bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Facebook killed off trending news – and now is looking to support live broadcasting.

My sense is they’re going down the rabbit hole again.

The problem with their initiatives is that they aren’t playing on the strength of the platform, to help inform and create a better experience.

What is it about Facebook that could improve the news experience? 

Thats the product question they need to answer.

My take is that they need to look to Twitter as a reference. They organise news topics and highlight the top tweets in their explore tab. It’s not rocket science but it does exactly what I want as a user, the Twitter take on a story.

This is a good model for taking the best of Twitter to be additive to the news experience.

How Facebook could tackle this

When a News event happens, trigger it as an event and let people contribute. Make them the hero’s. Lift them up – and elevate them.

What people share on Facebook is more direct, more personal. Twitter is more of our public face. So embrace that.

Then for bonus points, personalize that view for each and every user:

• Share opposing points of view.
• Share voices I don’t often hear
• Elevate the official references of facts

Finally, embrace the small, sometimes for a news story, there is only 2-3 unique points of view worth sharing. That is ok. If you’ve delivered a great experience, the job is done.

Enable journalists

To enable journalists to use this and inform their reporting:

• Provide tools to reach out (or a process) and to get consent for reuse of media.
• The same for interviews.
• And/or to ask questions of the audience.
• ^ This helps the news industry produce better news.

And this is a lot better than just writing cheques for media companies to do what they already do.

Twitter is having a second go at it, with one of their co-founders Jack Dorsey returning to the helm.

Whilst you have the ability to follow Obama, Snowden, Lebron. The challenge has been, sorting through the tweets, to see, to have and participate in the conversations.

The refreshing thing about the platform is, it is about talking, about listening, whereas Facebook is about sharing. They can look the same, but the experience is different. Twitter is about the now, getting as close to having a real unfiltered conversation.

And now, is the last frontier of the internet, it is the ultimate shared expression – the now.  If they can just nail it, so that that experience is more accessible, we’ll see some exciting times ahead.

And in a broadcast internet, that’s what we need.

There are some incredibly smart people which read the blog, here are a couple:

Robbie Mackay (@rjmackay): His blog posts, whilst short and sporadic deliver bursts of insight.

Andrew Weaver (@drewmaniac): Mixing it up, he shares great content, ideas and my favourite photo finish friday.

Louis Rosas-Guyon (@louisrosasguyon): Great ideas, from a technical focus, give it  a read.

Give them a read, follow them, send them a tweet.  At the least subscribe for a few weeks, get a taste of what they’re up to.

And I’ll be honest, I can only highlight and engage with those who I know are reading, if you have a blog send it my way… the worst that’ll happen is I place a comment or two.

Visit http://search.twitter.com

Enter some of your customers pains, see what kind of results you get, engage.

Simple.

Now download TweetDeck, load those searches as columns, check in once a day.

You’ve just opened yourself to a world of opportunities.

Running early for a client meeting a fortnight ago I pondered Twitter business models, so here are the results of that brain storm.

Models seen in action:

• Simple sales channel:  Push special twitter sales via twitter, coupons, don’t dilute keep them timely, relevant
• Customer Service:  Answer questions via twitter, talk to clients
• New Product Development:  Get ideas from your market, market research, watch the conversation.  Sure you can run focus groups but how relevant are they really, get unbiased reviews from real users of your product whilst they use it.  Fast & real time
• Networking & relationship building:  Using the networking model to meet people on a local or global scale, help draw people to your website, ensure that you can convert on your website.
• Building a niche audience:  To pour qualified prospects into your sales channel.

Potential Models I have yet to see utilised:

• Sell subscription to your network:  Have a free network of tweets, then charge for private access which includes coaching, marketing help, health etc.  (Used by the protect updates feature).
• Provide free data:  Users can take a new action to generate some dollars (ie free weather, txt for hourly forecast or traffic reports).
• Extra service layer:  Provide dm reminders of appointments, or account balances, notifications of specials.  Perfect for service based industries like mobile, banking, auction sites.
• Sponsorship:  Sponsor some twitterers to join in their conversation, or to mention your account, or to generate a conversation with them.  Like endorsement good to be seen with the right people.
• Gaming:  Provide a text like game, interacts with your brand, charge for upgrades.

The loose platform for conversations has huge huge potential, it is just narrowing down the kind of conversations you can build or extend a business off.

Twitter has in my mind reached a tipping point.

Reason being? at a family function last night someone asked me about twitter, something happened this week and suddenly everyone knows about it.

I will check in a few months and see if indeed this week has been it.  It definitely is in conversations it wasn’t last week.

Radio mentions, Skittles, Tv, all these things have combined.

People all over the world are asking the ‘internet guy’ in their frame of reference, what is this twitter?

If you are  a brand who has exposed yourself to this internet guy you are ahead.  For me I highlighted Twitter with Vodafone & Telecom, brands they know.  If you haven’t made the leap you are already behind.

Now twitter has reached this, what is the next step? Monetisation.

Tip of everyones tongues.

And from my readings, observations and looking forward several steps, contextual advertising is the way to go.

Twitter bridges the gap between, locality, motivation, mood that Google doesn’t.

Live, response driven ads, are going to not only help the twitter experience, they will drive a lot of value to users.

Imagine an event being cancelled, a competitor can immediately place an ad saying hey we are still on, for all those that search for the event.  This is timely, relevant and reaches a motivated audience.

That is just one application, same can be for brand monitoring ie search for coca cola, coca cola has a special deal or competition running.

I would certainly pay for an advertisement to pop up everytime someone searched bwagy or ben young.

That’s friday thoughts, have a think, how would you leverage advertising on real time search?

(Note: by definition Google is post-search, it searches events that have already happened, certainly within the frame of reference of someone who wants information from within 15 mins ago).

One of the number one questions I get is:

1) What do you do?

2) How do you earn money?

Since #1 almost requires an essay i’m going to answer #2.  

Actually no I’m not as that would require answering #1 which neither of us have time for (save that for another day).

The real question is how do you make a return off social media?

It is all about frame of reference.

Some Tv Ads are all framed around awareness, such that when you are making a purchasing decision you choose one brand over another.

Social Media works on a similar wavelength, that is by turning up and participating, you are putting yourself (and your products/services) in the frame of reference of those that also read / participate.  

Then once they in turn have a conversation or are making a purchasing decision their experience with you floats to the top of their minds.  

Why? Because they have had a real experience with you, whether it was some Marketing Advice or some chit chat about your favourite podcasts.  In such a fragmented world this is where the real value is derived.

Is this directly measureable? No but neither is word of mouth (unless you engage in just one tactic) but it is rewarding.

How about trends? Return is not straightforward, you need to look over the long term, over 6 months how are we trending.

So when you find yourself doubting social media, remember:

1) You are engaging with people.

2) They may not need you now but are likely to sometime in the future.

3) Once you have a relationship.  No one can compete.

Twitter is a great platform for conversation. 

However how could you run a marketing campaign on it?

Criteria would be:

• Remarkable content
• Idea worth spreading
• Of actual benefit to those who consume it

If you were to fulfill these, how could you spread the word?

Same as any strategy, plan, line up your chess pieces and execute.

My strategy would be around:

• Have a series of tweets, to provide background information or arouse curiousity
• A follow up tweet with the actual subject
• Stimulate discussion tweets.

Then target 5 users in your niche to engage in it, with slightly different variations of the tweets.

An example would be:

1. bwagy: checking out this cool video @bwagy sent me
2. bwagy: hilarious, check out this video from @bwagy http://blog.local
3. bwagy: what did you think? watch it here http://blog.local retweets appreciated

Of course this only works for the criteria above and with people you have solid relationships with.

It’s more of an initiative to maximise coverage of your first and second tier networks of your offering.

The next step would be to do multiple timezones within a 24 hour period to ensure global coverage.

You can then directly measure through tracking webpage visits and tweets (using search.twitter.com).

That’s what I would do if I was to try and get a message out over twitter.

This information is worth thousands to the right person so help spread it for me as its free 🙂

Update: Tweet this to share:

Running a campaign on Twitter http://tr.im/2j8k by @bwagy [make sure to add your comments when you tweet]