TRAACKR

Charlene Li, ex-Forrester, now Altimeter was talking over the weekend at SXSW about the fact social networks will be “like air”. 

I really like the metaphor she uses of a gas that is invisible yet everywhere, hard to contain and that occupies the whole volume of a void space. I would only challenge the scope of her statement that I find too restrictive: the social web as a whole (meaning all online user generated content), not just the social network component, is ALREADY behaving this way and filling the void of antiquited processes and unaddressed needs by online communities.

Charlene uses Amazon as an example of the deepening penetration of the power of users over brands. This is not the future, this is today.

The power of this metaphor also goes to show the reason why efforts to contain and control the social web are bound to fail.

As an example, Apple has tried to control the review process for iPhone Apps in iTunes. Results? iPhone reviews take place elsewhere: blogs, YouTube, and even on Twitter.

Conclusion? The social web is like air: if brands like Apple don’t provide online users with the tools to express themselves, read unedited content, and conduct their own fact checking on authorship, then these conversations will take place elsewhere.

This blog post from Tech Crunch poses a very interesting potential business model for Twitter.  I didn’t realize it, but now new Twitter users are given suggestions for 100 people they should be following.  As you can imagine, the names on that Suggested 100 list stand to generate an ENORMOUS amount of followers, very quickly.  Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has offered Twitter $250K to be on that list for 2 yrs.  So may think he’s crazy…I think he’d be getting a steal at this price.  It would cost $250K for a 30-second spot during a just ok primetime tv show.  How many eyeballs would that get you (with the DVR factor)?  Vs how many eyeballs and impressions being on this Twitter list will generate in 2 years.  Don’t have time to do the math right now, but will later and come up with an answer for this…

Very interesting.  Is Twitter a powerful media platform?  You bet it is…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/12/how-much-is-a-suggested-slot-on-twitter-worth-jason-calacanis-offers-250000/

DS

Good post yesterday from Mike Nelson at Livingston Communications: “A Poor Man’s Guide To Finding Influencers.”

Mike points out good (and free) resources to help PR firms and marketers find people they need to reach out to on the social web.

This is a great way for communication specialists to get started and get a feel for the amount of buzz out there on their topics as well as the profiles of the people covering their issues.

Just like everything in life, you get what you pay for, and one can’t have too high expectations on the precision of the results coming out of a manual web search for these influencers.

The reason why such a method is not sustainable over time (though I’d argue a great way to get your feet wet) is that as soon as you start getting serious about it, the data quickly becomes absolutely overwhelming and you only manage to get a very partial picture of the activity level, let alone the opinion leaders behind the activity.

When we introduce TRAACKR to web-savvy PR agencies and marketing firms, we often hear that they are already managing a list of online influencers that they created following a process very similar to the one Mike Nelson describes. Our response is always the same: great, let’s compare notes!

The results are invariably the same when we apply our technology and run an influencer search: we always find the group of influencers identified by our client being a small subset of our online influencer list. We also find that they had missed many (sometimes most) of the top influencers in their market; they also misqualify many influencers in their list and as a result focus on lower ranking (less impactful) ones.

The three main reasons behind this gap are:

1- the amount of data and data processing required to thoroughly qualify individual contributors on the web cannot be handled manually.

2- results are very fluid and change rapidly over time: if your list is one month old, chances are that you need to do it over.

3- manual searches result inevitably in personal bias and the person performing the work involuntarily introduces a systematic bias in search terminology and filtering that results in screening out some influencers while promoting others with no corroborating evidence.

Understand that I’m not criticizing the people who have undertaken the Herculean task of finding influencers by themselves, quite the opposite: marketers and PR professionals who are currently doing this work are ahead of the curve and have learned tremendously; they will be able to carry this experience with them as this new field develops.

The good news is that TRAACKR brings is that the days of searching manually for online influencers are over and communication professionals can now concentrate on more value-add tasks: making their client or marketing campaign news-worthy!

Brillant idea by John Fluevog to create an open source footwear project where people can contribute shoe designs. The community votes on the best designs that are then produced and sold by Fluevog (much like Threadless).

When TRAACKR talks about how online influencers are a game-changing phenomenon, this is very much what we have in mind: a new way for companies and their customers to collaborate, in which everyone wins. Corporations lower the risk associated to launching new products and services (as they have already been vetted and will be supported by their customers), reduces drastically costs of development, while their customers enjoy recognition (VIP status) but more importantly a positive experience with products and services they care about.

I won’t ramble too much on this as Bill Taylor, writer for Harvard Business, already says it all in this video.

Kudos to John Fluevog taking the leap in this new world.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the new site for Skittles (yes the candy…www.skittles.com).  It has generated an enormous amount of chatter and buzz online this week because they are doing some very interesting experimentation.  At the beginning of the week, the home page was, essentially, one big Twitter search for the term “Skittles.”  The entire page was really a  Twitter search page.  They had a small Skittles box with a nav bar on the top right corner of the page where you could link to other Skittles pages.  I just noticed that they just switched the page to their Facebook profile page.  I am sure this switch will generate another wave of online chatter.  It’s really fun stuff!

We have to commend Skittles for having the chutzpah to play with their main site like this.  It’s a fun experiment and something very interesting for those following the social media world.  But, is it working?  We’re very interesting in hearing what everyone thinks about it so far.

Certainly, it is generating an enormous amount of chatter and buzz.  I’ve received 5+ tweets about it in the past 2 days (and I’m not following that many people).  I’ve seen another 5 blog posts about it (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure).  And here I am writing a post about it myself.  While I don’t know how much traffic it has generated to the site, I would have to say that based on “buzz” as a metric, it seems to be working very well.  It’s an interesting phenomenon – they are using social media tools to generate buzz through social media networks.  Fun.

With that said, is this strategy working for the Skittles brand?  What image is it creating for Skittles?  Is it appealing to the right customers or is this just a “social media publicity stunt” that won’t drive sales or additional brand affinity?  No real way to tell at this point, but my gut says that this experimentation has helped secure a fun, free and wild image for the Skittles brand and that it will ultimately lead to sales.

Love to hear more thoughts, though.

DS