AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

AlexSchleber 32 minutes ago in reply to Scobleizer

Revenue share is a great idea to make this palatable, AND the fact that sponsored payload is in no way an intention of you the author would make this compliant with the new FTC rules: Even though you may get some revenue, the fact that you never chose/inserted/endorsed the ad should make it OK.

Very important, as otherwise the new FTC ruling makes it mandatory to put something like "AD:" or "Sponsored:" in a tweet.

And therein lies the even bigger genius of this: You are completely right that it would make little sense anyway to insert ad/sponsored tweets (say with some sort of highlighting around it), people would just train themselves to ignore those in short order like they have with everything else online, especially in Social Media.

So instead, make it a conscious decision by the user to look at more info. Totally changes the mind-set, more similar to the "solution focus" we see with search ads. People are signaling that the they may be looking for something!

It is ESSENTIAL to give people more of what they were already looking at when they "raised their hand". Context is everything. And that's why Robert is right, there has to be a tweet first for this to be attached TO, else there simply is no context!!

What's the context of your Twitter stream? That's right, there is just about none, at best you could say "social activity". But each individual Tweet can have a context, and if it's not just the shortest of conversational snippets, it typically does.

See what I wrote about this exact problem (Web content monetization) some months ago: http://businessmindhacks.com/post/is-advertising-failing-on-the-internet

 

Twitter client Seesmic has already integrated geo data.

Geolocation is a two-edged sword: Some of the potential incredibly cool, some of the potential pitfalls in terms of privacy and security incredibly worrisome.

Until these companies can demonstrate to me a more well thought out approach than all or nothing on/off (by opt-in), I'm staying out of this.

Just the other day there was a post by someone describing how Foursquare is potentially surfacing your home address for uninvited guests after your own guests obliviously identified it at YOUR party by checking into the app.

Nice if someone makes themselves "mayor" of your house...and suddenly has it be a target for potential mischief, mild or not so mild. Only recourse so far is for you to manually opt-out your home's location out of the Foursquare database...sheesh.

OK, enough of that, DO click through and check out the cool usage examples ReadWriteWeb has come up with:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_location_api_possible_uses.php

PT: ...My observation on it is that it's striking how few people from Silicon Valley are represented in the Obama administration in any sort of capacity. The only cabinet level person who is even remotely from Silicon Valley is the secretary of energy, who i guess was a physicist at UC Berkeley.  People supported Obama over Hilary Clinton in the primary in Silicon Valley in a big way and in a weird way its translated into like no influence at all.

SiliconAlleyInsider: How would government be different if there were more tech and entrepreneur types running it?

PT:  The biggest area of reform that I would identify would be making the government more efficient, where the government can do more with the same amount of money or do more with less money even. That concept just seems alien to the political debate on both sides. The Republican side is that [the government must] do less with less, and the Democratic side is you have to do more with more. The idea that you should do more with less just seems completely outside of the debate.

My BOLD highlights.

FIRST: This is NOT meant to be political.

I wanted to highlight the last two sentences, which are simply brilliant. I've never heard it expressed quite so succinctly.

As Einstein said, a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that it was created at. Why does it seem that the entire political system (regardless of partisan affiliations) is never getting smarter by very much?

Great detailed post too, click through.

Good thinking here, Andrew. BTW many thanks for promoting my post on the same topic.

As for the bit about “pandering for social capital”, I would say that from a Behavioral Economics perspective, that can never be fully divorced out of the equation. Nor should it be:

As I tried to make clear in my post, social capital (i.e. trust, asf.) as an ongoing unconscious calculus is very real. A little bit of it is put on the line with each tweet, and each retweet. So why would we want to take ourselves almost completely out of the equation, and lose our voice?

That’s what Social Media has been about at the core after all, everyone having a voice. Sure, there are many "Powerbrokers" that wish this hadn’t happened, and would like nothing better than to take it back (Murdoch/Old Media, etc. etc.).

So it seems that at a deeper level, Twitter is learning (for the second time, first came the @ replies brouhaha) a lesson about a “Powerbroker vs. Friend” archetype conflict: Trying to tell us how to do something (The Powerbroker) that was established at a community (The Friend) level.

Which is why I really wondered if they of all people still don’t get social media. Or that they have built the platform(s) (same goes for Facebook) to allow the community to yell more loudly than ever before about having Twitter trying to dictate something.

By all means click through to read Andrew's detailed post about the "New Twitter Retweet".

I wrote a post on the same issue from a slightly different angle yesterday that got a lot of interest:

Twitter Tries To Change Retweets, Doesn’t Get The Social In Social Media

Read it if you haven't yet, it seems to have struck a nerve.

The New Mainstream

Based on this data, we believe that “connected consumers”—mirroring other industry research studies and the general broadband population in the United States—are shooting the adoption curve when it comes to Internet technologies.

The Technology Adoption Curve

“Connected consumers” are actively engaged with digital media, both at home and on the go, and are personalizing their experiences whenever possible. This type of behavior may sound a lot like your own, actually. That’s not a surprise—but the speed and scale at which such digital fluency is occurring across the U.S. population is. Simply put, “connected consumers” are the new mainstream.

First, always nice to have a good graphic of the adoption curve handy...

Second, it is interesting that the data from Razorfish's FEED report substantiates what has been a "felt" (i.e. anecdotal) reality for me, and likely for you as well:

The mainstream has clearly shifted, the "geeky" interests, tools, and toys are no longer geeky anymore, they are what everyone is using. This has broad implications for this Attention Economy:

If engagement, to sustain attention, is the new key, then it becomes even crazier to want to e.g. hide your content behind a Pay-Wall, as Rupert Murdoch has been proposing. If you disappear from people's "connected" radar screen, you quite simply... disappear.

And if you're thinking, "well Alex, I'm just a small business, how does what Rupert Murdoch doesn't get apply to me?" I'll tell you how it applies.

Far too many coaches, trainers, and experts of all stripes are placing the equivalent of Rupert's Pay-Wall around their best ideas. By trying to charge say $10 or $20 for that eBook or "real book", they ensure that very few people will ever get to find out what they really have to offer.

Because if you're not known already, it becomes that much harder to push someone over that first sale ("is always the hardest") barrier.

Think about it: Someone like @problogger has been in essence giving away great content for years. THAT is what "earns him the right" to charge for extras, i.e. puts him in a place to successfully to ask for $50 for a report, or $x/month for a membership subscription.

It's called: Moving the Freeline... the antidote to Attention Scarcity brought on by the "connected consumer"...

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/?sort=&search=freeline

josh_wills: @Scobleizer I see you tweeting about lists alot, but I don't see that you get why it's important. hint: it's not the filtering.

about 12 hours later from web · Reply · View Tweet

Scobleizer: @josh_wills OK, you hooked me. What's important about lists in your view?

2 minutes later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer they're hyperlinks w/anchor text. Anchor text is *really* important for search.

1 minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer twitter democratized publishing. Now they've democratized linking. Real-time linking for anyone = Better RT search.

less than a minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer bloggers begging for lists == bloggers begging for links.

half a minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer good article. I bet twitter's (eventual) pro accounts will let you create more than 20 lists.

I realized only tonight that Twitter had made List names into clickable links inside of tweets when I came across a Mashable tweet that included "@mashable/mashable". I immediately went searching for when this was first discovered, Scobel had a tweet about it from Friday afternoon which I had missed before.

Here is a Twitter Search for the phrase:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%22link+to+lists%22

Since there is no way to search Twitter with full REGEX there is likely no way to search for the first tweet using the new convention (with something like @[^/]/[^ ] ).

More than likely it would have come from one of Twitter's developers. But at least neither @twitter, @ev, or @biz had anything about this convention in the last 9 days.

The points made by @josh_willis could indeed be huge. The entire Twitter ecosystem has suddenly changed, and we likely haven't thought of all the consequences yet.

(Also see: "Why Twitter Lists Change Everything - Dave Troy" http://bit.ly/4bm3ke )

Can Microsoft just once think for itself and INNOVATE something? Really, I say that as an embarrassed MSFT customer.

And yes, the source of this article is Apple Fanboy biased, but that doesn't matter. The obviousness of this is way beyond all denying...