Software as a Service (SaaS)

Twitter and tweeting are rapidly becoming part of the lexicon, at least among the digerati who have discovered the jouissance of followers and following. Twitter hasn’t unleashed a unique technology, but an inspired broadcast pivot on existing messaging models. As the generation that has grown up texting rather than e-mailing takes over the planet, Twitter and its ilk will go mainstream.

By Dan Farber

With Twitter, you have followers (those who subscribe to your 140-character-limited tweets) and following (those whose tweets you follow). As you can see from the graphic below, Twitter usage comes in all shapes and sizes.

At the top end of the scale, TWiT.tv’s Leo Laporte has the most followers to date, with 32,728 (see Twitterholic for the top Twitterers list), followed by Barack Obama. You’ll note that the digitally savvy Obama (the Obama camp, not the candidate himself) follows practically every follower it has, whereas Leo follows on 427 Twitterers.

The Obama camp is definitely not prolific–only 119 tweets to date to thrill and inform its more than 32,000 followers. Leo is more generous with 895 tweets, but the most energetic and prolific man of Twitter is Robert Scoble.

He follows almost as many people as those who follow him, and has showered his fans with more than 12,000 tweets to date. On Saturday, he scribed 103 tweets to his more than 20,000 followers.

Paying attention to the daily tweets of 20,000 to 30,000 people, even at a maximum of 140-characters per pop, isn’t remotely possible unless you spend your entire day and night in the Twittersphere.

As with Facebook, you can collect thousands of friends and followers but only a small portion will matter. Leo’s ratio of followers to following–32,728 to 427–is a more realistic and practical approach to using Twitter.

Search and filtering applications for Twitter help to reduce the Twitter overflow. FriendFeed and Alert Thingy (a desktop app for FriendFeed) vacuum up Twitter, Flickr and other feeds into a single, uber stream. Summize tracks Twitter conversations in real time.

Others are taking the Twitter concept into new areas. Seesmic has created a video equivalent of Twitter, and Pownce extends the Twitter model to file transfer and possibly music trading.

As a communications medium, Twitter is a self-promotional mechanism, as in the Twitter feed of CNET News headlines, as well as a vehicle for people to share random and often useless data, such as what you had for breakfast. Twitter can get noisy, but essentially it’s an efficient broadcast and sharing conduit. For example, I first learned about the recent earthquake in China and ongoing developments from my Twitter stream.

Twitter is a complement, not a substitute, to blogging (also called "writing"). With its roots in SMS and instant messaging, the 140-character limit forces thought economy, saying more with less.

It’s also having a side impact on blogging, implicitly training writers to write more succinctly, conserving bits even though they are in near infinite supply. A person’s time and attention don’t have infinite supply–getting to the point without rambling is a plus in our data-rich and continuously partial attention world.

One of the potential downsides of Twitter and other short-burst messaging apps is that context can be lost or it is very loosely coupled, which makes connecting the dots more difficult. On the other hand, if you consume a big enough supply, and the most salient, bite-size chunks of data, the bigger picture will come into focus.

The reality is that humans in the early 21st century will be required to process and buffer more discrete, loosely coupled bits of data than in the past of human history. Over the next few decades, more intelligence will seep into the network, filtering the overflowing stream for each of the 7 billion or 8 billion inhabitants of the planet and shaping more meaningful connections.

Observations on Twitterdom | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Comcast is adding a social dimension to its services through the acquisition of Plaxo, a deal the two companies announced Wednesday afternoon. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price is thought to be in the $150 to $170 range.

By Dan Farber

The acquisition is a big win for Plaxo, whose Pulse social network service, with 1.5 million active monthly users, has been overshadowed by the likes of Facebook and MySpace. It’s a smart move by Comcast, which can enhance the user experience across its 14 million high-speed Internet subscribers, 3 million voice customers, and 24.2 million cable subscribers.

The acquisition is built on a preexisting relationship. In May 2007, Comcast partnered with Plaxo to offer a networked address book to subscribers of its various services. Comcast is Plaxo’s largest customer and partner, with Plaxo hosting all Comcast subscriber e-mail address book accounts.

“The address book and Pulse combined will change the way people navigate through thousands of choices of content,” said Sam Schwartz, executive vice president of Comcast Interactive Media. “You could know what shows your friends are watching, what they are downloading or what they are recording on DVR. Plaxo can help us build that vision. It’s less about the Comcast.net portal and more about bringing the social aspects to all media consumption.”

Plaxo’s software could also be applied to Comcast’s tru2Way project, which will allow developers to create applications that run on any set-top boxes.

“Many users on Pulse share Flickr photos with their friends and family. We want to extend that sharing whether they are in front of the TV, on the phone or at the computer,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo. “Whether you are on Fandango (Comcast’s movie ticket service) or on demand TV, it gets that much better with social graph layered on top.”

Acquiring Plaxo will help Comcast socialize its cable, voice, and Internet services, including FanCast. “FanCast is major initiative in last couple years,” Schwartz said. However, creating a user interface that can make sense out of all the content choices and devices will be even more difficult than creating a universal remote that a mere mortal could program and use.

“We understand that consumers are looking in lots of places for content, and it should be tied into one easy-to-use interface. You can ask it where to get content and it will tell you if it’s on TV, in a theater, on demand, or on FanCast,” Schwartz added. “We are very much innovating in terms of how consumers manage content. With the choices becoming almost infinite, you need better ways to navigate. The key is making it simple for the user. Right now we are in period of time where users could be confused–did they order it on Netflix, did they buy it on iTunes, did a friend buy it, is it loaded on a DVR. We can help create the best possible environment for the consumer.”

Plaxo includes features common features in today’s social networks.

Plaxo will fall under Comcast Interactive Media, which is tasked with growing Comcast’s Internet business. “Pulse features will be turned on in some Comcast properties starting this year, but it is a multi-year strategy as we give the social media experience to all platforms we are on,” Schwartz said.

Comcast could have chosen other routes to gain a social dimension, such as Google’s nascent Friend Connect. “Friend Connect is complementary to Plaxo Pulse. It’s trying to light up the long tail of the Web site. This is about making social media a natural part of the (Comcast) experience,” said John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo.

Comcast goes social with Plaxo acquisition | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

CRM News: Customer Loyalty: Social Networking’s Limits
By Denis Pombriant

Marketers with high expectations for their data and low thresholds for interpretation can be surprised when reality does not live up to the numeric expectations generated by a community. Furthermore, if a company’s production apparatus takes the raw data and runs with it, complications can be nasty.

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about
social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and
as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself.
Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate
preferences, just musings on how it went down.

First, I think there is
something overlooked about the differences between Iowa and New
Hampshire — and if it has not been overlooked, it certainly has been
underreported. The big difference is in how the votes are cast — and
it’s important. In Iowa, as everyone knows, the general description is
caucuses and the format is open voting; in New Hampshire, they have a
formal election and use a secret ballot. Caucuses are a form of social
networking designed to form consensus. In a traditional secret ballot,
the consensus is made evident only once the votes are counted.

Secret Ballots

It might be surprising, but the secret ballot is a relatively recent
introduction to politics. The ancient Greeks and Romans used a form of
secret ballot, but when democracy made a comeback after a roughly
17-century hiatus, a lot of people couldn’t read and open balloting was
the form.

In the 1850s, Australia
introduced the concept of a secret ballot, and in the U.S. in 1888,
Massachusetts was the first state to do so. Kentucky was the last
adopter in 1891, which means that Grover Cleveland in 1892 was the
first U.S. president to be elected solely by secret ballot.

Consensus is a good thing, but
open balloting is open to abuse and intimidation in voting, and that’s
one reason secret balloting came into being. Intimidation can be a
subtle thing. It doesn’t require a bunch of big guys with narrow
foreheads to affect a vote. For some people, it can take a lot of
courage just to stand in a small group to be counted for a particular
candidate, or anything else for that matter.

Outcome Impacted?

I wonder whether Hillary would have won in New Hampshire if they had
not used secret ballots. Since many people apparently made up their
minds late (according to news reports), some of them may not have had
their reasons fully worked out in their own minds.

In other words, their choice
might have been more gestalt than conviction, and they may have not
been able to articulate their reasons. Without the ability to clearly
articulate their reasons in a caucus format, some people might have
folded and selected another candidate. We will never know, but we
certainly have proof of a big discrepancy between the information the
pollsters collected and the final results.

It’s quite a different thing in the marketing
world, though, and one of the valuable attributes of social networking
outside of politics is its ability to capture the thought process as an
idea percolates and matures — and consensus is reached — in a
population. Since people make actual purchase decisions in the privacy
of their own minds, the intimidation factor is either not operative or
greatly reduced.

Not Created Equal

That brings us to a related issue, the sample population. Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace,
a company that develops and manages customer communities on behalf of
corporate clients, gave me a few insights about populations last week.
One of the overlooked issues there is the quality of the population as
measured by individual activity levels.

As with any population, there
is a bell curve for participation — some people participate a lot,
some visit once to sign up, look around and never return. Within those
extremes there are gradations — people who visit a site but only read,
some who read and post new content, people who show up once in a blue
moon and others who are addicts.

When a social networking site’s
raw population numbers are quoted, beware. We also need demographics,
metrics and filters to understand the meaning of the data that gushes from these services.

According to Hessan, a site’s total membership
cannot realistically be expected to be engaged in any single issue, so
understanding who is engaged — and how many of them there are — can
mean a lot if you are expecting that population to act as a surrogate
for the market.

Context Is Key

Marketers with high expectations for their data and low thresholds for
interpretation can be surprised when reality does not live up to the
numeric expectations generated by a community. Furthermore, if a
company’s production apparatus takes the raw data and runs with it,
complications can be nasty.

All this goes to show that
we’re still finding our way. The technology available is powerful,
important and valuable for politics as well as conventional marketing
but we need to learn how to use it effectively. We need controls,
standards and insights to truly understand the data that comes to us in
torrents from new tools.

At this point, we’re still
watching for ultimate results to see how it correlates with the data
we’re collecting. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just the adoption
process at work.

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