Alabama's Local 15 News Live Twitter Billboard

A few days ago I found this shocking blog claiming “Live Twitter News Billboard Leads to Social Media Fail“… go ahead, read it and see if you agree.

First, the fact that they pulled off a digital billboard with live tweets is awesome.

So now ask yourself, what was the cause of this event? live tweets? twitter? social media?

The answer is none of the above. The only reason this happened is due to organizational readiness. There are two factors here:

1. Are they ready to accept that people talk? Does it really matter if something like this shows up? how much is it really going to affect their brand? is it really a failure? what are the thresholds and limits?

2. If it is a concern, why didn’t they implement a simple keyword filtering? Any simple profanity filter would have caught the word ‘rape’.

3. If simple keyword filtering is not enough, they could easily have hired a moderation company. Moderation could have been pretty simple to do … would require a person/company to approve every tweet to go live on the billboard. Depending on the refresh rate and how real-time this billboard gets the data, this task could be really simple. Just refresh it every 10 minutes, select 140 tweets per day, done.

So did Twitter lead to failure? I don’t think so … they agency should have added a few precautions, but even without anything in place, the fact that I’m blogging about this and giving props to their agency for innovating digital out of home advertising is great for a local news station … I think it was well worth it.

Every once and a while I will engage in a conversation with someone — whether in the office, on the road, at Cannes, at the local eatery, you name it — and they will say something that inspires a barrage of new thoughts. In each instance the statement’s effect on me frequently goes unnoticed by the giver, while in my mind it sparks a very intense and enduring stream of thoughts which for weeks change the way I approach life or in this case marketing.

This is one of those instances, and I can’t believe I was not able to verbalize this before.

For most of modern marketing, we have operated on a constantly revolving cycle of campaigns, the goal of which has been to pique interest and in doing so drive sales, ensure retention, or create awareness. In most instances these campaign run and spark a quick burst of conversation or buzz, which then diminishes over length of the campaign. In the end what are you left with? One word: Silence!

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Infrastructure software giant Autonomy launched a new web content management tool under its Interwoven brand, designed to monitor social media content and allow businesses to act on the insights gleaned.

The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.

The technology uses clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling to understand sentiment, and can present marketers with a richer and more contextual set of data than traditional keyword spotting tools may be able to, according to Autonomy.

Anthony Bettencourt, chief executive at Autonomy Interwoven, argued that marketers have not been able to keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in consumer behavior.

“Social networks, which are by nature dynamic and unstructured forms of information, do not fit neatly into traditional, database-driven analytics systems,” he said.

“Interwoven’s meaning-based marketing approach, which can derive meaning from human-friendly information, and empowers marketers to automatically act on those insights, will transform how organizations engage with customers in the years to come.”

Once marketers have determined the trends on which they can act, they can use Interwoven’s TeamSite and LiveSite web content management products to deliver dynamic, targeted and optimized content to cash in on these trends, the firm said.

The company’s Optimost tool can then be used to run multi-variable testing on any changes to the site, according to Autonomy.

Twitter Search is going to get a lot more interesting soon, said Twitter’s new vice president of operations, Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was VP of Search Quality for Google. Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation would be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

The seemingly endless media and industry fawning over Twitter has lead to the widespread debate over the merits of real-time search and the future of the search industry. Yes, Twitter is an amazing service that allows people to share their thoughts, however poignant, painful or pointless, on events as they happen. However, the hype is reaching a fever pitch only exacerbated by Google acquisition rumors. With that in mind, it’s time to try and figure out exactly where this wonderful new medium belongs in the world of search.

It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.
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