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September 2, 2008
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting (in what sounds like a Verizon PR piece) that there is a broadband Internet price war going on in the United States.
My question to you: do you see it?
It seems like few people in the United States have enough broadband choices for there to be any local competition for prices.
Businesses could promote something nationally that makes it sound like you're fostering competition, yet at the same time do nothing to promote it in markets where you have no competition.
Is this lowering costs or increasing speeds for consumers? If so, where?
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August 28, 2008
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Fifteen years ago, AOL was actually kind of cool. It provided email, shopping, entertainment, and chat applications through a slow internet connection to millions of people. But over time, the popularity waned as people realized they're better off bypassing AOL for the actual world wide web.
To me, this seems quite similar to the state of the mobile industry, including the iPhone today.
1. It's slow.
2. The carrier acts as a gatekeeper to content and applications.
3. One of the most popular buttons is for the web, rather than the applications the provider thinks are important.
History seems to be repeating itself on the mobile Internet.
Based on Apple's recent approaches to application approval, I get the impression that the transition from AOL-style gatekeeper to web surfing device will be faster than in the past. If Apple denies their users access to content they want on their phones, they'll simply use their phones to find similar content on the web. Apple will train people away from the App Store.
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August 26, 2008
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John Battelle is a busy man, and he makes sure to get that across with occasional posts on why he hasn't been posting regularly on his blog. Here are my top-5 funniest posts from John from the past two months:
5. Back, Sort Of
4. Traveling . . .
3. Still Traveling . . .
2. Lite.
1. Where's Battelle?
I don't blame John for the light posting volume, but I have to wonder: do people find posts that say you're not posting valuable? Personally, I don't. Just posting something valuable when you can or don't post at all.
I guess this is kind of the inverse of my Twitter philosophy which is, don't say anything unless you have something valuable to say.
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August 25, 2008
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Twittter is all about positive reinforcement. They make people feel good by sending out new follower notications like the one below every time someone new signs up to follow your Tweets:
That's cool, but I think it's also one of the things that causes Twitter abuse.
Why?
Because people only see the positive. They're offering carrots with no corresponding stick.
If people received an immediate notice everytime they LOST followers, they may use that feedback to increase the quality of their tweets over time.
Twitter today is all about self-esteem building rather than providing real, objective feedback on what others think of the tweets they send.
While there are certainly people who could care less about this, working under the mindset of, "I'll tweet about whatever I want and if people don't want to follow me, that's fine with me," there are also people who do care about their followers more than themselves. These are people who are interested in building large, valuable, audiences who would appreciate knowing when they're pissing people off with overly offensive tweets or burning out their followers with heavy tweet volumes. Unfollow notifications would provide this information.
And I'd also like to see someone figure out how to generate a list of MOST UNFOLLOWED Twitter users. This, to me, would be extremely valuable since other Twitter users could study those users to figure out how they've managed to churn through so many followers.
Chris Brogan has a great post offering 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business that's worth a read.
Chris has a lot of great ideas, but #29 on his list made my head tilt around 30 degrees and say, "huh?"
29. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
To me, this sounds like a big potential problem.
For example, let's assume you're in the business of selling some sort of high end product or service to businesses. If so, your target market is probably at or near the C-level with titles like CEO or CIO. If you told people at that level that they could keep up to date on your business using Twitter, they may find the idea very interesting. Now ask them how often they'd like to receive tweets from you with the following options:
a. 20+ times per day
b. 10-20 times per day
c. 2-9 times per day
d. Once per day
e. Only when you have something really valuable to say.
I'm guessing somewhere in the "d-e" range is probably going to be what you'll hear.
Now ask them what they'd like to hear about:
a. News regarding your products / services / company
b. News about your personal life
I'm leaning toward "a" on this one.
Of course, there are no clear-cut right or wrong answers here. The point is simply to illustrate that you need to think about who you're trying to communicate with and how they'd like to be communicated with before Twittering.
No matter what you say on Twitter, you'll probably be able to find an audience interested in hearing it. But is it the audience you want? That's what businesses should be asking.
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August 24, 2008
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How many referrals do you get when you drop a link on Twitter?
There at least three ways to track this:
1. Check your referral logs for referrals from Twitter.com. This will miss all the Twitter users who visit after clicking over from applications like Twirl, text messages, etc.
2. Using click through metrics through URL shortening services. This works well, but it creates a silo of data with a different service.
3. Set a tracking URL on the link you drop. This will allow you to use your main web analytics software to filter for that traffic.
Personally, I prefer #3. Here's what #3 shows me vs #1:
Basically, I see that Twitter delivers 3X more traffic to my site than I could measure if I relied only on domain referral traffic. This makes sense since it's well known that most people use Twitter through sites, applications, devices, other than directly through Twitter.com.
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August 23, 2008
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What makes for a good business Twitter account? Does it have to be all business all the time, or should it be a combination of business and personal messages in order to build personal relationships with followers?
Shannon Paul seems to believe that the best use of Twitter for business is to keep the business talk at less than half of posts:
Don’t be that guy:
Here are 5 things that guy does to inspire hatred and annoyance in social media circles:
1. Set up a Twitter account and tweet about your product/blog/website/agenda more than 50 percent of the time.
Personally, I think this is far from a rule, and dead wrong in many cases.
If I follow a business on Twitter, I want to hear about business communications only. If a business account only Twitters about business related issues less than 50% of the time, the majority of content they're putting out is worthless to me.
The person behind the business Twitter account may be the most interesting person in the world. I may have a lot in common with that person and love to hear about it. But I don't want to hear about it through a Twitter account set up for business use.
Sure, a combination of business and non-business related tweets on the same account can build a large and loyal following. However, I have a hunch that it's not the best following you could build. You'll probably end up losing busy business people would love to hear about your business but don't care to put up with the noise. Do you really want to lose those people? If a CEO looks through your business' last 20 tweets, will they have a clue what you do?
Shannon Paul's take on Twitter is interesting to me. She obviously uses Twitter much differently than her blog where she writes great content, consistently, on one topic: PR. People subscribe to her business blog because they know what to expect. It's not about her pets, what she had for dinner last night, or vacations more than 50% of the time with an occasional PR post thrown in. It's about PR.
This isn't to suggest that business people with personalities should stop sharing things about their personal lives on Twitter. Absolutely not. I'm just suggesting that there may be some benefits to having different Twitter accounts depending on which hat you're wearing at the time.
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