Micro Persuasion

The Next Twitter or Facebook is the Open Web

Photo Credit: Open on Flickr by Mag3737 

The following is also my column in this week's issue of Advertising Age.

As Edelman's crystal ball guy I can't go to a meeting without being asked what will succeed Twitter or Facebook as the future king of community. It's unfortunate, but it's just how history has conditioned us to think.

Remember, however, that Second Life was digital marketing's Vietnam.

Communities come and go. Hubs seem to lose their innovation edge just as consumers grow more fickle, new venues emerge and viable monetization options remain scarce. If history repeats itself, Facebook and Twitter will one day be replaced by something else. However, this time it will be the open web.

A group of standardized technologies are emerging that will evolve social networking from destinations we visit into something bigger - a federated address book that makes every single web site that chooses to adopt them entirely social.

Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research has been thinking about this deeply. This week Forrester is releasing a paper that outlines a five year vision for how the open web, thanks to connective technologies like OpenID, will become one giant social network. This global brain will follow us everywhere and influence every purchasing decision.

While Forrester doesn't get this tangible, here's a fictional scenario to consider.

Today online shopping means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducing a transaction.

Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without ever having to visit the site. What's more, Amazon will show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly said about a product and/or its category in any one of thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your friends' friends opinions in a way that protects their identity.

So how should marketers prepare? Owyang advises to focus on advocates, evolve models from push to pull and adapt internal cultures. I think, however, it starts with something more fundamental.

Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it's peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways.

links for 2009-04-27

• LinkWithin - Related Posts Widget with Photo Thumbnails
  Fantastic tool, which I have implemented into my site.
  (tags: widgets semanticweb links blogs tools)
• Windows Brand Ambassador program launches
  Note: Microsoft is an Edelman client but we didn't work on this particular project.
  (tags: microsoft socialmedia CustomerEvangelism CaseStudies)
• MediaPost: Study - Twitter Users = Information Junkies
  (tags: twitter stats)

Could Twitter One Day Replace Email PR Pitches? Maybe

Over the last few months as I travel the country I have noticed that lots of people in PR that I meet are giving out their Twitter IDs in lieu of their email addresses. Many feature it front and center in their email signature. There's even a site that will generate a graphical version for you, which I have embedded above.

On a related note, more of my inbound and outbound communication these days is in the form of Twitter direct messages or, sometimes, public replies. The direct messages arrive through email, but I find myself often reviewing or responding to these in one of my preferred Twitter clients - either Tweetie or TwitterGadget.

At first I despised the bacn. Now, however, I embrace it. What's more, I have come to see the benefits of direct messages and its potential for PR. It has me wondering: can direct message pitches become an accepted practice that journalists can live with? There is upside for them.

For starters, just like with RSS, journalists are in complete control of the relationship. A PR pro can't direct message a reporter unless he/she is following. This means we have to earn our way on to a reporter's screen by providing valuable content, which many of us but not all of us do. Robert Scoble alluded to this in his recent note to PR pros. 

The key benefit here is that a journalist can always un-follow any PR professional who abuses the relationship. Still, with spam weaving its way into Twitter though replies, it threatens to put the whole kibosh on the plaform's potential for media relations (I am drawing a distinction here from direct to audience engagement via Twitter, which is very different).

Second, for the journalists and bloggers that do encourage PR pros to pitch them via Twitter they can streamline the process by keeping missives down to 140 characters. That's less than the three sentence format some are embracing. It ensures people make their point quickly. This makes it more mobile friendly too.

Now some pitches could be public tweets, others will have to be private direct messages depending on their nature. And of course Twitter will never replace email pitching entirely. 

Despite all the growth and hype, Twitter is still small. Pre-Oprah, Harris Interactive found that in the US, even among the ever-wired 18-34-year-olds, only 8% of those surveyed said they use Twitter. Other demographics break out down as follows: 35-44 (7%), 45-54 (4%) and 55+ (1%). Net, email is ubiquitous, Twitter aint. 

Nevertheless, more journalists are using Twitter. So this makes it increasingly attractive to PR professionals. It also makes it essential that we behave ourselves. A few bad eggs will kill this fast.

What's your view? PR pros, have you built relationships with reporters and/or enhanced them using Twitter? Journalists, I am sure you're worried about any such trend, particularly since many of you use Twitter for both personal and professional communications purposes. Weigh in with a comment below or reply to me on Twitter @steverubel. If there are interesting responses, I will round them up in a subsequent post.

Google's New "What's Popular" Feature Aims to Clone Digg

Google's personalized home page, iGoogle, added a new feature that basically clones the core features of Digg and StumbleUpon by embedding them into a gadget that is easily accessible from right within the web desktop.

The feature, which Google started highlighting in its directory this week, is called "What's Popular." Using the widget consumers can submit links either anonymously or publicly and rate whether they like or dislike other submissions.

According to Google's description, the What's Popular gadget "uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader." 

That's just the half of it though. When you click on the maximize link the gadget expands into a canvas view that sorts submissions into different categories - e.g. stories, videos and images.

This won't be the last we see of Google adding social services to iGoogle. They are slowly adding such features to many of their products. Eventually I expect they will also follow Microsoft's lead in rolling up your friends' social content from around the web on Windows Live. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)

San Francisco Tweet-Up on Monday

Edelman is hosting a Tweet-up on Monday, April 20 from 6 to 8 pm at Sugar Cafe in San Francisco. If you're going to be in the Bay Area, you're all welcome to join us. Hope to see you there.

Twitter's Monetization Strategy: Developers, Developers, Developers

There's endless speculation about how Twitter will make money - and when. Twitter is really hot right now, making it attractive to advertisers for both outbound marketing and deep insights. However, I don't think Twitter will be able to build a long term, sustainable business through advertising revenues. 

The brief history of online communities (all 15 years worth) informs us that it's virtually impossible to make money around them. No one has been able to build a sustainable business doing so that has lasted more than five years. The reason is, people online are fickle. We come and go. This is why I wrote that Twitter is peaking - at least as far as in its ability to grow users.

What Twitter has done, however, that very few companies have achieved, is build an amazing platform that developers love. That ecosystem, if they invest in it, changes the game. 

Suddenly, Twitter is no longer a web site. Rather, it is becoming the web's first major social operating system. Twitter is to rapid fire online communication what Microsoft is to PCs, Apple and Blackberry are to mobile phones, Google is to search and advertising and Facebook hopes to become to the social graph. The numbers from comScore don't tell the real story. This BusinessWeek photo essay, which shows the innovation in the platform, does.

If Twitter invests in growing its platform and empowers developers to do more with its API (i.e. build profitable companies), it can create a remarkable business much as these other giants have before them. The beauty of it is they will never have to worry about the ever cyclical online advertising market or the fickle consumer who is in search of the next hot site. What's more it can spur all kinds of innovation, as the platform has already done.

This is the surest path for Twitter: mold the robust platform into a social OS and add premium services for developers and Twitter could become a giant business that weathers the ever-changing fickle nature of online communities. Choose instead to focus on growing site traffic and advertisers and it will fall prey to the same fate as The Well, GeoCities, Tripod, ICQ, Friendster and every community that walked before it.

So Twitter, be Microsoft, not AOL. Focus on the developers. Enable them to monetize and to grow with you. Become the Internet's first social OS and the rest will take care of itself. Do not chase Madison Avenue. Build the platform, monetize it with value-added services and inspire innovation and Madison Avenue and the rest of the world will plug into you.

AOL, ESPN, Others Seek to Bypass Google with Address Bar Searching

Above: AOL's relaunched Love.com builds curated, vertical sites all on the fly from the address bar. 

For years, when consumers wanted to find specific information they would go to a major vertical site like ESPN.com and execute a search. Google's growth, however, is changing the game. 

Today when consumers turn to Google to say, search for say Shaq, there's a ton competition their attention. It's coming from everywhere - Twitter, Google News embedded links, SEO-optimized brand sites, news sites and more. This doesn't bode well for major media companies that have built vast databases of content.

Several sites, however, are now looking to snatch their traffic back from Google by letting consumers easily execute searches from and curate content on the fly, all from the address bar. Three such sites include AOL's newly relaunched Love.com, ESPN and IceRocket. The goal is to make it easy to search from the address bar by tacking on a word to the domain.

Last week, AOL quietly launched an alpha of Love.com - a portal to topical content from around the web. Now, of course, you can search directly on the home page for any topic you want to track. AOL will build a site that curates content from you from across the web. However, the beauty of Love.com is that you can enter any term as a sub-domain and Love.com will build a site for you on the fly - even if it doesn't exist. For example, try shaq.love.com or twitter.love.com or even steve-rubel.love.com. The pages pull up news stories, YouTube videos, tweets and more.

According to an AOL spokesman, this is part of the company's effort to become an aggregator of content - a strategy that some feel is the future of media. Currently, there are 100,000 love.com sites live. AOL has plans to launch 250,000 in the next few weeks. The technology is being powered by Relegance, which they acquired in 2006, and is rolling out across its Mediaglow brands.

ESPN, meanwhile, now has an ad campaign running on air that encourages sports fans to search by adding a term at the end of their domain. The ad showcases that searching for former NFL star and now commentator Bob Golic (ESPN.com/bobgolic) turns up different results than for Serbian ping pong sensation Biba Golic (ESPN.com/bibagolic). The technology works nicely for pretty much any team or star - e.g. ESPN.com/yankees.

IceRocket's Big Buzz social search feature, which I am a fan of, also offers similar URL-based searches,according to founder Blake Rhodes. Simply add any su-bdomain and it will pul together a curated search. For example, try advertising.icerocket.com or easter.icerocket.com and IceRocket will build a nice site that includes blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and more.

I suspect that Google will easily copy this feature very soon. They have the technology and I am sure don't want to see vertical sites grab any of their traffic, no matter how small. Still, this is a smart approach and I am sure that we will see more of it not just on media sites but in social networks (via redirects) and on corporate and brand sites too.

How to Become a Super Tweeter in Just 15 Minutes a Day with iGoogle

Do you want to become a Super Tweeter that everyone is dying to follow? Who doesn't? The good news is that it's really easy. Here's the formula: find stuff that people don't have time to on their own, link to it, talk about it and engage in interesting relevant conversations around it. That's all there is to it and this is a snap using iGoogle.

First, if you don't have an iGoogle page. Go sign up here. Then add a tab for Twitter and bolt on these four Google Gadgets to your page: Google Mini Search, Google News, Google Reader (assuming you're a Reader user) and TwitterGadget. If you click on the "edit this tab" link in the sidebar you can reformat the page so it's two columns. 

If you look at the above screenshot you will see what my page looks like. The left-hand side is where I graze for content. The right side is where I share. I have customized my gadgets so that they cover topics that both my followers and I are interested in.

Now here's where this gets fun. 

All you need to do is use the left to find stuff and the right to share and comment on it. The mini search widget lets you search the web for related links. The Google News and Google Reader let you track topics. And the a-mazin' TwitterGadget is for searching for Twitter topics (type a word and it ctrl-q to search for it on Twitter), tracking the people you follow and for re-tweeting. You can even drag links from the left into the right, as I did in the screenshot above.

That's all there is to it. Do this for 15 minutes a day around a topic that people are passionate about and you will be on your way.

links for 2009-04-08

• Twitter Traffic Explodes...And Not Being Driven by the Usual Suspects! (comScore Voices)
  "Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago"
  (tags: twitter stats comscore)
• Trying to Get Your Boss to Blog? Show Her Meaningful Conversations.
  Interview with me re sharing information and social media.
  (tags: blego PR marketing socialmedia blogs edelman)
• Attention! PR Grabs Keith O'Brien from PRWeek - mediabistro.com: PRNewser
  Best of luck to KOB.
  (tags: PRweek PR friends)
• Web Trend Map 4 in Final Beta - ReadWriteWeb
  Annual visualization that shows prominent Internet trends, products, companies and people
  (tags: trends)
• FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses
  This release was a bit too fast for my tastes. But the Friendfeed team is smart and they will find their way
  (tags: socialnetworking socialmedia microblogging friendfeed attention)
• Timeline of Articles from a Google News Cluster
  "Google News enhanced the presentation for the clusters of related articles: after showing options to filter the articles, a search option and feeds"
  (tags: google search trends googlenews)

links for 2009-04-06

• AccuWeather.com Twitter Bot
  Get weather conditions and forecasts from AccuWeather.com AccuWx Twitter bot.
  (tags: twitter weather)
• Twackle - Sports News, Scores, Stats, Rumors, and Twitter Updates
  "We find Twitter messages about your favorite sports leagues, teams, players and events, and put them all on Twackle!"
  (tags: sports twitter mashups)
• TWTRCON SF 09
  The first event focused on Twitter as a business platform. I will be there - will you?
  (tags: twitter events blego 2009)
• Employees Want to 'Talk Back' to Companies - MarketingVOX
  "many would like more opportunities to use social media and have face-to-face communications with company leaders"
  (tags: stats employeengagement internalcomms socialmedia workplace)
• Digital Marketing: Can Transparency Be a Business Model? - Advertising Age - Digital
  Esther Dyson: A Proposal for a Place to Talk to Your Critics and Tell the World How Your Products Are Made
  (tags: Transparency ideas marketing)
• Social Networking Grows 93%; Communication Becomes Entertainment
  Time spent communicating online rises 18% to 32% of the total
  (tags: stats socialnetworking time attention)

Google Preferred Sites Option Now Available to All Users

Google's experimental "preferred sites" option allows users to overweight certain web sites in the search engine result pages. It debuted in January but at the time was not available to all users. Now anyone can sign up for the feature via Google Labs.

Once you sign up, Google recommends pages from your history that you tend to visit when searching. You have the option to make these sites (or any other) a preferred destination. Further information is available here as well as on the Google Operating System blog, which first reported on the feature earlier this year.

Bring Twitter Right Into Gmail with the Amazing TwitterGadget

I have tried TweetDeck a number of times but I keep uninstalling it because it puts a drain on my system and I find it distracting. Still, I want fast access to my Twitter account and to be able to track my replies, direct messages and to also quickly glance at what my favorite users are posting. Enter the amazing TwitterGadget for Gmail.

I always keep Gmail running in a tab in my browser. As I have written, I use Gmail for far more than just communications. The TwitterGadget embeds a powerful Twitter client right into your Gmail account. The instructions for adding it are here.

When you first add TwitterGadget, you get a miniature Twitter app that sits in your sidebar. But that's only the half of it. Click on the double arrows in the gadget's title bar you get a full blown Twitter client that looks like the photo at the top of this post. In many ways TwitterGadget is the best client out there. The app also can be added to iGoogle or run stand-alone in a browser tab.

Here are some things worth exploring. If you tweak the settings, the gadget will auto refresh every three minutes (hopefully the developer will make it real-time soon). You can also easily click on a tweet to reply or even re-tweet it. All short URLs will turn into the full links if you hover over them. In addition, you can change the colors and more in the settings.

Where TwitterGadget gets really interesting, though, is with its kller keyboard shortcuts. They add a ton of functionality. For example, if you type a phrase, select it and then hit "control Q," it will pull a Twitter search right in the app (see photo below). Also, you can easily pull up tweets for an individual user and/or see statistics about them.

Finally, if you have the "go to label" and "quick links" features enabled in Gmail Labs you can bookmark the TwitterGadget and then pull it up with a keyboard command.

There's another Twitter app for Gmail that's out there that looks promising, but it's a bit buggy and not as feature rich. For now, however, TwitterGadget is a game changer and I highly recommend it to anyone who uses Gmail and or iGoogle.

The Future of Advertising: Just Ask "What Would Google Do?"

Photo credit: WWGD & Jeff Jarvis at the Frankfurt Buchmesse

Jeff Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do?, is a must-read and a real eye opener. Here is a Q&A that Jeff graciously participated in for my column in Advertising Age...

How Google is Changing Advertising Agencies

Jeff Jarvis Suggests Asking "What Would Google Do?"

In just a little over 10 years, Google has built a business that is impossible not to admire. In fact, its success begs the question -- what would Google do (WWGD)?

Media pundit and thinker Jeff Jarvis tackles this question head on with a new book by the same title. In "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis breaks down Google's practices into 12 distinct rules and then applies them to aging industries like media and advertising.

I interviewed Jeff by email on Google's model to get his thoughts.

Steve Rubel: Since you titled the book with a provocative question, I will start the same way. If Google were an ad agency, What Would Google Do? How would they run it?

Jeff Jarvis: I'd say we already know: Google is a new form of agency-as-platform.

As Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out in my book, Google served an entirely new population of advertisers who didn't have agencies and that enabled it to set new rules. Google sells performance instead of scarcity (a lesson the rest of media must learn in this post-scarcity economy). Because it rewards relevance, it encourages better, more effective advertising.

Through search, Google enables any brand to speak with customers without advertising. Google still does business with the agencies, of course, because they hold the checkbook -- and that is delaying the tectonic change that will come to advertising as it has to music, newspapers, TV, and radio. It's coming.

Mr. Rubel: A book, however, is very un-Google, as you noted in several places throughout. It's ranking well on Amazon. How did you apply the lessons in WWGD to the way you wrote/marketed the book and what can digital marketers learn from your experience?

Mr. Jarvis: As I write this, the book is up in the 500 range (on Amazon) and, of course, I hope this Ad Age coverage gets it back up to at least 100!

I do confess that in seeking this old-media attention and in publishing an old-media book -- instead of just putting it all online, where it would be searchable, linkable, correctable -- I am a hypocrite. I did not eat my own dog food. Why? Because the book industry still works well enough to pay me an advance. Dog's gotta eat, you know.

My publisher, HarperCollins, is trying many new things. They had me produce a 23-minute, sitcom-length video version of the book. We put full text of the book online (in a widget that that Google can't search). I shared 30 days worth of excerpts on my blog. Most important, the book began on my blog a few years before it was published -- as I explored ideas there and got help, even an entire chapter, from my readers -- and the discussion continues there and in Twitter now (I love seeing readers tweet their reviews and quotes).

Where this should go: Readers should be able to buy access to an author's ideas in all media at once. I'm impressed that O'Reilly books offers a lifetime subscription to updates of its digital titles. By the way, I asked in my hardback edition whether the paperback should be ad supported; this wasn't met with a resounding yes.

Mr. Rubel: In the book you stress Google's relentless focus on the consumer. And you wonder whether focusing on the consumer over the client makes more sense. Isn't this what ad agencies already do? And if not, what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: In the book, I quote an Australian ad exec saying that agencies should pay attention to clients instead of consumers. Then I quote the ever-quotable Toboccawala saying that agencies should focus instead on their customers' customers. I'd vote for the latter. The real question is whether agencies -- ad or PR -- can truly act as consumers' advocates. If a company has great customer service, do customers need advocates?

Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?

Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise.

OK, that's going too far. There is still a need to advertise -- because customers don't know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.

In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you're Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason -- and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

Mr. Rubel: You also talk a lot about transparency. Google, however, isn't the most transparent company. What does the ad industry need to change here?

Mr. Jarvis: Google is not perfect. It expects us all to be transparent -- so we can be found in search, so we can benefit from our Googlejuice. But Google is not sufficiently transparent about its ad splits or its Google News sources. So, as our parents would say, this may be a case of doing what Google says more than what it does.

Online, it only makes sense to be as open as possible, to have answers to every possible customer question online, to join in conversations with customers as people rather than institutions. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is just good business.

Mr. Rubel: How does WWGD apply to b-to-b marketing?

Mr. Jarvis: Customers are customers, communities are communities. In the mass of niches, there's nothing to stop every community -- moms or plumbers or chemical engineers -- from joining together online and sharing their knowledge and interests. See the success of blogs such as TechCrunch and PaidContent with targeted B-to-B content, advertising, job boards, and events. In the highly specialized world of online media, B-to-B represents a big opportunity.

Mr. Rubel: If Google were a Super Bowl ad, what would it look like?

Mr. Jarvis: It wouldn't. Google does not treat us as a mass. And it has better ways to spend its money.

Mr. Rubel: Can advertising become a platform?

Mr. Jarvis: In a sense, Google is that. It provides the means for anyone to reach anyone, whether through ads or through their own sites and conversation. This, I believe, is Google's greatest lesson for media, advertising, marketers, as well as government: provide a platform for your customers and communities to succeed and you, too, will succeed.

Is that advertising? Well, if we redefine advertising, it might be. Most every company and brand can become platforms for their customers and except for the means to accomplish that, there's nothing new in this. A great company always helps its customers do what they want to do. That's a platform.

Mr. Rubel: What parts of the advertising assembly line (e.g. research, creative, media buying, PR, direct, digital, etc.) has the greatest risk of getting Googled or the greatest opportunity to become Googled -- and why?

Mr. Jarvis: Everything is changed by the Internet, and not just by Google, of course: We have more means to learn more about customers today than focus groups or certainly panels, ratings, and samples ever told us.

Customers make the best creative when and if they recommend and talk about products. Media buying, I believe, will morph into network creation; in a mass of niches, there's opportunity in curating those niches to create critical mass and that work is being done today not so much by agencies but by technology, media, and network companies. PR becomes everyone's business in a company, which must have direct relationships with the public, person-to-person. Direct? The Internet is direct and we're still not done with the argument over whether it is anything more.

Everything in marketing is changed.

Mr. Rubel: Finally, in the book you wrote that "The agency and the advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between customers and companies." This seems like it's an endorsement for public relations -- if it's done in such a manner. Yet, you are sour on PR and lump its future as questionable with the legal profession. Why? And what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: Though they can and certainly do use the Internet to improve their businesses, PR and law can't take on all the attributes of the open age because they serve clients and thus can't be transparent or consistent. The true test of a firm's willingness to prove me wrong would be firing a client that doesn't act Googley. I don't see that happening often.

Having said that, I know what you're fishing for here: If -- in my radical oversimplification -- advertising is failure and relationships are everything, is PR in a better position strategically than advertising?

Well, maybe, but there is this: A company and its employees must cultivate direct relationships with customers and communities without middlemen. So what is the role of the PR agency? It can advise and goad a company to build those relationships. But then, like a good consultant, it needs to get out of the way, to leave. I doubt we'll see that, either. The economics of agencies are built on getting clients to spend more, of course. So the real question is whether new economic models can support both agencies and Googlethink.