There is a growing amount of discussion happening about understanding the return-on-investment of social media.
eg. What is the value of spending $100k to encourage chatter? Will it generate sales? Just because people are talking about you, how can you tell if that conversation is actually doing more damage than good?
I’ve been reading a number of articles recently, but this one in particular pointed towards research and mathematics so I followed one link to another to compile this list of reads:
- Twitter Effect Redux: 78% of Tweets About Inglourious Basterds Were Positive.
- Information about Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot Opinion Monitor which was used for the tweet monitoring.
- And for any budding maths enthusiasts, the abstract for “A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science” links to a PDF from Harvard Professor, Gary King, outlining the research and mathematical formulas used by the VoxTrot Opinion Monitor.
I was thinking about this sort of data this morning… people are using it a whole lot, yet Twitter themselves don’t seem to be making money yet. They give away their best data (search and hash tags), the service is free for everyone… I wonder how they’re going to make money. They need to make money, we need them to make money, or else we need to get used to Twitter going away ;)
Or maybe they just plan on selling out to Google for scary-billions, which is after all the web2.0 dream… ;)
Twitter’s business plan is sure to surface soon.
From the murmurings going around, I expect it will be similar to the YouTube and Flickr model where business will be able/forced to buy accounts where they receive additional access (eg. detailed statistics on searches performed in which their tweets appear, demographic information about their followers that “normal” users can optionally provide, etc). Businesses may need to verify their purpose to be rewarded with authenticity badges that will help “normal” users direct their tweets at official accounts.
Twitter has proven itself and has created so much momentum that businesses would be silly to not pay in order to receive an official measurement of activity or other benefits that they come up with.
Making the “normal” user pay would be a barrier to entry that I don’t expect them to attempt. Taking away something that has previously been given away for free (hmm… newspapers online comes to mind) could cause a backlash and angst against the brand, un-doing all the happy-vibes they are receiving at the moment.