Archive for November, 2008
The Best Way to Get into Social Media- The Double Dutch Analogy
Nov 29th
Recently I have had a lot of friends and others contact me asking advice on how they should get into Social Media, blogging, etc. Building your personal brand through Social Media is extremely valuable and can be a great asset for both your personal and business growth. So how do you get started? Enter the Double Dutch Analogy.
You’re probably thinking what the hell does jumping rope have to do with Social Media, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit.
But here’s my thought process..When children jump rope together, specifically double dutch and another child wants to get involved in the process, that child will:
- Watch others jumping and the rhythm / timing of the two ropes
- Prepare them self mentally
- Jump in
I feel that’s the same process you should take to get involved in Social Media. I recommended to each of the people who contacted me to follow the same process.
- Watch others utilizing Social Media and learn from them
- Prepare yourself mentally
- Jump in
See how others utilizing Social Media interact with their readers, listeners or viewers depending on the kind of content they create. What do you like? What don’t you like? See how they present their content…Do you feel it’s an effective way to connect with their audience? What can you learn from them? Some great places to find top Social Media participants in your niche are Technorati Top 100, Twitter Grader Elite, and AdAge Power 150.
After you finish step one, to prepare your self mentally I recommend commenting on relevant blogs in your space. This will help you find your personal voice and get you in the mode of discussing and interacting with others who are interested in similar topics as you.
After the previous two steps your ready to jump in. Set up your blog, podcast, vlog or other content platform. Keep in mind that just like in jump rope you’ll make mistakes. For me one of the big mistakes I made when I first started blogging, was that for the first three months I only posted about my company GroupTable. You can see this by checking out my archive from February-April in the footer of my blog. Not until the post I made on May 11th entitled A Transformation did I decide to switch things up and begin creating content that I feel would be helpful and interesting to others. So far that decision has worked out very well.
Come to think of it this formula can work on virtually anything from entrepreneurship to sports. If anyone else has any thoughts on the Jump Rope Analogy feel free to share them.
Did You Know- Education in the 21st Century
Nov 28th
This video- “Did You Know” is about the changes in the world as a result of technology and the importance of providing an education that prepares students for the 21st century work place. This is a challenge because many of the jobs we’re preparing today’s students for don’t even exist yet.
Lots of interesting facts and very thought provoking, definitely worth checking out.
How Google SearchWiki Will Affect CTR & SEO/SEM
Nov 22nd
A few days ago Google added a personalized search feature called SearchWiki. This feature allows you to bump search engine results for a term you searched for up or down, or even remove them completely from the results page. You can also comment on a particular search result and view other people’s comments. Though this feature is really cool, I wonder how will it affect CTR (Click through rates) and SEO/SEM efforts.
SearchWiki reminds me of StumbleUpon in the sense that it allows the user to see comments about a site and decide after they have heard other opinions if it’s a site worth using. It’s putting the results back in the hands of the end user, not a company paying thousands per month for back links or SEM. I feel this will alter CTR rates and deemphasize SEO & SEM to a degree. In six months to a year when people have become accustomed to using Google’s SearchWiki and more people comment on websites in the Google SERPS, less will be focused on the position of the site in the SERPS and more on what real people are saying about the site. Google will have more of the value that made Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon popular. This will force companies to be even more competitive in providing the best service or product possible, or else an unsatisfied customer could slander them on the SERPS. SEO will still be important, because a person will still have to find what their looking for, however once they find your website it may be tougher to get them to click, or easier depending on what’s being said about you.
You can visit Google’s blog to find more about Google’s SearchWiki and personalized Search or watch the video below.
Even though these features are only available to you when your logged into your google account, do you think Google’s SearchWiki will have any affect on click through rates and SEO/SEM?
What are your thoughts on these features Google has added?
How do you finish this statement?
Nov 20th
I was working the other day and was sending an email out. No big deal right? Well it was a normal email until I got to the end….I started typing “If you have any questions feel free to…” . I usually finish this statement with call me or email me, but the person I was emailing was heavily involved in Social Media. I believe I did end up finishing it with a boring…email or call me. But then I got to thinking… How many phrases could I have finish that statement with?
Well I thought about it and this is how I could personally finish that statement in regards to ways somebody can reach me:
If you have any questions feel free to…
- Email Me
- IM Me
- Skype me
- Tweet @ me
- DM me on Twitter
- Text me
- Call me
- Send me a Facebook Message
- Poke me
- Facebook Chat with Me
- Gmail Chat with me
- Message me on LinkedIn
I could get crazy and start adding in many other niche social media sites, or even snail mail. But seriously..How do you finish that statement?
I’m interested to hear the comments on this
GroupTable Update- What do you bring to the table?
Nov 18th
November was a great month for GroupTable. With no funding, nobody on our staff working full time and a lot of late nights GroupTable now has over 1200 students using our software, and we’re still in beta! 
You can also see our unique visitors to the right. All of our marketing, minus one promotional event at UCF during the summer and a few email campaigns, has been through word of mouth/social media. On a limited budget it’s amazing what having a quality product that solves a need and tech savvy users can do. You’ll notice a small dip during the summer months, but a strong rebound when school started. By the way this graph includes November and there is still a week and a half left in the month.
This month there were also a lot of great posts written about us on various education and technology blogs Here’s some of my favorites:
We really have a perfect product for the time. College enrollment is rising, especially with the economy the way it is. On top of that, students are staying school longer for their mba and doctorate degrees. Group projects are often required in classes and it’s proven that study groups improve grades, however students are busy and/or lazy and getting all group members together and focused at the same time is challenging. Many students face this problem and neither social networking sites or course management software systems solve this need, however GroupTable does. Below is a message sent to us via twitter.
Besides our strong user traction and growth, we have a number of companies that want to partner with us that can really add value, an enhanced design ready to be integrated, several campus representatives at different locations across the country and a solid revenue model. We are in the process of raising capital, which will allow us to really ramp up. If anyone knows of any investors passionate about education and technology please connect us. The sooner we obtain resources, the sooner GroupTable’s staff will be able to give this venture our full attention, build our team and grow GroupTable to it’s full potential…What do you bring to the table?
Contacts? Capital? Comments?
How Will Twitter Monetize
Nov 14th
There has been a lot of talk about how Twitter will monetize their service. I am on twitter (@davidbrim), but am not as active as some of my colleagues in the industry (Not everyone can have a 99.9% twitter grade like @tedmurphy). As of now I have a Twitter Grade of 80%, feel free to test out the twitter grader tool and get your score. Either way I still wanted to touch o
n the “how will twitter monetize” topic and encourage others to do the same.
I feel there are a number of ways that twitter can monetize that can be extremely profitable.
- Highly contextual advertising below tweets
- Charge users a small annual or monthly subscription fee
Imagine sending a tweet saying your going to Red Lobster, your followers would be able to click through to Red Lobster’s site where a landing page could offer you a 15% off coupon. This kind of advertising could actually be appreciated being that it is highly relevant and adds value.
These ads would have to be performance based. Either CPL, CPA or CPC. They wouldn’t do well as a CPM model because it would be too difficult to quantify the people who actually saw the ad. I for one know there are a lot of tweets of people I follow that I never see. No advertiser in their right mind would want to pay for ads on a CPM model unless it was an extremely inexpensive deal.
Twitter could also charge people a certain amount to upgrade per month/or year to not receive ads within tweets. This would be a good idea, because regardless of how relevant some will feel the ads are, there are still going to be some people that feel the ads are spammy and would be willing to pay the premium to get rid of them.
This is something interesting to think about. Ask yourself would you pay $1 a month, $5 a year or another nominal amount to use twitter? There’s going to be a lot of people that wouldn’t pay for something that they’re used to getting for free. However on the other hand twitter has so many thought leaders and professionals that utilize it that many people would find the nominal subscription fee well worth the ability to build relationships, network and share meaningful content.
They could also impliment a freemium model. The base model of twitter would be free and they could offer some sort of upgraded service at a premium.
The revenue potential from both models is really a function of their user base. So how many users does twitter have? According to Compete twitter has nearly 3.5M unique visitors per month. I don’t think that’s an accurate estimate of people that actually use Twitter, being that many people use applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck or applications for their mobile devices.
From what I gather nobody really has a strong hold on how many users twitter has, but twitter and they’re not talking.
TechCrunch estimated back in March that twitter had 1M+ users, 200k active users and over 3M tweets per day.
There has also been people such as Daren Rowse of Problogger that estimated there are tens of millions of people using twitter across the globe.
Lets do some hypotheticals…
CPC Model: If twitter has 1M users and a total of 3M tweets a day, all with some form of contextual advertising…With an average CTR (Click through rate) of 2% and an average CPC (Cost per Click) of $.50 their daily revenue would be: $30,000 per day.
Here’s the math just in case you were wondering:
3,000,000 tweets x .02 CTR= 60,000 clicks
60,000 clicks x $.50 (CPC)= $30,000 per day
$30,000 x 365= $10,950,000 per year
Affiliate Model: It’s hard to say the CPA or CPL an advertiser would pay out on twitter because so many different types of advertisers would be relevant. I was going to take a shot and try to do a projection, but decided not to. There are advertisers that are paying out $1.50 for a registration and advertisers paying out lucrative commissions for travel packages or other products or services. If I tried to project it wouldn’t be accuarate at all…
But what the hell…Using the same 3M tweets per day stat and 2% CTR if there was a 10% conversion of those that click through and the CPA was $10. Twitter would have a daily revenue of: $60,000 per day.
3M tweets x 2% CTR= 60,000 clicks
60,000 clicks x .10 <–Conversion x $10= $60,000 per day
$60,000 per day x 365 days= $21.9M per year
Hybrid Model: Most likely my guess is that they would do a hybrid model…part CPC and part CPA. So for the sake of argument we’ll take 1/2 of my calculation for CPC and 1/2 for my CPA calculation.
$16,425,000 per year
Keep in mind this is probably way out of the ball park, but atleast I gave it a shot.
According to Tech Crunch Twitter raised a total of $15.1M:
| Total | $15.1M |
| Series B, 7/07 2 Charles River Ventures Union Square Ventures Marc Andreessen Dick Costolo Naval Ravikant Ron Conway Chris Sacca |
$100k |
| Series C, 5/08 3 Union Square Ventures Bezos Expeditions Spark Capital Digital Garage |
Do you think the investors would be happy with the numbers I projected? My thought is the revenue I projected is very attainable for Twitter and would add value, however I feel the real cash out for Twitter’s investors and founders is acquisition.
I project that a large Tech Giant will want to acquire Twitter and try to monetize it in the ways I mentioned or use it as a piece of a larger puzzle they are trying to put together within the next 3 years.
What do you think?
Cool SEO Video
Nov 13th
This video was brought to my attention from a post on Rebeezie’s blog. The video is a presentation by Stephan Spencer. In the video he discusses the top mistakes that bloggers make regarding SEO and helpful tips to improve. I definitely found value out of it, so thought I’d share it with my readers….Enjoy!
Magic, Mashable and Mo-Users…Oh My!
Nov 10th
Today was a really good day. In short GroupTable officially passed 1,000 registered users for our beta, I got 3 free tickets to go see the Orlando Magic and while there Paul Glazowski of Mashable, one of the most popular tech blogs online published an article about GroupTable. He mentioned that:
“The entire makeup of the service is quite impressive”
- Paul Glazowski
You can view the whole article by visiting the following link:
http://mashable.com/2008/11/10/grouptable/
This should provide some good buzz for us. Often times other tech blogs see what the top dogs like Mashable and TechCrunch post and give their personal twist on it.
Fyi- The Orlando Magic lost, but Lindsay and I still had a great time!
If you have any thoughts on the article, or have other ideas or comments about GroupTable feel free to post them here or email me: Dave (at) GroupTable (dot) com.
The Power of Building Your Personal Brand Online
Nov 6th
I just had a great conversation with James Betterson about the power of building your personal brand online. I mentioned that each time you create value-added content and contribute to meaningful conversations online in your respective niche you are building your personal brand and “Flexing your expertise”, as my friend Anthony Richardson calls it.
By flexing your expertise through social media you can expand your circle of influence, position yourself as a thought leader and build relationships that could result in potential job offers, business partnerships, additional media coverage etc.
There are many times that I have met someone that I’ve interacted with on twitter or in the blogosphere and when we met it was like we had been friends for years. This is very powerful because people often want to do business and interact with people they know and respect.
Something else I would recommend is to create an accomplishment, or achievement page on your website or blog. This is not to boast, or brag, but to establish credibility for yourself and the content you create. (Note: Don’t embellish or lie about your accomplishments. Because someone out there will expose you).
Having an accomplishment page also allows you to leverage your successes. When others can see what you’ve accomplished for yourself or other companies you’ve worked with they will be more likely to want to do business with you, hire you, or give you/your company additional coverage in the press.
Just my $.02 for the day!
