Alert Blog Reviews

Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream . And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr to analyze participating publishers’ followers, as well as how they receive ads. The analytics offer information on user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad said the analytics, “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.” As with all user-based social media advertising, there have been a number of ethical and practical questions floating around Ad.ly. Would a service like this increase the noise in the stream? Would it turn off or even drive away followers? Now users are better equipped to understand how their followers interact with their sponsored tweets. What do you think? Would you use Ad.ly? What kind of analytic data would you need to help you evaluate the service?

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Sponsored Tweets from Ad.ly Add Analytics

It’s been a long time doming, but now it’s officially, truly, official: AOL is part of Time Warner no more. (Technically, actually, AOL bought Time Warner—isn’t that weird?—and now they’re the ones being spun off.) And with its newly-single status, AOL is eyeing every woman in the room—especially old flame Yahoo. They were flirting (or at least rumors have been flying) heavily last year , with reports resurfacing periodically . But now the love has turned to rivalry, with AOL and Yahoo both focusing on their Internet display advertising businesses . AOL is also looking to take on other Internet behemoths like Citysearch, Yelp and Google in a local effort : The initiative — which he characterized as “digitizing towns” — will grow to 100 municipalities in 2010, [AOL CEO and ex-Googler Tim] Armstrong said. Providing a turn-key platform where schools, government departments, local businesses, and classified listings firms can create or update Web sites will be at the heart of the effort. AOL is also focusing on an API-intensive ad platform to allow users to interface directly with their data. That’s cool. But the heart of their plan is their content. AOL will be heavily focusing its advertising sales upon its own properties, where 80% of the content is original. Yahoo, by contrast, has about 20% original content. What do you think? Can AOL be turned around, or is it too late?

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AOL vs Yahoo–Again

At the LeWeb conference in Paris Twitter is busy making sure that all the developments in the real-time search and social media world aren’t just coming from the Googleplex. Maybe it’s the end of the year rush or it’s the need to create excitement going into 2010 since 2009 was a rough year for many. Whatever the reason the news is fast and furious inthe space in general. Twitter’s busy letting the world in on the sheer volume of apps that have been developed for the service and how they are going to help foster more growth in the near future. TechCrunch is convering the event and tells us Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at LeWeb a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem. He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs. The roadmap ahead: Transparency : “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions” Communication : “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on” Utility : “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive” Profitability : “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010) Of course, since this is Twitter most people will laser in on the P word (profitability). Some of the significant ‘details’ around these areas is that everyone will have full access to the data stream in 2010 (what that actually means is TBD). Look for a new website for developers with dashboards and the like for the development community. Also, as a sign that the development of apps is truly a big deal there will be a Twitter developer conference in 2010 called Chirp in San Francisco next year The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010). So Twitter continues to flourish and develop to try to handle the continued growth despite some concern about visitor fall off recently. I suspect that some of the developers are the very reason for this ‘concern’ as many people access Twitter through third party apps to begin with and those growing numbers are not tracked by these number crunching entities. Looks like 2010 is going to be another big year for Twitter.

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Twitter’s App Nest Is Big and Growing

I’ve been a contributing analyst for the eConsultancy/ cScape Customer Engagement Survey over the past few years. The 2010 edition has just landed and I thought I would share with you the data that jumped out at me. Email Newsletters Fading? The 2nd Customer Engagement Survey saw businesses focusing their efforts on using email newsletters to improve customer engagement. An incredible 69% of companies stated that they had measured a tangible improvement through their e-newsletter campaigns so it was not a surprise that 59% planned to invest heavily in email marketing by the time we came to the third survey. By contrast, investment in social networks – such as Facebook – was down on the list of priorities with only 36% of companies planning to increase their investment in that area. Social Networks See Huge Investment So, what happened now we are on survey four and looking at 2010? Those that took a chance and invested in social networks saw a big return on investment. For companies, email newsletters still rated as the tactic offering the highest tangible improvement (67%) but a whopping 44% – almost double the percentage from 2009 – have discovered that social networks helped increase their online customer engagement. That return on investment has clearly caught the attention of both companies and their agencies. In 2010, the survey predicts that 61% of company executives will be increasing their focus on social networks , while agencies are even more bullish, expecting their clients to spend more on social networking (66%) than even email newsletters (41%). Twitter’s King of Engagement Perhaps the most stunning statistic is the percentage of companies that plan to invest in Twitter as a channel for customer engagement. In last year’s report, Twitter barely registered with survey participants with just 7% of companies realizing improved customer engagement from Twitter, hence only 13% planned to invest in Twitter in 2009. What a difference a year makes! Twitter has seen massive growth and companies are scrambling to make the micro-blogging channel a key part of their customer engagement efforts. In fact, with 35% of companies seeing an improvement in their customer engagement from Twitter in 2009, almost 44% of companies plan to increase their investment in Twitter in 2010. That’s a three-fold improvement over last year! Engagement = Conversations What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, it’s apparent that companies are realizing that customers expect engagement to be a two-way dialogue. Email newsletters are a great way to keep customers updated but they don’t really engage them. Instead, companies are seeing measurable benefits of actually having a conversation with their customers be it via Facebook, Twitter or whatever, making them willing to invest more of their marketing/PR budgets to reap the fruits of that engagement. Want to get your hands on all the data? Get your copy of the cScape/Econsultancy report!

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Customer Engagement Survey Shows Twitter is King of ROI

I’ve heard that a company can get so big, it can “put you on the map,” but Google is apparently SO massive, it can put whole villages on the map–even ones that don’t exist! The UK’s Telegraph reports on the fictitious town Argleton that’s appearing in Google Maps. The town doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s in Google Maps, it’s causing a few headaches: An internet search for the town now brings up a series of home, job and dating listings for people and places “in Argleton”, as well as websites which help people find its nearest chiropractor and even plan jogging or hiking routes through it. The businesses, people and services listed are real, but are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode area. There’s speculation that Argleton is nothing more than a “trap street”–often inserted into maps to catch people violating the map owner’s copyright. I’m not so sure. Google’s quite happy to encourage the use of its maps in all manner of mashups, so I suspect that it’s more likely to be a mistake than a “gotcha.” That appears to be the case–at least according to the official response from Google: “While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors. We’re constantly working to improve the quality and accuracy of the information available in Google Maps and appreciate our users’ feedback in helping us do so. People can report an issue to the data provider directly and this will be updated at a later date.” Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see if Google Maps can help me find Narnia, the land of the unicorns, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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Camelot, Atlantis and Now, Argleton

Imagine for a second that I’m a doctor. Now imagine that I specialize in…ahem…erectile disfunction. Let’s say the average married couple has sexual intercourse 3-4 times a month–backed-up by most national surveys. But, I conduct a survey among my viagra-popping patients, and release a report that suggests married couples are in fact having sex 8-10 times a month. Would you throw out the other data? Or, would you piece this together and say, “wait a minute, of course you’re seeing a higher number?” Well, that’s the observation I made when reviewing iCrossing’s new study that suggests Google accounts for almost 77% of search engine visitors–compared to the 65% and 71% suggested by comScore and Hitwise respectively. Either I’m the only one seeing this, or it’s all in my head, but wouldn’t a company that helps its clients improve their Google traffic, see higher numbers like this? Now, I know that SEO firms supposedly help you with all your search engine traffic, so this Google-bias should be negated, but do they? I don’t know a single search marketing firm–or client for that matter–that doesn’t focus 90%+ of its efforts on increasing traffic from Google. With that kind of focus, aren’t you artificially increasing the search share you realize from Google? Look, I’m not out to bash iCrossing. I just want to help you connect the dots that this data is no more unbiased than Click Forensics’ reports on click fraud. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Why iCrossing is to Search Share as Viagra is to Sexual Intercourse

Quick: if I asked you “Do you use an Internet service or site to share updates about yourself?”, how would you answer? “Yes: Facebook,” “Yes: my blog,” “Yes: Twitter,” (yes, all of the above)? Okay, let’s say I took all of those yeses, no matter which site/service you use, and declared them all to be Tweets. Face it: someone with that little regard for the differences between the above types of sites probably shouldn’t consider himself/herself to be an Internet researcher. 19% of Internet users answered yes to the question “Do you use Twitter or another service to update your status about yourself, or to see others’ statuses?” in a Pew Internet & American Life study , up from 11% in April and last December. Naturally, Pew concludes that all 19% of them use Twitter. Brilliant. In fact, they’re so confused, I’m having a hard time figuring out these stats. They’ve mixed up the data so well that I can’t tell whether they mean “update their status” or “actually use Twitter” whenever they talk about Twitter use. I’m pretty sure they mean “update status” instead of “Twitter” here. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure they don’t know what they mean. Pew, of course, is a respected research firm and has never, ever run a sensationalized headline, or failed to think through their conclusions. Like, maybe, telling us that nobody on the Internet takes their product research to influence their purchase decisions and including non-Internet users in the stats , or defining a “purchase decision” as something other than deciding where and what to buy or something. Nope. However, they have discovered why I don’t tweet very often, and that might earn back all that lost respect. The study shows that wireless Internet access, and more and more wireless devices, are both positively correlated with updating one’s status. About 25% of Internet users with a wireless device—including, interestingly, a laptop—update their status, while only 8% of those with a tethered connection do. And, unsurprisingly, the more wireless devices you have, the more likely you are to update your status: “Fully 39% of internet users with four or more internet-connected devices (such as a laptop, cell phone, game console, or Kindle) use Twitter [they mean update their status], compared to 28% of internet users with three devices, 19% of internet users with two devices, and 10% of internet users with one device.” There isn’t any research on whether the increased access leads to diminished quality. (”I am sitting on the porch.” “I haven’t updated my status for two hours.” “Bored in line.”) Other stats in the study: women update more than men, and Internet users 18-44 update more than older users. I can’t decide whether it’s just laziness or ignorance (I’m loath to put stupidity on the list) that leads to conflating Twitter use with updating status (or even just reading others’ statuses). As TechCrunch notes, Facebook was among the first to coin the term “status update,” which isn’t used by Twitter. Facebook, meanwhile, told TechCrunch they see 45 million status updates every day. So why don’t I tweet enough? Apparently I need more wireless devices. What do you think? Is this a good indicator of Twitter use, or just superficial research that doesn’t tell us enough to draw conclusions about Twitter?

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19% of Internet Users Update their Statuses