Tag Archives: twitter

September 19, 2012 · 10:08 am

Should You Abandon Your Website?

I came across an interesting article on Marketing Profs the other day.  Called “Four Reasons to Jettison the Traditional Website and Go Social it advocates a point of view that I’ve discussed with clients and would like to throw out to you today.  The author puts it out there like this:

Everywhere around me now, I see companies dispensing with the traditional website in favor of integrating the most popular social networks right into the website and communicating with customers in real-time via tweets and Facebook posts. Big players like Skittles and Coca-Cola have completely bought into social, as have savvy small mom-and-pop shops.

He then goes on to explain why brands might not need websites any more, including reasons such as “it’s fresh, it’s affordable,” and others.  I disagree with his point of view.  First, brands need a home base.  As you might have noticed, the social world isn’t exactly a unified place.  Sure, Facebook is the main place consumers go, but they don’t really go there to interact with brands (and as we discussed a while back, brands haven’t figured out how not to behave like brands).  How many companies took a step back in their social effort when Timeline was deployed?  That’s an example of why you need to control the platform as well as the content.

The author also does a disservice to his readers with this statement: “Compared with the cost of building a website from scratch, plus maintaining it, establishing a business presence on a social network is ultra affordable.”   This perpetrates a mindset too many clients have about social – it’s cheap and easy.  Neither could be further from the truth.  Sure, anyone has access to Facebook for free, but many of the support tools needed aren’t free and you still need humans to support the effort.

The gist of his argument is that big brands are very focused on social and they don’t do anything without testing and retesting to make sure it works so you should do it too.  Putting aside the “follow them off the roof” mentality, I agree that everyone needs to be including social elements in their marketing although I don’t think we can simply say get on Facebook and Twitter and be done.  A well-designed and supported website can accomplish a lot more for your brand than can a social front door.

I won’t be advising my clients to shut off or redirect their web efforts any time soon.  What about you?  What do you think?

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September 4, 2012 · 8:59 am

Fake Traffic

You probably have read about fake Twitter followers.  Most people have some (1% of mine are), famous people have lots (Justin Bieber has 14%).  You can check out the fake or inactive counts at Status People.  Obviously I haven’t gone out to acquire fake followers but like every part of the interwebs, Twitter has its share of  spammers and other flavors of cretin and they leach on to legitimate folks all the time.

That’s very different from folks who create fake accounts to add to their follower totals and very far removed from folks who go out and buy followers.  I suppose that the quantity of an audience is important to some people who market themselves based on their Twitter base or Klout score.  It’s been interesting as I pitch new business to have potential clients ask about that and how their minds change a bit after they understand how the system can be gamed.  Caveat Emptor if you’re hiring based on that and not on business acumen – it’s much harder to buy!

One way a system is gamed that I find really disturbing is the sale of web traffic.  No, I don’t mean impressions being sold to advertisers as ad space but the sale of bulk traffic to websites looking to increase their numbers.  There are a number of firms – I’m not going to plug them here – who will generate visits to your website for a fee.  Need 100,000 visits quickly?  $250 will get them for you.  Obviously for sites that sell based on rate bases or on impression guarantees, this is a form of fraud.

How do they do this?  Some companies use bots – automated scripts.  Others pay people to do nothing but click on the list of pages they’re given.  Still others push pop-unders which display the purchasing site when a user hits some other site the vendor controls.  Others use redirects from abandoned domains.  Pretty questionable stuff.

I’m told that some rather prominent sites use these firms near the end of a month when their traffic is kind of light.  I sure hope not.  This is exactly the kind of thing that will set back digital advertising 10 years just as it’s getting a fair amount of traction.  I can’t imagine what these folks are thinking.  Like the lightweight consultants who buy followers and game the reputation system, once this found out, those same systems will be used to spread the word about their duplicity.  Skeevy, right?

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August 28, 2012 · 9:47 am

Twitter And The API Decision

You might have read or heard about the Twitter brouhaha last week.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

No, not another politician sending pictures of his undies.  Twitter announced that they are going to restrict the use of their API and due to that a bunch of companies are going to have big problems.  While I realize that this entire discussion might be a bit of inside baseball for you non-tech business folks, I think the decision Twitter made is instructive no matter what business you’re in.

Basically, Twitter announced a bunch of restrictions on the number of times an application can access the Twitter stream.  You can read the details on Twitters developer blog but suffice it to say that anyone who makes a traditional Twitter client – Storify, Echofone, TweetBot, etc. – is going to have some issues.  These folks compete with Twitter’s own app (both the regular Twitter client and TweetDeck, which they own) for ad dollars and part of what Twitter announced was the division of the Twitter world into four quadrants.  One of those is “consumer engagement” and while Twitter is trying to encourage competition and business building for analytics and B2B, it wants to ” limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.”  In other words, restrict anything that interferes with their ad-supported business model.

I understand why Twitter is doing this.  After all, it’s their data (even if the users are creating the content).  However, I think they’ve got it backwards.  Rather than protecting themselves in a very difficult, competitive area (ad sales), maybe they should have focused their revenue efforts on the folks who are making money themselves (the analytics and other B2B guys).  They’re saying they welcome development on their platform as long as it avoids their core revenue model, which is consumer experience enhanced with advertisements.  In my mind, setting up a bigger toll booth in front of the folks who remarket the data for large fees makes more sense.  It’s the Willie Sutton rule – go where the money is.  Twitter has no competition when it comes to the folks using their data to drive their product while there is plenty of competition in the ad world – Twitter isn’t yet a “must” buy.

That sort of decision-making comes up in many businesses from time to time and I think a long look at what Twitter chose is instructive. What do you think?

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