This is a ENORMOUS post. If I weren’t summarizing a presentation I gave last night, I would have broken it into a small miniseries with many guest stars including Betty White. So make sure you go to the bathroom before you start. Last night I got the chance to speak to a class at DU that focuses on creating business plans. Social media is perfect for the startup due to the low barriers of...
Thursday we started off with several of my students asking if my Twitter account had been hacked. And yes, it had. Someone got in and sent out the following message: ‘hi, i’m 24/female/horny… i have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name *****@hotmail.com’. They had direct messaged a large number of my followers. (I was also alerted by someone who...
Social media is pushing the adoption of mobile web in the US. (Twitter happened because of the iPhone!) Everybody put your helmets, shin guards on and brace for the impending collision between mobile and social. This year mobile internet useage is up 110% nationally and 148% internationally. Gartner predicts that within 3 years web enabled phones will outnumber terrestrial internet connections...
I saw a tweet this morning from @kim about a search engine for Twitter lists. It’s aptly named List Browser and was created by Dave Winer. For those of you that haven’t heard of Twitter lists yet, they’re a way of organizing the people that you follow. The hopes is that you will categorize your contacts into categories, thus allowing others to follow the list all with one click...
Way back in July (sound familiar?) I posted about Twitter, geo-targeting and location based services combining to create what I referred to as conduit marketing. (Also talked about it here and recently here.) About a month ago I heard of a company called Schmap and how they were using Twitter to essentially create the foundation for this type of service. They call it Geotweeting. (Brightkite does...
I read in TechCrunch last week that Twitter is going to be enabling search across all tweets in the near future. From this, businesses will able to enable intent marketing (a term that came up after a conversation with the CEO and founder of DOUBLE ENCORE, Dan Burcaw: interview coming soon!). With intent marketing a marketer can know what a user is looking for if/when they tweet/post about it...
Fans of Twitter have openly wondered how they’re going to make money. They have over 2 million users (and growing), a rabid fan base but still no revenue. This is common among Web 2.0 companies; get the audience and then figure out how to monetize later. I keep wondering when the later will be. I started to think I had figured out how to monetize twitter; but later figured out it would fail...