Today I came across a blog post about Twittad, a way to make money off your twitter profile. The jist of the service seems to be that you sell the background of your profile to an advertiser.

I’m pretty interested in this idea for a few reasons (and no, not interested because I think it’s a good idea).

From the perspective of an advertiser:
As a frequent twitterer, I can’t say that I visit people’s profile pages very often at all. Instead, I use twhirl on my laptop, and twitterific and twinkle on my iPhone. So I’m curious about how much traffic a profile page is likely to garner. How many eyeballs would an ad really get?

Branding the background of the page means that an advertiser can add a graphic, but no links. This means a profile viewer can’t simply click an ad to visit your site, he must type the URL in directly. I can only assume that this would result in fewer visitors than a standard clickable ad would elsewhere.

However, we have no way of knowing. Currently there are no metrics available on twitter profiles views, and without clickable links, click-throughs obviously can’t be tracked. How does an advertiser know if his ad was effective? There doesn’t appear to be any way to calculate the ROI or effectiveness.

Is the investment worth it for an advertiser? It’s hard to say. Certainly it’s not a large investment (some of the going rates are $5), but many of the twits willing to accept advertising aren’t exactly highly followed.

From the perspective of a twit:
I will admit, I haven’t done anything to modify the default display of either of my twitter feeds. Both @afhill and @afhill262 are basically twitter-branded. However, if I were to change the overall feel of the profile pages, I would want them to promote my personal brand, not that of an advertiser. Obviously it would depend on the objective of your twitter account.
I often recall a comment made by Marsha Collier at iCitizen last May. She said that she doesn’t have adWords on her site because she views her personal brand integrity as more important than the income she could make off advertising.

I’ve already questioned how often a profile page is viewed anyway, so I don’t want to make too much of a case for not diluting the brand by placing an ad on this page. At the same time, is it worth putting an ad on your profile for a couple lousy bucks? Particularly in light of the fact that you don’t actually get paid until you have $20 in your account?

I know that there’s been an unofficial race to figure out how to many money off twitter. I’m just not sure this is it. And without metrics or tracking associated with the program, we’re not likely to find out.

Edit: After a response by the CEO of TwittAd, I started thinking about how some level of measurement could be achieved. If TwittAd serves up the background ads, they could use their own metrics packages to determine how often the ads are served up. That could potentially even allow them to shift their offerings from time- to impression-based. As well, educating advertisers on using a custom URL in the ads could help to identify which visitors were coming as a result of viewing twittAds. It’s an inexact science to be sure, but there may be ways to come up with some means to measure the impact of the investment..

Today I came across a book at the library entitled “Web 2.0 Heroes: Interviews with 20 Web 2.0 Influencers”. Eagerly I picked it up, and scanned the names on the cover.

Hmm… not many there I actually recognize..

So I flipped open to the table of contents, and saw the products/services they represented. Stumble Upon, eBay, Ning, Technorati, DotNetNuke, Skype, LinkedIn… ah, there were some names I knew!

There is plenty of talk right now about personal branding and internet celebrity. Increasingly the line between a brand and a representative thereof appears blurred. Some may believe this is due to the fact that web 2.0 is commonly believed to be necessarily associated with individuals-

Web 2.0 is ultimately about harnessing network effects and the collective intelligence of user to build applications that literally get better the more people use them.
- the Web 2.0 Strategy Guide

So in an arena that facilitates the promotion of an individual’s personal brand, how are we (or how am I) not familiar with these names? Particularly in light of the fact they are being presented as ‘heroes’?

I will admit, I haven’t read the book, so perhaps what makes these individuals ‘heroic’ is explained. Yet I find it hard to believe that one can be heroic behind the scenes. Yes, heroic deeds involve effecting positive change, but I also believe that a hero is considered a role model, and I’m not sure this can be achieved without some level of recognition.

I suppose this is semantics, and I’m sure there are some insights to be gained through reading these interviews. I know I genuinely enjoyed the few chapters I read in Accidental Branding. Yet in accidental branding, the entrepreneurs were presented as ordinary people who did some great things. By setting the stage for this book to be talking about heroes, I can’t help but think they have plenty to live up to..

Who are your Web 2.0 heroes? I will admit, I didn’t stop to think about who I expected to see on the list before I picked up the book, but there are certainly different people I associate with Web 2.0. Leave me a comment with your picks!

I like to hang out in the LinkedIn Q&A section, and recently someone asked about the relationship between RSS and Feedburner. This is a slightly lengthened version of my response:

RSS refers to the format (more or less standard). Many, many services out there offer an RSS feed. That way you can syndicate your content: people can get it when they want it, rather than having to come to your site to see if there is anything new.

There are two implications to this:
1) metrics: you can’t measure page hits. What’s your traffic like?
2) maintenance. What happens when you change your URL, do you lose your subscribers?

Feedburner helps with both of these issues (and more!) You create a feedburner URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/afhill) and then can access your metrics via the feedburner site. You can see how many subscribers you have as well as how often they’re acting on the posts they’re reading. You can get some more information about their platform and how they’re accessing your information.

Using feedburner also allows you to dress up your feed a bit more. You can incorporate your del.icio.us bookmarks into the feed that is pushed out, without having them actually show up on your blog, or add in your flickr photos. You can choose to post only content excerpts, and select which means of social sharing you want to enable directly from the feed. Feedburner offers options you likely never even considered! All these options are organized into 5 sections on the feedburner site: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize. This may seem a bit daunting, but all the features are easily enabled and disabled, so it’s easy to experiment and optimize for your own needs.
I personally use several Wordpress plugins related to analytics (Feedburner Feedsmith, Google Analytics, Wordpress Reports and the Most Active Widget) and Wordpress reports gives me the option to monitor my RSS circulation right from within my Wordpress dashboard. Handy!

Back in May, a colleague pointed me to Groundswell, a new book out by the folks at Forrester. The notion of social technographics resonated with me right away, it was similar to the idea of the motivations of iCitizens, as explored in the book The OPEN Brand by thought leaders at my company, Resource Interactive.

Groundswell was promoted in a very open, accessible way. I subscribed to the blog (with Charlene Li leaving Forrester, it will be interesting to find out where Groundswell news will now live), and learned more about the philosophy via a free webinar. I read about social technographics and POST, and the book landed on my (admittedly lengthy) “to read” list. So when a blog post went out on May 21 offering free copies for blog reviewers, I was quick to respond. At the time, I also made a suggestion to entertain the notion of interviews with authors, as Rohit Bhargava did for “Personality Not Included“. As I went to grab the link to the blog post today, I see that they’d updated the post to thank me for my suggestion and offer up such interviews. I will definitely see if the possibility still exists! I also have to admit that I’m absolutely tickled that they were receptive to my suggestion.

As I mentioned, I was already somewhat informed and very excited about Groundswell even before the book arrived. But unlike many movie trailers these days, the promotion of the book did not “give away all the good stuff”. While I was familiar with some of the broad concepts, the level of detail given to them, as well as the in-depth case studies and additional information made this a valuable read.

According to the authors, “the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get things from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” No one can deny that technology is changing how people communicate and get informed, yet it is not always clear what the implications to business are.

Such implications are two-fold: how can an organization adjust to remain relevant to consumers, and how can they actually benefit from this trend?

The book is organized in a straightforward manner: Part 1 - Understanding the Groundswell walks the reader through the “what”, the “how” and the “who”. What this trend is about, what tools are being used, and who’s using them. The important message echoed throughout the book is that it’s necessary to “concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies.” Even as a technologist, I think this is an incredibly important point. It’s not about having a wiki, or a blog. It’s about tapping into the sort of relationship you are trying to foster, and determining the best means to do so. A book about technologies is destined to become outdated: societal shifts happen slightly more slowly This is not to say that the book does not mention specific technologies or services, but it is not the focus.

The chapter on the “who” explores the notion of the social technographics profile, the initial idea that attracted me to the book. Individuals are characterized based on their level of engagement online, although it is acknowledged that “the same person may have different motivations depending on where she’s participating, what day it is and her current mood or objectives.” Forrester has done some great work around characterizing online users, and their profiling tool can help an organization made some broad assumptions about the level of engagement of their users. This can help identify the applicable tactics to be employed, based on what activities your visitors are likely to engage in.

Part 2 - Tapping the Groundswell outlines a four-step planning process for aligning with the Groundswell. POST is the acronym used to refer to the order of the steps: considering People, Objectives, Strategy and lastly Technology. While this trend is characterized by the use of technology, technology is but the enabler, and must be relevant to the people who are to use it.

The book outlines five primary objectives that companies may pursue. These are:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

In order to make these objectives seem more concrete and relevant, they are mapped to existing business functions: listening = research, talking = marketing, energizing = sales, support = supporting, development = embracing. This may make it easier for organizations to identify a single objective for their project or initiative, and help frame strategy and technology.

As well, the objective of the initiative can help establish the baselines for measuring success. Two of the case studies illustrated this point. Blue Shirt Nation is an online community for Best Buy employees. The site objective is to listen to employees, and the creators were more than happy when 10% of all Best Buy employees joined. In contrast, the social networking site set up by Organic was created to “re-energize employee collaboration”, and the majority of employees need to use it for it to truly be effective.

The next five chapters of the book go into more detail as to how to leverage technologies to achieve these strategies. There are detailed case studies, and in some cases even some rough numbers outlining the ROI of the activity! The list of companies and case studies are impressive and help legitimize the movement. Not all of the stories are straight-forward ’success stories’, but each shows to highlight how an individuals’ vision and dedication made a difference.

After all, is this not the point of the Groundswell? The significance of an individual to make a difference? An organization may not always be prepared to respond to the suggestions of individuals (internally or externally) but it must be aware of the fact that those discussions are taking place regardless.

Part 3: The Groundswell Transforms attempts to prepare the reader for the implications of embracing these new ways of engaging with the consumer. A major consideration, and one that organizations are not always prepared for, is the notion of giving up control. This is an essential step to truly leverage the power of the Groundswell, but requires a fundamental change throughout the organization.

Another impact to the organization as a whole is the idea of leveraging the tools of the Groundswell inside the company itself. I’ve worked several places that have provided employees with blogs, wikis and forums to generate internal collaboration. It is not enough, however, to simply make the tools available. Often it is felt that leaders must drive the use of these tools, or they will not be widely adopted. If the company’s leadership does not recognize the significance of such relationships or means of engagement, that perception will be perpetuated down the ranks. On the flip-side, however, it is recognized that it’s “nearly impossible to force social technologies on organizations from the top down, because by their definition, these technologies require the participation of [the] employees.” It’s important that everyone in the organization embrace this new way of doing business.

The last chapter, the future of the Groundswell, paints a picture of what the future holds. Again, this is not focused on specific technologies or tools, but rather on how relationships are evolving and how to be prepared for them.

Groundswell is a well-crafted, thoughtful book. The book is not a high-level theoretical tome on how organizations must adapt to this new way of doing business. Rather, it provides guidance, encouragement and plenty of anecdotal evidence to individuals who sense the change, and want to be on the forefront.

I have been talking about Groundswell and social technographics for months now. Recognizing the visitor’s motivations and providing him with tools to satisfy his specific needs really appeals to my background in user experience. Now that I’ve read the book, I feel even more prepared to actually put these practices in place. As a technologist, I know that this stuff isn’t hard to actually build, it is the shift in organizational perspective and acceptance that is the biggest challenge. Thankfully this book has provided plenty of evidence showing the benefits of this shift, and hopefully will help accelerate this evolution in how organizations conduct business.

The final session of the day that I attended was on strategies for blogging and social networking marketing. Some of the content was similar to the viral campaign session I’d attended earlier, I liked the use of the one specific case study to frame their work.

Right away speaker Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing laid out the three things you need for success:

1. a compelling hook
2. the right channels
3. identify client goals

In the case study he shared with us (Shizuka New York), the compelling hook was “bird poop facials”.

A good litmus test to whether or not your idea is compelling- would you talk about it at dinner? a new CEO hired from a competitor? Nah. But bird poop facials? Sure!

Bill mentioned four specific channels to consider:

1. SEO Press release
2. Blogger outreach
3. video
4. Social networks

I wasn’t really familiar with the terms “SEO Press release”, but it was quite interesting. Bill mentioned that they will search for specific phrases on search engines to ensure the uniqueness of their phrasing. That way they can be sure that when monitoring buzz or search queries, all the results are directly tied to their efforts. He did acknowledge that the most newsworthy your story, the more likely a journalist will snap up the idea and write about it in their own words. In this case, your carefully chosen phrasing is lost.

Through the presentation, Bill was very diligent at showing us the “before and after”, highlighting the importance of analytics and establishing your measures for success. We looked at google news, which had 2 links to the company in May, and roughly 50 post-campaign.

Blogger outreach is refers yet again to really figuring out the type of influentials to tap.

As for social networking, Bill said that they did not try to build for or leverage all the social networks. He said they actually received the most traffic from StumbleUpon, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize it was such a bg player. He also acknowledged that like it or not, you can’t ignore mySpace.

Supposedly CNN ran this story on the front page one day, but still 46% of the traffic came from social networks. While CNN gave a one-day spike in traffic, the networks were overall more significant.

Someone asked about the time this campaign took, and he said the video shoot was the biggest task, coming in at about 10 hours. The rest of the campaign and marketing was about 40 hours. In the end, the company saw traffic increases from all sources, not just referring sites. People weren’t just clicking on links they had presented to them; bird poop facials at Shizuka had reached a point where people were talking or thinking about them, and motivated to seek them out.

He talked some more about some compelling ideas and hooks, including the work they did for Hatteras networks (the cash cow), or the scantily clad etymologist at HotForWords.com

While I don’t know that this session really offered me many “strategies” for blogging and social media marketing, I did find the session interesting. I appreciated the focus on the results achieved, and how they were managed. I still feel in many ways that analytics is still in its infancy, and I appreciated the approach that was taken to demonstrate the campaign’s success.

The second session I attended was “Igniting Viral Campaigns”, by Jennifer Laycock. Her session was in such high demand that we had to change rooms to accomodate the number of attendees!

Jennifer presented an incredibly comprehensive slide deck on the topic. She started with an introduction to viral marketing itself, the premise being:

1. people distrust ads
2. people trust friends
3. people trust strangers
4. the web connects us

Initially I wasn’t sure I agreed with her “people trust strangers” comment, but as she explained it more, it made sense. She considered strangers to people we don’t know in real life, whereas for me, it’s people with whom we have no relationship at all.

She clearly called out the benefits and challenges related to viral marketing. While for many companies it may seem an obvious tactic given the low budget, but the challenge is in coming up with an idea that is genuinely buzz-worthy. The consumer needs to have some motivation to share it. Once again I’m struck with the idea that good marketing (as well as good design, good client relations, good anything) is just what I’d consider user-centered design. What consumer needs (realized or unrealized) are being met? Indeed, Jennifer referred to the customer reaction effect. That is, by empowering ordinary individuals to share and promote a brand, you are offering them some sense of celebrity and giving people a chance to talk about your product. In turn, the brand benefits from a level of increased credibility, as it is being ‘blessed’ with personal recommendations.
The potential downfall, however, is that you lose control over your brand messaging.

As for any project, it is important to establish goals to be able to measure the success of the project.

There are three questions to be answered when coming up with this idea:

1. what sparks passion?
2. what hasn’t been done before?
3. will they risk their reputation?

For an idea to catch on, it has to address the above questions. The last refers to the idea that a forwarder is basically offering his personal recommendation to whatever he is forwarding, and will need to believe in the message or cause.

Jennifer then did a great job at walking us through specific strategies to developing a campaign. She shared tangible examples to really drive her points home.

I was impressed with her specifics related to the delivery of the campaign. She warned us to be sure to watch out for scalability, inventory, sustainable ROI and backup servers. I suppose the idea is that you should always plan for the worst case (which in this case is the best: your viral campaign takes off!). This actually reminds me of when we helped out Wal-Mart with their holiday campagns last year. Evidently there had been some question about our use of Akamai, and someone had questioned “what if akamai goes down?” At the time, we all laughed. Our thoughts were that if akamai went down, the Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
Guess what, at the height of the campaign, Akamai went down.

She offered us a list of different campaign types: humour, debate, attack and fear. Along with examples, she listed out pros and cons for each campaign type. It was a wonderful overview while also offering us the benefit of her expertise.

The next part of the presentation specifically dealt with pitching bloggers, which is an arena where I’ve only ever been on the other side of the screen. As Jennifer went through her pitching checklist, I reflected on how I’ve been pitched to myself, and determined that I am way too easy-going I guess I don’t yet have any reason to be too picky!

Jennifer’s biggest rule was “respect the blogger’s time”, and many of her recommendations were based on this (for example, read at least 5 posts, write a few contextual comments). I also felt that this was simply good practice to ensure you’re on the right track. If you have identified this blogger as an influential, prove it by opening yourself up to be influenced

At some point during the presentation, Jennifer noticed that we were running behind, and offered to cut the presentation short. The room was unified in their desire to hear her entire presentation. It was truly an incredible session, well worth the price of admission

Jennifer walked us through a project they’d done, through using brainstorming worksheets to assessing capabilities and the actual execution of the plan. It was a great way to really understand their methodology and gave a lot of credibility to their process. While she was great in not using her presentation to pimp out her company, I was definitely interested in learning more about them, as it is obvious they shine in this area.

Afterwards I was following on twitter as Jennifer and the session attendee that was sitting next to me talked about #SBMU and despite the fact I don’t actually have a small business, I’m tempted to attend!

I just came across the blog post ‘Learning to listen - the real “quiet revolution” that is social media‘ by Maddie Grant. I was really interested in a quote she used that stated that there are five different listening styles, ranging from appreciative and empathetic through comprehensive to discerning and evaluative. The comment is also made that a good listener becomes proficient in each style.

I began to wonder if it was appropriate for an organization to be classified as one of these types of listeners. Just as we look at the motivation of an individual online to best meet his needs, I wonder if recognizing how an organization listens is a way for us to best assess how social media can be integrated into the organization.

This is most easily illustrated with an example. Just as an individual may engage in a conversation with the simple goal to be entertained, so too an organization may desire to monitor buzz out of curiosity. This is dramatically different than the open organization that is seeking to refine or radically alter strategy based on what consumers are saying. It comes down to the level of engagement in the conversation: how actively the listener is listening may in fact impact the message of the speaker/writer.

This is another important consideration: how the organization publicizes its listening strategy. Sites like MyStarbucksIdea or DellIdeaStorm (both fueled by Salesforce) are prime examples of a company actively soliciting feedback, and then being held accountable for making changes. On the flip side of the coin may be the company that is quietly monitoring the buzz around their brand, but not publicly acknowledging it. The alternative, to acknowledge negative feedback but not respond to it, is more damaging than to appear oblivious of the negative buzz at all. Both parties in the conversation should be aware of the desired outcomes of the other.

Are certain styles of listening “best” for an organization? If we continue to personify the organization as an individual, we would expect all styles to be important. However, we have seen cases where a company has a core principle on which all their operations are based, and to deviate from this could have negative effects. An excellent example was in Made to Stick - Southwest Airlines operations are based on a core principle to be the low cost airline. Therefore, all business decisions are made to work towards this objective. Any feedback from consumers that would detract from this objective are not considered. Southwest may listen to consumers to be aware of their desires, but the information will not be integrated into business decisions. It is still important to be in touch with consumers, if only to be able to acknowledge their wants (without fulfulling them).

I am always interested in how we personify an organization. The Corporation remains a movie I refer to often. It clearly calls out how behaviours we would consider completely inappropriate or even psychopathic by an individual are acceptable from a corporation. In this same vein, while we would expect a certain level of respect and give-and-take from an individual engaging with us in conversation, we cannot be guaranteed such with an organization. Indeed, we may be lucky if they listen at all, much less endeavour to be active listeners, engaging us in conversation and ultimately bettering their own practices for it.

As I mentioned, last week was the iCitizen client symposium, held by my employer, Resource Interactive. We had a social media cafe dedicated to showing attendees the power of social media and in particular, some of the most popular tools and services out there. We had an official live blogger and twitter stream, as well as a host of other delegates participating.
To showcase the power of twitter, we educated people on how to track a topic, and we kept Summize up on a few screens to show people how to monitor buzz. We were ecstatic to see that we reached the #1 trending topic at a few different times through the conference.

As the day wore on, we found we were having more trouble with twitter. Some of us who used the service regularly laughed it off, instructing people that “the first thing you need to learn about using twitter is that it isn’t always reliable.”

Yes, there was no reason for me to suspect this was anything different than any other twitter downtime. But then today I saw a link to what I recently saw referred to as the “twitter excuse blog“, where they shared a graph of the week up until Wednesday (iCitizen was Tuesday and Wednesday).

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A curious commenter noted the peaks:

It peaks in the evening time on the 19th, then in the morning on the 20th, then the entire evening again. On the 21st, it peaks in the - morning again? - nope, flat in the morning, peak at mid-afternoon, slammed in the evening again.

Now, I don’t know about the time zone for the graph, but I do find it interesting that the times were entered around our event. Goodness knows we had some hardcore twitterers sharing their thoughts.

Many of us had been tracking the term “icitizen”, and something I read earlier today mentioned that it was potentially this feature that caused some of the problems. I know we had some cases where people were overwhelmed with the volume of messages returned from tracking, and turned to tweetscan on their own:

icitizen tweets coming in too fast and furious to keep up! I’ve switched to tracking them here: http://snurl.com/29xfm #icitizen (from @getshust)

Now we’re all home and recovering from frantic tweeting, and while twitter is still struggling (most recently, suffering from a DB crash), I can’t help but wonder if in the true vein of iCitizenry, if we were all influential in taking twitter down?