The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

UPDATE: I had originally written this specifically about MLM spammers, but in the end it’s spam that puts twitter at risk. Twitter is a small company 20+ people with some great funding but no real revenue model yet. As we see spammers and hackers have an incentive to use twitter for very destructive exploits and if they have even a minor ROI they will continue to try to exploit this. Twitter on the other hand is going have to invest money in fighting these exploits when IMHO money could be better spent on creating a sustainable business model. I had proposed in a later post that some kind of business model where people were charged based on the number of people who you follow, but another option could also be to charge people to send DM’s. Even a charge of $10 per year to send some number of DM’s would kill spam dead, it only works if there is no incremental cost for sending messages.

more animals

This post is the culmination of a long experiment with twitter and I have bad news for twitter, MLMs (multi level marketers) will kill it and so will anyone else with a business model that can extract value from exponentially growing network… so any blogger.

So I’ve built up quite a following on twitter, mainly due to my popular T-Shirt blog Tcritic.com and as of two days ago I had 1,800 followers on twitter. Now that’s a pretty respectable number but of course pales into comparison with people like Scoble who has 45,000 followers, and Garyvee with 25,000 followers, or Kevin Rose, founder of Digg with 77,000 followers. And forget about it when Twitter gets mainstream which it will as soon as kids realize Brittney is on there with 10,000 followers and sports fans realize Shaq is there with 18,000 followers . Anyway, the point is i’ve got a pretty small network compared to these guys.

So a couple of days ago I saw a tweet about a competition to win a gift certificate for KMART, all you needed to do to enter the contest is RT (retweet or rebroadcast) that message to your network of followers. Simple idea, so I tried it using $25 Threadless gift certificates (I get $3 to spend at threadless every time I send them business and I don’t need more T-shirts) and posted this (note that I included my name in the message so people would rebroadcast that:

@karllong is giving away 10 x $25 gift certificates for http://threadless.com - just RT this to enter, will tweet the winners

I then had another window open at search.twitter.com searching on my name and watched as people rebroadcast the message, again and again and again. In the end the message was rebroadcast by 500+ people to their networks. The first person to RT this message was CoryObrien who has 1,200 followers so I almost doubled my reach with the first step. From an impressions or click through standpoint I have no idea the actual conversion rate, I had included a link to threadless.com in my original tweet and chose to leave the url long so people could see what the link was.

Luckily I do usually shorten my url’s that I post to twitter using cli.gs because I get ongoing metrics on my links I share and my click through rate is well over 2% for just general FYI links I put out there.

Another interesting aspect of this is that through what was essentially spamming my network with an “offer” I added about 250 new followers, so I increased my network and influence by well over 10%. Those are some pretty good numbers, so I got 250 new followers for $250, and they are also people who like TSHIRTS so will be open to more offers in the future (don’t be scared i’ve grown my network with integrity and substance so i’m not planning on strip-mining my network, I want to create more value

So on to the MLM, well apparently my recent 10% growth in network attracted a deluge of new followers who were not human beings but actually spam bots all promoting a video of Mike Dillard who was going to sell me some “marketing secrets”. And guess what, that spammer is also on twitter and he’s got twice as many followers as me, even his spam bots are getting connected and following each other and gaining perceived influence. Seriously, he doesn’t have any marketing secrets except how to make money from an exponentially growing network. Twitter defeats regular spam accounts with ease, but it’s going to have a much harder time defeating ‘profitable networks’ of people that move in. I imagine with the economy the way it is MLM is looking like a viable option for a lot of Americans.

The problem with spam is that it only needs an incredibly low conversion rate, and some UC Berkley students found out when they hacked the storm botnet it does have a conversion rate.

So what should the Twitter business model be? well IMHO it should be a mechanism to help people value their network, give them a personal rate card essentially so companies can see how valuable and connected some of these people are and let them work with companies they love and believe in. Surely Patagonia should be sponsoring Richard Branson on his latest voyage where he’s live twittering from his boat (who BTW rewarded his 2,000th follower to spend the day with him). Anyway, you get the picture, you could add pro-accounts, real metrics on conversion rates, reach and influence, and who you influence.

BTW not for nothing, but John Battelle with 4,500 followers (author of the book Search) the other day tweeted this:

I can say this: Google is very, very focused on indexing Twitter. VERY FOCUSED. http://snurl.com/774g5 [www_google_com] 5:40 PM Dec 4th from web
johnbattelle

and I can concur if you do a search for karllong is giving away 10 x $25 gift certificates for http://threadless.com - just RT this to enter, will tweet the winners

That was only two days ago!

What makes me laugh so much about this brilliant parody and almost homage to viral marketing is how it’s almost plausible. Remember LonleyGirl15

The liquid on top of a metal tray on top of a booming sub-woofer produces some memorizing effects that look supernatural. The liquid is a mixture of water and cornstarch at about a 1:6 ratio, start with the cornstarch, add water slowly, it’s a substance that feels ‘hard’, pours like liquid.

I just signed up for another location based micro-blogging/micro-media/social-media site at 11870.com (similar to britekite.com) and quickly discovered they have a very unique error page. (click on img for full size)

Wow!

Kluster.com is an interesting collaborative crowdsourcing decision making platform. They seem to position themselves as a sort of collaborative ideation/innovation platform. It seems that their main marketing strategy is to launch interesting services on it’s platform and the most recent one is called Name This, the main idea being that for $99 companies/entrepreneurs can post products and services to have the community come up with names for. As a demo they are running an initiative to rename Wolf Blitzer, a newsman who is famously on CNN more than any other person.

I particularly like these suggestions:
Garrison Sontag
Stonewall Blitzer
Slartibartfast

Other things they are attempting to rename in this demo are:
Chevy Nova
Zune!
Verizon’s G’zOne

As with all social tools like this I like to look at the rewards and recognition part of the culture, why would people participate in this in meaningful ways. In the case of Name This the primary reward seems to be cash money. Essentially they distribute $80 of the $99 fee to the top 3 names and the invluencecers:

Personally i think cash is a pretty weak motivator, especially when so few are going to benefit, and they need to do a better job of showcasing the top participants and have some non-cash community points for participation.

Via Mashable and my friend the Mad Finn

Another recent branding related crowdsourcing application is of course the runaway success BrandTags.com by Noah Brier

Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.

bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.

Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.

Oh, you can find me on Plurk here

UPDATE: Looks like Plurk is the new twitter… it’s down

Apparently April 7th 1969 is a contender for the birth of the internet, who new it was so old. Here’s a pretty funny video from Canadian CBC news, not sure when this was broadcast but it is pretty damn funny.

Via

Another wonderful throwback news story is this Newsweek piece from 1995 called “The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

The thing that continues to blow me away is still how early and nascent internet technology is, I don’t know what the future holds but i’m certain that in 10 years we will look back on the hype around social networks like facebook and myspace, thinking “oh how naive we were”.

All of your favorite internet stars including Chocolate Rain guy (Tay Zonday), Star Wars Kid, Laughing baby, Sneezing Panda, Tron guy, Numa Numa, and Chris Cocker (Leave Britney Alone), and possibly LonelyGirl15 in the background.

Via Fimoculous

Asda loans one of the biggest personal loan lenders is a part of the walmart family

A genius typeface made out of Post It Notes, I wonder if 3M would have to get a cut of this if it ended up as a font

Via Ffffound

This video is so extraordinary and strange, it essentially acts out the history of wars (from an American perspective) from WWII onward using the various foods associated with the warring nations. This kind of short form, bite sized entertainment is so ideal on the internet, and even via mobile it makes me wonder what kind of company or eco system is going to enable and capitalize on this more.

Via BoingBoing