Twitter premium use – the search for a business model

Steven | multimedia,twitter | Tuesday, 24 March 2009

As long as I know Twitter (I joined the service over 2 years ago) people are talking about the business model behind it. Till this point, there is none!
Twitter is build with Venture Capital, $55M at the moment as you can see on their crunchbase profile.

Twitter So there is no business model yet. This means the service is not making money on its own, not as far as we know that it. At first, when twitter was largely unstable, users would like to pay for a stable version. But that passed by when Twitter grow more mature.

There’s 4 ways for Twitter to make money.

1th is by acquisition. If, let’s say, Google would buy the company, that’s all what it takes. This would be a company that typically is interested in the data, the relations, .. and thus can use Twitter as a research base. Google would definitely fit this description. They can learn from it. An other type of company could be on that has an idea to monetize it, but this is, in my mind, less likely. If Twitter turns into a money making machine, I see Obvious (the company behind Twitter) doing this themselves.

A second way would be by advertising. If banners, adwords, .. are placed on the site they would generate a decent amount of cache. There’s just that many users, so loads x small CPM is still good. However, a lot of users ever see the website since they’re using different clients (like twhirl, tweetdeck, ..) which is possible thanks to Twitters’s great API. Of course it would be possible to insert commercial tweets in the stream, but I think this might be something some people consider a bridge too far. For me personally, I guess I could live with it, but I prefer without.

The 3th way is just turn it into a commercial service. Let users pay for the use, or let them pay if they want to go over a certain threshold like following xx people or posting xx tweets per month. Let’s avoid this scenario shall we :) – But it IS a possibility.

The 4th way, and in my mind most possible way, is by adding commercial features. Sure, the small feature set definitely helped the service grow, but there are some things that would be interested and in my mind. I read this post the other day, and it started me thinking (that was about time :) ). Obviously it’s a fake post! Random followers, having celebs to follow you .. I’m sue people would pay for it, but it’s just not what Twitter has become and is love about.

What I do think is a great commercial feature is opening up the analytics of Twitter. It completely fits in the context of this time. Everybody is obsessed by numbers, and with reason. At this moment twitter is monitored by Google Analytics, and in GA it is pretty simple to log data on multiple accounts. So a model could be: you pay for example $5 each month, and you can add your own tracking ID so your stats become visible in your own GA account.

I would pay for that, and for me $5 each month would be acceptable. I used to pay for feedburner before it was acquired by Google as well.

Easy Money! If we consider a usebase of 8 million people (this is an estimate based on Compete, might be higher because of the API, might be lower, only twitter has the answer) and suppose only 5% of the users would pay for this, this would result in a turnover of 24 million dollar! Even if only 1%, so 80.000 users would pay for this, which seems likely to me, this would still generate about 5 million dollar a year. And then you can start tweaking the numbers based on research: what would be the perfect amount of money to ask for a user to generate the most income? You could even identify these users as “pro” users, if you see the status this brings on for example Flickr .. it might work.

I started a little poll to find out how people feel about this, feel free to participate (no registration whatsoever needed). If you think $5/month is too much let me know what you would pay for it.

I would like to turn this into a movement, so if you think this is a good idea embed the #5dollarGA hastag in your tweets. This is something Stenito came up with. Or just tweet a link to the poll or to this post.

Thanks! You can follow me on twitter under @minorissues.

Social Media ROI

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns | Monday, 23 March 2009

Excellent presentation on Return on Investment when using Social media. Great to see the non-monetary values are stressed out.

I love the opening quote: “Social media is like teen sex. Everybody wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.” :)

Hat tip Wim.

BlackBerry or Apple

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns | Friday, 20 March 2009

I would say, Nokia N96, too bad the battery sucks!

UPDATE: Lol there’s a pro-apple answer to this movie. Check it out!

Hat tip: donotfold in the comments.

Surface physics

Steven | multimedia | Tuesday, 17 March 2009

This must’ve been the most impressive Surface demo I’ve seen so far!

By Razorfish.

Hat tip: @crossthebreeze

Twitter for PR

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns,twitter | Monday, 16 March 2009

Quite interesting presentation on using twitter for PR purposes.

Quite interested I said because the examples aren’t exactly new (but that’s ok) and if you don’t know the cases it might be hard to understand without explanation. Example: “arrested”, or Zuck on SXSW. But if presented, they’re strong cases!

Hat tip Futurelab.

How to increase the comments on this blog?

Steven | Random Thoughts | Friday, 13 March 2009

I don’t want this to be me writing, you reading. I want engaging conversations! There should be no threshold spitting your thoughts!

crazy indian guy!

Who knows how to boost this? Feel free to comment ;)

Sixth sense – Augmented Reality to the max

Steven | multimedia,Random Thoughts | Friday, 13 March 2009

There’s a lot going on about Augmented Reality (AR) these days. And sure, there are some really cool things going on. Watch this or this and you’ll get what I mean.

But then I say this TED session that beats it all.

Presented by Pattie Maes, a fellow Belgian. On a roll!

The @Bogusky challenge

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns,twitter | Tuesday, 10 March 2009

Alex Bogusky was on twitter. It just wasn’t something for him, so he quit

prematurely. Read my previous post for some background information.

Since he left his mail address, in his last post, I decided to mail him (he agreed on posting this BTW).

Hi Alex,

I was very pleased to see you on twitter. Too bad it didn’t work out :(

I would love to see you reconsider. It might be something that isn’t in your routine yet, or even something you yourself get little value out. But just know you reach a global audience pretty instant. You can talk to them, listen to them or even just let them know where your working on or what your thoughts are on specific topics.

Apart from that it’s a great way to do PR for CP+B .. I know you probably don’t need it, but isn’t it cool if you can inspire lots of people and engage with them?

Anyway, I wrote a blogpost about it, you can find it here: http://www.minorissues.be/2009/03/05/alex-bogusky-was-on-twitter/

So hope to see you back online, and if not: keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Steven
http://twitter.com/minorissues


Steven Verbruggen
Interactive Strategy Maven
Nascom (Belgium) – http://www.nascom.be
+32 478 88 10 64

And yes, I got a response from the man himself!

image Steven,

Great post.

You’re right on all fronts. For me it’s more about pure time.

Don’t have what it deserves. But who knows. I might be back. I don’t mind reversing my own decisions.

Wishy washy is how I roll. I want people to feel they have access. That was important to me. And that is why in the end I dropped my e-mail. If I had a following of 3000 or something I would figure out a way to manage some sort of version where I don’t feel so compelled to interact. That’s the hardest thing for me. I’m a communicator and if somebody tries to communicate it’s nearly impossible for me to resist.

A
__________________________________

This message was created with six fingers.

First of all: I like his style. He’s responsive, and the way he’s formulating is just poetry to me!

But second, and most important, he’s giving us a challenge! "If I had a following of 3000 or something I would figure out a way to manage some sort of version where I don’t feel so compelled to interact"

So all, head over to his twitter page, and start following him right away! I’m curious to see what he’ll come up with, aren’t you? 1700+ followers ATM, that’s +200 since last week.

Why I think it’s important to have guys as Alex on twitter (or something else) and not just on email? 1/ it’s a great way to see what they are up to, what work they’re working on, what people they interact with, and 2/ interaction! Sure, you can email them, but tools like twitter just have a far lower threshold! If you decided to mail someone you don’t know, an authority, .. you just think 10 times before you send. You make sure your email is perfect, and perhaps, along the way, you missed your moment or decided to not mail them after all. On twitter you just share your thoughts. If it isn’t picked up, no bad. But if it is picked up you know the guy is really interested and listening and the conversation just kicks in.

On the other hand, if somebody I might want to interact with publicizes his/her email address,  I’m always tempted to actually mail some stuff, and start the interaction that way. It’s harder, takes a lot more time, but if you indeed got a response you know it’s no bullshit guy/girl and you might learn something. Remember my mail to Steve Balmer? I always try to ask some valuable questions, not just kiss ass and tell them how great they are. They know :)

I try to live by the same principles myself. And sure I know I’m no authority (yes! lol) if you send me some questions or remarks, by email, or by twitter, I always take the time to answer and share my thought.

(more…)

When an analytics guy has to treat pie, you’ll get ..

Steven | Random Thoughts | Friday, 06 March 2009

pie-chart01

pie-chart02

Kudo’s to Yves :)

Case Study: The Barack Obama Strategy

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns | Friday, 06 March 2009

Pretty cool presentation by SocialMedia8, one of our partners at Nascom.

It sums up really well what went on.

I only disagree with the 4th slide: “advertising never started a movement”. In my mind it’s just not true. Examples? Well, for instance the Bud Whassup? campaign, or Mastercard’s priceless.

Obama actually made a spoof on Bud’s campaign, it’s even in the SocialMedia8 presentation.