TwitPay, The Sweet Tweet of Money

Those who say social network in turn say, (or will say), social commerce since conversation and commerce are interlinked, even if there exist many different types of commerce.


Can Twitter, the quintessential conversation platform, also become a commerce platform?


TwitPay, launched in November 2008 as a payment solution between Twitter users, is betting on it.

TwitPay presents itself as a way to transfer money from one user to another.  Its strength is its simplicity.  All you need is a Twitter account and…….a PayPal account, because the second asset of TwitPay is that it works with PayPal and, therefore, benefits from its user base, its security, and its credibility.

To make a payment simply send a tweet.

Nevertheless TwitPay has not shown huge growth and only has a few more than 5100 followers, (you must follow TwitPay to have an account).

The main reason is that TwitPay can currently only carry out hypothetical transactions between Twitter users, since there is no organized supply market currently on Twitter. 

Also, your account risks looking like this:

However, let’s take the gamble that commerce will develop on Twitter and that TwitPay, which takes, in addition to the PayPal commission, only 5 cents (1 nickel) on all transactions less than $1, will find its place, if it lasts until then.
 
While waiting, here is the “tweetflow” of TwitPay happening simultaneously as I’m writing.

Have you Read Half a Million Tweets?

Probably not.  Even at the height of the live tweet feed #iranelection, I read only around 200 tweets a day, equaling a potential annual amount of 72,000 tweets.

However, Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), did!

Assisted by a small team of two students along with Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter’s chief scientist, Jim Jansen analyzed 500,000 tweets to study the presence of brands on Twitter.

In the crossroads of marketing, sociology, and technology, social commerce is becoming a “red hot” subject of research and business.

The results of their study were published in the “Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.”

Confirming my post “The Twitter Paradox”, brands are often cited on Twitter.  With 20% of tweets being about or mentioning brands, Twitter is the quintessential word of mouth marketing platform.

Considering that there are 6 million people who use Twitter on a daily basis who tweet around two times a day, this equals 2.4 million tweets about brands.

Jansen adds:

“It may be right up there with e-mail in terms of communication impact.”

“Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship.  Personal use is all over the board.  A lot of the brand comments were positive.  There are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with.”

When one of the biggest hesitancies in using social networks by brands is the fear of “bad rap”, it is debatable whether adopting the use of social networks as communication tools is close and unavoidable.

In fact the results of the study by Jansen’s team are telling and can be broken down as follows:

• Very positive (no criticism, buying recommended)……..29.8%
• Positive (positive feedback, prevails over criticism)……30.8%
• Balanced (positive status is mediocre or balanced)…….12%
• Negative (globally negative or deceiving)……..15.7%
• Entirely negative (no positive feedback, not recommended)……..6.5%
• Neutral (no opinion, ask questions)…….5.2%

Brands need not worry because the percentage of negative tweets only account for 22.2% of the total.

Contrary to other marketing strategies which are based on the purchase of key words or the diffusion of emails, social marketing on networks is founded on the creation of conversations, the differentiating feature of the word of mouth strategy.

A challenge for all who think that it is only a question of money and that they would be running the risk of the networks being spammed, word of mouth works according to the relationship system that Jansen presents above.

The publication of a tweet can positively or negatively affect the image of a brand and marginally improve its notoriety.

The tweets circulation among followers and eventual retweets reinforce the confidence and satisfaction and generate loyalty or strength, which in turn shows in an immediate or future purchase. 

Pepsi “Amp Up”: The Social Excuse Way & The Bad Buzz Strategy

Pepsi learns to “socially” apologize to women while playing it buzz macho.

Whether a difficult exercise or premeditated calculation, to promote its energy drinks Amp Energy, Pepsi took the initiative and developed an App for the Iphone entitled “Amp Up, Before you Score”, which involves “classifying” women into 24 different categories and obtaining “information” about these, as well as tips on how to seduce them.

They may be only stereotypes and caricatures, but, according to Pepsi, are in tune with Amp Energy’s male public.

Though it's not even certain that men identify with a simplistic vision of seduction, pretending to share common interests by using fitting responses provided by the application, which looks for them on Wikipedia or Twitter.

Would the public of Amp Energy be comparable to Pat Healy in the film There’s Something About Mary!?

Worse, this is the general overview of Amp Up Before You Score as it appears on the App store:

“Here’s how it works:

1. Identify her type

Got your eye on a girl, and aren’t sure how to get started?  Pick out her profile, flip the card, and study up quick with a cheat sheet on the stuff she’s into with lists, links and some surefire opening lines (surefire to what, we won’t say.)

2. Keep a list

            Get lucky?  Add her to your Brag list.  You can include a name, date and                 whatever details you remember.

3. Brag

You got it?  Flaunt it.  Keep your buddies in the loop on email, Facebook or Twitter.”

Keeping with the "subtlety" of Amp Up, the App includes an "elegant" “After you Score”!  

In fact the App was not successful. Launched in mid-summer, “Amp Up, Before you Score” quickly topped out at 1400^th according to Mőbclix, free Apps ranking .

This went on until “bad tweets” mainly from women started to appear little by little on Twitter provoking the release of very negative articles such as the one in the Wall Street Journal on Oct 13 entitled,

 “Looking for obnoxious chauvinism?  There’s an app for that.”

And so Pepsi found itself in the middle of a real brand image problem.

While Amp Up suddenly had a great public success by becoming, within two days, the 8^th most popular free download, is this result positive for Amp Energy and Pepsi?

Some say yes, associating an energy drink with picking up women, male chauvinism, and seduction, is a well known strategy called “bad buzz”, adapted for this type of product.

However, the bad buzz strategy from now on, needs to take into account the existence of social networks and their capacity to impact a brands reputation.

For Seth Godin, known blogger and author of Tribes,

“Pepsi is learning a valuable lesson in social media marketing the hard way, for too long advertisers and marketers thought it was okay to treat women as objects to sell something.  The difference between now and then is [general public] now has a platform to complain about it.  This is a symptom of platform shifting.  Pepsi’s not the only brand that’s going to have to learn this lesson.”

This “citizen” change shows that the rules of “buzz marketing” have changed!  In the past, this was a way to help launch a product by creating a growing buzz, generated by communication actions, before or around the launching of a product.

However,  buzz were unregulated and shapeless by definition.  With the dawn of social networks, the buzz can no longer avoid taking the form of global conversations, nor can they avoid  the control that network users exert through these conversations concerning the value and authenticity of marketing campaigns.

Thus, if  Amp Energy could have been satisfied with this transgressive “bad buzz” toward its targeted audience and the growing success of the App on the Iphone, the brand now runs the risk of degrading its image and losing its footing to the playing field of this transgressive aspect.

This risk is high since Amp Energy largely associates itself with sports, including by promoting women.

Amp Energy is left with trying to repair the damage by presenting excuses.

Here the result is also catastrophic because Amp Energy apologizes but doesn't pull the App from the App store.

Once again this is a total lack of authenticity that does not go unnoticed in social network days.

Worse look at  the bottom of the excuse.  Amp Energy encourages Twitter users to send their comments using a specific hashtag called #pepsifail .

Behind the apparently good idea to open up a specific channel on Twitter, Amp Energy light-heartedly attaches the Pepsi brand, which is much more of a household name than Amp Energy.

The famous site Advertising Age very rapidly did the diagnostics of the situation,

“The Amp brand Twitter feed has only 1,000 followers, compared to about 15,000 for Pepsi, almost 18,000 for Mtn Dew and nearly 5,000 for PepsiCo…

The tag, along with the re-tweets, seems to unnecessarily associate Pepsi and Mtn Dew, two of the company’s largest brands, with a heated and potentially damaging debate.  Ostensibly, those who have a problem with the app are not Amp’s core customers, after all.

But now that Pepsi, Mtn Dew, and Pepsi corporate have attached themselves to the debacle, the problem appears much larger, as those brands and, indeed, the entire company may appear insensitive to women.  For example, many of the tweets commenting on the app have bypassed the Amp brand entirely and are instead assigning the apology, the App and their distaste to Pepsi.”

Now New Fiction  a well known blog claims:

“Alienate Your Female Customer?  Pepsi Has An App For That” 

 

Bad buzz or social reputation?  It’s up to Pepsi to decide……

From Social Marketing to Social Commerce

On the Internet e-marketing is linked much more to e-commerce than marketing and commercial activities outside of the Internet.

This is even more the case with social networks.  Social marketing and social commerce often overlap each other.  If the second one is not yet come about, it is very possible that it will directly develop from the first.

Several recent contributions by reputable commentators are following the leads of both E-Marketer and WebPro News.

Chris Crum wrote on WebPro News “Beyond Social Media Marketing to Actual E-Commerce”

“We talk a lot about social media marketing – using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to market brands and drive traffic to sites.  There is no question that these can be effective tools for doing both of these things”.

But will social marketing remain limited to these two objectives?  Is it just a question of developing a fan base and then directing it to brand sites or E-commerce sites?

Chris Crum continues:

“As time goes on, it may become helpful or perhaps even necessary to use these tools for actual e-commerce.  The common thinking behind social media marketing is that you don’t want to be too sales-pitchy in your conversations, and in some ways that is still very true.  However, while social media is largely about conversations, it’s not only about conversations”.

Activity on social networks is not, strictly speaking, only built on conversations. For dozens of millions of young people and more and more adults, social networks have become a “hang out place” that have developed into mediums where one can share photos or even play between friends, on asynchronous mode . All these are social activities that continue or strike up conversations.

He adds however that people are not content with conversations only,

“They are looking for information.  They’re using social networks to help them make purchase decisions.  Sometimes this is through conversation.  Sometimes it’s as simple as being a fan of a brand’s Facebook page and receiving timely updates.”

The commercial outlet of all this social activity is logical.  It is the outcome of two symmetrical forces at work.

There is an obvious social aspect to shopping that has been part of our culture for a long time while shopping also plays an integral part in our social relations.  Take, for example, the Tupperware network that developed in 1948. 

Denise Zimmerman, president of NetPlus Marketing Inc. was actually just interviewed on this subject by E-Marketer, “Social Shopping and the Brand Experience” and talks about a natural evolution.

“If you successfully connect and make shopping valuable to the community in a way that’s easy and accessible and meets their needs, it’s a no-brainer”.

As a matter of fact, Facebook just simplified Facebook Connect implementation on web sites.  This is currently the best way to link E-commerce sites to the network which has an extremely practical advantage.

Paul Dunay, Global Managing Dir. of Services, Social Marketing Avaya, was also interviewed by E-Marketer, “The Future of Social Shopping” touching upon the practical aspect of Facebook Connect, and closing with a definition of Social commerce,

“Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.”

“Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access friends so you could spark up a chat.  So I could say, “Hey, Jeff, I’m looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook.  I heard you bought something.  Would you recommend this to me?”

All this, he adds, would be like virtually taking your friends shopping with you.  In order to do this, internet search will have to go through your graph of friends, and perform what Paul Dunay calls a “social search”.

However, for this concept to work, it is necessary for those in our social graph to identify their consumer skills, and even some of their purchases allowing them to become public to our friends.

Lack of privacy and  consuming information not meant to be shared creates an obvious objection to this idea.

The success of  fan pages, however, proves the opposite.

Got Any Virtual Chocolate Lately?

AdNectar, for whom this isn’t the first time, and Fun140, publisher of quizzes on Twitter, just launched branded virtual goods, such as Godiva virtual chocolates or Malibu virtual rum, on Twitter or LiveJournal.

 (A previous virtual campaign of Godiva on Facebook)

Thus, if a person sends some virtual chocolates to a friend using Twitter, the friend is notified via a direct message, Twitter’s private messaging service.

By clicking on the URL in the message, a link will then direct it to the virtual chocolates and a tweet will alert the sending party when the gift is received.

“People use virtual goods to personalize how they communicate with their friends.  Branded items will make this social experience on Twitter more engaging and entertaining” explains Ashvin Kumar, co-founder of Fun140.

By allowing the offering of branded virtual goods, AdNectar diffuses the brands directly into the network of friends.  Thus, socially accepted, these goods benefit from a viral dissemination that is much more effective than displaying advertising banners.

AdNectar's clients 

3 years ago the brand fan pages, now common, might have seem to be a marginal and exotic media.

Today, given the continual increasing widespread use of virtual goods, it is more than likely that branded virtual goods are going to become one of the strongest social marketing tools, because it subscribes to the new implicating, engaging, and recreational marketing logic.

A previous campaign for Godiva chocolates in virtual form, conducted by AdNectar on Facebook before Valentine’s Day showed impressionable propagation results. 

Golf, Fans, and Brands, the Golfsmith case

The growing popularity of Facebook fan pages or their equivalent on Twitter indicates a major change in E-marketing and the direction it is taking.

No longer is it enough to give consumers the floor on Internet sites, which, in reality, few sites do. From now on it is necessary to start multiple conversations with fan pages on Facebook and followers on Twitter.

With 7000 fans on Facebook and 1200 followers on Twitter, Golfsmith, a producer and distributor of golf equipment, has a notable and innovative presence on social networks, yet remains average.

Eric Mahlstadt, Senior Online Store Manager, talks of his business strategy in relation to social networks.

“The value right now to us as a retailer is not as much about what kind of people these are, but what kinds of experiences they’re having.  We’re interested in providing as many choices and platforms as possible for our customers to share thoughts and ideas and provide input.  The struggle then becomes having enough engaged ears to hear all the feedback and to be nimble enough to act on that feedback” 

Golfsmith already has an open website where comments are welcome and the home page strongly encourages users to leave feedback.

In order to link user feedback on its site and those from fan pages on Facebook or followers on Twitter, Golfsmith chose a social marketing solution proposed by Bazaarvoice, a specialist in “community management”, called Social Network Accelerators.

How does it work?

 

“With the new Social Network Accelerators, Bazaarvoice ensures that companies achieve more from social commerce by using social networks like Facebook and Twitter as a distribution channel for user-generated content created on brand sites.”

How Do You “Metric” Word of Mouth? The Twitalyzer case

How do you measure word of mouth?

The Twitalyzer case!

While more and more brands are looking to establish a presence on social networks, there is an intrinsic difficulty in measuring the return on investment (ROI) obtained by marketing on social networks.

In any case, when it comes to analyzing more than click performance of ads on Facebook, for example, by measuring the impact of a fan page, of a Twitter account, or of word of mouth, the “metrics” still need to be defined.

Firstly, is it necessary to measure word of mouth?

Elaine Gantz Wright, who’s blog is specifically geared toward fund-raising activities on social networks and how they can help transforming society,  just published an interesting post on the subject, “The ROI that would be King” .

She mentions a comment made by new special media journalist, Clay Shirky that can be applied perfectly to marketing problems encountered in social networks.

“A revolution does not happen when a society adopts new tools.  It happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

 

Elaine Ganz Wright adds,

“And I think that quote sums up the core conundrum.  At the end of the day, social media is really not “a program” at all.  It is a fundamental shift in the way customers, donors, constituents, and employees consume and produce information.  Its behavior- a change in the way we are in the world.”

As is happens, the effect of marketing in social networks can be evaluated much like banner ads of the internet are or buying keywords though Google.

It’s not the R.O.I that we need to talk about for judging the impact conversations have on brands, fan pages with blogs or word of mouth in general; any of these marketing tools or situations that allow an “engagement “or, translated, an “implication” around brands to develop.

Elaine Ganz Wright talks about replacing the R.O.I with R.O.E (return on engagement).

Evaluating is of utmost importance!

This is where Twitalyzer comes into play and analyzes the impact of personal or brand accounts on Twitter.

The idea behind Twitalyzer comes from the development of several different metrics to calculate the impact of an account on the micro-blogging network, not only by its popularity (the number of followers).

What are the criteria?

• Impact, or the number of “followers”
• Authority, or the number of times you are “retweeted” by others (RT)
• Generosity, or the number of times that you “retweet” (RT) others
• Rapidity, the number of tweets that you publish within a 7 day period
• Clout, or the number of times that your account is referenced by others
• Signal to noise ratio which calculates the number of tweets that include URL’s, number of tags, RT’s and web addresses, meaning all the tweets that create socialization and information compared to those that are only anecdotes.
• Influence, which balances the different aforementioned measures

Twitalyzer has developed new metrics adapted to the presence on Twitter.  Indeed they only calculate the impact of your account and not free word of mouth that mentions a brand or a person independent of their account.

But at least these tactics go beyond the number of followers and separate the “influential” tweets form those that are purely anecdotal.

Let’s take for example the two brands Starbucks and Coca-Cola who took full advantage of the turn around of social networking and use the most influential Facebook fan brand pages, resulting in respectively, 3,850,000 fans and 3,706,000 fans (Sept 09).

Starbucks is ahead of Coca-Cola again on Twitter!

Here are the score boards developed by Twitalyzer:

Starbucks has a profound influence and a very high signal to noise ratio, referring to, in some way, the quality of its tweets, which also shows its weight (clout) to be at a maximum level. 

Coca-Cola doesn't score badly either on its signal to noise ratio, but its authority is much weaker.  It is also less generous than Starbucks, meaning less active in retweets (RT) than other accounts.  Is Coca-Cola more egocentric than Starbucks? 

Should we think that the Twitter audience likes Coca-Cola less than the Facebook audience, or is the black liquid just missing 140 characters of savoir-faire?

The Twitter Paradox

Following the serial “Where is Twitter’s business model”, an article published on the trendy on-line magazine Fast Company.

“Twitter Doesn’t Sell Advertising”, Yet 20% of Tweets Mention Brands”

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, nonetheless continues to say that Twitter is not ready to sell [advertising] space.  There are so many brands mentioned in the tweets, however, it’s enough to make any one give in!

Twitter archives already represent a database of comments on very popular brands.

By the time this post is published, Renault, passively defeated by Twitter’s French community, would without a doubt pay good money to analyze conversations.

Read the rest on Fast Company