The New York Times sums it up best in their Freakonomics blog:
“Robert Cialdini has shown time and again that people like to conform their behavior to that of others…..Want to get hotel guests to forego daily towel cleaning? Include a message telling them that most other guests reuse their towels. Want them to recycle even more? Tell them that most people using their very room recycle.”
We are seeing that exact same behavioral phenomenon happening with Social Media. People you would never expect to be using Facebook, MySpace, or even more of a stretch – Twitter, are starting to do so in droves. Why? Not because they made the decision solely on their own or that it is even remotely connected to their historic pattern of internet usage. They are molded by the power of suggestion and may feel like they are missing out on something if they don’t join the ‘social revolution’.
I experienced this first hand this past week. I have two very close friends exhibiting completely opposite behavior. One, with more than 600 friends on Facebook, ‘freed’ himself of the burden of being so connected and shelved his account. The other, with significantly fewer friends and relatively new to Facebook, took it a step further and started a Twitter account on Saturday…. He must have watched Oprah on Friday. Reports have put new users of Twitter since her show @ more than 1Million… Do you think they’ll keep their accounts active or is this a short lived ‘peer pressure’ moment?
“Literally out of nowhere, the little micro-blogging platform that constrains your messaging to 140 characters or less, is, according to Compete.com, this very month passing the august NYTimes.com, as measured by numbers of unique visitors.”
“….that little bird is fluttering right past The Times on the web’s list of top sites, and you might say, leaving the old business modelers wondering, “What exactly was that thing that just blew by us, anyway?A bird, a plane, or…”
Full article @ BNET. comScore charts growth in an age group you wouldn’t expect.
It’s Finals time. Not in the NBA – in Fantasy Basketball. I’m not in them (no surprise there – I never seem to be, despite my best efforts) but that doesn’t stop me from following them ardently. What is interesting this year in the NBA is the rapid adoption of Twitter by some top names in the league. Shaq, Baron Davis, and Paul Pierce. My favorite – Charlie Villenueva. He’s probably one of the most prolific NBA players on Twitter…with his most publicized ‘tweet‘ coming at halftime of a recent game against the Celtics.
What I find intriguing about this is that it gives unprecedented access to our sports heroes. Shaq and Paul Pierce routinely give out tickets to games via the micro-blogging service. With Shaq, it’s the first person to find him in the NBA city he’s playing in and touching him after he tweets. He recently visited my hometown, Portland, and put the tweet out for tickets against the Trail Blazers. It took 4 minutes for someone to find him and win the tickets. His response to his followers? “100 people n the prtland area just came for tickets wow portland twitterers r niiiiiice“…
I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out my current opponent, who is not ashamed of using the power of Twitter to gain an edge in his matchup. Fab Fish – this one’s for you…. way to game the system.
Somone has gone to a lot of work to find and verify accuracy of sports figures on Twitter, which they list in a spreadsheet for the public to see. Who will you follow?
Twitter Search tagline: “See what’s happening — right now“. Sprint commercial tagline: “This is what’s happening now. Sprint, The Now Network“. (*click the link and you will find the world’s busiest widget – wow). I found this on the new Sprint commercial featuring the Palm Pre smartphone. What was most interesting to me was the incorporation of Twitter into their commercial – not just a callout, but a full blown incorporation of the ‘Twitter birds’ flying around the spot. From my recollection – this is the first time I’ve seen Twitter incorporated in a commercial, visually. I’m sure it won’t be the last.
As I wrote about in my previous post, Twitter is one of the fastest growing community sites this year (for the month of February unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year) and is becoming pervasive in the mainstream (largest volume of the population on Twitter was in the 35-49 age group) per Nielsen. No one can argue that that microblogging and, Twitter specifically, is on the rise – but does everyone love it? No. There is a growing trend of ‘Twitter Quitters’…heavy heavy users with a large following that attempt to ‘leave the nest’ (pun intended) and go tweet free. Even more interesting…they almost always come back. The LA Times profiles one of the more well known Twitter Quitters…Leo Laporte.
“They kind of have you,” said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service…..because you have to go where the community is.”
Not only do they have you…with today’s announcement, they are finally finding a way to monetize their model. From the WSJ:
“Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and board member who is a partner at Union Square Ventures, says Twitter will make money by “following the money,” or building on the ways that others are developing businesses based on the service.”
This will be interesting to watch. Are you willing to pay for something you’ve gotten for free thus far?
“…a resource to help you find and follow the top business executives on Twitter” From the about section (where you can find all execs that are on board) on the ExecTweets.com
“Twitter.com continues to grow in popularity and importance in both the consumer and corporate worlds. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, it has evolved into an important component of brand marketing. Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month.”
What I found very interesting was the fact that the largest volume of the population on Twitter was in the 35-49 age group, and they spend their ‘Twitter time’ at work. One of the biggest stimuli for Twitter? The fact that it’s portable. The volume of tweets sent through a mobile device, either via the web or through a text message, is truly staggering. Personally – I spend most of my time on Twitter on the PC (it’s frankly easier for me to manage since I sit in front of a large screen 10 hours a day), but I understand how those on the move (celebrities, athletes, business travelers) would lean heavily on their mobile device.
Recently there was an interesting article in the Tech Crunch about the value of Twitter Traffic and the staggering amount of money that people are willing to pay for a slot in the top 20 of the suggested list on the Twitter site. From Jason Calcanis’ Twitter stream:
“It’s actually a standing offer to Twitter. $120k for one of the twenty slots. In fact, I’ll pay $250k for two years in advance.”
Calcanis went even further to outline why he was willing to pay that amount of money for such a placement, indicating that he felt such a place in the top 20 would be worth $1M in 5 years time – equating it to levels spent on ads in the Superbowl.
I believe Calcanis is not alone in this theory. Even though he doesn’t claim to be willing to pay the same upfront costs as Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki professes his willingness to pay upwards of $500/month for using Twitter. He talks about his prolific use of Twitter in marketing his brand and that of Alltop in a recent interview with Jennifer Jones on Marketing Voices. He says “I don’t know how we would do Alltop without Twitter” and likens it to a “free and instant announcement system“. With more than ninety thousand followers being constantly exposed to his ‘brand’ and that of Alltop via his Twitter stream – it’s not surprising to see his loyalty and willingness to pay for this communication vehicle.
I’ve been pondering this post for a while, as anything ‘political’ sometimes rubs people the wrong way. Enough pondering – it’s relevant so I’m posting. As Computer Weekly states, we are in the middle of the first truly digital Presidency. It’s an interesting shift in how a campaign footprint can extend beyond the status quo and can serve as a model for businesses to incorporate social computing into their marketing mix. Looking at this Fast Company article that I was impressed by his forward thinking ways. By incorporating social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and disciplines into his everyday campaign activities, he was able to ‘Fish where the Fish are‘ and go where his customer base was. That’s top of mind for me every time I engage in a social effort in my day job at Intel. It just makes sense. I don’t subscribe to the ‘If you build it, they will come’ mentality of marketing. Your customers have established patterns and heavily traffic sites they feel a sense of trust with. As marketers of a brand it is our job to engage valuable customers, both current and prospective, where they are already going. Obama’s campaign staff took that to heart, and it helped pave the way for him to the ultimate CEO gig.
Update 3.21.09 – Fast Company profiles Chris Hughes, the man behind the social media component of Obama’s campaign.
As I wrote about in my 
