Amitonomics | Social Networking and New Markets

Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way

March 25, 2009 2 Comments

More revenue for Twitter on the way: The company confirms — for the first time weve seen, at least — age-old theories that theyll sell commercial accounts to power users or companies using Twitter.

In exchange for a fee, companies could get “more features” on Twitter, the WSJ reports. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells the WSJ that the company recently hired a product manager to help develop those accounts, but doesnt specify what the extra features will be or when the accounts will launch.

This makes perfect sense. Theres a lot of stuff companies would pay Twitter for, such as a way to verify the company reps legitimacy; to more analytics and information about who is reading their Twitter page; to better tracking features to see what people are saying about their company.

What would you pay for an account like this? We could see a lot of companies paying $10 or $20 a month for the service, even for simple tools. But we could also see many companies — Comcast, JetBlue, Starbucks, etc. — paying more than one hundred dollars per month for really good, insightful tools.

via Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way.

Filed under Online Maketing Tagged with Amitonomics, comScore, DVR, Facebook, Media, MR, Networking, Social Media, Twitter

Twitter Fires Up the Spotlight | Marketing Pilgrim

February 24, 2009 Leave a comment

Last month Twitter launched its ‘suggested users’ feature and the impact on those who were put on Twitter’s red carpet has been significant. Some of these profiles saw tens of thousands of additional followers added to their own personal profiles which created some very happy folks and, you guessed it, some not so happy people. The LA Times Tech blog has all the details but here are the high points.

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, co-founders of Twitter put this feature into place last month. When users sign up for a new account which is happening at a dizzying pace they are given a list of suggested users to follow. The folks at Twitter were noticing that many folks were signing up then not using the service. The hope by offering this was to get the newbies in the game. Makes sense to me since Twitter can be somewhat daunting for those beyond the early adopter / social media savvy part of the population.

The list includes Felicia Day, The Guardian, Rainn Wilson, Dell, The New York Times and CNN to name a few. The benefit to those who made the cut is very clear:

Since Twitter began endorsing a handful of personalities in mid-January, The Guardian was among several entities to reap a subscriber windfall. Its account jumped from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month, according to stat-tracking service Twitter Counter. And within the last two weeks, @GuardianTech added new users at a pace about 300% faster than the previous two weeks.

Day, an Internet video maven, experienced similar results. She has jumped from 20,000 to 83,000 since mid-January.

TechCrunch went… from 41,000 to 111,000 in the same period. The New York Times’ Twitter account increased its subscriber base by a factor of six — to 145,000.

The Twitter purists, however, are crying foul. The concern is that those who have grown their following organically and around ‘real’ value or severe self importance, you make the call are going to suffer. Leo Laporte of TWIT puts it this way:

via Twitter Fires Up the Spotlight.

Filed under Online Maketing Tagged with 2009, Amitonomics, Entertainment, Facebook, Guy Kawasaki, Online Advertising, Social Media, Social Networking, socialtoo, Twitter

Jay Leno’s Move Hints at Future of Prime-Time TV – NYTimes.com

January 23, 2009 Leave a comment

With one sweeping shift this week, the ailing NBC network reordered the playing field of prime-time television. The introduction of a five-night-a-week program starring Mr. Leno, beginning next fall, was a concession that TV norms cannot continue, at least not at fourth-place NBC.

The programming and viewing habits of the last 50 years — exemplified by the checkerboard of competing programs on the broadcast networks — are being replaced by an Internet-influenced time-shifting model of scheduling. As a result, the very definition of prime time may be changing.

“We do have to continue to rethink what a broadcast network is,” Jeffrey Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, said at an industry conference Monday, hours before the news of Mr. Leno’s new assignment emerged. He warned that if changes were not undertaken, “the broadcast networks will end up like the newspaper business or, worse, like the car companies.” Maybe Mr. Zucker has seen the future; after all, his network has lost 50 percent of its 10 p.m. audience in the last three years.

The announcement of Mr. Leno’s show continues to reverberate on studio lots and executive corridors here, as the Monday-through-Friday “strip” is unprecedented in the modern network television era. NBC framed the decision in terms of competitiveness and cost-effectiveness, because it defuses the risk of Mr. Leno’s move to another network and saves untold millions of dollars a year. But it also reflects the increasing irrelevance of the network schedule.

The irrelevance is partly because of digital video recorders, the bane of many a television executive. Viewers in the 28 percent of homes with DVRs are recording programs at 8 and 9 p.m. and playing them back later in the evening, hurting the 10 p.m. hour. Of the 10 prime-time programs that gained the biggest audience from DVR usage this year, none were on at 10 p.m.

The biggest gainers from DVR viewership were dramas. According to statistics on time-shifting released by Nielsen Media Research on Friday, the NBC series “Heroes” benefited the most from DVRs, with a 35 percent increase in its audience after seven days of time-shifted viewing. The new Fox drama “Fringe” experienced a 26 percent increase, and the ABC series “Lost” had a 25 percent increase.

via Jay Leno’s Move Hints at Future of Prime-Time TV – NYTimes.com.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with 2009, Advertising, Amitonomics, DVR, Entertainment, Media, Obamanomics, Sports Marketing, Time-shifted viewing