Recently the internet comedy channel Indy Mogul came up with an awesome parody video- Twitter’s movie trailer.

It has been written: Soon every aspect of social media will have its own parody Social Network trailer.

Other parody versions have already been created for YouTube and MySpace.

I found the twitter movie trailer absolutely hilarious and well worth sharing.

I hope everyone enjoys it as much as myself and those in my office did!

Here is the link to view Twitter’s 101 guide.  You can view the guide online, download ppt slides, or download the full guide.

At my previous job at a top social media marketing company we ran sponsored tweet campaigns and twitter contests for Sears, Kmart, SeaWorld and more.  If you have any questions about twitter or would like to discuss growing your company’s presence on twitter feel free to contact me at David[at]Davidbrim[dot]org, or follow me on twitter: @Davidbrim

Obviously this is a joke….The video does pokes fun at some real issues though. For instance what’s next in the realm of social media. Twitter has been around since March, 2006…That’s over three years! The early adopters of social media & technology, people like Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and others have been using twitter for a very long time, however it hasn’t been until the last 3-6 months that there seems to be a twitter boom amongst the main stream. Maybe it’s because Barrack Obama is on twitter or celebrities like Ellen, Puff Daddy, Austin Kucher and more are now active on twitter.   What’s interesting is that my girlfriend @Lindsay273 is now active on twitter when a year ago she used to make fun of me for using it and didn’t quite get it.  Technology is constantly evolving and there’s always something next on the horizon, something that the early adopters begin to migrate towards.  I once heard one of the founders of twitter mention that they want twitter to be a social utility like a telephone.  There are also stories of people using twitter in strange ways such as turning off the lights in their home or allowing your un-born baby to tweet, but will twitter every be adopted as a main stream method of communication like email or the telephone, or will it just get acquired and trail off over time?

With that said, tomorrow is my one year anniversary since I started blogging.

The purpose of this post is to outline major events in my life and the lessons I’ve learned about blogging since I first started on February 11th, 2008.   I encourage each of you to do this exercise as well.  It can really be rewarding/helpful and encourage you to think about what a year from today can bring. If you do, or plan on doing a similar post drop me a comment, I’d like to check it out.

Major Events Since February 11th, 2008 (My blogging B-day)

1. Launched GroupTable‘s Beta (First week of February)
2. Went to the Indy 500 Racetrack & pitched GroupTable to judges in the back of a limo (Late March, National Business Plan Competition)
3. Won the UCF Joust Business Plan Competition (Only UCF Student to ever win back to back competitions, April 2008)
4. Started working at IZEA (May 2008)
5. Attended conferences: Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Search Marketing Expo in Ny, Blog World in Vegas,  IzeaFest, Affiliate Summit in Vegas (Random dates- Definitely learned a lot)
6. Became the Director of Premium Blogger Relations at IZEA- Met and worked with top bloggers like Chris Brogan, Wendy Piersall, Chris Pirillo, Jim Kukral, ShoeMoney, Neil Patel and many more. (Late July)
7. Moved with Lindsay (@Lindsay273) to an awesome apartment in Baldwin Park (August)
8. Graduated College from UCF with a degree in marketing (Mid August)
9. I was interviewed on Orlando’s Local Six news about Social Media & its impact on Politics (Mid August)
10. I got my first dog (Pics: Jackson and me, Jackson and Lins) (September)

There’s a a few more…but I’ll keep it to 10

Lessons I’ve learned about and from blogging

1. Blogging is a great way to build your personal brand.
   
2. Like writing in general, blogging is an effective way to organize and get your thoughts together.  It can be very therapeutic.
3. The blogosphere/twittersphere has its own culture.  It’s best to interact on other blogs and see how those who are experienced do it before you jump in. (Double Dutch Analogy)
4. I’ve learned how to identify influencers and high quality bloggers…It’s my job
5. I learned that I like WordPress way better than Blogger.  It’s more flexible and has lots of cool plugins.
6. If you don’t post regularly your traffic will drop….significantly
7. Write about issues others are interested in (even do keyword research before writing certain posts).  When I first started this blog all I wrote about was GroupTable.  When I started writing about other issues (like some of my favorite posts on the right) my traffic and reader engagement went way up.
8. Social proof is a powerful thing.
9. It’s good to comment on other blogs regularly. (Helps build relationships and brings you traffic)
10. Twitter is an incredible tool to increase awareness & traffic to your blog if you know how to properly use it.  (Many people who join it don’t have a clue how to harness it’s power or are unaware of all the third party twitter apps available)

Writing this post definitely helped me become more aware of how far I’ve come in this past year and what I’ve learned during my first year of blogging.

What have you learned since you started blogging? Isn’t it great to be able to have a chronicle of what you went through, or were thinking over the last year(s)?

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

I feel there are a number of ways that twitter can monetize that can be extremely profitable.

1. Highly contextual advertising below tweets

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.

2. Charge users a small annual or monthly subscription fee

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:

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?