Twitter Has Changed the News Business

Public relations practitioners are already talking about ‘breaking’ news of an event (staged for commercial benefit) using Twitter, thereby bypassing any editorial scrutiny.

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Of course journalists themselves are being side-stepped by bloggers and citizen reporters, some would rightly note.

These are people who have little interest in what is viewed as “old-school” media practices that require investment of more time when researching stories. Even journalists would admit to relaxing their own rules for their blogs, Twitter feeds and other interweb media.

Twitter breaks news, but will it break journalism? | memeburn

How Regulation Can Make or Break an Internet Business

Google and Twitter have weighed in on the 'hot news' doctrine, which grants newspapers in some states a time-limited, quasi-property right over facts they report, arguing that the legal concept is old 'n' busted in the instantaneous Internet age.

The companies filed an amicus brief in the legal case between financial website theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Plc, claiming that Internet chatter cannot be contained and that restricting the spread of news content could hurt the public.

A U.S. federal judge ruled in March 2010 that a news site called "theflyonthewall.com" had misappropriated content from major analyst firms by publishing highlights of new equity research by Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch.

The judge agreed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and that flyonthewall.com was making money off of their hard effort by offering subscriptions so that users could access The Fly's near-realtime writeups of the analysts' work.

An injunction was issued, but then flyonthewall.com asked whether it was permissible to publish information that already had appeared elsewhere, as for example news reports by Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal.

Google and Twitter have filed briefs supporting flyonthewall.com's right to publish once the information already has been made available elsewhere on the Internet.

Google and Twitter pointed out that it's nearly impossible to implement some period of exclusivity for news when it can spread so quickly across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and that upholding such a restriction could actually hurt the news-consuming public.

It's just another example of the decisive rule regulations and laws can have in creating or destroying a business model.

Google and Twitter pour cold water on "hot news"

Google, Apple, Microsoft Trusted by Half of Adults, Just 8% Trust Media

Nearly half (49 percent) of U.S. adults trust Apple, Microsoft and Google, according to a new Zogby Interactive survey.

About 13 percent of respondents trust Facebook.

Almost nobody trusts traditional media or Twitter, each of which had a trust level of eight percent.

Google And Apple Trusted More Than Facebook And Twitter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Twitter Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day

Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. Those numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. Most users don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a media source.

Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day

Advertisers Might Be Able to Update Ads Dynamically Using Twitter

Google has quietly invited a handful of advertisers to test a new display-ad integration with Twitter, which essentially allows ads to be updated in real time by changing the content of the tweets.

The layout of the ads places the Twitter bird is in the left-hand corner while the advertiser's latest tweet is featured in a box centered in the unit. A button to the right reads "Follow on Twitter," allowing users to become a follower of the advertiser without leaving the page.

The ads are linked to the client's Twitter account, allowing it to always dynamically insert every tweet. Clicking on any part of the ad other than the "Follow on Twitter" button takes the user to the advertiser's Twitter page. The ads are appearing on sites in the Google content network, ClickZ reports.

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Twitter Bans 3rd-Party Ads

Twitter has is banning third-party advertisements on its site, in a move to control its monetization of the micro-blogging service, and perhaps also to protect users from perceived ad spamming.

The Twitter "Promoted Tweets" platform poses some risks of user annoyance, but might arguably provoke much more irritation if the appropriateness of the promoted messages is not controlled.

As mobile advertising starts to become a more important and bigger revenue stream, control of inventory is going to become a bigger issue, as it always does for ad-supported media.

Twitter Gets Serious About Getting Paid - PCWorld

Social Networking and Brand Building: B2C Works Better than B2B

The top 10 brands on Facebook, according to number of fans suggests a couple of obvious "lessons" for marketers. All of the top-10 brands are in the consumer space, and all tend to have "enterprise" size marketing budgets. Facebook itself is in the top position, but ignoring that, the list looks like:

#2 Starbucks 7,266,488 Fans
#3 Coca-Cola 5,567,046 Fans
#4 YouTube 5,114,322 Fans
#5 Red Bull 3,727,372 Fans
#6 Disney 3,488,088 Fans
#7 Victoria’s Secret 3,470,724 Fans
#8 Converse 2,749,691 Fans
#9 McDonald’s 2,270,109 Fans
#10 H&M 2,062,377 Fans
#11 MTV 1,924,744 Fans"

In the business-to-business space, and especially for any firm that is small or mid-sized, Twitter probably is a better bet.

Is Social Media a New Way to Build a Brand? | Millennial Marketing:

Twitter for iPhone: No Twitter Account Needed

Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store and people can even use Twitter to read top tweets, browse trends, find people and read public tweets from users located nearby without actually having a Twitter account.

The whole idea is to make it real easy for people to use Twitter on their iPhones. Discovery and consumption of interesting, relevant information is a central focus.

Quick and easy signup exists within the application so new users won't need to visit the Twitter web site to create an account.

Twitter Blog: Twitter for iPhone

What Works Better for Marketing Campaigns: Twitter or Facebook?

After studying Twitter and Facebook as business marketing vehicles, Irbtrax says "Twitter performed better in the general business to business marketing category due to its viral marketing benefits."

But Facebook performed better in the business to business marketing category for select companies that are 'personalities'. In other words, "hot" products or services with high user inmvolvement can use Facebook in ways that other firms cannot. That also means Facebook likely is better for consumer products.

The study concluded that it is not even necessary to have a large group of Twitter followers to benefit from Twitter's viral marketing advantages. Twitter also might be better for real-time promotions, events, special offers or location-based offers, the study suggests.

The study concludes that both work, and that it is best to create a presence on both. But extrapolating from the findings, one might argue that a business-to-business campaign is better suited to Twitter, while consumer products might fare better on Facebook. That especialy would be true for products without a high degree of personal and emotional involvement.

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75% of Twitter Users Use 3rd Party Services

Twitter says it has 105.8 million registered users, is adding 300,000 new users every day and sees activity by 180 million users every month.

About 75 percent of its visitors don’t go to Twitter.com, but to services built by third-party developers. That is significant because traffic counts based solely on the Twitter.com site vastly undercount actual Twitter activity.

That shows the power of third-party developers! 

Twitter Gets into Advertising

Twitter has introduced its "Promoted Tweets" advertising program with a handful of advertising partners including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.

Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users, initially only when a user has conducted a Twitter search function.

Users will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. Twitter says it will attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don't resonate.

Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted" when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Twitter says it wants to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in user timelines in a way that is useful. That means the program will get a slow introduction and will be user tested in a variety of ways.

Twitter argues that all promoted tweets are organic Tweets, which makes them different from traditional search advertising and social advertising. Promoted tweets will also be timely, Twitter says.  "Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment," Twitter says on its blog.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet, the company says. Promoted tweets must resonate with users. That means if users don't interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the promoted tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Rretweeting it, the promoted tweet will disappear.

Twitter blog

Twitter Users Want News, MySpace Users Do Not, Unless it is Celebrity News

Twitter is a social networking medium, but it also is a news distribution mechanism, it appears. A new stydy by Chitika shows Twitterers mostly consume news while MySpace users want games and entertainment.

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Facebook also is a news site, but less so than Twitter is. About half the traffic (47 percent) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users’ interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebook users by nearly 20 percent, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for news-focused users.

MySpace users, on the other hand, seem to have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead, MySpace members seem to prefer video games (28 percent) and celebrity and entertainment content (23 percent).

more detail here

Why and How Businesses Use Social Media

Social media marketing is a developing art form. In fact, you almost would find it odd that budgets to support social marketing and mobile social marketing are growing on a fairly widespread basis even though a majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment from social media.

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In fact, according to a recent survey of marketing executives by Econsultancy, 61 percent say their organizations are “poor” (34 percent) or “very poor” (27 percent) at measuring social media ROI.

According to the Econsultancy survey, 61 percent report that they “have experimented with social media, but not done that much.”

A quarter say they are “heavily involved in social media”, while the remaining 13 percent are not engaging with social media at all.

So why are marketers using social and mobile social media? They do so for the same reasons they use other marketing channels: generation of sales and leads as well as softer objectives such as improved brand awareness and reputation.

As an intermediate objective, social media efforts often are measured by their ability to drive traffric to company Web sites. "Increased traffic to a Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely to be trying to influence through social media marketing," says Econsultancy. Fully 74 percent of companies say they use social media to increase Web site traffic.

"Direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of offsite social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents (63 percent)," says Econsultancy.

More brand recognition (64 percent) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media. A similar proportion of respondents (62 percent) cite better brand reputation. And that might be a big part of the reason why social media is used.

Just over half of companies (56 percent) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24 percent) use sales as a metric for measuring social media effectiveness.

50 Million Tweets Every Day

Twitter now has reached 50 million tweets a day, excluding all spam, says Twitter analytics staffer Kevin Weil.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day, he says. Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second," says Weil.

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about, he says.

Still, as with Skype's "concurrent users" metrics, it is a milestone.

Native Twitter App for BlackBerry Coming

Historically, the ability to make and receive telephone calls from a device in your pocket or purse, anytime, has been the killer application for mobile phones. Recently, other killer apps have emerged. For many smartphone users, the killer app was email in the pocket or purse.

Recently, access to the mobile Web, or perhaps the App Store could be seen as the key driver of iPhone adoption, while now social networking has emerged as the first consumer killer app for smartphones.

You could get a debate about whether users prefer to have a discrete application to get to their social networking sites, or are just as happy using their mobile browsers. But lots of people, and lots of suppliers, might vote for the application approach.

Now BlackBerry seems to be close to getting its own RIM-supplied Twitter app. There are other Twitter apps available for Blackberries. UberTwitter and TwitterBerry, SocialScope and Tweetcaster, are examples.

But the BlackBerry blog "CrackBerry" says an official RIM Twitter app is under development as well.

Apparently the RIM versiion will be integrated with other core BlackBerry applications and be tied in to the address book, browser and device setup wizard.

If one wanted to know why an official RIM version might get traction, as opposed to any other app, it likely is the degree of integration with other BlackBerry apps. We'll know soon enough.

33% of Users Will Post to Social Networking Sites Such as Twitter

The thing about social or online media is that people use media in different ways. In fact, even thinking about those ways has to be updated from time to time. Twitter and other social networks provide an example. Analysts at Forrester Research have for a couple years used the notion of "social technographics" to describe the different ways people interact with Web content.

Up to this point the focus has been Web sites and blogs. But now social networking is part of the model, as Forrester has added a new category, "conversationalists," to the framework. About a third of people will update their status information on a social networking site or post updates to Twitter.

That is more people than the 24 percent of people who actually publish a blog, for example, while 70 percent read them.

About 59 percent of people maintain a profile on a social networking site or visit social networking sites. About 37 percent post reviews or ratings, leave comments or contribute to online forums.

The analysis tries to describe ranges of online social media behavior, which has lots of people consuming content and relatively fewer creating it.

Conversationalists are 56 percent female, more than any other group in the framework.

Aside from the idea that people have different levels of involvement in the social media content creation process, the new category illustrates an important new feature of social media: the ability to create, sustain and promote conversations.

Twitter Appears to be Profitable

Twitter appears to be profitable, on the strength of new deals with Google and Microsoft to allow indexing of Tweets, as well as lower telecom expenses, Bloomberg BusinessWeek says. As important as that is for Twitter and its investors, it also is good news for Twitter users, who now can have less concern that Twitter will vaporize for lack of a sustainable business model.

To be sure, the long-term model still must be created. But Twitter now has more breathing room to do so.

In exchange for making tweets, searchable on Google, Twitter will receive about $15 million, while the Microsoft partnership is worth about $10 million.

Twitter also achieved profitability by reducing expenses, particularly the money it used to pay mobile providers to disribute tweets as text messages.

Apparently Twitter has managed to renegotiate so many deals with carriers that the company pays far less for the services.

By some estimates, Twitter now requires about $20 to $25 million in operational costs. That means the two search deals basically cover Twitter's operational expenses, at least for the moment. That will allow Twitter to spend time creating an ad revenue stream and commercial services that would allow enteprises to analyze traffic, for example.

Twitter: "What's Happening," Not "What are You Doing?"

Twitter has made a refreshing, helpful and important change in the basic question our tweeting bird friend asks us.

"What are you doing?" had been the question. The new question is "What's Happening?" That makes more sense to me, corresponds to the way I use the service, and I suspect will deepen and extend the use of tweets as a broadcast, one-to-many information service.

"The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates," says Twitter founder Biz Stone. "Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people and events you care about."

What's interesting here is an important, if subtle shift from "you" to "the world around you." That isn't to say people will stop posting about where they are, random musing or what they are doing, as people.

It is to say that Twitter now is poised to become a more important "news" or "media" format, as it already has been becoming.  I like it.

Is Twitter Traffic Falling?

More than one recent study has suggested that Twitter traffic is declining, after leveling off in the summer of 2009. But is it really? The answer is complicated.

According to Nielsen, traffic to Twitter.com was down a dramatic 27.8 percent between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors.

Research firm comScore also noted that unique visitors were down 8.1 percent in October, while Compete reported a 2.1 percent decline.

Some might suggest the traffic decline is caused by falling interest in Twitter, while others suggest the traffic simply is caused by Twitter third-party applications and mobile access.

Crowd Science, for example, in August studied traffic patterns and found 43 percent of Twitter users accessed the service through third-party applications, and 19 percent using text messaging.

Personally, I'd bet on the use of third party apps and mobility as the explanation. Nielsen says the third quarter of 2009 was the first quarter in which more than half of mobile Internet users were accessing the Web using a smartphone, and since social network updates are a huge driver of smartphone usage, it stands to reason that traffic sources are changing.

Amazon Integrates Twitter

It increasingly looks as though Twitter's business model will rely, in large part, on marketing services of various types.

A recent study by professors at Penn State University found that 20 percent of tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, says Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

Separately, Amazon.com has introduced a new feature that allows Amazon Associate members to broadcast links to Amazon products via their Twitter accounts.

Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.

Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link and text to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share.