Wildfire Tech PR Blog – Business and Consumer Technology Public Relations

Anyone who knows me will know I’m partial to (more than) the odd beer at my local pub. But when it closed indefinitely last month, us villagers were quick to up sticks and walk the 20 yards across the road to join the Royal British Legion.

I’ve paid my subs for the year, the membership card sits nicely in my purse and I’ll admit I’ve become a real fan. The beer is flowing (at a much reduced rate), you always get a warm welcome from old Fred behind the bar and they’ve even got a new bowl for the dog so he can join in the proceedings.

It’s a charity I’m very pleased to be supporting, so I was keen to move my new found allegiance online and look for the British Legion on Twitter.

But oh dear.

I checked out @RBLPOPPY and @POPPYSUPPORT . But where was my warm welcome? The cheery banter? The sense of community?

@RBLPOPPY just shows me a list of URLs about how to become a member of the forces, with no updates since the beginning of this year. I don’t want to sign-up to the army, but I do want to know how my support is helping veterans and wouldn’t mind the odd bit of interaction (akin to my little chats with Fred) via Twitter.  No @ replies either (unless you count the one to Cheryl Cole applauding her on a great X Factor show). Crikey.

@POPPYSUPPORT seems better. A greater variety of news and information provided by the team, but I did get the sense I was being bombarded with links rather than getting drawn into a conversation, and it all appears to be focused around the Autumn to link in with Remembrance Day. Surely it would be better to keep me engaged all year round and use loyal followers to draw in even more fans by the time the poppies go on sale next year?

But now I’m starting to feel a bit mean. I really do like the British Legion and what it stands for.

I guess my disappointment stems from knowing that they do offline communities so very well and wishing they would transfer that sentiment to their online presence, and potentially bring a whole new generation of British Legion fans with them.

By now, everyone knows that Twitter is about more than just follower count.  Yes, it’s still one of the first impressions you get when you load a profile and this won’t change soon but ultimately, when it comes to followers, it’s more about quality than quantity.

Simply put, without an interested and involved audience, its difficult to generate the interactions and relationships that prove the platform’s value.

With this in mind, it recently occurred to me that maybe there’s a different way to think of follower count.  What if we considered it the same way that businesses track revenue versus profit?

Revenues

In such a scenario, total number of followers becomes your total revenue.  That is to say, it should give some idea of the volume or scale of the operation you’re dealing with.

Whether because of high quality content, a regular thirty tweets a day or simply splashing out on a nefarious auto-follow service, the person running the account has clearly invested time in their Twitter profile.

Before we get into the details, it’s worth emphasizing that revenues are important.

It’s very rare that an account with only fifty followers is in its optimum position of influence.  Generally, this is instead a sign that either the content isn’t adding enough value or the user is missing opportunities to interact within wider discussions to extend their reach.

The economies of scale that come with a large group of followers are one of the key factors to maximize the return on your invested time with Twitter.  After all, you’re still inputting the same 140 characters but getting a bigger bang for your buck.

However, this is where the idea of profit comes in.

Profits

If you’ve a thousand followers but they’re largely spammers and charlatans tweeting about “red hot iPad deals” and SEO marketing, the value is going to be minimal.  If instead, they’re an interactive and relevant cross-section of stakeholders in your market, interests or products, it’s a different case altogether.

While Twitter makes it hard to work this “profitability” out for others’ follower counts, it’s a valuable distinction to bear in mind when cultivating your own community of interested users.  By all means, accept the more spurious followers into your community but be realistic about whether there are 500 people genuinely fascinated by the string of press releases that you’re putting out there.

This shift in perspective helps you assess which tweets and techniques are bringing in the right crowd.  It can be hard work finding and defining the character of your account; especially for B2B brands but this feedback is a good indicator of your success.

Ultimately, you need followers who will gain something from the relationship with your account and (if you’ll forgive the tautology) the best way to do so is make sure you’re giving them some value.  The patterns of profit as we have defined it should match up quite neatly with the degree to which you’re enhancing their social media experience.

In conclusion, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’re looking at a situation of high revenue but low profits, it might be time to consider reworking your Twitter ‘business plan’ … or face inevitable bankruptcy.

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In a post on the company’s official blog, Twitter has announced that it is rolling out a new link shortener for Twitter.com and native Twitter apps. In addition, it has announced big changes to the way these links will be treated and displayed.

T.co

The first move the company is making is to replace the standard Twitter shortening service twt.tl with t.co. The roll-out will be gradual and will happen across the next few months.

Partially displaying actual URLs

The second development is more radical, as the post explains:

“A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.”

As alluded here, the move is surely an attempt to protect users and ensure they know exactly where a link will take them. However, according to the post, the new links will also be used with Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising service to provide metrics to advertisers.

This is a big move by Twitter, even if the company has admitted it is still uncertain of how some of the finer details of how the service will work will pan out (it is currently being tested by staff – check out @rsarver and @raffi - so expect more changes after this ‘beta’ trial). It will also be interesting to see the response from services like bit.ly…

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Reports this morning have revealed that Twitter is set to roll out its long anticipated advertising model this evening (UK time). This follows a series of moves over the last week which suggests that Twitter is starting to make some major moves to upgrade the service.

The new ad service – called Promoted Tweets – will allows advertisers to place their ads next to certain Twitter searches that they have purchased keywords for. In the future, Twitter plans to insert sponsored messages into users’ streams in what will be seen as a much more controversial move:

“When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.”

It will be interesting to see how well this integrates with the service moving forward. Initial reactions on Twitter suggest that any form of advertising is going to be met with suspicion, but if this is integrated well, there is every likelihood that it could start a long but necessary journey for Twitter in finding profitability.

And for brands, the challenge (or opportunity) is how best to use these ads to help with reputation or brand promotion. Will users get immune to the ads at the top of their feeds?

The new Twitter branded services for Blackberry and iPhone (via Tweetie) announced in the last few days, combined with the eagerly anticipated new Twitter.com layout suggests that Twitter’s main goal is to keep users on its properties near its ads. Will it work? Time will tell…

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A brand new Twitter client launched today, claiming to bring Twitter to the masses. Seesmic Look comes from the French company Seesmic who already have a number of desktop and web clients to their name.

Seesmic Look is a Windows desktop client (Microsoft are partners in the venture, in the same week that a certain Mr Gates joined Twitter no less!) that is essentially a slimmed down version of a Twitter client. It looks great: really slick and very 2.0 but without any of the scary features and long, tedious setup you might find on the more serious Twitter clients.

Seesmic has also signed up a number of other partners all of whom can feature their Twitter account as a ‘channel’ on the application – these include a number of media companies – including the Huffington Post, Kodak, Red Bull, CNN Money, SOTS, and Time.

Having had a quick play with it, the software is certainly very impressive. It is easy to do a number of different tasks, but the functionality isn’t what you would expect from a traditional Twitter client so does take a bit of getting used to. However, for Twitter newbies, this won’t matter of course.

Getting the application to the masses will be more of a challenge for Seesmic, but as long as they can overcome this not insurmountable, but cumbersome obstacle – I’m sure Microsoft will help – there is no reason why Seesmic Look won’t do the business.