.

Coincident to WSJ article's reference to brand-based online video schemes,  the NYT Business section today dedicates a half page "viral video strategies of the week" to Thinkmodo and the strategy they devised and implemented on behalf of upcoming film "Limitless"...  The Youtube driven shorts have apparently attracted 500,000 viewers in the last four days alone. Let's hope that the film comes out real soon, otherwise the recall rate is at risk of melting down faster than a nuclear power plant.

Speaking of online--for you marketing/sales execs overseeing online and e-commerce initiatives--keep your fingers on the pulse of increased brick and mortar retail lobbying efforts to turn up the volume on imposing sales tax on products sold over the Internet.

Friday, March 11, 2011

#SocialMedia & #Financial Services: Buy-Sell-Hold?

For brokers, savvy traders and fund managers: the trend is your friend; don't fight the tape.
That said, when it comes to regulated industries, this compliant author reminds you: bears and bulls profit; pigs get slaughtered.

For those that have been following this blog on a regular basis, you know that we've dedicated many posts over the years to the topic of social media, and that we've profiled various strategies used by various brand marketers across various industries.

More recently, and because this author frequently resides at the intersection of Madison Ave. and Wall Street, we've poignantly observed the social media initiatives (lack of, poorly executed, and best execution) demonstrated by financial service industry players.

There's an increasing  number of expert observations on this very topic (see links below), and illustrative of the need for smart thinking, its interesting to note that social media czar Neil Edwards, the serial entrepreneur and former CEO of mobile game maker Cellufun, has recently switched gears; he's now offering expert social media guidance to major banks, brokers and fund managers.

Perhaps the most resonating recent observation extracted from a March 8 article in Financial Planner:

"..But many in the industry still find social media as an effective way to connect with and enhance their relationship with clients. At the recent TD Ameritrade Conference in San Diego, Christopher Van Slyke, a partner and co-founder of Trovena, LLC, spoke about how Facebook has been a boon for his business.

“Why is Facebook the third largest nation on Earth,” he asked the packed room attending the Social Media Bootcamp run by Marie Swift of Impact Communications. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Facebook allows you to leverage who you know. If your business is relationships and your relationships are better because of social media than it has helped.”

editor note: this article profiles the planned social media initiative by SecondMarket, the electronic exchange platform facilitating the trading of non-public shares in companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc ...Yet another story from today's WSJ profiles the initiatives of online poker casinos that are gearing up again to help win the legislative battles that are brewing in states from Nevada to New Jersey..

If they were really smart, they'd call Neil Edwards before doing something that might backfire..

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

#Social Media Does Sell: Shares In Company

In response to blowback we rec'd from powerhouses Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan re: most recent posting "..consumers don't respond to brand pitches via social media."....we've been asked to clarify.

In view of the fact both of these global investment banks have acquired direct and/or indirect stakes in Facebook, Twitter (respectively) and un-named other social media enterprises via investment funds created by those banks, it should be perfectly clear that social media does sell, even if only what is selling are private shares in these companies to 'institutional investors' at prices that remind us grey beards of the Internet bubble(s) that inflated and popped back in the ancient times of the late 20th century.

According to this a.m.'s NY Times, Twitter's valuation is now north of $4.2 billion +/-, up 30% in the past six months alone. Twitter's 2010 revenue of $100 million (unconfirmed because its not a public company), is derived mostly from advertising deals. Taking off our CMO hat and putting on our CFO hat, that means Twitter is worth 45x revenue.

Having worked on Wall Street in a prior life, and notwithstanding the extraordinary profit margins leading web and social companies enjoy (Zynga purportedly delivers 45% net margins, GOOG 30%, YHOO! north of 25% profit margins, etc), this writer can only say "WOW!" re: Twitter's seemingly preposterous valuation.

For argument sake, let's give Twitter the benefit of the doubt and estimate that ad sales will increase 50% a year for the next few years, unless of course some 20 yr old introduces a better mousetrap before hand.

Come 2013, Twitter might therefore deliver $500 million in gross revenue, and let's say their profit margin narrows to 40%, providing a bottom line $200 million in profit. Obviously, we can't predict what the market valuation might be three years from now, but when reflecting on the 150+ year history of organized financial markets, enterprise valuations of 20x gross profit is pretty pie in the sky, when considering GOOG's valuation is about 5x its gross revenue.

Let's give JPMorgan the benefit of the doubt--its not as if they're buying a stake in Twitter without having a hedge in place (including the ability to quickly move any proprietary position into a 'fund' they manage for investors. Or maybe they're intrigued by the black box apps that are interrogating stock market-related Tweets and using the data to make intra-day bets on global markets. Presuming JPMC's people can get themselves an inside track on tweets a few seconds before they get published, their several hundred million dollar investment in IT, regardless of the 'valuation,' is certainly justifiable. If only Bernie Madoff were still on the outside!