A new study suggests that Twitter is the root cause of the current economic malaise. Policy experts predict a Twitter moratorium may be declared for Summer 2009 as part of an effort to stimulate economic production and reverse GDP declines.
Is there a lesson in all of this?
If you spend much time poking around the Web for the straight skinny on social media, you’d be hard-pressed to miss Jeremiah Owyang. Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a fairly well-regarded analyst firm that covers business and technology, including social media.
On Monday, while attending SXSW in Austin, Owyang tweeted this about mZinga, a social media software vendor: “I’m getting more information (nearly 4 reference today) that Mzinga is having financial difficulties. They need to brief me immediately.”
My initial reaction was mixed and dispassionate. On one hand, part of Owyang’s job is to disclose information – the good, the bad and the fugly – to the clients who rely on him to help them make buying decisions. On the other hand, it seemed as Owyang was tweeting a bit out of turn, based on incomplete, dubious information.
But he didn’t stop with that tweet, adding in a subsequent tweet a link to this blog entry where he said, “I strongly recommend that any Mzinga clients or prospects stall any additional movement till they brief me next Monday.”
Owyang’s blog is extremely popular – if the chest thumping on it is true, Technobabble has ranked it the #1 analyst blog, while it comes in at #31 on AdAge’s Power 150. Owyang has more than 33K people following him on Twitter. The numbers suggest that the overwhelming majority of people paying attention to what he says are, in fact, not clients. My hackles were raised.
Add to this the fact that Forrester is on the take from mZinga, who, like many other social media software companies covered in Owyang’s WAVE report, pay Forrester for consulting services*. Apparently mZinga didn’t schedule a briefing with Owyang quickly enough to dissuade him from telling tens of thousands of people not to buy their products until further notice.
I’m foaming at the mouth.
The shady world of software analysis has avoided the public ire for long enough. Taking money from clients looking to buy AND vendors looking to sell, and claiming ANY amount of objectivity is, flatly, a ruse. We can thank Owyang’s stunning lack of judgment for exposing a little more of the emperor, but dude’s been naked all along. (I remember waiting with a gut full of nerves the arrival of Gartner’s latest “Magic Quadrant” covering the mobile industry. I can assure you it was always many things, but never magical.)
In the Web 2.0 world, can’t software analysts be rendered obsolete? How about a community where the masses describe and rate vendors, and where those ratings are rated based on how helpful/true/bogus they are?
At the very least, analysts should pick who they want to shill for, and disclose it thoroughly. Forrester can start exhibiting the same transparency they extol by naming every single vendor who pays them and appears on their WAVE report.
*We help business and marketing executives at technology providers with:
– Market and competitive assessments.
– Go-to-market strategy.
– Custom market research.
– Product development.
– Message tuning.
– Case study development.
– ROI proof.From the Forrester site.
Olney100, the site we are running for the town of Olney in north Buckinghamshire continues to power ahead. We are shooting up the Alexa Rankings. At 32 000 for the UK, we’ve outstripped the local gov.uk sites and are rapidly closing on the local football (soccer) team.
I am carefully watching equivalent sites around England and we seem to be in the front pack. That said, we are still small enough to pour over Google Analytics in some detail and a little example helped me frame the value of social media quite simply. It went like this.
Somebody was searching for “welsh rarebit outside catering”. If you aren’t from the UK, you may need to know that a welsh rarebit is like a toasted cheese sandwich without the top piece of bread.
This highly specific search led the surfer from the third page of Google results to of our local deli’s. The phrase “welsh rarebit” was no longer visible, but being a young site, I’m able to recall that a welsh rarebit was mentioned in a conversation about British Breakfast week that took place over a month ago.
This example illustrates the immense value of social media which I summed up this way.
Tell me, I know for a minute and no one else knows.
Tell me on social media and Google remembers forever. Months later someone else will overhear your conversation with me and knock on your website to find out more.
Social media can add hugely to the effective advertising of a small business. As far as I know, no one is tracking these effects.
I cn’t imagine how much conventional advertising it would have taken to generate this lead.
Of course, the next level is to make it easy for surfers landing on their social network page to contact them and to show that the conversion rate is higher than it would be with a flat website.
As many people in Olney are not very familiar with social networking and still see the internet as an extension of “Disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells”, this little win prompted me to circulate this three point rubric.
Use your real name! Customers cannot find ye who hide!
Have real conversations with real people! Months later people will ‘overhear’ your conversation on Google and come looking for you to find out more.
Wear your heart on your sleeve! Say what you want to be known for.
And my next post will be on something that is a problem for hyperlocal sites – the debris on the internet.
You’re seeing it more and more: on blogs and new sites and even search results: twitter is being integrated, either via hashtags or simple a particular user’s tweets.
@dsandler has a bright idea: why not institute something for a particular blog post as a commenting tool. People have tried using digg or reddit but this execution holds the promise of something truly different. It works something like this:
You come up with some sort of naming convention (in his example he simply used the tinyurl for the post, as most people would be including that anyway)
Then, at the bottom of each post, you include search results for all tweets which include that tinyurl.
When you consider that you can include that link in a URL like so and twitter search results are easy to integrate, making such an idea a reality is not hard.
I think it’s all well and good that you can put your blog on your facebook and twitter from google reader and whatever else, but I think this kind of idea is what makes the web such an interesting place to be.
Experimental: Twitter for comments
As always, share this story, check out my website, follow me on twitter, leave comments below, and fight on.
Olney, United Kingdom is a delightful little town in north Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom. We are close enough to London for the local delicatessen, Much Ado, to raid Covent Garden and Billingsgate for us every Wednesday night and we are far enough away to be a town of truly unique shops. We have a Co-op, and our Tesco opened today – yep on 4 March 2009! We don’t have a Boots. We have a few big names in the form of banks, two real estate agents and a shop providing clothes for riding horses. Otherwise, we are town of independent shops providing high fashion, contemporary art, designer crafts, intriguing books, hand made furniture, antiques, carpets, interior designers, fresh food and gifts and an extraordinary number of artists, photographers, composers , writers and charities. Supporting this Bond Street in the Shires are the usual supporting cast of childcare, pet shops, hardware stores, garages, toy shops, plumbers, gardening centres, gyms, accountants, PR specialists, printers, graphic designers, webdesigners, pubs, restaurants, opticians, churchs, etc. I realise writing this list that I need to be able to automate this! I’ll do better next time!
I like living here so I launched a community site on Ning, which you probably know is a versatile platform that permits Google Analytics. As ever, hands-on experience is a great teacher. Launching a community site even in a fairly prosperous self-contained town like Olney is hard-work.
That’s all for now. I’d love your comments and suggestions and do pop over and have a look. We are Olney at Olney100! Guest log in using olney100 at gmail dot com with password olney100.