who owns your content’s profitability?

22 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Yesterday’s surprising news that Twitter actually earned a buck in 2009 raises interesting questions about profitability, labor, and the gift economy.

As reported by Business Week,

Twitter is ending 2009 on a high note. The microblogging site has reached profitability after inking $25 million of deals that make its content searchable by Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), Bloomberg BusinessWeek has learned. In October, Twitter said it had struck multiyear arrangements that make users’ short blog postings available on Google.com and on Bing, which is run by Microsoft.

In exchange for making short blogs, known as tweets, searchable on Google, Twitter will receive about $15 million, the two people say, adding that the Microsoft partnership is worth about $10 million. “The deals were huge,” says one. “With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in.”

The payments Google and Microsoft were willing to make to Twitter underscore the growing value of the massive volumes of data coursing through Twitter’s network. Executives of both companies have said their technologies would be considered incomplete if they did not include the millions of messages that get posted on Twitter every minute.

Microsoft and Google purchase the rights to publish our content. But we don’t get a cut of the profits.

Make sense to you?

Twitter’s terms of service clearly state, “You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services.” But then go on to say, “By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”

So, we own our content, but Twitter can do pretty much whatever it likes with that content. Try thinking about this with a physical good – you own your car, but I can pretty much do whatever I want with it (demolition derby!). You own that pie, but I’m going to run it through my digestive system.

How’s this fair?

Well, as Josh pointed out to me yesterday, “Twitter let’s you use their service for free in exchange.”

But then Twitter would be worthless if I hadn’t used their service and brought my friends with me… right? And from the Business Week article, Twitter actually cut their operating costs by negotiating with mobile carriers because the size of their user base is now so large. So I doubly helped Twitter.

Right?

Well, isn’t this what Google did?

Yes and no. Google ‘crawled’ my content (on my own .com) and the content of millions of other people to better understand how it all fit together, and in turn, improved how search engines fundamentally find content. Google does display a brief snippet of my content to searchers, but it does not publish the content in its entirety. This new use of tweets will (perhaps simply because tweets are so short, anyway).

Welcome to the collision of the gift economy and the market economy (Adam Smith’s economy).

The market economy is structured in nearly immediate transactions of value – what I give is predicated on what I expect to get in return. Quid pro quo. The gift economy separates the input and output for the foreseeable future – I apply labor with the expectation that eventually, some day, I will be repaid. And that payment may come in social standing and not gold, women, or sheep.

Like you, I’ve tweeted for so long not in expectation of some financial reward, but with the hope/knowledge/expectation that someday my efforts would be repaid in connections, status, interests, and beautiful strangers.

But our belief in the gift economy can be unsettled when the market economy generates a sizable wealth from our donated behaviors. Imagine if the Blood Bank of America, an organization that has consistently run under the gift economy, began selling our blood to private enterprise (hey, that’s my B negative!).

One way to look at this is Generalized Exchange – that value is exchanged circularly and new types of value are created in the process – as Twitter gains profitability it can begin offering new services, new value, and as more users flock to the the platform they bring with them new value to Twitter.

But then again. $25 million. That’s a few jetpacks, right there.

twitter vs the google zeitgeist

01 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

A recent article from Techcrunch shows that only 2% of tweets overlap with Google search trends.

His (Vik Singh) stats came from an analysis of 10 million Tweets he crawled last summer. He looked at all Tweets, not just trending topics. When he stripped out the non-essential words, he found that the average Tweet consists of 6.28 terms, or the equivalent of a really good search query. But there is not much overlap between what people are Tweeting about and what the general population is searching for. Maybe that is because people tend to search for what they don’t know, whereas they Tweet about what they do know or think they know. Or maybe it’s just because people on Twitter are not normal.

Why do tweets not match up to search queries? Because they’re entirely different tools, serving entirely different behaviors.

From studying Twitter for the last year or so, trending conversations on Twitter seem to fall into these categories:

• Rituals/Community Customs – these are events created or appropriated by the community, a sort of test of who’s hip and who’s not
• Media fandom – Twitter is full of conversations between fans of media properties (live-airings, debuts, and opening weekends are important to watch)
• Ongoing Events – users spread updates and continued news for very large-scale, if not global, events (ongoing news events can mature into adopted hash-tags)
• Breaking Events – these trending topics are short-lived and come together within one-to-two hours in most cases

As you can see, this is quite different from the kind of behavior that leads one to a Google search box. Twitter is a social tool (the more anonymous, the more its treated like a chat-room, I’ve found) and Google is a search tool. One provides a set of possible solutions to a defined problem, the other provides social interaction (among other things).

becoming a mad man, revisited

15 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

In a bit of “holy shit that’s awesome” news, I see that my report, Becoming a Mad Man, is part of Henry Jenkin’s syllabus for the fall course he’s teaching on Transmedia Storytelling at USC. It’s sure to be poked, prodded, and maybe even dismissed, but I’m incredibly honored for its inclusion in the course.

By the way, season three of Mad Men starts today.

In the 8 months since I published the report, I’ve been rather obsessed with fan culture and have done my best to dive deep into Henry’s research (and the research of many other brilliant people). If you’d like to learn more yourself, here’s a quick roundup of my previous posts. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with a cable network to create a fan based strategy for their digital marketing team, a strategy based on the 30 years of fan research that came well before me. It was a blast, and I look forward to working with that team in the future to refine the model.

I’ve come to believe that the whole Mad Men on Twitter incident may have been small in the annals of fan expression, but it was a critical moment in time for digital marketers to take notice, be curious, and perhaps learn something. Some have learned, and some haven’t. When Paul Isakson gave up the @don_draper account to AMC, I had hoped that the network or its digital agency would have done something with it besides let it sit idle for 8 months. Instead of engaging fans during the off-season with the account, on a platform that is obviously ripe for tv fan expression, they’ve done absolutely nothing at all with it (an update: now you can help Paul man the account). But to be fair, I was happy to see the art of Dyna Moe used (she was much beloved by fans for her illustrations) in marketing this new season.

I’m excited for this new season. The writing and acting behind Mad Men never disappoints. Be sure to tune into AMC tonight at 10PM/9C.

Oh, and keep an eye on Bud Melman. I hear he’s got something up his sleeve.

robotweets

06 Jul, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Twitter could easily become far less about one-to-one conversations, and more centered around information delivered by automatic sources.

For instance, posting will become more automatic.

Apps running in the background (someday) will push notifications to my Twitter feed, like my location, what I’m listening to, calories I’m burning, content I’m capturing, etc.

Responses will become more automatic, too.

Beyond brands trying to act like real human beings, they’ll also push to create automatic feeds offering real value. If you mention a location you should get a coupon or competing offer. If you mention wanting a product, Amazon or eBay may try to sell it to you. If you get annoyed by the offer, you’ll tweet back with something like “@amazon UNSUBSCRIBE”.

Twitter will become the little loyalty card you get punched every time you buy a coffee. Agencies will sprout up with the capability to build these services for brands and their brick and mortar stores. I know I must sound naive – this has been the basic premise behind anything mobile for the last few years, but I’m really beginning to doubt that people will accept messaging without having consciously pushed out related content. Twitter is the perfect channel to play eavesdropper and it’s still easy enough for people to ignore you when they choose.

Brands will retain their main handles for the conversation stuff, the back and forth with their super fans, but they’ll soon start generating dozens of automatic accounts to pump out deals and news. (Dell on Twitter is the first mover here)

This was a quick bake, so I want to hear your thoughts here…

on branded accounts

26 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 10 comments

At Undercurrent we like to experiment. We try out new products, new ideas, and new behaviors and see what’s worth keeping around and what’s worth tossing out.

In that spirit, last February we created a Twitter account for the whole brand.

And then, about a month ago, we collectively decided to kill the account. It just didn’t fit our DNA or our needs. Undercurrent is, and should always remain, a bit of an enigma. We don’t talk about fight club – with anyone. And moreover, we don’t have the need for a strictly homogeneous mouth piece. Our strength lies in our people, who just happen to be some of the most visible people on the web for what they do (see @juliaroy and @joshspear). And it helps that I happen to work with generally brilliant human beings. Why would you want to distill and dumb that down into some corporate-ish vehicle? Even at its most humorous, or useful, the whole never equaled the sum of its parts.

It’s a bit of a misuse of Twitter, anyhow. It may make sense for a giant brand to need one single account for people to turn to for customer service, but a think-tank? a small think-tank? You can just follow those of us you’re interested in following (check out Undercurrent.com to find us all quickly). One could argue that it is better to appear more often in someone’s twitter stream, and with around 17 of us, if we all earn your follow, then we’re having a much more dramatic impact than that single account ever could.

I’m blogging about this because I’ve seen some conversation here and there about the topic. There is no single right answer. You need to ask yourself what needs you have, and how a branded account could help or hinder those needs. And I would also let this choice fuel some thought about your point of view – such in, do you have one? If you ask someone to follow a brand, what besides a logo are you offering? What’s your reason for being?

For a company like Undercurrent, our main objective should be continually leveraging the independent and generally brilliant voices within our walls.

fans: rise of the machines

13 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

You see those trending topics on Twitter? Those are fans talking about things they love, to their friends, and anyone else that will listen.

Oprah mentions Twitter and registrations surge. That’s not the power of Twitter, that’s the power of Oprah’s fan community. CNN and Ashton go at it for new followers. Again, that wasn’t Twitter, it wasn’t a virus, it was fans acting on a leader’s nudge, and to connect to each other to share information and social currency.

You don’t scan your tweets every day because of Twitter either. You’re looking for people you know, friends, and also people you’re a fan of. Twitter can connect anyone: you to Ashton, Ashton to your third grade english teacher, and so on. Twitter is a bit of technology that better enables what fans want and need to do: connect with each other, express their fandom/define their identity, gather information, and feel more connected to what they love.

Fandom makes or breaks technology. Meetup.com took off because fans of beanie babies needed a place to swap and collect. Friendster cracked down on fakesters and it reduced a way fans could engage. Facebook is the center of a brand’s digital world because users can now ‘fan’ things.

Still think focusing on fans is too narrow? Or do you mean, ‘we just don’t have any fans?’ Those are two separate things: one is bullshit, the other is fixable. One is kidding yourself, the other is killing yourself (or at least resigning yourself to a slow extinction, better hope for no meteor showers). Brands should be out there courting and supporting these vocal fan communities. They’re right there, they aren’t hiding; in fact they’re doing very much the opposite.

are twitter users narcissists?

11 May, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Of course we are, but I’ve never loved a mostly anonymous crowd like I love you.

it oughta exist: twitter and the numbers game

19 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

I’m getting pretty exhausted these days by people that are only following me to accrue an astronomical number of followers. The whole myopia of that number (that only exists on your profile page) is really devaluing my experience with Twitter.

I wish Twitter would drop the numbers. Or let me choose to block follows by such gamers. (I can’t stand getting the 50 emails a day, of which 2 are valuable follows) Like any social networking site, as my experience matures, my focus is less on creating new connections and more towards managing my existing ones.I know people with 20k followers, but that’s not my purpose for using Twitter.

But I have huge doubts that Twitter would ever drop the numbers game. So I’d like to propose a new Firefox plugin. I’d like a plugin that strips the numbers out of people’s pages and only gives you a thumbs up/thumbs down on each person based on the following:

• Following to Follower Ratio – this should be as close to 1:1 or weighted toward greater followers than following
• Growth of profile – the plug-in should help me steer clear of those accounts using scripts and dirty tricks to grow their network
• I’d also like to see that plug-in show me the last 5 people that viewed the profile (that had the plug-in installed)
• And I’d like a rating of how many of my followers were following this person for some peer validation
• I’d finally like to flag users and see some kind of warning based on the rating of others

In addition to the Firefox plug-in, I’d also like Twhirl to help me punish spam followers. If I get a new follow by a spammer, I’d like Twirhl to continously follow/unfollow that user and send them a few hundred follower notifications to that person’s email. I’d like to make it painful for them to abuse my network.

Anyone up for building it?

mad men on twitter at sxsw

02 Mar, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

So, my desk mate Mike and I are headed to SXSW in just a few days. He leans over and says, “Hey, there’s a mad men on twitter panel, why aren’t you on that?” Normally, Mike is a lunatic, and he’s not to be trusted. But sadly, there is a panel being run by Carri Bugbee (Peggy Olson and Shorty award winner). But, nope, I wasn’t asked to to discuss being a mad men character on twitter, or writing that report (that was covered by Henry Jenkins, and NYMag), or even about my feelings towards the future of fan and brand engagement.

Nope, you can’t file into a room to hear me speak on that panel. You’ll just have to come right up to me and have an old school one on one conversation about it. I’d love to see not just me speak about it, how about Paul Isakson? He was Don Draper! Or Rick Leibling? He played multiple characters. Maybe we can get Henry himself or Josh Green and others to circle up and chat. How’s Tuesday the 17th around 2pm?

I kid. I kid.

where the wild things are

02 Feb, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

I want to write for your blog. Gratis. But you have to give me a great question or profound thought to ponder. That’s what Shari Doherty did. Shari works at Loopt, and she’s asked me to wrap my head around location based technologies and the mobile phone. Shari also asked me to speak with Loopt’s CEO and Founder, Sam Altman, at SXSWi this year. Shari is my new best friend.

So with each new jump in technology, I’m less interested in mass application and more interested in how our LARPERS in the woods will use it (or fan communities in general). Mapping their behaviors to emerging technologies can be a great exercise in considering what’s next. And now we find ourselves with a sophisticated device that fits in the palm of our hand and enables us to connect the web with our physical location in the world. If you consider the power of tightly connected groups and their obsessions, there’s no limit on what you can offer.

Go to the Loopt Blog to read the full post. I’m becoming rather obsessed with fan communities and their tightly wound connections. I think there is so much we can learn from their socialization and use of technology; and I challenge brands to not spend a dime outside of their fan communities this year. More on that later.

Please help me show Shari some gratitude and leave a comment on the post.