Alert Blog Reviews

OK, I have learned my lesson. I am going to tell you right out of the gate that when I read this piece of information about Twitter turning a profit in 2009 I was a bit skeptical. Now, the second part of this is that the source, BusinessWeek, is well, BusinessWeek so I tend to pay attention a bit more. Well, the times they are a changin’ for sure because the distinction between the venerable BusinessWeek and the rest of the Internet space may be less noticeable than before. As I went through the article I read the following In October, Twitter said it had struck multiyear arrangements that make users’ short blog postings available on Google.com and on Bing, which is run by Microsoft. Those agreements carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances , who asked to remain anonymous because Twitter’s books are not a matter of public record. I added the italics because I now immediately place this story in the category of rumor. I suspect that if Twitter wants people to know that it turned a profit, no matter how big or small, they will let us know. Do I think they actually did turn a profit? I honestly don’t know because I don’t do their accounting and I haven’t spoken to ‘sources’ who think that leaking corporate data is cool. Now, of course, let’s not discount the possibility that Twitter allowed the leaks but now we are getting into silly territory. What this looks like though is that BusinessWeek is starting to sound more like the tech blogs and new world media that it has fought against. Verify facts with the company being covered? Nope. Two anonymous insiders will do because the story is “hot”. Oh boy. The one thing that is certain is that the biggest revenue generator (maybe only?) are the deals that were struck with Google and Microsoft for the Twitter feeds to be indexed in the search engines. These are rumored to be in the $25 million range with $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. If these numbers are indeed accurate I have to wonder what the $5 million difference is since the two companies are essentially getting the same data. Your speculation is welcome in the comments section here, as always. Another part of the ‘information’ that was ‘leaked’ to BW was the fact that Twitter has been cutting expenses and has now been left with people being the bulk of the expense to run the service. The company used to pay a lot of money to telecommunications companies for distributing billions of text messages over wireless networks. Twitter users can send and receive messages over both its Web service and text messages. Now that Twitter has become so popular, it has gained bargaining power with telecom companies and has managed to renegotiate so many deals with carriers that the company pays far less for the services. With 105 employees and estimates placing the needed money to run the operation at $25 million per year either those 105 people are making some nice coin or they have deals that are starting to look like being a pre-IPO Google employee. Either way, good for them. So as always is the tendency when looking at Twitter we must try to figure out just what will happen in the future to make more money through the widely used service. The BusinessWeek article tells us Over the last year, however, executives have started to talk about the various ways the company has been exploring to generate revenue. In addition to the search deals, Twitter plans an advertising program for early next year. The company also will charge for commercial Twitter accounts that would let businesses analyze tweet traffic. Get ready for 2010 to be a big year for Twitter as the world watches how they integrate advertising into the Tweet stream. Also, if you are a company you better make a little budget room for whatever commercial account services become available. Nothing was ‘leaked’ about how much that would cost so your guess is as good as ours or BusinessWeek’s or some anonymous guesser source.

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Twitter Profitable in 2009?

Okay, so hopefully everyone’s gotten used to the new design and layout around here by now! Honestly, we’re really loving it. We did “tone down” the graph paper background a bit, after some feedback from readers that said it was a bit too dizzying. Hope everyone agrees that things look great here now! So this post is to outline the newest way we’re accepting articles from you. A few things have changed, and there have been a few submissions that don’t quite seem to be working properly, so I wanted to put this out there to help out some. First and foremost, if you’d like to submit an article for TwiTip (and see your face “up in lights” on our sidebar and on the post itself) then you need to submit it here: Add A Tip . We’ve got a whole new format now that I think is pretty rockin’. Before, you’d email me your “pitch” and then I’d send you the guidelines, and then you’d write it and submit back. Then I’d have to put the post into the back end, format it (because typically posts would be sent written in Microsoft Word, and that puts really icky code into WordPress), and then post it. Now, you simply go to the form, fill out the fields, and submit! I get notification, and if the post is approved, I do a little font formatting and all is well! The coolest part, is that if you know basic HTML, you can submit your post in HTML. Or you can write it in your own blog editor, and copy the HTML version and paste that in there. That saves even more time, because then all the formatting is done, and I can just read and publish. The whole point of setting up this form this way was so that we could get more content in from you guys, and get it published more quickly than before. So far, it’s been a great tool to have here on the site, and you can consider this the official “Open for Business” invite to submit all your great Twitter related posts! Just keep in mind a few basic things: It cannot be a post you’ve already published elsewhere. We want original content that’s only ever going to appear here. You also shouldn’t plan on, or allow others to publish it on any other site after the fact. Also, don’t submit links to your site, or to your already published post, please. If you have images you want to include, send them to Lara [at] TwiTip [dot] com with the title of your post so I know which one to include it with. The form we’ve got is fantastic, but it doesn’t have image upload capability at the moment. Please make them decent posts. I’ve had a few come through that are basically a paragraph or two that talks about some random Twitter tool no one’s ever heard of (or would care to), or are very basic “6 Reasons To Use Twitter” type things… we’ve got enough of those! Be original and creative. Check through the site to see if we’ve written about, or posted the same type of article before. (If I get another post about HootSuite , I think I’ll scream! ) So there you have it. We’d love some fresh, new tips and posts from you, our dear readers! Oh, and if you have a Twitter related question, feel free to put that in the form as well, and we’ll post it up so other readers can have a chance to help you out! Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . TwiTip Call For More Content!

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TwiTip Call For More Content!

Last week I talked a bit about experience marketing. At the end of the post I linked to a video of a talk given by economist Joseph Pine . In Pine’s talk he briefly articulates a transformation from an agrarian economy to what we now know as an “experience economy”. Pine tells us that goods and services have become commodities, and experiences have become the growing consumer demand. It’s the same reason that so many people will pay $4.00 for a cup of coffee – the experience of connecting with a trusted brand is important to them. Pine then tells us that not all experiences are equally sought after, the dominant experience within the consumer conscious is authenticity. …authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility — the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from, and what they’re going to buy. Authenticity is responsible for fueling the independent music and art industries. It’s the reason that original concepts , that would have been written off as foolish 10 years ago, are changing the way we communicate. And it’s the same reason why Google has grown in popularity over its competitors. But Pine then fills us in on a little secret: There’s no such thing as true authenticity. This is because every experience is created by external stimuli and thus our experiences are only as authentic as they are rendered to be. In the end it is the illusion of authenticity that drives consumers to engage. To quote Rae Hoffman , “Good spam never looks like spam.” As marketers and business owners it is our job to render authenticity. If we fail at doing so, we will lose the consumer’s trust and risk being “fake”! OK, so what’s your point Joe? Last week, Google announced a gamut of changes that they will start to implement. The most significant of these changes is default personalized search . Around the same time, Google’s CEO made some pretty alarming comments regarding privacy concerns. In short, Google now collects all sorts of data about its users and then customizes its search results and other services to reflect each users unique behavior. It collects the user’s location, the web sites that they have visited, and various other pieces of data. All of this is done with relatively no consent from the user and without notifying them. It is clear that Google’s mission statement that now reads “…organize the world’s information…” should read “… exploit the world’s information…”. All of these changes reflect a continuing trend at Google to create a highly sophisticated personalized platform that not only produces the best results but also the best ads. This disregard of user privacy completely goes against the feel good, do good image that Google has worked hard to create. As a result Google is killing its rendered version of authenticity. Pine gives us three tips to staying authentic: One, don’t say you’re authentic unless you really are authentic. Two, it’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic. And three, if you say you’re authentic, you better be authentic. A large part of being authentic is staying true to yourself. Which is why classifieds giant Craigslist is fighting eBay with everything they have to retain a majority of seats on their own board. For them, running the company they founded the way they always have, is that important to them. Which is the same line of thought that ultimately lost Jerry Yang his job as the CEO of Yahoo. Yang refused to sell out in the beginning to Microsoft because he believed in his company, he believed in staying true to his ideals. At the end of the day it won’t matter who has the better search engine. If Google loses the trust of its users and cannot retain authenticity, Bing, will be more than happy to step up to the challenge of earning that trust and building its own brand of authenticity.

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Cup of Joe: The Seeds of Google Destruction Are Within

New data from Chitika indicate that Microsoft users—both browser and operating system— click on online advertisements more often than other users. And considering what a significant portion of the market those segments constitute, that’s pretty dang good news. From a sample of over 130 million impressions, Chitika saw a click-through rate of 1.05% from Internet Explorer users, versus 0.66% from Firefox users, 0.50% from Safari users and 0.21% from Chrome users. Similarly, Windows users outclick their Mac and Linux counterparts, 0.92% to 0.52% to 0.46%, respectively. According to TechCrunch, even Bing has higher click-through rates than other search engines. So why is this large audience clicking so much? Are they “gullible,” as TechCrunch asks, not savvy enough to switch browsers or recognize an ad, or simply more engaged? For whatever reason, this large group of the market certainly constitutes a valuable segment for marketers. What do you think? Why do Microsoft users click more?

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There’s Something about Microsoft Users?

Ow, brain freeze! Brain freeze! You know that sensation. It usually accompanies the consumption of too much of a good thing, such as ice cream, milkshakes, or…Google updates?!? Yeah, apparently we’re at that time of the year when Google initiates its own “brain” freeze–effectively shutting down innovation until the New Year. Writes TechCrunch … …people at Google are still working, but apparently Google has a “code freeze” policy that goes in place sometime in December. If you don’t get your product/service out the door by then, it gets pushed til when the freeze is lifted, likely sometime in the new year. A few Googlers confirmed this policy off-the-record, but all seemed concerned about publicly acknowledging it. It certainly makes sense–based on the recent flurry of new Google updates–but I’m not entirely convinced that we won’t see any updates over the next 4 weeks. All it would take is some big announcement from Microsoft, and Google will be just a matter of hours behind it–with its own announcement. You can take that to the bank!

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Ow! Ow! Google Brain Freeze!

As I mentioned yesterday, I love Bing’s shopping engine . In no small part because I can earn some serious cashback . As long as I make sure I’m getting the lowest price in the first place, the cashback makes it worth using Bing. So, Google Product Search can wave all the new fancy features in front of me that it wants, if I ain’t getting a kickback, I ain’t using Google! OK, maybe some of you aren’t quite so price conscious as me. Maybe for you, shopping is more about the journey, than the destination. If that’s the case, you’re going to love the scenery Google just added. First, we have a new gallery view: We also have new review summaries: Nearby stores: Video product reviews and a mobile friendly interface complete the list of new features. But, what it doesn’t have is this: And, until it does, I’m sticking with Bing! Note: This is not a paid post, but someone, somewhere at Microsoft PR just got a raise.

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Google Product Search: Give Me Cashback or Give Me Death!

A confession. Sometimes I use Bing.com. Stop looking at me that way. I said I “use” Bing.com. I didn’t say I enjoy it! In fact, I “use” Bing.com when I’m shopping online and want to get the best price. Bing has a pretty cool shopping engine and I can get up to 10% cashback with its cashback program . See? I use Bing.com. The problem is, that use does not result in me using the search engine for any other task. And that is the issue I see with rumors that Bing is willing to pay News Corp and other news organizations to provide their content exclusively to the Microsoft search engine. The FT reports : Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. OK, so let’s say this deal comes together–which I really doubt–but let’s say it does. What will happen? I, and many others, will know that in order to read an article on the Wall Street Journal, we have to go to Bing.com and not Google. We conduct our search, read the article, then decide to keep Bing as our default search engine …go right back to using Google! While Bing does need to get some exclusives like this, I just don’t see them being enough to fully switch the masses away from Google. If I know that my favorite bread is only available at Trader Joe’s, I’ll occasionally buy my bread there. The rest of the grocery shopping will be done at Harris Teeter…technically by my wife, but you get the idea. What do you think? Will deals like this convince you to switch to Bing? Forget you–you’re smart–will it convince the average search user to switch? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Why a Deal With News Corp Would Make Bing the Trader Joe’s of Search