the F rant

I’m quoted in this Patrick Stafford piece in SmartCompany.  It’s about Twitter’s appalling churn rate of over 60%.  I’m not at all surprised, as I said to Patrick.

Some of the reasons why Twitter’s retention rate is so bad:

1. It’s limited – 140 characters.  No video / audio / rich media / expression / detail / depth – yes you can link to those things, but that’s it.
2. It’s a mass broadcast mechanism – like blogs or like an online version of reality TV.  Fine if you want to get a message out to a large number of people at once, but terrible if you are using it for a more personal or limited conversation.
3. It’s very easy to set up, so there’s little in terms of “purchase investment”.  You register, follow a few people and if you walk away / forget, it’s not like you’ve spent hours of your time – there’s little to “lose” by abandoning it.
4. It’s a media phenomenon.  The media are going nuts over it, when the punters are far less interested.  It’s like Second Life – not a day would go by when the media wouldn’t write about Second Life – it drove a spike in interest, but didn’t drive long term usage.
5. As I wrote in a previous post, Twitter is for old people.  Young people couldn’t care less and aren’t using it in any substantial numbers.  Older people either don’t have the time, or the interest, so they join up, look around and leave after a while – they don’t keep the ball rolling.
6. It’s not customisable.  I might enjoy some tweets of some people (person focussed), or some tweets by all people (topic focussed), but definitely not all tweets by all people.  It needs to be customisable.  Right now, whether I like it or not, I have to read the tweets of all of the people I follow on Twitter, whether I like it or not.  You could argue that there are multiple plugins and applications that allow for customisation of Twitter, but the basic beginner user isn’t interested enough (or capable enough) to then look for filters and plugins.  So they get bored / frustrated and stop using it.

Read the full article here:  Research casts doubt over whether Twitter fad will last – Business news, business advice and information for Australian SMEs | SmartCompany.

Your thoughts?

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends boring, churn, retention, social media, twitter

It seems much of the world is obsessed (but not infected) with swine flu – it is dominating conversations, and being referred to in even the most innocent of situations, eg:

ME: “Geez it was hard to get out of bed this morning”

RESPONSE: “You must have swine flu!”

Me: …

The interest in swine flu is dominating Google search.  For the past two days (in the US at least), discussions around “swine flu”, “pig flu” and other such iterations have at least 10 references in the top 100 US searches, according to Google Trends.  While not in the top five searches, people aren’t simply searching for “swine flu”, they’re searching for “swine flu deaths in California” and other such specific references – breaking up the overall search.

It was the idea that people search for things related to illness that was the basis of Google’s Flu Trends – a service they set up in 2007-2008.  Their thinking is that when people get sick, they’ll type in symptoms or descriptions of the illness into Google in an attempt to learn more about the disease – and cure.  Google discovered that if there was an outbreak or a pandemic, that they would be able to predict it up to two weeks faster than the US Center for Disease Control (CDC).  This is the power of Google – in terms of being a “database of intent”, it knows what people are doing & thinking because it knows what people are searching for, on a mass global scale.

The bottom line of search and online activity is – people want to know whether it is near them, and whether swine flu will kill them.  So how has the social media space reacted?

The Wikipedia listing for Swine Flu refers to a mortality rate of around 10% (the Wikipedia page has been viewed 114,687 times so far in April vs 237 times in March – and edited over 100 times in the past day).  Google Maps has a live map, listing every outbreak of swine flu – as it happens!  The subject “swine flu” is the number 1 trending topic on Twitter.  Nielsen Blogpulse is showing the topic making up over 1.75% of all blog posts today.

What other social media elements have come down with swine flu?

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

Brad Howarth has published a piece providing tips on guarding your online reputation, in “SmartCompany”.

In the piece he quotes a number of social media gurus, including yours truly. SHAMELESS PLUG: Contact me here if you’d like me to help improve your online reputation!

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends engagement, online, reputation

Google AdWords is an incredibly effective way to advertise, utilising context to display a message.  In other words, Google reads what is on a webpage, then works out ads that may be relevant to that topic, and displays them for you on that page.

It’s not perfect – for example sometimes websites or news items that discuss airline crashes are served up with ads for Qantas, but on the whole it gets the ad right – it’s far more effective than traditional advertising placement.

The Age has a beginner’s guide here, it’s pretty solid:

Beginner’s guide to Google Adwords – BizTech – Technology – theage.com.au.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

An excellent editorial from John Roskam in today’s Fin.  It’s about the cheerleading mentality of Australian influencers regarding Rudd’s Keynesian stimulus package.

My favourite bit:

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, something is ‘‘pathetic” if it invokes ‘‘pity or sadness or contempt”. Pathetic is the only description that can be applied to the behaviour in recent weeks of Australia’s economics profession, business organisations, and the media.

Witnessing the reaction of these groups to the federal government’s $42 billion stimulus package, it is impossible to avoid feeling anything other than a mixture of pity, sadness, and contempt.

It’s a pity that the country’s economists, corporate leaders and journalists have been reduced to little more than cheerleaders for the government. It’s sad that we’ve come to this. And there’s something a little bit contemptible about the whole thing.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

A great piece in today’s Herald-Sun by Andrew Bolt, about the battle between the ACCC and Visy – or specifically, Graeme Samuel and Dick Pratt.

He makes a brilliant point:

This must not be a country where the rule of mates trumps the rule of law.

…read it here.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

Someone in Perth attached a video camera to a model aircraft, and attempted to re-create a scene from “Top Gun” – where the plane flies up  and intercepts another – in this case, a Virgin Blue 737-800 – before being blown off course by the “jet wash”.

It’s quite dramatic footage, made all the more compelling by the voiceover between Tom Cruise and others, directly from the film “Top Gun”.  They’ve then turned it into the YouTube video for the world to see.

While it looks fun, it’s completely stupid – and something that could have caused a massive crash.  One wonders though – would this prank have been attempted in the pre-YouTube era?  It is quite possible that people might have done it – and kept the video at home for the amusement of themselves and their friends, but now that anyone can have access to a global audience via YouTube, what greater incentive to pursue much sillier pranks?

Finally, if CASA and the police are investigating, surely it’s a simple matter of seeing who the identity of the person who uploaded it to YouTube is?  Surely not so hard?  Oh yes, it might be. The FOOL has got his name on the side of the model plane. SHANE CURRIE. The guy who owns the plane is called SHANE CURRIE. You can see it as the footage zooms in on the crashed plane at the end. So, who wants to call 000 and let the West Australian police know?

Here’s the footage:

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

Watch this short film, Oktapodi, in HQ – it rocks…

FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment