StevenSilvers.com

Ten billion Tweets means what, exactly?

Most of my clients and colleagues acknowledge the expanding value of social media.  But they still don’t know what to make of Twitter.

Blogs, online communities and forums are relatively easy for them to comprehend as strategic communications tools.  But the incessantly babbling Twitter, with its Gnostic lingo of hashtags and retweeting and @replies, is not. 

So what are we to make of the fact that Twitter has reached 10 billion tweets?  Maybe a lot.  But maybe a lot of nothing.

Consider this unscientific illustration of Twitter’s contribution to productivity.  If each Tweet took on average only ten seconds to be posted and read, then Twitter would already account for almost 28 million manhours.  That’s an average year’s work for 15,414 Americans. 

What value has come of all this effort is debatable, especially when you consider that 40 percent of Twitter posts are what one study called “pointless babble.”  Probably just as many posts are babble that makes a point. 

Twitter also suffers from a growing spam and phishing infestation. A study by online security firm Barracuda Networks estimates that only 21 percent of Twitter users are genuine.

Nobody denies Twitter’s ability to spread the word.  But for many otherwise Internet-savvy communications executives, it’s still far from clear how to most effectively anticipate, respond to and leverage a free online messaging service that by design is a magnet for the world’s clutter.

Also see:

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

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(Above) Social media consultant Muhammad Saleem created this excellent graphic illustrating Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets and what’s been shown true along the way.

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A business primer on the new FTC transparency rules

Representing its most sweeping action in 30 years, the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules governing endorsements and testimonials will change how marketing is done.

Here’s what the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising say:

ACCOUNTABLE FOR BLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA.

The FTC already directs online reviewers to disclose if they’re being paid by advertisers. Under the new rules, however, every blogger, Twitter user or social network member must disclose any “material connection” with a company, product or service.

Taken literally, this connection could result in fines for bloggers who fail to disclose anything from getting a sample can of chili in the mail to having a spouse who owns company stock. While consumer advocates support the guidelines, some prominent bloggers argue that the rules in effect force them to disclose every business relationship they’ve ever had.

Enforcement is another matter. The FTC says it will primarily go after the advertisers rather than individual bloggers, though it will take into account how companies encourage transparency in their paid reviews and freebies. Beyond that, the agency will decide matters on a case-by-case basis – which basically means they’ll know deceptive advertising when they see it. What makes things even more convoluted is that the agency doesn’t say by what means it will handle these situations.

Given that the new transparency standards for bloggers are higher than what’s required of commercial news media and politicians, the FTC rules are generating considerable debate among marketers and social media proponents alike. Stay tuned.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR TYPICAL RESULTS.

Ads that feature individual consumer experiences with a product will have to state clearly what kind of results everybody else can expect. Soon to be history are those ubiquitous ads that whisper “results not typical” while showing some guy who lost 300 pounds drinking vitamin shakes.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR EMPLOYEES.

Employees that promote their company or its products online must “clearly and conspicuously” disclose who they work for.

The FTC urges that companies have social media policies as one way to avoid fines or other actions when employees pretend to be someone else – say, a happy customer or invigorated shareholder.

Keep in mind, however, that a recent Deloitte study found that a third of all employees don’t even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR CELEBRITIES AND RESEARCH.

A warning to every company that uses movie stars, retired quarterbacks and 70’s sitcom actors for promotional tours. Under the new FTC guidelines, both advertisers and their celebrity spokespeople can be held liable for making false claims as part of a commercial endorsement.

The ramifications are huge. Celebrities making the rounds of late-night talk shows, state fairs and Twitter feeds must disclose their business relationship with any company or agency that’s paying them to pump movies, books, products or even charities.

Companies that quote research must also disclose if they paid for the studies, or if they have any business relationship with the organization that did the research.

These standards go way beyond front groups and hidden clients. From now on, any failure to disclose corporate affiliations could be considered deceptive advertising. That’s going to hit a lot of marketing PR campaigns.
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Download a PDF of the revised FTC rules here.

It's a fact: PR people are just as ethical as dental students

Next time somebody throws out the old tripe about sleazy flacks, I’ll just say, “Au contraire! You obviously are unaware of the scientific research conducted by two Johnson Legacy Scholars at the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at Penn State University!”

Okay, I may have to write that down.  But I’ll explain how some smart people did the first empirical study to measure PR people’s moral standing in comparison to other occupations.

“It turns out that public relations professionals are good ethical thinkers,” said scholar Renita Coleman in a press release.  “They show similarity to other professionals with comparable levels of education such as journalists, nurses and dental students.”

Even more interesting, public relations pros scored better on the moral compass than accounting and veterinary students, orthopedic surgeons and even “business professionals.”

No doubt that general executive category includes the bosses of the Boeing company spokesman who just got caught posing as an independent blogger so he could sit in on a competitor’s briefings.  You sure don’t see dental students doing stuff like that.

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What's behind The Twitter of Babble

A new study finds that 40.55 percent of all Twitter messages are “pointless babble.”

Of course, that percentage goes way higher if you also include babble that is irrelevant, incoherent or inane. 

But what’s driving this share-your-nothingness phenomenon?  Why are there so many millions of people who feel compelled to tell strangers on the Internet that their feet are cold or that they’re going to lunch?

Some experts say we live in the most narcissistic age ever.  But others think the babblers are filling a void.

“Twittering stems from a lack of identity,” one clinical psychologist told the London Times.  “It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”
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Proof that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't

Anyone who’s been a boss knows this already, but new research from NYU Stern confirms that executives who choose between two rotten choices – like eliminating healthcare or firing people to avoid going out of business -- are likely to be blamed no matter what choice they make.
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Judging the reputation of America's law firms

US News and World Report will launch a new annual listing of the nation’s 3,000 largest law firms.  The rankings will combine hard data with results from surveys sent to tens of thousands of private practice attorneys, clients and law firm employees. 

A law firm scorecard is sure to generate considerable fear and loathing, just as the magazine's well-known college rankings have done for years.

Two years ago a dozen university presidents went so far as to send a letter to hundreds of liberal arts colleges urging them to not complete US News’ "offensive" survey of institutional reputations, which accounts for the largest percentage of each school’s score. 

"Reputation can be another word for gossip," Washington State Trinity University’s president said at the time.  People being surveyed, she said, had no personal knowledge or experience with all of the colleges they were asked to rank.

"This is not a survey that has integrity based on objective data," she argued to media that would listen. "We are saying that we will not engage in slandering each other’s institutions or inflating each other."

No doubt many law firms will have a similar reaction to being rated based in large part on the input of competitors, bad clients and other people with agendas to pursue.
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To my attorney friends: What do you think of all this?  What are your PR people going to do to either stop it, ignore it or make sure you get to the top of the list?  What's the sense of urgency?  Drop me a note. I'll stay on it.

Facebook gets gray around the edges

New research shows that people age 35 to 54 are now the biggest group using Facebook, making up more than 28 percent of all accounts.

Experts suggest that recession job losses and the use of Facebook by 2008 presidential candidates may be behind the growing numbers of older people joining the social networking site.

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CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

What a time.

Four years ago, a BusinessWeek cover story said blogs will change your business and influence the course of civilization just like the invention of the printing press did more than five hundred years ago.

Now a Time Magazine cover story announces that Twitter will change the way we live .

At this rate we should expect another planet-altering social media tool by Labor Day.

That is, unless you don't think a free online short-message service rastes with our generation’s revolutionary information technologies: voice mail, cell phones, the Web.

You’re the people who think Twitter is the Internet-era version of the CB radio fad. 

And you don’t believe that hot hype will take precedent over the cold realities of the marketplace.

In "Ten ways Twitter will change American business,"  Time’s writer predicts that the ability to send and selectively receive 140-character Tweets will give business, politicians, media, investors and other interests the ability to “engage” people like never before. For example:

“Twitter … will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter… having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.”

The problem with this vision is that it assumes consumers will do four things:

… One, that they'll stay fixed on reading and writing Tweets all day long, day after day.

… Two, that they’ll want to receive product announcements, promotions, surveys, celebrity restaurant orders, contests and other sponsored messages, at every turn of their day.

… Three, that they’ll overlook the intrusive advertising and spam that will increasingly pollute their legitimate news and conversation stream.

… And four, that they won’t mind how Twitter reserves all rights to sell any information it has on them so others can identify, locate or contact users.

Consumers don’t behave this way.  They won’t for Twitter.

Twitter’s problem is that the Internet has no walls.  There are no beachheads to dissipate the relentless waves of marketing and campaigning.  We hear anecdotes like how a suitcase company responded to a customer who Tweeted about his broken handle.  But take that scenario a few years from now – if that long – and that same customer will be inundated by followers, followees and interlopers Tweeting everything from luggage deals and discount travel to political fundraisers and pleas to help some secret princess transfer money. 

Nobody says Twitter doesn’t have huge potential for mass communication.  It does. The Iranian election aftermath shows how microblogging can facilitate real-time citizen-journalism.  But the same holds true for misinformation and propaganda.  The bad guys know how to use Twitter too. 

That's one reason corporate America isn’t exactly clamoring to get on board. And Twitter's goofy dot-commish name itself alienates the service from thousands of CEOs already averse to social media.

In fact, big brands see less value and more risk in associating with any Internet free-for-alls.

Consider YouTube. Time Magazine reports that despite drawing 99.7 million viewers watching 5.9 billion videos, YouTube's content is overall so bad that marketers have become reluctant to embed their messages within it. 

After paying $1.65 billion to own it, Google told investors that YouTube is "not material,” making the Web’s third-most popular destination also one of the ten biggest technology failures of the last decade.

It's a stretch to think Twitter will do better.  It doesn’t even own the micro-blogging concept, and several competitors already offer more features and open-sourcing.  RSS inventor Dave Winer, who PC World calls the father of modern-day content distribution, went so far as to predict that Twitter is the next Netscape.

As for the 29 million users, new research also suggests that Twittermania may have already peaked:

• 90 percent of all Tweets come from only 10 percent of all Twitter users. (Harvard University study of randomly selected sample of 300,000 Twitter users)
  
  
• Though 99 percent of Generation Y -- age 18 to 24 -- use social media, only 22 percent of them use Twitter.  (Pace University study for Participatory Marketing Network)
  
  
• 55 percent of Twitter account holders have never posted a Tweet and 56 percent aren’t following anyone.  53 percent have no followers. (HubSpot analysis of 4.5 million Twitter accounts over nine-month period)
  
  
• 60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first month.  (Tracking from Nielsen Online)
  
  
• Twitter’s growth came to a screeching stop in May, growing by only 1.5 percent.  (Tracking by Mashable)

Then there’s the Oprah factor.

Well over a million people signed up for Twitter in the first 72 hours after Oprah featured the service on her show.  But as Silicon Valley Insider reported, Oprah is already bored with it.  Despite having 1.56 million followers, Oprah herself follows only 14 people and Tweeted just four times in June. 

So what are we to make of all this?  I agree with InternetNews columnist Mike Elgan, who thinks Twitter is simply leveling out to what it really is minus the hype. 

“It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium,” he writes. “It's just a service for sending messages.”

And you can get mine at Twitter.com/StevenSilvers.  Or at least until I move on to the next big thing.
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Also read:  No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.

Managing the unmanageable: Employees talking about your company on the Internet

Here's one of the questions I hear most:

"How are we supposed to manage what our employees say about us when they're on Twitter and Facebook all the time?"

Executives worry about social media in relation to two things: risk to the company and loss of productivity.  Both are legitimate concerns. Yet many of those same executives are downright tepid about bringing up the productivity issue. It's as if they're worried about sounding ridiculous, like the old dolt who doesn't get this World Wide Web hullabaloo.

Or perhaps they've seen studies like the one claiming that employees who use the Internet for personal reasons are nine percent more productive. Researchers in Australia report that "workplace Internet leisure browsing, or WILB, helped to sharpened workers' concentration."

There you go. Can't argue with an acronym.

But even CEOs who buy it are concerned about how social-networking employees might be representing the company. And they dang well should be.

Deloitte's 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey found that 75 percent of working Americans think it's easy to damage a brand's reputation via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media services. Yet a third of all employees say they never even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

This is scary stuff.  It means that a good chunk of any company's workforce could include people with the same kind of mental disposition as the two Domino's employees, aged 31 and 32, who posted a video of themselves spitting on food and stuffing cheese up their nose -- all while laughing that "somebody will be eating them, yes eating them... Now that's how we roll at Domino's!"

In the first 48 hours, more than a million people watched the gross-out video just on YouTube.  Internet exposure and news coverage hit like a hurricane. And in only four days of tracking, consumer perceptions toward one of the nation's most popular brands went from great to rotten.

Domino's responded comprehensively and is even being credited with being the "Tylenol crisis" of the new media era.  But winning a PR trophy doesn't come close to accounting for what that little video prank cost the company in lost sales, bad publicity and ridicule, penalties paid for health-code violations, costs associated with managing the crisis and the expenses of investigations and litigation.

And unlike the Tylenol crisis, the image of a smirking Domino's employee sticking cheese up his nose will keep showing up on the Internet forever.

In a New York Times story, a Domino's spokesman underscored the real bottom-line risk of social media:

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea. Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair."

Companies must have comprehensive social media policies in place, and many do. But rules alone won't change how many people behave online. In a world where so many employees (and bosses) could give your brand a black eye, it will take considerable internal culture-building and communications programs to ensure they don't.

Technology savvy or not, that gives every CEO good reason to wonder how much time their people are spending on social media.  And what exactly they're doing there.
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Links & Resources

• Deloitte | 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey Results
• New York Times | Video prank at Domino's taints brand
• USA Today  | Domino's nightmare holds lessons for marketers
• Domino's | CEO YouTube response: "Disgusting Dominos people"
  
• Scatterbox | Transparent generation realizes downside to growing up online

No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.

For all we know, social media services like Facebook and Twitter could change the course of marketing history just like the telephone, the Web and the commemorative plastic drink cup.

For now, however, social media isn't actually selling anything but itself.

A study from research firm Knowledge Networks shows that while 85 percent of people online use social media, less than five percent visit those networks for help making purchase decisions.

Word-of-mouth is still the greatest influence on what people decide to buy. That's followed by TV, a medium of influence that keeps hanging around despite its alleged obsolescence.

"Obviously, a lot of people are using social media, but they are not explicitly turning to it for marketing purposes, or for finding out what products to buy. It's really about connecting with friends, or connecting with other people," Knowledge Networks executive Dave Tice told Marketing VOX. "The influence of social media isn't at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing - about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads."

Lack of tangible results, however, aren't keeping companies from getting into social media as fast as mass media can hype it.

In a story headlined "Jumping on the Twitter bandwagon," USA Today reports that major banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America are "establishing presences on social-networking sites to tap into a growing demographic and to control the conversation about their brands. Yet the economic turmoil, some say, makes it even more important to reach out to customers any way they can."

It's overstatement to suggest that collecting Facebook friends and Tweeting free 140-character online messages will give a company the power to control what consumers want to say about them. That's the hype part.

But as one banking company's spokeswoman told USA Today, "Social media is a whole new world, and you cannot afford to not be a part of it."

That's the truth part.
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Also read:  CEOs won't say Twitter and other contraditions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it.