This is the first time I've done one of these end-of-the-week roundups so bear with me. There's some great content in here today: ideas on where Twitter is heading and how it could monetize, who's using social networking sites, making money on product review blogs, and preferences on Twitter followers versus blog readers. There's some great content in here, so take a look.
Twitter as CRM
There's no doubting now that Twitter is a great idea; almost everyone who's used Twitter for any significant period of time has had at least one "wow, this is incredible" moment. So of course investors continue to pour money into the service. With an idea so great, it's amazing that there's still so much concern over how the company will make money. Everyone points to advertising but the click-through rates on social networking sites have been terrible. Jeremy Owyang has an idea.
Owyang points to certain B2B opportunities available to Facebook. There are so many companies using Twitter as a means to personally communicate with clients and consumers. However, it's extremely difficult to manage and observe all the followers. Owyang proposes that "Although they have not directly said it, I think Twitter can go further than this, they could be their own CRM system, by perhaps offering their own analytics system to brands, that will help them to track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere." Read more here.
Demographics using social networking
When I first jumped on Facebook there were no photo albums, no status updates, no News Feed and no chat. When I first got on Facebook 'The Wall' was one plain text box that could be cleared out by a single person if they felt evil enough. Yeah, it was a lot different. The concept then, as described to me, was "Myspace for college." It's a lot more now. Social networking sites have grown far beyond the college and high school demographics, moving into the business world and beyond.
Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has an interesting look at the demographics using social networks and other online services. Currently, growth in use by baby boomers is far outpacing growth in use by Gen Y. Very interesting stuff for marketers. Continue reading.
Product review blogs: a better way to make money online
Everyone's seen them—the countless number of publications online preaching about how to make money online. They usually come accompanied with ridiculous fonts and images, maybe some animated .gifs straight out of 1997. Chris Guthrie on John Chow dot come says there's a much better way to make money online, and that would be by starting a product review blog and using affiliate marketing networks to bring in the dollars. Guthrie speaks from experience, having made $200 in his first month publishing an extremely basic netbook review blog. Read more.
Most prefer more blog readers to Twitter followers
Twitter is on the rise, there's no doubting that. Most would say that with their increased Twitter usage, their blogging consistently has fallen off a bit myself included. Even so, according ProBlogger, 84% of those polled would prefer to have more blog readers than Twitter followers. Even though Twitter is getting more and more popular, people will still always be looking for content longer than 140 character blurbs. Twitter may serve as a great resource for finding content but on its own it doesn't provide the best content. Continue reading.
I guess you could have included Paul Greenberg's response to Jeremiah Owyang & Brian Solis' posts wrt Twitter & Social CRM. You can find his response on his ZDNet blog: http://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/?p=417
Summary, Twitter cannot be Social CRM unless it becomes something unrecognizable.