Tag Archive for ‘twitter’

Tag Archive for 'twitter'

Earned media ?

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Earned media is media you don’t buy but earn the hard way.

I was reading the insightful post of Fred Wilson about Earned Media and wanted to share the slides he prepared with a friend.

They asked me what “Earned Media” was, and I realized it’s not easy to explain to a non-tech savvy. I just came up with two simple (known) examples: a superbowl commercial versus the JetBlue twitter team.

The SuperBowl commercial costs $3M for 30 seconds of time. 30 seconds in which everyone jumps out of the sofa to get new fresh bears, the bar stool to use the restrooms and order new chicken wings, …. And of course, the $3M doesn’t include the commercial production costs! Yes, you reach potentially an audience of 90 million viewers. Potentially.

On the other side, you have the JetBlue twitter team. JetBlue decided to to have a bunch of people “listen to the twittersphere” and answer some requests, claims, concerns. See below an exchange - isn’t this cool? Can you imagine screaming out (i.e. twittering) that Google suck today because Gmail is down, and then receiving a response saying “Sorry, we know, servers down… Hang on tight!”.

Earned Media would require some more interaction and integration with existing services. Think picture uploads on Flickr, videos on YouTube, a fan page on Facebook, a blog of course, live feeds on JustinTV and UStream, and all that regularly updated.

This is basically called online presence, needs to be lively and requires interaction to the user and users. And the best thing of all: it doesn’t cost a lot.

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Twitter is no search engine

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I had a discussion yesterday with my friend Michael about the future of twitter and their potential positioning. It’s funny that it was relayed this morning in a Techcrunch article.

Why would I bother?

First of all, I’m not a twitter fan. I use it personally, and so far I’ve been using it as a communication tool. I do it because I want to stay on top, and reach an audience that is beyond (besides?) my personal audience.

But all of my friends are on Facebook, and all of them update their Facebook Status. Even when they use Twitter more than their Facebook status, they update their Facebook Status via Twitter (like @ceonyc, @cyrillamblard, @danielito, …).

And finally, until now, nothing has been easier to follow a conversation than Facebook: you can comment it, you’re notified when someone answers, you see a clear thread of conversations.

I don’t see how this specific usage of Twitter, even now that it reached a critical mass, could make it a search engine. How can “@so-and-so Yes man, you rock, loved that article but @thingamajig sucked last night” constitute the raw data for a search engine?

But …

But I also use Twitter for CabEasy. CabEasy allows taxi users to share cab rides, and each time they create a cab ride, they can tweet it. In addition, I’ve been using twitter to “source” the market and contact people who were looking to share a cab ride … with twitter. When I started doing that, I realized the value of this data mining (Summize at the time).

Actually, traffic is not free and to get some on CabEasy.com I have to pay. If I had a CPL (cost per lead) of $1, whether it’s through affiliation partnerships, advertising on Google or Facebook, or automatic responses on Twitter, I would be ready to pay to use twitter’s service if it brings me (i.e. CabEasy) qualified traffic. That’s where I think twitter could go. And they just might.

There’s been a lot of ink on what Twitter should do, and I’m not gonna add to it. This is just a reaction - and my 2 cents - on TechCrunch’s article.

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I want to be the CEO of such a service

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I wrote yesterday about premium and pricing options for CabEasy.com. This afternoon, I was reading Allen Stern’s note on CenterNetworks about Twitter stopping to deliver outbound SMS to twitter users in Canada.

Continue reading ‘I want to be the CEO of such a service’

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Twitbin and twitter’s quota ?

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I’m trying to be more “present” on Twitter. Until now, I’ve been a silent follower / spectator.

I followed mainly through the Gmail chat client, and when I’m off grid receive all the updates by email. I filter through the twitter-noise and try to get the important updates (market intelligence, benchmark, locations, …).

So I just installed Twitbin, and it didn’t last hald an hour until I got the “Unfortunately you’ve exceeded Twitter’s maximum hourly requests.“.

Yeehaa, I am off to a great start !

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Finally: Facebook mini-feed comments !!

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I’m not using FriendFeed, and maybe I should. I have a limited use of Twitter, but find it very useful to follow friends and industry news. The reason I don’t use twitter more is the limited conversation visibility and transparency: I have been frustrated by the lack of visibility I have on a thread of messages (not me to many, but external to me, so as a spectator). Of course there are third party tools that allow this, maybe like Summize but it requires an extra effort to get to them - an we all know web apps are great for limiting efforts.

Continue reading ‘Finally: Facebook mini-feed comments !!’

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Twitter API - How to send tweets from a Wordpress “Tweet this” button

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I just posted that I installed a new feature that I called “Tweet This” on My Life Sucks … Big Time !!!. It allows a visitor to post a twitter message directly from the website, and tweet the link to the post.

Continue reading ‘Twitter API - How to send tweets from a Wordpress “Tweet this” button’

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New feature on MyLifeSucksBigTime.com: Tweet This !

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I saw a cool feature on Twitturly that allows visitors to tweet a story quickly and easily from the site itself.

So yesterday evening, I put my amateur dev gloves again and quickly put together a piece of code that allows any visitor on My Life Sucks …. Big Time !!! to tweet a story from an ad-hoc form. Continue reading ‘New feature on MyLifeSucksBigTime.com: Tweet This !’

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100% of Flickr users look at pictures

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Just found an interesting study on Flickr usage: The Strength of Weak Cooperation: a case study on Flickr. Le Figaro, a french magazine, has a review of the study (in french).

Continue reading ‘100% of Flickr users look at pictures’

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Laurent Kretz