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Perez’s Twitter followers are younger

by henrycopeland
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Comparing the demographics of PerezHilton’s Twitter followers with those of his blog’s readers, we found Perez’s tweeps to be significantly younger than the blog’s readers. Also more female, Libertarian and comment-prone. Interesting eh?

We’d love to run more comparisons like this, so let us know if you’d like to run a parallel blog/twitter demographic survey.

Suxorz 09 slides

by henrycopeland
Friday, May 22nd, 2009

In the cheerful and snide spirit of Cluetrain, here’s the Suxorz deck from this year’s SXSW fully annotated and posted. (I’m running it big here so the text is legible.)

Here’s the Suxorz audio.

The most interesting discovery in updating the deck: since we publicly reamed KFC, they’ve dealt with their fired-employee/former-KFC-blogger problem by removing her post and unlinking her post. (And perhaps persuading her to take her blog down?)

Twitter = losses? Not.

by henrycopeland
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Sanford Bernstein analysts think Twitter “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

That’s idiotic. Twitter has clearly become a foundation for a new type of communication. The easy, obvious (and perhaps only) route to monetize twitter is to charge users a nominal fee for “registering” their usernames. (Much as domain registrars charge $10-$20 a year for each .com or .org registration.)

Twitter would give the first six months or 300 tweets away free, locking users into the twitter ecosystem.

Twitter now has atomic-powered network effects: who wants to re-follow 1000 people in a new network… or try to convince 500 followers to move elsewhere? Shaq isn’t going to ask his 300k followers to migrate. Perez isn’t going to take his 230k followers elsewhere. I’m not going to want to re-follow 410 people. And all the companies who have built tools around Twitter’s API aren’t going to be eager to recreate those services around other APIs. Once hooked up/in, people will gladly pay $5 a year or $1/month rather than lose their entire network of relationships.

Assuming 50% attrition from its current 7 million users, that would generate roughly $20 million a year… plenty of revenue for servers and the company’s 40-odd staff. It wouldn’t be glamorous, but it would secure profitability and let twitter continue growing the plumbing for a new type of communications revolution.

Update: John Hawkins argues that Twitter’s hordes of followers are inflated by bots.

Update 2: I ran this idea by a friend in-the-know and got what amounted to a “no comment.” Signal or noise?

Crystal ball

by henrycopeland
Friday, February 20th, 2009

You know “social media marketing” (so-me-marcom?) is totally mainstream when a fortune teller, being interviewed by NPR about how the recession is helping her business, mentions that she uses her twitter account for “customer retention” and the journalist doesn’t make that the point of the story.

At 8:09 Eastern, said seer, Alexandra Chauran aka /earthshod, has 276 followers.

Next to last tweet: “My fortune cookie: “A blonde from afar has something interesting for you.” WTF to DEATH with that cookie?”

OK, I’m following her.

It’ll be an interesting test of the twitter/NPR/so-me-marcom nexus to check, at the end of the day, how many radio listeners have followed her.

Playing so-me-marcom-seer myself, I’ll predict >500, with a good chance Alexandra meets an enriching new life-partner if she’s remains vigilant to the day’s wonderful potential. (And she’ll rival Scoble a few months out if the twitteroi adopt her as The Official Twitter Sage.)

Social media consulting bubble

by henrycopeland
Thursday, February 19th, 2009

BL Ochman, auteur of Budget Rentacar’s great social media campaign , makes an fun observation about the glut of instant experts on social media marketing:

You just never know

by henrycopeland
Thursday, December 4th, 2008

…when a particular ad campaign is going to strike the fancy of a particular set of bloggers. It’s kinda like falling in love, there’s just some chemistry, some rhythm. Well, Wonkette has gotten into a might strange groove with the EcoDriving campaign.


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