One of the things that has set Twitter apart in its short but fast development history is how the users have adapted Twitter for use in ways which were never intended by its developers. People use Twitter in many different scenarios and of the common and prevalent usage is in conference settings.

This was the problem which we studied in the Personal Information Management class at Virginia Tech in the Spring semester of 2010. I joined hands with two other passionate Twitter users Edgardo Vega (@CasaDeVega) and Josette Torres(@girlinblack) from the English department to study how people are using Twitter at conferences. Fortunately, our professor Dr. Manuel Perez Quinones (@mapq) is also an ardent Twitter user and this helped a lot!

Twitter is a huge personal information repository and there were many motivations to study this problem. This is what we did

• Randomly selected twenty users who attended SXSW 2010 based on the Klout influence score.
• Using the Twitter API, we scrapped all the tweets made by the users for a five week time period. We obtained a little over 10000 tweets for the time frame which included two weeks before the conference, the conference week and two weeks after the conference.
• Performed quantitative analysis measuring the number of tweets/mentions/replies etc
• Performed qualitative analysis by manually assigning all the tweets into 15 different categories. Some of the categories were ‘location’, ‘informational’, ‘observation’, ‘emotion’ etc
• Inferred results from the data analysis.

PS: There are many big holes in our analysis methodology and the results are not perfect. We planned to do a lot on the data part but due to time constrains we weren’t able to. Nevertheless, this was a very good experience and definitely one of the different projects that i worked on in grad school.

I have embedded the final paper below and the download link for the PDF version.

Now that every business be it large or small is on Twitter trying to promote their brand, the big question is are they getting any return for the time and money which they invest. Whenever we speak of a successful Twitter or social media marketing story we point to Dell, Ford, Zappos or a similar big name brand. These companies have dedicated teams which take care of the social media marketing services and and no wonder they reap the benefits. Moreover it is not such a big deal for an established brand like Dell or Ford to get the message sent across the table.

Every day our twitter timeline gets spammed filled with several messages similar to the ones below.
“I just entered to win a Macbook pro. Simply RT to participate < some random link>”
“XYZ is giving away free passes to that dumb event, Check out how to get one for you <some random link>”

I have always wondered how successful are these campaigns and how well they provide a return to the people/companies who start these on Twitter. I explored one such recent campaign conducted by CyberMonday.fm which as the name suggests is a website where people can find coupons for laptops and other electronic gadgets.  The one started by CyberModay.fm was nothing new. They gave away a Macbook Pro to one random person who posted a pre-written tweet like the one above on their profile. Sounds fair! It is like entering a raffle where in instead of buying a raffle ticket you just post a tweet. So do you think CyberMonday.fm got their money’s worth doing this? Let’s see!

The Math Part

• Total Money spent for the campaign : $1199

(The winner was provided a $1,199.00 gift certificate to the Apple store in lieu of a Mac Book Pro.)

• Total number of Retweets : 63000 + (via Topsy.com)
  

• Total number of clicks: 286,000 + (via bit.ly public stats)
  

One good measure for internet campaigns is CPC or the Cost Per Click. It might not be totally applicable to a Twitter marketing campaign but it is definitely one good measure to look into.

CPC = Cost /Clicks
For this campaign
CPC = 1199/286000 = ~$0.004

$0.0004 is an extremely good CPC for any internet marketing campaign. Comparing it with Google Adwords, the minimum cost which an advertiser has to pay to obtain one click is ten cents ($0.10). Imagine how much money the advertiser would have spent if he had to get 286,000 clicks on Google and that too a major part of it on a single day. I know i am comparing apples and oranges here but this comparison was just to give a rough idea.

No wonder that the alexa graph of CyberMonday.fm had a big spike and rose up 19700%! The pictures and the numbers speak for themselves.

Using Paid Tweets? – Nah!

If the advertiser had decided to use a paid to tweet service like ad.ly or Sponsoredtweets.com, do you think they would have obtained similar returns? Definitely not!

For a budget of $1200 it would be possible to get less than 3 tweets from a web celebrity like Shoemoney or JohnChow. One other option is to get 1200 tweets from low profile tweeters paying them $1 a tweet. We should also not forget that the company in between (ad.ly or sponsoredtweets.com) takes a 50% cut for providing the service. Looking at a recent ad posted by Shoemoney, it gives a really bad impression.

Here is a paid tweet which was posted by Shoemoney. He charges somewhere north of $1000 for making a single tweet.

Here is the outcome. If the advertiser had paid $500 for this tweet the CPC is more than $1.This might be the worst case though. A recent screenshot in one of his blog posts revealed that one such paid tweet sent more than 8000 clicks.

Some Takeaways

• CPC is definitely not a good metric for Twitter marketing campaigns but i thought it would be a good measure for this case study
• Traffic does matter but what matters more is the number of conversions that the campaign yields. For example if the Commission BluePrint advertiser who paid Shoemoney had enough subscriptions or purchases then it is well and good. Integrating a conversion tracker and measuring it will definitely tell more about the success or failure of the campaign.
• For CyberMonday.fm , they had to show the best deals to people and make them purchase it from a third party site like BestBuy, Dell etc who in turn will pay a % commission for making the sale. Obviously a huge traffic burst would have done the trick for them.
• Cybermonday.fm is not a household name and i bet 9 out of 10 people would not have heard about them before this campaign. One thing to note is how a relatively unknown brand can pull up a successful campaign on Twitter.
• More than conversions, sales, traffic one other factor which many of the advertisers look for is brand exposure. A single tweet from a celebrity will definitely send the message far and wide.

There is no doubt that more and more businesses are going to use Twitter to promote their products and the amount of spam is going to increase drastically. One other thing to note is every one else except Twitter are making money in this process! How is Twiiter going to make money?

One question which has been lingering in all our minds for quite a good time is ‘How is Twitter going to make money’? The COO of Twitter Dick Costolo revealed that Twitter will be launching an advertising business in the near future and also mentioned some of the other possible revenue streams for this hugely popular microblogging service which boasts of millions of users. This is the first time that an authoritative person from the Twitter HQ has spoken about the revenue model of Twitter putting an end to all the speculations.

As an end user we hate to see the ads right? But if they are implemented in an intelligent way in a complementing manner then it would definitely be a nice value addition from an user perspective. Now that we know for sure that Twitter is going to do advertising but it has kindled up more questions than answers. The biggest of the lot is how exactly is Twitter going to implement the ads in a way which doesn’t annoy the users and at the same time provides value to the advertisers.

Having plain old CPC/CPM based text and image ads will definitely not be the right thing and we know for sure that the intelligent team at Twitter didn’t wait this long to have a advertising model like that.

Advertising Model?

Dick Costolo has mentioned that it will have nothing to do with the new Retweet feature and so we can stop thinking from that point of view. Having ads between Tweets is something which most of us wouldn’t love to see but there are a handful of companies doing it currently. Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets.com are two notable companies which are doing pretty good in the in-stream advertising arena. With celebrities charging a 5 digit amount for posting a single ad tweet, it looks pretty lucrative. Twitter might very well kick these players out of this game and do it on their own.

Twitter also introduced the new geotagging API and this will allow users to add location coordinates to their tweets. It will definitely make the twitter search feature rich but more importantly it gives a nice playground for Twitter to experiment location based advertising. Imagine a situation where you tweet about a restaurant and an ad shows up which gives you a discount code which you can use while paying the bill or may be provide offers to the restaurants near by (like FourSquare). It will be a ‘win-win-win’ situation for the user, the restaurant and Twitter as a company.

SuperTweet

Robert Scoble wrote about  SuperTweet wherein ads are presented to the user based on the metadata harvested from the tweet. Implementing it in an unobtrusive way will be the biggest challenge if Twitter plans to go ahead with a model similar to SuperTweet.

API Access

There are hundreds of third party apps which make use of the Twitter API. Currently Twitter imposes a restriction on the number of API requests per hour. There are already a few apps which pay Twitter to gain extended access. Twitter is also planning to make money by providing service level agreements where priority and access guarantee will be provided to the interested parties. This will be a big boon to the companies who have paying clients using their twitter API based apps, web clients etc

Premium Accounts

It is well known that many companies use Twitter as a marketing/customer support tool. Dell drove over $2 million sales via Twitter, JetBlue uses it for customer service, Starbucks posts new offers and there are many other big brands which get a lot of value out of Twitter. By the end of this year Twitter will be launching corporate/premium accounts which will provide enhanced analytics and other features which business might find useful.

Glad that Twitter is gonna make some real money!

Image Credit: RandomAnimal.org

I have been trying to do something like this for quite some time and now that i got an opportunity and a good cause to support here goes the experiment. Different forms of this experiment/cause have been done by other people but this is my experimental version. The word ‘Social Charity’ is not something that i coined but i am putting it in contextually in this case and here goes my definition.

‘Social Charity’ is the act wherein a group of social media users support a charitable cause either by action or contribution.

The ultimate aim of such an experiment is to raise money for a charity organization through social media and at the same time provide some kind of benefit for the company/blog which initiates the experiment. To kick start this experiment, I am starting it on Social Couch and the benefiting charity will be Bhumi Chennai ( http://bhumichennai.org ) with Dr. Prahalathan being the person of contact. Bhumi is a non profit organization which works with under-privileged children in and around Chennai.

The Action Steps

1. For every new confirmed email subscription , Social Couch will donate $1 to Bhumi Chennai.

Opens in a new tab or window. When you enter your email address and confirm it, all new articles published on SocialCouch will be delivered directly to your inbox. This email will not be used for any other purpose.

2. For every new confirmed RSS subscription, Social Couch will donate $1 to Bhumi Chennai.
Subscribing via RSS will send in the latest articles to your feed reader.

3. For every comment posted on this entry, Social Couch will donate $0.5 to Bhumi Chennai.

4. For every retweet of the below text, Social Couch will donate $0.5 to Bhumi Chennai

Social Couch is donating $125 to BhumiChennai.org in this Social Charity experiment http://tr.im/CaO6 Please participate & RT

To make the $125 reach Bhumi Chennai one of these should happen before the end of the ten day time period. 125 new subscribers OR 250 comments OR 250 Retweets or a combination of these. An optimal success result can be something like this

25 new RSS subscriptons
25 new email subscriptions
30 comments
120 Retweets

A person can feel free to perform more than one action step. The total duration of the experiment is 10 days and any/all the action steps performed during the next ten days from the time stamp of the post will be counted. The subscriber count will be obtained from the Feedburner statistics and the Retweet count from Tweetmeme. The maximum amount which SocialCouch.com will donate to Bhumi Chennai through this socialcharity experiment is $125. The money will be paid via Paypal.

Why am I doing this?

• The Bhumi volunteers are doing a great job helping out the kids and staying in a land thousands of miles away this is the one small deed that i can do for now. On a lighter note i also want to increase my karma points!
• I know for sure that this money will be put to good use and Bhumi as an organization doesn’t have big overhead costs. The major part of this money will serve the deserving population directly.
• This will serve as a small case study for one of the projects which i am intending to start in the coming months
• This will bring in traffic and gain exposure for Social Couch as a blog and a brand. Although I have no plans of monetizing SocialCouch for now this might help me in the future.
• This will provide an opportunity for others to help a charitable cause without chipping in money.

Seriously! Is this Ethical?

I have discussed this with a few people and in my opinion this whole experiment is totally fine. First of all, i am not seeking monetary contributions from anyone and i am the only contributor. A few weeks back i read a nice post from Manas Tungare about the exploiting nature of Marathon Fundarisers. I would not put this on the same line but still it had some good points to infer. I am not exploiting my social graph directly too. As a reader if you have any objection regarding the ethics of this experiment do let me know and i will take the necessary corrective action.

What if it succeeds?
Stay tuned! I will let you know.

For now all i need is one step of action from you!

Tracking the social habits of people is one of the interesting things that has been made easy by social media. There are many user powered sites where people can voice out their views by making a status update like in Twitter or sending a text message or uploading a picture. Most of these sites make a provision for anonymous updates and taking a rough glance will also tell you that many users provide the update without disclosing their name and location. Here are some of the sites that fall under this category.

PS: Some of these sites may have obscene language and might not be suitable for audience of all age groups. So please be cautious. On the other hand, i can assure that this post is pretty safe for work!

1. FMYLIfe

FMYLife stands for Failing MY Life and it is undoubtedly the most popular site of the lot. It serves as a medium where users can let out the frustrating happenings in their daily life. As the site says “it allows you to realize that you are not alone”. The success of this site can be attributed to how people can relate themselves to the screw-ups that happen in others’ lives. A voting system with “I agree, your life sucks” and “You deserve it” helps people to cast their opinions.

2. TFLN

TFLN or Texts From Last Night works on the interesting notion that some people prefer texts rather than conversations and also people tend to text a lot at the night time that too when they get drunk. The site asks the users to just enter the area code and the content so that it reveals the best parts and at the same time it covers personal information. In general, we will be curious to know what is happening in our locality and TFLN has rightly captured this by making a provision to segregate the updates by area code.

3. MyLifeIsG

MyLifeIsG or My Life is Good is the reverse version of FMyLife. It documents the small but nice happenings in the daily lives of people. If you are looking for a one minute motivation, then this is the site you have to visit. If you feel that ‘your life is awesome’ then go ahead and post it over there and share your happy moment.

4. MyLifeIsAverage

The reality is everyone doesn’t excel in life and MyLifeIsAverage is a site which stands as a testimony for this fact.  The majority of the world lives and dies an average life and sharing those mediocrities makes things a little bit interesting. What makes this thing interesting is how insignificant stories happening in an anonymous person’s life brings in some sort of relevance/significance to the reader.

5. I Just Made Love

IJML or ‘I Just Made Love’ is a nice visual representation which shows where in the world people made love. A pretty good example of how the Google Maps API can be utilized! Users can update their location in real time and the site also provides nice time based filtering.

6. F**K My Sex Life

This comes from the makers of FMYlife and to quote from the site.

it’s a wonderful little site where you can share your less than desirable situations about your sex life or other people’s sex lives

Not much to explain or post a screenshot!

7. Can i tap that

Users randomly text some one asking “you can tap that” and post the reply which they get. Although it may be inappropriate to do such a thing it is pretty common among college going kids!

Once again not much to explain or post a screen shot!

8. It Made My Day

Every day we will have some small happy moments like finding a long lost pen or receiving a wish from a friend which will make our day. ‘It Made My Day’ is a site where you can share and read about such small and sweet happenings. It is pretty similar to MyLifeIsG.

9. This is why you’re fat

Although this one is not similar to the other sites in the list it forms a nice conclusion. Users submit pictures of junk food which looks really good. The site also has a very nice caption-’Where dreams become heart attacks’.

One interesting similarity which can be noted in most of these websites is that as a end user we have no connection in the social graph with the poster but still we will be able to relate to it in some cases. Have you come across any other sites similar to the ones listed above? Do share it in the comments.

It is really hard to spot a person who does not tweet or have an account on face book. Every one loves to tell the world about what they are up to and at the same time curious to know what is happening with their friends, family, colleagues etc. Celebrities belong to one big breed which keeps the social media sites hot and happening. Twitter and Facebook fan pages of celebrities serve as an avenue for the common man to get to know their heroes better and also to interact with them at times. Without the celebrities from various walks of life the social media world would definitely not be as interesting as it is now. Here are some funny instances which prove that celebrities rule social media.

1. The Million follower secret

Now there are many people and organizations with more than a million followers on Twitter. Ashton Kutcher was the first person to achieve this feat and now he is sailing strong with more than 3.6 M followers. It was an interesting competition between @cnnbrk and @aplusk as to who will reach the landmark. It is also worthy to note that Ashton was live streaming on Ustream and sharing the victory with all his fans.

2. The Tennis Hero’s twin babies

It is a well known fact that celebrity magazines pay millions of dollars to get the first photos of famous persons’ babies. Roger Federer went out of normal way and shared the first picture of his twin babies on his Facebook fan page and his 2.5 million fans on the social network would not have been more happier. This photo got more than 30000 comments and over 100 thousand people clicked on the ‘Like’ button. In the ESPN interview with Federer it was also revealed that the he was getting “2 fans per second” on the Facebook profile.

3. The Oprah Effect

Initially Twitter was something which the tech guys and the geeks used and one of the good reasons for the wide spread usage across various sectors can be attributed to Oprah Winfrey. When Oprah sent her first Tweet on April 17th 2009, Twitter saw a massive 43% traffic boost when compared with the previous week and 37% of it came from new visitors to the site. Twitter.com also went offline for a while on that day showing the infamous fail whale as it was unable to react to the Oprah effect.

4. Hits, likes and more

Twitpics posted by celebs get thousands of views within minutes and a random status message on Facebook gets several hundred comments and likes. This one is a classic example! Being a fan of The Big Bang Theory, this one from Sheldon Cooper made me chuckle.

5. The Top 100

Not a big surprise but if you look at the top 100 twitter users published by Twitterholic it is flooded with all the big celebrities. Only a few well known companies like Google, CNN, Zappos etc feature in the list and the rest of it is pretty much dominated by the celebrities.

Do you follow celebrities on Twitter, Facebook or some other social media site? Do they make the place more interesting or just use it because everyone else does?

Remembering numerous passwords is really hard and having a same password across various sites is risky. It is really tedious to create accounts by filling the registration forms in various sites and the perfect solution to this comes in the form of social sign on. The single sign on solution Open ID created a lot of buzz some time back but many people are still not aware of the concept. The first hurdle is that many don’t know that they can use their existing account login credentials from popular sites (Flickr,Google,Yahoo) on Open ID enabled sites.

If you own a membership based website or a portal it is definitely worthy to enable social sign on. To clear the mist surrounding the concept of social sign on, it is nothing but providing an opportunity for the user to sign in to a website with their existing accounts on Twitter,Facebook, WordPress etc without creating an account. Enabling single sign on will improve the user registrations on the site and gathering user data also becomes really simple.

How can you enable single/social sign on?

RPX Now is a really nice service which will act as a bridge between your website and the identity providers. It provides a login interface which shows the various third party providers enabled for the website. The user can just click on any one of those and it will automatically create an account and map the corresponding login credentials.

When the user comes back to visit the site, RPX Now will remember the third party service which they used the previous time. Then, the user can sign in with a single click verification process.

Plug-ins for WordPress & Drupal

Integrating RPXNow into your website is pretty simple. All you have to do is get the API key from the website and follow the simple installation instructions. The sign in interface can be embedded in the web page or it can be displayed as a pop-up.

If you are running a site built on WordPress or Drupal your task has become much more simpler. There is a wordpress plugin and a drupal module which will help to enable social sign on in your website with ease.

The admin interface of RPX Now provides ways for customizations, account mapping, configuring the third part providers and many more features. RPX Now also provides a plus account and a pro account which gives additional features like social publishing, customizable login interface etc

Enabling social sign on will increase the interaction in the website apart from paving the way for more user registrations. Enabling it in the comments section is also a wise option as this will encourage more users to post comments. The Intense Debate commenting system has an integrated Twitter Sign in and a facebook connect.

ClickPass is a similar service which lets you sign in to websites without revealing your password. These services will definitely enhance the security and also makes the sign in process lot more convenient.