Media'ZBiz!

As Facebook has become an incredible online community (more than 100 million users in Europe) and has shifted from being not only a social network for personal use but also as a key platform and medium for brands online, businesses have started to look into spending more time hanging out and engaging with their fans and users, in a legit way.

But businesses are still trying to get the hang of this new opportunity to bring in customers and, at the end of the day, make more money.

For many businesses, Facebook is seen as something for college students, graduates, and technology early adopters. The reality is that Facebook users in the 35 and older category are growing at a very fast rate. In Europe this category represents 28% of total active users, growing very fast as you can see on the chart below per O’Reilly Research report published last August.

One of the reasons Facebook is so interesting for businesses, is because it has a variety of features that are focused on community building and sharing information with users. There are several ways to participate on Facebook: personal profiles (private), pages (public), groups and applications.

Whether you are participating for fun or on behalf of a company, creating a profile is the most basic thing you can do on Facebook and is required if you want to do anything else such as create a fan page or a group. So you should work on building your personal profile before starting any other efforts on Facebook (a full profile looks much more interesting than an empty one). This will give you the opportunity to learn what works for you and what doesn’t, while participating as an individual, rather than potentially jeopardizing your company brand image. Watch this funny video (in English with French subtitles) for a better understanding on the Facebook manners.

And, please do not create a personal profile for your company. This looks weird. Facebook profiles are designed to be private. It makes it difficult for users to interact with your company. A better way to have a company presence on Facebook is to create a Facebook page.

Facebook pages are publicly viewable, and have many of the same features as profile pages, but with information that is geared toward your company’s activities. Facebook pages offer a unique opportunity for your company to engage consumers, users, providing viral hooks to recruit new fans and recurring opportunities for existing fans to re-engage. Fan pages are very easy to manage making regular contributions to your community rich and simple. Some features include creating content, sharing status updates, posting photos and videos, hosting events and built in analytics.

Here are few tips for building a great Facebook page:

1. Create an awesome landing page. It is as important as if you were to create an ad for your brand. Don’t neglect this part. Make it unique and build it to get found.

2. It might be good for your landing page to have some call to action and engaging content so to get new fans hooked immediately. Lets face it, Facebook users love contests, giveaways and promotions.

3. Provide value, i.e. engagement, entertainment or education (pick one, two or all three). If there are two things that can quickly destroy your reputation on Facebook is spam and poor quality content. If the quality of your page is poor and the value it provides low, fans and visitors will leave your page and will never return. The more engaged your fans are with your Facebook page, the more successful your Facebook (and social media – see tip #5) presence will be and the more likely future fans to join (i.e. more consumers = additional ‘potential’ sales).

4. Let users (consumers, customers, team members, partners, suppliers) generate content such as uploading (and tagging) photos and videos by giving them incentives to do so. Your brand will have an extra layer of interaction around it, giving more life to it and extending your reach by featuring your users personal newsfeeds. Publish yourself ‘fresh’ content.

5. Network with other social networks (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc…). Many companies lack in doing this, expecting their fans (consumers) to find them automatically. More often than we think, a consumer will stumble upon your page, either through a friend, a blog or from another network.

6. You may want to consider using Facebook applications, a great way to collaborate, network and do business through your page. There are Facebook apps available for everything (more than 52,000). The most common ones are the RSS Feed application to incorporate your blog or news feed and the Twitter application to incorporate your tweets (30+ apps for doing Business on Facebook by Mashable and here in French).

Then, once you have done all this, you may want to run some Facebook Ads, driving more traffic to your page, targeting potential audiences using keywords.

So, if creating a Facebook page is simple, getting it to work well takes time, dedication and some planning. Don’t expect to turn traditional marketing on its head in just a click.

Several companies out there seem to get it. IKEA is one of those. In a couple of weeks and with minimal investment, IKEA got people actually engaged with the brand and also got them to promote it to their friend (read article here and watch the video).

Other examples of Companies Using Facebook Fan Pages Well.

There are many ways to maximize your Facebook Page. If you have other ideas or tips to share that you’ve found effective, I’d like to hear about them. Please let me know by commenting below, or connecting with me on Facebook.

Avatar, the next December 18th worldwide release has already had a tremendous amount of buzz on and offline. ‘Avatar’ is the story of an ex-Marine who finds himself thrust into hostilities on an alien planet filled with exotic life forms. As an Avatar, a human mind in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people.

More than ten years in the making, Avatar marks Cameron’s return to feature directing since helming 1997’s Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time and winner of eleven Oscars including Best Picture.

As we may expect, the promotional campaign is in full swing. Several trailers have hit the web, but the latest ‘interactive’ trailer – just released – is unique. The official Avatar Adobe AIR interactive trailer brings Avatar’s Pandora natives straight to your desktop.

The interactive trailer is really cool. It includes dozens of short videos enabling you to learn ore about the making of the movie, the main characters and backgrounds. The interactive trailer integrates as well Avatar’s Twitter, Flickr and YouTube feeds, so you can see and share all the latest news from fans around the world straight from the interactive trailer.

To download the interactive trailer, you can do it via the film’s official movie site and social network profiles on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

According to a report published early this year, over one-fourth of users ages 18-24 are interested in having more social media features integrated into their TV. The study found that there’s a desire to use social networking as a platform to actually enhance the TV-watching experience through interactive chats with other viewers and to have the ability to recommend shows to friends. Another new study by Knowledge Networks reveals that the ways in which people learn about and ultimately decide to watch video on TV or the Internet are remarkably similar – with verbal word of mouth (in-person conversations or phone calls) scoring well above social media as a regularly used source, and TV ads and search engines also playing major roles.

The “lean-back” medium is now more “lean-in” than ever.  The report, shows that television ads are the most important source for discovering new programs and deciding what to watch on TV (see table below), with verbal word of mouth coming in second for discovery and third for decision making (behind interactive program guides).

‘We see a variety of important, often untapped opportunities for leveraging the ways people learn about and decide to watch video,’ said David Tice, Vice President and Group Account Director of Knowledge Networks. ‘On TV, the interactive program guide remains largely underutilized for promotion, given its central role in viewing decisions. And, with online video, one sees the possibility of placing too much emphasis on social media sources, such as tweets from celebrities, as direct drivers of viewing. In fact, it is ‘in-person’ word of mouth and search – even TV ads or coverage – that show more influence in the online space.’

At the same time we all know that viewers are increasingly leaning froward and socially engaging on other devices while they watch TV. This is know as media blur. LiveHive Systems, measures how viewers are socially engaging with TV while they watch. Their ‘Social Engagement Index’ summarizes the interactive behavior of viewers to determine in real-time how effectively a show is socially engaging its audience. ‘The Social TV movement is forcing media companies to rethink how content is produced, distributed, and consumed. However, the tools to understand how viewers are engaging with a show have failed to keep pace.’ said Dave Bullock, President, LiveHive Systems. ‘Nielsen ratings make a rough estimate of how many viewers are watching a show, but Nielsen is not able to measure how engaged these viewers are, or how they are promoting the show on the social web. These are critical metrics that determine a show’s value and its impact for both producers and advertisers.’

TV shows producers are trying to monitor when fans talk about the programs. Getting the attention of someone who is texting, tweeting or talking about a TV show might still be good enough, after all, if you can’t get them to watch the TV show in the old-school manner.

‘We are in the early, early stages of what is now kind of being deemed ’social TV,’ said John Moore, exec VP-director of media services at Interpublic Group’s Mullen agency. He envisions more TV programming having a built-in social component over the next decade. Consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 “don’t want this isolated TV experience,” which he thinks will prompt TV networks to connect their content to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various widgets that will be packaged with a new breed of TV sets.

The online video industry is moving closer to Facebook. The latest example is ABC.com for its “V” program, CBS with its initiative around CSI and the recent offering by Hulu. Facebook Connect is Emerging as powerful catalyst for Video Views. Randi Zuckerberg explains to us why (video originally published on Beet.TV).

While the online video industry is moving closer to Facebook, mobile operators are moving closer to Twitter as a way to increase their average revenue per user. Orange, which runs TV services in France, Spain and Poland, just announced to offer tweet-as-you-watch service and integrated mobile features. Until now Twitter users have only been able to send and receive tweets from their online account or by text message. The key to the deal, is that Twitter will become completely integrated with the suite of digital media services available via its mobile portal.

“In countries where we have TV services we plan to enrich shows by allowing people to tweet while they watch their favourite programmes,” said Stephanie Hospital, vice-president of marketing and development at Orange.

In a similar way (but for free), a new application is now available on iPhone (and iPod touch) called tvChatter, enabling viewers to tweet in real time about their favorite TV shows. Watch tvChatter’s vision in video.

As audi­ences con­tinue to frag­ment, as more of us mul­ti­task with lap­tops on our laps while watch­ing TV, and as the Inter­net finally comes to our liv­ing rooms with a new gen­er­a­tion of solutions like listed lately by Gary Hayes (Social TV Reloaded – 20 Best Solutions), it’s only a mat­ter of time before tele­vi­sion becomes ‘fully’ social! Social TV offerings, are on many operators’ roadmaps.
(Published simultaneously on GLITNER’s Blog)

B2C versus B2B – is there really any difference when comes to using social media?

It’s a question we hear a lot. And for good reason: either way, you’re still marketing to a human being – right? That’s the advice given:  Instead of thinking B2B vs B2C, just think “human” said Chris Brogan.

In B2C social media marketing, companies are advertising to and ultimately selling to the end-users.  The user makes the buy/no-buy decision based on whatever criteria the business has determined. The smart marketer will understand these decision factors, and position the business product appropriately. For B2B, the purchaser is rarely the end-user.

Traditional B2B marketers resist social media because it doesn’t work when they use it as another outbound marketing channel. They will often say: “We’re a B2B operation! We don’t have social-savvy customers like B2C companies.”

In the latest research report from Business.com, Business Social Media Benchmarking Study (an online survey conducted between August 11th and September 4th, 2009) results show that among both B2B and B2C companies managing a company or branded profile on at least one social media site, Facebook is the most popular site.

B2B companies, however, manage profiles across a greater number of social media sites than do B2C companies and are much more likely to manage one or more Twitter accounts or LinkedIn Groups, manage their company listing on LinkedIn and have a presence on YouTube.

The report shows as well that companies can use a wide variety of tools to monitor company, brand and/or competitor mentions across blogs and other social media sites. Among B2B companies, Twitter Search, Google Search and Google Alerts are the most popular choices, and B2B companies are significantly more likely than B2C companies to use Twitter Search and Google Alerts for monitoring online mentions of their company or brands. B2B companies are significantly less likely to use Yahoo! Search than B2C companies.

No question, social media grew out of the consumer space, and B2C examples of social media success are easy to find. But, as shown in the report above, B2B companies have since acted the value they can get out from social media, which if we look at it closely is not specific for B2B or B2C companies. Benefits any marketers benefits from social media is, listening, reach and nurturing, as explained on the Bubspot blog:

Listening — Every company needs to listen. Doesn’t matter if you sell solder paste, CRM software or fencing supplies. You need to listen to your competitors, your customers, your prospects — your community. Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook make this easier.

Reach — Reach is important to any marketer. It’s the number of people you can communicate with directly via email, telephone, or any other channel. You need this whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses. Social media tools media it easier to build.

Nurturing — Nurturing is another critical marketing task for all companies. Regardless of what you sell, you need to build trust with potential customers and educate them about your company and your products. Social media facilitates the development of personal relationships at scale. This makes it an ideal tool for nurturing in any business.

Today, whether you are a B2C or B2B company, with the advent of social technologies, you can now enjoy direct and real-time relationships with the consumer throughout the whole supply process.

The 10:90 ratio is flipped on its head.

Now the willing consumer can join in with ideas, provide feedback through out their development and help market the end product to his peers.

This can deliver a never-ending feedback loop of improvement, innovation and efficiency.

Dell Computers announced last June that it has surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts, making one of the most high profile examples of social media Return on Investment (ROI).

But, will this be enough, telling your reluctant boss that social media is worth using because Dell made $3 million on Twitter!

In social media, we have a few very powerful mechanisms like customer referrals, customer advocacy, customer content contribution and several other contributing factors which all help a company financially to make substantial improvements, when done right. Everyone knows that trying to measure Social Media ROI is not that easy! Here is what I found…

The talented Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst, outlined a framework for measuring Social Media and said:

“Although social media channels seem to be mostly qualitative in nature, user activities can be easily quantified.  Although users interact with channels in different ways, four common factors quantify social media success:  Attention, Participation, Authority, and Influence.”

Here is his framework for measuring Social Media benefits:

1. Attention.  The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time.  Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views.
2. Participation.  The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel.  Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, or widget interactions.
3. Authority.  Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content – like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video.
4. Influence.  The size of the user base subscribed to your content.  For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page.

He says that “There’s an “x-factor” that comes into play well:  sentiment”…. but a lot of CEO’s will not buy into the  sentiment game. They will still be insistent…. saying “I don’t care about these sorts of soft numbers show me the hard facts ..show me the ROI on Social Media Marketing and I will give you the budget.” It’s chicken and egg scenario all over again, so how do you approach it.

It seems therefore that developing these high-value links (which will enables you to easily rank prominently for targeted terms in search engines and increase your long-tail traffic which will stabilize at a much higher number than the pre-social marketing campaign number), as a result from placing your content on the highly trafficked social media sites is not enough. So, how do you then measure financially the social media ROI?

Olivier Blanchard captures the essence of ROI from social media in a humorous, easy-to-understand way:

Marketing professionals need to understand this: If the investment (the “I”) is $$$, then the return also has to be $$$. It can’t be eyeballs or impressions or clickthroughs. You have to tie your results to a $ amount. Anything short of that, and you’re not proving your value to your boss or client.

It isn’t to say that eyeballs, impressions and clickthroughs aren’t important. They are. But they’re one link (of the action-reaction-outcome narrative) shy of ROI. (They don’t tie the investment to the actual return.)

The relationship between a company’s investment and the return on that investment pretty much looks like this:

$ Investment by company –> Action –> Reaction –> Non-financial impact –> Financial impact $

What happens between the investment and the financial impact (the return on that investment) is VERY important (as explained in his video). As well as the importance of monitoring and measuring it in order to tie the investment to the associated financial impact (and ROI) in future posts.

So the Financial ROI = measuring the investment in a given currency and compare it with the corresponding profitability or margin in the same currency. Dollars on both sides of the equation!

Axel Schultze early this year has posted a similar formula than the one described above by Blanchard.

A = Contribution margin in currency generated from externally referred customers
B = Cost in currency for human interaction and other cost to manage and engage in the ecosystem
C = Social Media ROI
A/B = C

With this formula for social media ROI we have US$ or “currency” on both sides of the equation. And guess what we have benefits from the investment for both: the business AND the customer community. Of course this is only possible if you know your ecosystem and if you did your “customer mapping” as we call it, but with the tools we have today this is easily possible.

Unlike traditional marketing and PR, Social Media actually provides a way to calculate an ROI, that can be taken into the books by a CFO.

The latest in date on the subject is the video by Socialnomics which showcases examples of Social Media ROI on campaigns and companies that have thrown themselves into the Social Sphere.

Related posts:

The nitty gritty of ROI in social media (David Cushman)

How To: Mesaure Soxial Media ROI (Mashable)

8 Steps To Demonstrate Positive Return On Investment For Social Media Marketing (Jeffbulla’s Blog)

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi (Olivier Blanchard)

Paramount’s micro-budgeted ($15,000) horror phenomenon “Paranormal Activity” reached another notable benchmark yesterday, clearing $100 million at the US box office. The unusual roll-out of this movie is one model that studios and filmmakers are going to need to look at closely as distribution options for smaller to midsize movies continues to shrink.

Independent filmmakers and distributors are turning more and more to social media to help build online buzz around television shows, theatrical and dvd releases of blockbuster and independent movies. There’s an obvious opportunity for them, since these platforms are more affordable, by and large, than traditional, “old media”, especially if you stumble upon the holy grail of online marketing: the appropriation of your messages by the audience. Some have started saying: ‘If we all thought that Facebook and Twitter social media growth phenomena were extraordinary, wait until Social TV hits your screens.‘

One thing is for sure: Hollywood Studio marketers are becoming Facebook friends and Twitter followers!

“Facebook is really the focus for us right now,” said David Singh, executive VP of creative content for Disney. “Something like 70 to 80 percent of frequent moviegoers under 25 visit Facebook seven or eight times a day. In fact, I think marketers are fixated on Facebook because we tend to use it a lot ourselves.” (posted in The Wrap October 8th)

David Singh is right. According to a study released last September by former New Line web marketing guru Gordon Paddison, who is now an industry consultant, 73% of 4,000 moviegoers have established profiles on social media networks.

David Poland has grouped them in 3 categories for us:

CRITICISM:
84% of moviegoers make up their mind to see a movie regardless of what the critics say about it.
62% of moviegoers now get review information online.
45% of heavy moviegoers rely on movie review aggregation sites, placing a high value in seeing an average score.
75% say they trust a friend’s opinion more than a movie critic.
80% say positive reviews from other moviegoers make them more likely to see a movie (vs. 67% who say a positive review from professional critics does).
40% say negative reviews from other moviegoers make them decide not to see a movie (vs. 28% who say negative reviews from professional critics would keep them from going).

WHO’S ONLINE?
94% of all moviegoers are online; this is true across age groups. 88% have high speed/broadband connections.
86% of moviegoers across all demo segments go online via computer or mobile device at least once a day. They spend more time each week online (19.8 hours) than they do watching TV (14.3 hours).
90% of all ages of moviegoers have mobile phones; 32% of moviegoers no longer use a landline (44% of the 18-29 demo).
93% use Internet search to find more information about movies. Exposures that trigger online search include: Seeing a trailer (71%), seeing a TV spot (60%), someone telling you about a movie (58%).

HOW DO MOVIEGOERS FIND OUT ABOUT MOVIES?
69% of moviegoers watch online video content; 66% of moviegoers who look at video content watch movie trailers and 55% watch movie clips.
70% credit awareness from in-theater trailers, 73% from television, 46% from word-of-mouth, and 44% from the internet… all ranking ahead of such traditional methods of advertising as billboards and newspaper advertising.

And this…

Movie choice is highly influenced by group decision-making. The fact that someone else in the group wanted to see a particular movie (55%) was as important to the decision process as the movie’s storyline (57%).

2012 just released in theatres is another (good) example. The movie’s Facebook and MySpace pages contain trailers, photos and other information on the film and promote the iPhone apps, the game and other elements.

Everyone seems to agree that consumers are more and more playing an important role in film distribution. Adertising Age looking at the ultra-low budget Paranormal Activity came up with four lessons to be learned for the marketing community:

- Let consumers dictate distribution.
- Don’t waste money on large-scale TV campaigns when you can talk directly to your fans.
- Don’t create false hype.
- When there are low financial barriers, have fun.

“Paranormal Activity” cost a mere $15,000 to produce, with little spent thus far on traditional media, so Paramount stands to recoup any overhead costs thousands of times over if the film catches on with a national audience. But despite the initial success, “If it all ended today we’d be very happy,” said Paul Greenstein, the studio’s co-president, marketing.

Futurist Ross Dawson interviewed by Davy Adams (CXO Australia) on the future of media and how should marketers best navigate the new order in order to influence buyer behavior, has answered:

There is no simple and foolproof path to success. For marketers, one of the most important issues to deal with is the shift to the “influence economy” (“influence landscape” document here), in which peer and expert influence dominates decision-making. Pushing messages will not give you access to key influencers; engaging in interesting conversations will. This requires capabilities that are new for most large companies.

So to conclude, social media technologies could help filmmakers and distributors in:

• providing insight and commentary in real time (from location during shooting)
• promoting special contests, sneak previews
• facilitating collaborative video production experienc
• involving online communities in the design
• building conversation about the movie or television season or individual episodes
• opening dialogue between promoter and promotion participants
• movie & television website traffic generation
• promoting events such as movie premiers
• posting press releases

but ‘none of it should be taken lightly (…), be elegant and responsible while at the same time being strategic’ (words by Gordon Paddison).

Related articles:

Film marketing: notes towards a social media toolbox.

Movie Marketing, Part 1

Social TV Reloaded

The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands, delivering a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience.

As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

This is what apparently Twitter and LinkedIn have announced yesterday night: LinkedIn users will be able to publish status updates to their Twitter profiles and pull in some or all Twitter updates to their LinkedIn accounts.

Here is a first reaction from Read Write Web:

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development – then you’d see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. (”This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about ‘mobile,’ ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘gaming’ over the last 2 weeks.”)

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis – but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago, according to Nielsen.  In August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites. European are not that different. According to a report “Europeans Have Adopted Social Computing Differently” by Forrester Research, 60% of European online consumers are taking part in Social Computing activities such as reading or writing blogs, listening to podcasts, setting up RSS feeds, reading and writing online customer reviews, or taking part in social networking sites.

But is this enough for businesses to embrace social media?

Survey results from a recent Deloitte study (2009 Tribalization of Business Study), point to some key challenges that businesses are facing as they move toward integrating online communities into their social media strategy. The three areas they have identified as obstacles are:

Keeping visitors engaged:  30%
Getting people to join:  24%
Encouraging return visits to the online community:  21%

In addition, they agreed that the following are key business outcomes for their online communities:

Increase word-of-mouth:  38%
Increase customer loyalty:  34%
Increase brand awareness:  30%

Liana Evans is her last post starts by saying rightly:

If your online marketing agency has advised you to have a blog, a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account so that you can get more content just to attain additional search engine rankings, you might want to stop and ask why.

What You Deem Valuable Could be Worthless to Your Audience

You may think that PDF spec sheet of the 10 best of features for your product or service is the best marketing slick ever. You’ve spent hours designing the marketing look and feel around it, you want to make sure that it’s on your Web site and it’s put into every sales packet. You believe this is the most valuable piece of content there is to sell your product.

Listening to your audience talk about what the best features are of your product in social media communities should give you insight into how to provide them with valuable content. It can also help you improve your marketing efforts to reach and engage more people. Utilizing this kind of knowledge can help your marketing efforts in social media reach new engagement levels.

Unfortunately, you aren’t thinking from the end user’s perspective.

A list of specs of features doesn’t do the end user a bit of good if they can’t even figure out how to use your products or services. Many times, companies mistakenly believe that adding more bells and whistles to their products is what customers find valuable. Customers use the product the way it gives them value. Most of the time, the bells and whistles don’t give the value.

How we share ideas and connect with one another has dramatically changed. Previously media was limited to one-size-fits-all broadcast messaging sent out from the center. Businesses had to follow the same model in their communication with both employees and consumers. Social technologies – from forum to Facebook and Twitter to text messaging, means now things can improve.

Now everyone can and does join the conversation.

This explosion of these new communication methods bring people together in  an instant around any interest or passion – no matter how niche. In order to capitalise on these opportunities businesses must prepare to recalibrate with new  thinking and processes. The prize is greater efficiency and innovation.

“The enterprise is waking up to the fact that it needs to listen and that it needs business intelligence” for the communities, said Ed Moran, director of product innovation for consultancy at and one of the study authors.

This is what we offer at 90:10 Group.

Businesses have long had to close a gap between themselves and their consumers with a number of activities that are  inefficient and wasteful. These processes are dependent on  a series of expensive mediators: media owners, advertising agencies, marketing, PR and research companies.

90% of the energy to move from concept to sale is input by the business and its mediators. The consumer gets to join in for the last 10% – the purchase decision.

With the advent of social technologies you can now enjoy direct and real-time relationships with the consumer throughout the whole supply process.

The 10:90 ratio is flipped on its head.

Now the willing consumer can join in with ideas, provide feedback through out their development and help market them the end product to their peers. This can deliver a never-ending feedback loop of improvement , innovation and  efficiency.

Many examples show that consumers are increasingly demanding participation. They expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, and their volubility has forced companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in a new bottom-up age. Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Dell, Best Buy and Nike have all created digital platforms that allow customers to help them create new products and messages. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first 14 months since the launch of its proprietary online forum, mystarbucksidea.com.

Forrester recognizes that the past five years of social media evolution have focused on growth and adoption. It predicts the era of social commerce.

Brian Solis thinks that

The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.

Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

John Winsor in his article Business Week said:

There’s a delicate balance between encouraging participation and maintaining clarity of overall business objectives. As with any good conversation, a give-and-take dialogue is necessary, and every company will develop its own way of handling that debate. Most excitingly, new forms of social editing will emerge that allow customers, experts, and brand advocates to curate crowd-created ideas to sort through the ideas and stay on strategy. For now, the most important thing is to jump in and try.

What’s Twitter’s business model and how do they plan to make money? Haven’t you heard that before?

As we all know, Twitter is good for a lot of things, including sharing information and links, listening to the thoughts and announcement of people you respect, and as an organic, user-driven source of breaking news. But is this enough to make it a profitable business?

“A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information,” co-founder Evan Williams posted to the company blog. “As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

From the cache of documents leaked to TechCrunch earlier this year by an anonymous hacker, we know that every big player in online media, including Google and Microsoft, has been knocking on Twitter’s doors, seeking a deal (which have been announced very recently). This is no surprise: Twitter is the hottest thing in digital media since the advent of the world wide web.

BusinessWeek last week have started their article as such:

It has become a popular game, even among investors who should know better, to dismiss Twitter based on lack of a business model. But there is a difference between not generating income and lack of a business model. I believe that, in just a few short months, Twitter will show the world that not only do they have a business model, but that theirs is the most sophisticated around.

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, has to defend over and over why his three-year-old company isn’t making money yet, despite having raised more than $150 million in venture capital. He recently spoke on camera at Twitter’s offices with Adam Lashinsky for Fortune. Here is a video extract. Full article here.

Though, Twitter have many supporters and believers.

In a fascinating interiew with Business Week’s talented editor John Byrne published in May 2009, the excellent blog Social Nerdia extracted this insightful quote:

“I greatly enjoy Twitter. It’s a technology that permits more immediate and spontaneous communication with people. And for us, it’s a great way to collaborate with others and gain deeper and more meaningful engagement with readers on everything we do. There’s nothing that is more important to a media brand today than engagement. We’re all trying to achieve relationships with our users to induce loyalty, to increase repeat visits, and to encourage valuable editorial contributions from readers. Twitter is an essential tool to make that happen.”

Back in May, David Weir from BNET after reading “The Ten Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change American Business” by Douglas A, McIntyre, has derived & reoriented his post to focus on the media industry specifically. Here are an extract of his ‘12 ways Twitter will transform the Media Business’:

Jeff Pulver asked lately Loic Lemeur to think about the future of Twitter and even though he has no crystal ball (as he says), he gathered some predictions and put them into the following video.

Olivier Coudert thinks that:

The most obvious sources of revenue; advertising and premium features, are still to be developed. Advertising will not come before next year at best, and premium features for businesses are still looking for their foothold (like detailed analytics, insight in the retweeting dynamics, reports on followers and their behavior, trusted accounts, ROI measurements, etc).

Conclusion …

The last question is how Twitter will increase the number and the loyalty of its users, hoping this will also increase the quality and relevance of the tweets (90% of the traffic is generated by 10%  of the users, and a quarter of the tweets is spambot generated). Twitter has been refraining from providing utilities to manage tweets and followers, and that led to a proliferation of small startups. It will come a time –the sooner the better—where some consolidation happens in that ecosystem, bringing more automation and getting more people to sign up to the service. Twitter’s decision to support French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages will also make it less US/UK centric and more international.

by Olivier Coudert.