frankly speaking
Social Media Excellence - A Case Study
A couple weeks ago I wrote about a situation of social media failure. Today, I’m happy to write about a situation of social media excellence! A few days ago, I checked into Specialty’s via foursquare:
Three days later (coincidentally, I happened to be standing in line to order food at Specialtys) I received an @ reply via twitter from Specialtys entitling me to a free cookie:
Let’s be honest, I could care less about the cookie. What I find interesting is the fact that Specialty’s has the common sense enough to recognize that social media is a powerful marketing tool and in this case, is using it appropriately to try their products.
Not only do they have a customer, but now they will have someone who goes patronizes their business at least twice a week.
The Golden Triangle
Fred Wilson (MD of Union Square Ventures) posted this the other day and I agree with it 110%:
I heard something this past week that stuck with me all the way to the weekend. To the life of me, I can’t remember who said it but at least I remember what was said:
The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and real-time.
I like to think of this as the golden triangle. You can build interesting businesses in each of these three sectors. The iPhone is the poster child of mobile. Facebook is the poster child of social. Twitter is the poster child of real-time.
But it is what happens inside the golden triangle that is really interesting to me. What if you build a service that is mobile, social, and real-time? Well that’s a big opportunity folks and I’ve been seeing quite a few entrepreneurs doing exactly that. It is an exciting time.
Where Twitter Goes From Here
Let me first start of by saying that I think Twitter is one of the greatest technology developments in the last five years. The service allows you to update your friends, family, and everyone else in the twitterverse as to what you’re doing from wherever you are in the world. It has adopted millions and millions of users in just two years since opening its doors and earlier this week closed their third round of financing with Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital giving it an additional $35 Million.
The concept of Twitter is simple - tell people what you are doing in less than 140 characters. Celebrities, geeks, and soccer moms alike have quickly adapted to using the service a quick form of publicizing their daily lives to the outside world. It has a flexible API that has been superbly adapted by applications like TweetDeck, Twitterific and others, all with the purpose of keeping people ‘in the know’. In short, it’s one of the best services to come out of the Valley since Facebook.
The question that remains for Twitter is how does it start making money? Twitter is famous (or infamous) in the Valley for being one of the very few start-ups that has been able to raise three rounds of cash without making a single dime. It currently has about twenty employees and tons of overhead from data management and feed delivery to paying mobile phone companies for delivery of its users tweets.
Currently, Twitter also remains free for all users, though there are currently rumors that Twitter may start charging corporations for use. While Twitter co-Founder Biz Stone says that they will not impose fees on current services, it doesn’t preclude from possibly taking a fee from companies who offer discounts through the site.
Another simple solution for Twitter would be to advertise on the site. They could do this a couple ways: first, by inserting ‘paid tweets’ into a users feed after every ‘nth’ tweet that a user receives. The other option would be to plaster the websites with advertising similar to what Pandora does. Both of these ideas are short term solutions but won’t effectively help Twitter realize it’s $230 Million valuation that it got in its last round. What’s more, both of these would somewhat ruin the user experience on the site and cost Twitter both current and future users.
A third (and probably best) option for Twitter is hoping for a bailout merger with a more established company. This almost happened late last year when the company was chatting up Facebook. While this wouldn’t be a bad thing, it would most certainly take Twitter in a direction that most of its users don’t want it to go.
If Facebook bought Twitter, it would surely be integrated into it’s social messenging platform and become too mainstream for most of the users that currently make Twitter great. If it were purchased by a large media conglomerate, the conglomerate may start regulating the content that is shared by the users. The best merger option would be for a Google, Yahoo or (choke) a Microsoft to add the company and pray that it lets twitter operate independently.
Whatever Twitter decides to do, I hope it decides to do what’s best for its user base (as cliche as that sounds). It would be truly sad to see a great service be wasted because a revenue strategy couldn’t be found.
About
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Ben Wilkinson. I work in online marketing and advertising. I'm also a rabid Red Sox fan. This blog is dedicated to everything from sports and politics to business and pop-culture. Sit back, relax and enjoy!
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