inter:digital strategies

Everybody seems to be writing about Twitter. I can’t decide whether it’s so big because people think it’s cute, because people think it has marketing potential, or because it’s just so popular that they want to jump on the bandwagon. Nonetheless, it seems like I’m reading something about Twitter just about every day. The Twitter “micro-blogging” phenomenon is pretty intense.

I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…

The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?

• Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
• Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
• Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.

There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.

Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.

Spotplex is an interesting idea. You install their code, and they’ll track how often your blog (in general) and our blog posts (in specific) are viewed.

It’s similar to MyBlogLog, in that it tracks visits to your site. It’s like Technorati, in that it provides ranking of blogs on the basis of popularity and provides links to current and popular blog posts.

It looks interesting — it’s in Beta right now, but I’ve requested an invitation — see what happens and what I can learn!

As a note, the only reason I’ve noted this is because it’s currently at the top of Alexa’s movers and shakers list, having shot up to 5,969 today from a previous ranking of 247,451. On Technorati’s Where’s the Fire, it’s been
described as a “Trafficracy.”

From Spotplex:

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.

In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works. I feel there’s some risk that what will essentially happen is that the site will show most prominently whatever article is currently being Dugg, Slashdotted, or otherwise barraged by traffic from having gained prominence in one of the other major social aggregators. Still, I do like the absence of a visible vote/bury option: it’s just traffic.

In short: it’s not whether people liked your story — just whether they visited it. (Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open for debate.)

The big movement in web communities recently, or so says Time Magazine, has been user generated content. Whether it’s YouTube’s video extravaganza, blogging, or photo sharing from Flickr, the goal has been sharing information about yourself. But user generated content has an elder sibling which I have to confess to finding a bit more interesting — community created content. Forums have a long history of creating complex content through the interactions and information sharing behaviors of their members.

MyBlogLog has created a recent stir in the blogging communities by providing an easy way to connect bloggers with their own communities – essentially creating a community of blogs. This expansion of the two-way blogger/commenter relationship into a more three-dimensional interaction has a lot of potential. Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) recently wrote (in a comment):

This is a good example of the benefits of a blog community – not only can blog readers find out about me and my interests, but I have a way of finding out more about my blog readers. And, as I’ve found in this case, readers who are interested in what I am blogging about might themselves blog on topics which interest me.

Not every reader of your blog will comment. Not every reader will have a MyBlogLog account. However, the interesting combination of readers and fellow bloggers creates a unique collaboration. Rather than having pure statistics – knowing you’ve been visited by 48 people, 65 percent of whom used Internet Explorer and so on, you have a small insertion of real human data in your statistics. MyBlogLog can tell you that this person actually visited your blog and that person admires you enough to have added you to their contacts.

Really, it’s pretty cool.