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Dave Hendricks
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Dave Hendricks
How much is a follower worth? Will #freenexusone really work?
The release of the new Nexus phone by Google has clearly excited net denizens. For some of them it’s provided an interesting promotional opportunity.
This lucky phone will end up with one of Jason's new friends
Jason Calacanis, aka @jason, has raised the promotional ante by creating a twitter-based lottery for a free Nexus phone. Earlier today, Jason, who had tens of thousands of followers already, tweeted that he would give away
a10 phones to tweeple that followed him. He was getting several thousand an hour last time I checked.This is a great gimmick. @jason has encouraged people to retweet him to get more distribution. He estimates that he’ll be over 100k followers by the end of the day. That’s an impressive number. Or is it?
Jason already has a loyal following for his newsletter. As a member of his list, I enjoy reading his missives and often respond. Jason has always been great about responding back when I’ve replied with something interesting. That sort of engagement has made me continue to read and has given me the feeling that we have a relationship. Now, we do have some sort of real world relationship, but it is very acquaintance level. We met about a business deal when he was running Silicon Alley Reporter, back in the day, and since then I’ve bumped into him at conferences. I follow him on Twitter, but I don’t think he follows me.
So, I am fairly engaged with him and his message.
Now that he has 20,000 new friends today on twitter, how do I feel? Am I equal to those friends? After all, they are only interested in him for his free phone, whereas I am more interested in his opinions about tech and the web, etc.
After he runs out of phones where will his followers go?
Anil Dash might have some ideas about this. In his excellent post last week ‘Life on the List‘, Anil recounted his life since he became a member of Twitter’s suggested user list. Since his inclusion, his twitter follower numbers have skyrocketed.
This is as sustainable as the housing bubble
Anil has gathered hundreds of thousands of new followers. But his engagement patterns haven’t changed. Not one iota. Anil observed that:
Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don’t form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like “normal” followers do. If I’d have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I’d have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I’d have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn’t changed at all.
That makes total sense to me. After all, these folks didn’t follow Anil because he was engaging with them on issues of importance to them. Only because they were pre-checked on the entry to using Twitter. Anil goes on further on the concept of recommended users:
People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they’ve barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.
Recommended users are not the problem, however, rather random followers and following is the issue. In Anil’s case, the problem is that folks are just following a guided path and trying to get their footing. After all, you need to follow others in order to get the full value of Twitter. In Jason’s case, the followers he is getting are already in Twitter and they already follow people who are retweeting @jason’s message, or they have searched for #Freenexusone.
Ultimately the link between the folks following on the basis of winning a Nexus phone and following @jason are tenuous. Jason’s usual content is not ‘Free Phones’, but rather tech, web, startups, cars, Mahalo, TC50, his dogs, etc. Those are cool topics and his real followers are interested in engaged with him because of that. They signed up with him to hear about that.
My prediction is that @jason’s new friends will stick around for a few weeks and then as he does not repeat his trick and up his ante, they will slowly unfollow. In the meantime he’s generated tons of new followers.
@jason, how will you monetize them? Can you monetize followers that are not interested in your core message and product? I don’t think so. Do they leave you for the next shiny object (like and Apple Tablet)?
- dh
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Dave Hendricks
It pays to pay attention
It’s not a revelation to point out that there are increasing numbers of ways to get distracted today, like writing your blog and spending time on Twitter. And despite the dangers of taking your eye off the ball, we continue to do so, most often in the middle of something that can really affect us, like the street.
Look up! Manhole ahead!
Not paying attention also is rampant under seemingly less critical situations, like meetings. I started noticing people paying less attention in meetings when wireless access became more common. As soon as you could surf or check email – whatever, as long as it wasn’t paying attention – wherever you wanted, it started to affect the quality of meetings. I once presented to a group at a large software company where the main decision maker barely, if ever, looked up from his screen as we demonstrated our solution. Under these types of circumstances you wonder why you even bother. We ended up losing, but I didn’t feel as bad knowing that the decision maker had no idea what we had presented, so he hadn’t voted against us.
You can guess my surprise and delight when I checked my email this morning while my kids were eating their breakfast. Brad Feld, who’s Feld Thoughts blog is among my favorite reads, posted about the importance of paying attention and being prepared. The post, Board Meeting Lessons From the Supreme Court, is a loveletter on the virtues of preparing for important meetings (like court hearings and board meetings) and secondarily (but as important) paying attention during those meetings.
The point is, there are many shiny objects that can distract you, and if you are on your own time that’s just fine. But if you are in the presence of others who have prepared something for you, and who are looking for your input and analysis, you are cheating yourself and your associates by not giving it the attention it deserves. Turn off the iPhone and the Blackberry and shut the lid on the laptop.
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Dave Hendricks
Two things Today
Rupert shutting down access to NewsCorp sites to Google indexing
Google Buying AdMob for $750 million.
What will make more of a difference to your life? Google in the news today in a big way.
Here’s what Mark Cuban thinks: Rupert is smart.
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Dave Hendricks
Catch the Google Wave? If only they would throw us an invite!
Since I don’t have an invite – who does – to Google Wave, I’ve had to rely on other people to tell me what it is. To date, I’ve heard that it’s an update to the email paradigm – a sort of real-time, AJAX-y take on communication that melds collaboration with communication.
Well, some guys at some call Epipheo Studios have come up with a nice, cartoony explanation of what they consider ‘3.5%’ of Google Wave.
If I understand it correctly, this has some really cool applications beyond the interoffice environment. With moderation features, you could see viral commerce uses for this that would be very interesting. It might also make chain mail jokes easier to read. Now that would be an innovation worth paying attention to….
If you want an invite to Google Wave, here’s the link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/
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Jeff Katz
The concept is fantastic. However, in actuality, the product is not intuitive at all. I am a power user and am more confused than excited by this product. They seem to have taken all the google products and tried to jam them all into one product, but not well. Hopefully a future release will give people a more compelling reason to try out this tool, other than the promise of everything.
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Dave Hendricks
reBlog from avc.com: A VC
I found this fascinating quote today:
But many marketers don’t realize there are similar tools for getting customers and potential customers to see their email messages. As Matt Blumberg, CEO of our portfolio company Return Path, points out in this post, there are very similar tools available in the email world.avc.com, A VC, Sep 2009
You should read the whole article.
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Dave Hendricks
Artisanal News coming sooner than you think
Yesterday afternoon (star date August 31, 2009), The Nieman Journalism Lab reported the latest stunning figures put out by the Newspaper Association of America: Q2 2009 newspaper revenues were down year over year by a nearly incomprehensible 30.15%.
This can’t be a surprise. Another thing that won’t be a surprise? Newspapers are going to start loking for ways to 1) cut costs and 2) grow revenues like they have never done before. One action that we can count on will be a reduction in newsroom staff. The next thing that will happen will be the further reliance on syndicated content for all but the most healthy papers. The net result of this will be a reduction in local reporting, as it is replaced by bloggers – where it is replaced at all.
As the amount of original content produced by newsroom staff inexorably shrinks, attempts to ‘own’ and monetize this content will accelerate, and as access to this content is steadily reduced to only paying subscribers of the paper, distribution will plummet, reducing page views for the few(er) online ads the papers have sold. Online ad performance will then tank, and advertisers will start paying less for these ads, hastening the crash.
So what’s left for the newspapers to do? The Nieman Lab has the answer: Embrace the Digital Future!
I think that the age of the hyperlocal blogger and syndicated, artisanal columnist supported by her own subscriber base is rapidly upon us.
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Dave Hendricks
Mark Cuban comes out in favor of pay walls for Murdoch
As times are getting tougher for media companies, all options for generating
contentrevenue are on the table.In the last several weeks, the AP has announced plans to charge, as have FT.com and others. There are two camps forming and it seems like they are lining up in basically this fashion: Content Producers and Content Aggregators.
It’s a serious piece, that takes part of the Freemium model, but monetizes it more dramatically. For companies like NewsCorp, with multiple properties, Cuban makes the argument that once you are in the park (i.e. a subscriber to one of the properties) you should be able to get to ride all the attractions.
He also rails against news aggregation sites, and quantifies his argument with some calculations that lead him to believe and state that the traffic from aggregators doesn’t amount to much, and that content sites are keeping aggregators alive.
Again, see the article here on Blogmaverick.
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Dave Hendricks
Is the Computer Cafe era over?
There’s a not wholly unexpected story in the Wall Street Journal today entitled: No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users.
Would you kick her out? Hell yes.
While the evidence is pretty thin, it indicates that some coffee shops and diners are cutting off free wi-fi and free electricity to people who just walk in, ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee and work/surf/whatever.
I’m not surprised. I love grabbing a coffee, maybe a seat and – if I’m lucky – an electrical outlet at a Starbucks or somethign similar. I’ve given up, though, on free wifi. I have a verizon wireless broadband adapter that gets DSL speeds pretty much everywhere (right now I’m writing this on a train) and so I don’t need the free wireless. I do like coffee. And I do like electricity, since my
only has about 2.5 hours of battery, so I need that too.But I can understand why coffee shop owners want to kick people off their seats. A cup of coffee doesn’t compare to a lunch, and turning tables is a time tested way to increase revenue. Even the best restaurants try to kick you out of your seat after you’ve just spent $500 on dinner. They want someone else to come in and spend more right after you. Unless, of course, you are going to order another $500 bottle of wine. That’s another story. But if you are going to linger over your coffee, out you go.
Now, it’s hard to tell slackers and the unemployed from successful people these days. After all, look at how we all dress?
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Sean Polay
I disagree (respectfully, of course), and wrote about it somewhat simultaneously to your blog post.
http://www.commuterdaddy.com/2009/08/dear-coffee-shop-owners-wi-fi.html
As much as a Wifi leech might hinder table turnover, Wifi also creates a business opportunity for coffee shops, restaurants, and other businesses that offer it. Even in this day and age of air cards, Wifi is a business-selection criteria for many. In fact, without any data handy to back it up, I’ll bet the business opportunity created by the latter group far outweighs the revenue prevented by the former.
Chasing away customers just seems counter-intuitive, regardless of the motivation.
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Dave Hendricks
christian 11:54 am on January 10, 2010 Permalink |
one clear winner is here is the @jason brand – he is a master at self promotion and i assume mahalo also benefits from that. the only way i know how he could monetize his new followers is by signing up with adly or similar services that sell tweets based on number of followers…
Dave Hendricks 4:19 pm on January 12, 2010 Permalink |
Christian – there is a better way than ad.ly!