If you’re still not clear on what Twitter is then I suggest you watch this video… Educational, entertaining, and humiliating all the same time – what a combination!

This is TMTYL’s first guest blog post by Adam Needles. You’ll see us doing this more frequently as we find more and more people that we think bring some very interesting opinions to the table. Enjoy!

———————————————————————————————————————————-

The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

 Read More »

As Twitter’s growth explodes, speculation has intensified about whether the service can be profitable. Twitter’s online traffic, excluding cellphones, surged to nearly 9.8 million unique visitors in February from 6.1 million in January, according to comScore.

In pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition. “We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort,” he says. Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn’t set a launch date for them, according to the wsj.

My thoughts are that there are two groups of people using Twitter’s search API: personal, and commercial. Personal users use it for fun, low hits, personal websites, little mashups that don’t make money, and commercial users try to monetrize it, like those mashups that will charge for fee-based services, or listening platforms that monitor brands, sentiment, behavior on a mass scale… these companies would be happy to pay for the API use … Isn’t that simple? I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Part 1 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: list of tools to be used in techniques described on Part 2 / 2 – Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques — interactive marketing blog special.

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

 Read More »

Part 2 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: techniques to be used with tools on this page or any tool on Part 1 / 2 – Free Social Media Monitoring Tools — interactive marketing blog special.

We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

 Read More »