Twitter fight!

We're all too familiar with people picking fights online. The latest iteration of that is twitter fights with people trading short jabs with each other.

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin Durant and Dwyane Wade traded barbs over the Top 10 players in the NBA right now:
http://mashable.com/2013/09/25/dwyane-wade-kevin-durant-twitter-feud/

This was barely a feud, but it did cause some waves. Personally, I thought it might be related to some Gatorade marketing campain since both Durant and Wade were in a Gatorade commercial last year.

The whole idea of twitter marketing campaigns is really interesting since, well, it's happening! I've listed a few great examples of online marketing, but the idea of using twitter to create a more interactive campaign seems to be gain hold.

The latest has to do with the latest Honda Odyssey minivan which features a built-in vacuum that's meant to pick up all those crumbs that kids leave behind after eating their snacks. Their TV ads have been kind of lame actually:

But the twitter fights have been much more fun! Honda's twitter account tweeted at other snack or food brands...the types of brands that are commonly eaten in the car. Here's a nice summary:

Honda picks Twitter fights with snack brands to promote new in-car vacuum

The best thing about this is the replies from the other brands. That's what makes twitter a very different environment. It's easy to create an open dialog. And especially when smart brands are doing it, it turns out to be a fun thing which can create a little buzz in a very different way than can happen through TV ads.

Have you seen other good examples of this type of online marketing? I'd love to see more of it.

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Ads, ads, everywhere

So you think my discussions about monetizing social media interactions are esoteric?

Well, the ad execs at Google, Facebook, and Twitter certainly don't :)

I've written in the past about how users of search sites and social sites react differently upon seeing ads. I've also written about how Facebook is working to connect online ad views & interactions with offline purchases.

Well, here's a very interesting panelist dialogue about how Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to measure the success of ads.

Facebook, Google Ad Execs Spar Over The Value Of A Click

It's not surprising to me that Facebook's Rajaram is focusing very heavily on offline interactions as a result of online ads. As I wrote before, users of Facebook may not click on ads and directly buy products they see in banner ads, but the visibility of these ads at the right time and place can help guide them to purchase. As I called it back then, these mid-funnel users are key to Facebook's monetization of  its userbase.

Twitter is focusing on engagement metrics such as tweet responses or retweets. Google, unsurprisingly needs to look at a wide swatch of metrics including engagement (for social aspects such as on Google+), but also views, clicks, and ad forms (for ads based on search or context)

I suppose I'm overly enamored with this, but to me, these companies are finding new ways of growing their businesses. From the perspective of ads, they're finding new ways of getting people to react to the ads they see and eventually buy. People say Google is not really a search company, but an advertising company. I'd say that the way social media is evolving, Facebook and Twitter are as much about ad & media engagement as they are about social engagement.

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Socially Engaged brands

I've written a number of times about brands who have unique ways of engaging their followers and customers through social media like twitter, instagram, and facebook.

So it was really interesting to me to see this analysis of the 25 most engaged brands on Twitter (Hat Tip to Ashley Tevatia for linking to this in her daily brief!)

What Are the 25 Most Engaged Brands on Twitter?

Some of the most interesting takeaways may seem pretty obvious from a user's standpoint, but it's remarkable how it plays out in terms of actual engagement.

The first point is that a high follower count does not equal high level of engagement with those followers. This is clear from a somewhat surprising metric which shows that 73% of tweets sent out by major brands never have responses. This, to me, shows that these tweets are basically a one-way marketing vehicle and really no different than a TV or magazine ad.

There are also some metrics about how the frequency and timing of tweets really affects engagement, but the actual needs for the frequency and timing depends on each brand. Basically, a brand should stay consistent with frequency and timing of tweets, but other brands may choose to tweet more or less frequently and it may still work well for them.

The final thing that struck me is that the top two "brands" in this list are things which I would barely consider brands: @notebook and @disneywords. They're basically social media accounts that have developed followings and they followers really "connect" with the social content they're delivering. Either through quotes from Disney movies or love notes.

How the heck did two such random twitter accounts achieve such success? Well, that's something the marketing guys are these other bigger brands should look more closely at! My guess is that a lot of the engagement that @Notebook and @DisneyWords generate is in the form of retweets, but a retweet still spreads the word and brand message of a twitter account so even something as simple as an interesting quote can spread branding. Similarly, seven of the top twenty on this list are news or sports brands. MY guess is that those brands have a lot of news in their tweets and their followers want to retweet and comment about the news item. For the non-news or sports sites, I'm very curious to see how they achieve engagement and whether they follow a similar model to @Notebook and @DisneyWords.

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Is Content Still King?

What's more important about Social Media Sites? The "Social" or the "Media"?

I read an interesting article earlier this week about how LinkedIn has created a massive media empire. Of course the headline sounds a bit outlandish since most people typically think of LinkedIn as a social (albeit professional) site, but what the article gets at is something which is pretty core to any social media site: the content that matters in your social group.

Each of the major social sites has a different focus of content, but it's still the content which users are typically referring to on the sites themselves.

As the article above states, LinkedIn has created a unique niche with Influencers and the daily emails which are sent recapping a series fo interesting articles. In fact, I actually subscribe to those emails and find them pretty interesting. So I can personally vouch for the idea that this method of having a small number of content creators and very focused articles drives a lot of views and engagement.

Unlike LinkedIn, I'd say that most Facebook users aren't heading to facebook to read articles. They're typically looking to catch up on their friends' activities. The activities are listed in the newsfeed are content. But if you've visited your newsfeed lately, you obviously know that it's not just a listing of random status updates. People post articles they've read, photos they've taken, music they're listening to, etc, etc. So the newsfeed is actually full of a wide variety of content posted by a large number of users (ahem, the content creators). So while Facebook may seem like just a place to read about the lives of your friends & families, when you visit the site, it's about a lot more than that.

Similarly, Twitter has long tried to enhance the content of the timeline after recognizing the types of things people were tweeting about. So rather than just seeing 140 characters of stream of consciousness, you'll see content summaries of articles, you'll see twitter cards linking out to other sites, and if you go to the #Discover tab, you'll see summaries of that. In way, it's quite similar to what Facebook is doing.

On the face of it, it may seem like LinkedIn is taking a completely different path to engagement than what Facebook and Twitter are doing, but at the core of it, it's quite similar. LinkedIn has determined what can drive interest, engagement, and page views. Facebook has done the same. Twitter has done the same. Yes, it's social, but it's still about content. It may not be long investigative articles, but it's still content.

The methods of displaying that content may differ between sites, but it's clear to me that content is still king.

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Being more social

There's been a lot going on with features recently introduced by some of the major social media sites. And I want to take a few moments to talk about how these features are built to encourage us to be more social.

Some of the most recent rundown of features, as you may know, are:

• Facebook Home for Android phones and a revised Facebook iOS app featuring chatheads and some other goodies
• Twitter with it's #music foray
• LinkedIn with its completely revised mobile apps

Facebook's Chatheads

What would be the purpose of these new featuresets other than to entice users to stay on the site longer? Of course, that's the purpose of any website (or storefront) improvements...get the user to stay on the site longer and come back more often (or get the shopper to browse more in the aisles). But the major features we've been seeing lately aren't just about spending more time on the websites or apps, but about using the services in new and different ways.

LinkedIn's new mobile app

Chatheads is meant to pull people into using messaging more like a IM app and not just the pseudo-email it has been typically been used as.

Twitter's new music suggestion

LinkedIn's new apps re-focus them and shift a lot of the intended use to researching people you might be meeting with (the website continues to stay more focused on news & article posts)

#Music is meant as a new resource connecting your twitter-verse with other services that you'd probably not connect otherwise.

So this isn't just about showing more updates from your contacts, it's about connecting with them in different ways...whether it's real-time updates & messages, quick lookups for their professional background, or about what type of music their listening to, these companies are finding new ways which they're hoping pull people back over and over and over. Just like we instinctively head to google to look up anything and everything, these companies are looking for their own sort of "just google it"

Facebook's "Suggested Page" layout has
improved to be clear and separated

Facebook's "Suggested App" started
showing up last fall, but its layout has
improved over time.

Now, let me also say that the features these companies have been focusing on are not just whiz bang new features like chatheads or #music discovery, the features also include incremental improvements to each of these sites & apps which make them easier to use or just plain more useful.

The facebook website and mobile apps look quite a bit different now than they did just six months ago and many of those differences are about making the app look better and I've definitely noticed the improvements...and yes, I'd call them improvements. I've provided just two examples from the Facebook iOS app, but Twitter has made lots of tweeks which make it easier to scroll through your tweetstream, click on links for other users or websites. Each of these seemingly small improvements make each service more friendly to use

I love to see all of this change in this space. While we may sometimes wonder what big new feature a site may release and we may sometimes be underwhelmed those big features, each of those big changes is a try and expanding and changing our usage on the site. Additionally, between those big feature announcements, there are so many little things done that over the course of just six months, those incremental changes amount to big things.

And I believe that is all designed to encourage us to use their services more often, for different reasons, and help us all be more social.

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Social Media Platforms Playing Well With Others

If you're reading this, then you likely frequent Facebook and Twitter. And while you may see a lot of content from friends, family, and other contacts, when there's an article, photo or video posted, you pretty much experience in a couple of ways:

• Embedded within the stream
• As a click to a new page with the full content

This isn't a big deal when you're on your computer, but it can be sort of a pain when you're on your smartphone.

• If it's embedded in your stream, it's likely just a tiny snippet and you'll have to click through to the site anyways
• If you have to click through to the full site, you may end up some place that's not well formatted for smartphones. You might get popups to install their mobile app, interstitial ads, or you simply have to double click on the content column just to read an article

Basically, you have to leave what is a pretty well designed mobile app into an unknown. Twitter and Facebook may be fine providing you links to other content outside of their networks, but they typically leave it at that. They don't care if they leave with you a nice pat on the shoulder or a kick in the pants.

Well, Twitter just announced an expansion of their "tweet cards" which may be an interesting way  help ensure that as users walk out of Twitter, they're given a nice handshake and pat on the shoulder.

Tweet Cards first showed in June 2012 and they're a nice way to show some good embedded content within the stream so you can make a better decision about whether you want to click through to another site. This is actually pretty nice on a computer, but on a smartphone, it's not always helpful for the reasons I mentioned above.

So what's new? Now tweet cards can actually be really helpful on smartphones. Not only will they show some additional content within the stream, if you click through, they don't have to simply go to a website, they can actually open up the relevant app on your phone. So if it's a photo on Flickr, you don't just go to their mobile site, if you have the Flickr app on your phone, it would open up the photo in that app, which is a much nicer experience than their mobile site. Presumably, the same could happen  with a Pinterest or Tumbler link.

While this can be seen as a double-edged sword, as noted on this GigaOm article by Mathew Ingram, I think this is a great sign. It shows that social media platforms are actually thinking about how to provide a good experience for users. Not just a kick in the pants as you leave the network, but hopefully a warm  "Au Revior". Not only that, users can be made aware of interesting or useful smartphone apps. As the article notes, this could mean that Twitter could wield its power to push developers and smaller players around, but that's just part of reality. Twitter can do that since it is indeed so popular. And while doing so, it can presumably make more money without degrading the experience for its users through more in-stream ads.

I'd love to hear from you all about your experiences in frequently multiple social media sites and how you discover new sites or content through them.

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Innovative Social Engagement

There's a lot of talk about how companies and brands should engage their fans & followers on social media. In the title I use the work "Innovative", but let's face it, social media is so new and ever changing that everything could be considered innovative.

But I have seen a good deal of movement away from the stale model of posting brand specific content on a regular/set schedule. I see two aspects of the move away from this model to something which is much more fluid and also not quite as specific to the brand itself. In my mind, the moves broaden the usefulness of the facebook page (or twitter presence) for both the company/brand as well as the fans & followers.

The first simple part of this is the frequency of updates. People check facebook and twitter at different times of the day and for different reasons throughout the day. Mornings might be all about sending birthday wishes. Afternoons might be to see how the day has been going and plans to make for the evening. Nighttime might be for a quick update before heading off to sleep. Each check can be a valuable time for brands to be on the timeline.

This post from PostRocket goes into much more detail and after reading it through, it's obvious that a single daily post isn't really that useful (via @maneesh1):
4 BIG Reasons You Should Be Posting to Your Facebook Page MORE Than 1x Per Day

So it's clear that posting more often is a good thing, but what if the company doesn't have much unique content about their brand to post so frequently? A software or service provider could post tips to make their service more useful (eg, how can Evernote be used while landing on Mars?!), but what I've started to see is something way more interesting than simply "more posts, more often"

I'll call it expanding the relevance of the brand and I'll provide two examples. Essentially, it's all about finding things that brand followers & fans would be interested in. Call it playing to their sense and sensibility.

The first brand who's doing a great job with this is Oreo. They are finding significant news events and tying them back to the simple Oreo cookie. Read more about it here:
Oreo’s Facebook Salute to the Mars Landing Will Make You Hungry

They obviously have a big budget for this, but they've expanded the relevance of the simple cookie by tying it to things that their followers are probably interested in anyways. Whether it be the Olympics, Batman, or Air Conditioning; they've found a way to remind their followers about Oreo cookies (and hopefully go buy some!). I'd consider Oreo's social media brand work to be cutting edge. Finding interesting & relevant news events, creating a cool message about that news event, and inserting Oreo cookies as the key ingredient for the message. With thousands of likes and hundreds of comments for each post, it's obviously getting the attention of Oreo lovers everywhere.

Another simple example is by a company that my friend Maneesh runs, MightyText. The company provides a service for Android phone owners to enable SMS texting from anywhere. You'd think the brand page should focus on texting and the Android OS, but as you can see from their facebook page, there's a good deal of content that's just slightly related to texting or not at all related. But the commonality across those posts is that they are things which MightyText fans are probably interested in.  As you skim through their facebook page, each post has a dozen or so comments and many dozens of likes. So they're getting increased engaged by NOT JUST posting about their service or even just Android phones. As a startup, they don't have a huge budget to create brand new content, but they're finding content which their followers find interesting and running with it.

I'm looking forward to a lot more interesting and engaging ways that brands get their message out. Have you seen other cool social media from brands that keep you engaged with them? Let me know!

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Personas on Twitter - Part 3

Closing out on the topic of personas on twitter, I wanted to talk about what never feels right to me or like it doesn't work. (You can read my previous two posts on what DOES work in Part 1 and Part 2 here)

Now, I personally get annoyed by some individuals on twitter, but this post isn't about individuals, it's about what can backfire in terms of getting a following and maintaining engagement.

To keep it simple, as a business, the last thing you want is for your twitter personas to feel like it's made up in the back cubicle in your marketing department. Sure, the account can be used as a marketing tool, but it's so easy to come off as doing nothing more than bragging about your company and nothing more.

Being upbeat about your products is great, but if that's the only layer you provide to your presence on twitter then it's not something which will get much engagement. It might get some eyeballs, but they'll stray quickly to more interesting or more useful personas.

I was going to put examples here, but let me instead explain a simple way I have of thinking about this: If you only tweet what you have already said/posted/documented elsewhere (eg, your website, your marketing pamphlet, YouTube, etc), then you're not building anything useful to you or to potential followers; you're simply creating noise. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with tweeting those things as part of your stream, but you've GOT to do something more.

Now this may seem quite obvious, but many times, I just feel like companies don't get it. They just want to be on twitter, but don't think anything more of it once the account is setup. Or they may overthink it: They send out tweets only after multiple rounds of review by people in marketing or legal or They setup robots to tweet out headlines. Or they just constrain what their twitter account could be used for.

I'm not going to call out any specific twitter accounts here since, to be honest, I just unfollow such accounts. However, I hope this helps explain what I feel doesn't work in an environment as dynamic as twitter.

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Personas on Twitter, Part 2

Following up on my last post about brand/company personas on Twitter, I want to focus on bloggers...

I'm actually going to focus on Sports bloggers who go above and beyond writing posts on websites and keep an active dialogue on Twitter. They typically include a variety of NBA game re-caps, league summaries/opinions, and real-time game tweets.

I'm just going to list a couple of accounts that I think do a good job and explain why I think they maintain a great presence and persona on twitter (and not just be tweeting a lot)

@HPbasketball
@LakersNation

Now, LakersNation is obviously an account for fans of the LA Lakers. with 48k tweets to their names, they obviously keep things busy on twitter, but they do it in a variety of ways. Not only do they tweet what every Laker fan might be talking about during a game, but they keep things going in between games. Not just with thoughts about recent and upcoming games, but also about Laker history and trivia. I think it's a great way to keep fans engaged before, during, and after games. And since I'm a huge Lakers fan, it's no surprise that I follow them!

HPBasketball, it could be argued, hates the Lakers (not really), but he keeps followers engaged in a lot of ways. Again, there are blog posts and in-game tweets, but there's a lot going on between games. Some of it is analysis of the whole league, some is specific topics or nits that he needs his followers to understand. A lot of it may rub people the wrong way, but somehow, through 140 characters at a time, he manages to explain himself. There's a lot of times where I don't agree at all with his opinions, but the fact that he gets his thoughts out there and manages to explain things 140 characters at a time keeps me a follower.

So what's to learn about personas from these two accounts? It's fun to live tweet games, but the followers will only stay if you manage to keep their interest throughout the week. It takes more than linking to your game recaps or team/league summaries. And being a passionate fan of the subject shows off in how you engage your followers.

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Personas on Twitter

Lately I've been thinking a lot more about what works and what doesn't work in the social media space, specifically on Facebook on Twitter. The reason I started thinking about this is because I had noticed some "random" photos on Facebook being liked and/or shared thousands of times. These viral photos may be one-offs, but more often than not, specific websites/account would get large numbers of likes over and over. Anyways, it piqued my curiosity and lead me to look at my twitter timeline as well.

Now, I'm no social media expert and this post certainly isn't aimed at being instructive about how to increase twitter presence. I'm just going to focus on a few examples and tie them back to personas and try to understand why I think they're successful. I was originally going to do this all in one post, but I realized, it would end up being really long, so I'm going to split this into a few posts.

I'm going to break it down into a few types of personas. Note that I don't call these brands even though some of them are. A twitter profile can be a brand, but I don't consider it to be interesting or worthy of following unless it goes beyond just being a brand. That means I don't follow celebrities or product brands unless they do something other than advertise their products. That also means that the twitter accounts I really look out for establish their personas in strong, unique ways.

So let's start off with the persona that got me thinking about this whole thing:

@littledebbie - Very random that I start with this, but the person(s) behind this profile are definitely having fun with it and show they understand that a brand can provide factual info and help their customers, but also create a connection with the twitter-verse. I won't go into all of the details, but based on some simple tweeting with @Questlove in December and joking about their brand, a lot of people in the twitterverse noticed the tongue-in-cheek humor behind the Little Debbie account. I definitely noticed the fact that they go beyond just responding to "help me" tweets (in this case about nutritional contents). Before this, I hadn't thought of Little Debbie since grade school when my mom would pack a snack cake in my lunch bag. Now? I think they're maintaining a pretty cool persona on twitter. That is reason enough to say they've done a good job establishing themselves as something unique on the social internet.

More brands have done a pretty good job:

@eyeficard - They run a pretty standard support profile, but they have employees with other jobs also man this profile and get to the bottom of customer issues. From what I've seen, it's allowed them to provide consitent responsiveness in a world where waiting 10 minutes feels like forever! For a small company like this, I think it shows that you can establish a helpful presence for your customers no matter how big or small you are. Besides all this, I walk my dogs past their office all the time and they look like cool folks :)

@comcastcares - Back before twitter was a household term, this account became known as a place to go for help with Comcast issues. The reason it got noticed is because it seemed to be more responsive than the Comcast phone lines. That's actually a bad thing to say about the normal Comcast support process, but a really good thing when it comes to leverage the internet. It may not seem like it now, but Comcast was at the leading edge of this. The account content itself is kind of boring, but I think they've established themselves well as a consistent place to go for real help.

So my takeaway for these company/business/brand accounts is that just getting on twitter doesn't do much for you. However, there's a variety of ways to make a name for your company. It can be as simple poking fun at your brand or as another way for your customers to ask for help. The point for me is that some companies do a pretty good job at maintaining consistency in the persona they've chosen for their brands and that consistency is key.

Okay, that's it for now. I'm going to get to more interesting personas in the next post so keep an eye out!

[UPDATE: Check out the next post on this topic here: Personas on Twitter, Part 2]

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