“How do I make money from all this Social Media Stuff?” 5 ‘Simple’ Steps

The most common question I hear from clients is, “How do I make money from all this Social Media Stuff?” That is the $64 million dollar question and technology companies, advertising agencies, PR firms, and thousands of entrepreneurs are scrambling to answer it.

However, like anything new, 98% of it is either fluff or failure and 2% is of great value. So let’s forget the 98% and focus on the 2% that matters to you and me. First, let’s go to where the action is Twitter and Facebook. Between them are over 300 million members – many visiting and posting multiple times per day. They are interested in a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with your product or service, but some of them are interested at least some of the time. Now the trick is to find them, engage them and get them to come to you. This is where most efforts fail for lack of strategy and know-how.

So here are are 5 Things you and your business can do to make Social Media work for you:

Create a Social Media Chain-Reaction

1> Get in the Game: either you, or someone you hire, needs to establish Facebook and Twitter Accounts; post stuff that people may find interesting both personal and professional – maybe even political. DO NOT blatantly promote or advertise your service.
2> Build your Audience: the more people that you invite and Friend or Follow you, the more responsive they will be and the greater the odds they will call on you for your product or service when they need it.
3> Triangulate for Results: cross-link all the activity, content, posts, status updates to each other and your web site. See the illustration on this page. If you do this effectively, you will create a chain-reaction or a cascade of visitors to your Blog and Web Site.
4> Make Sure your Web Site helps convert a high percentage of these new visitors to customers. Professional design, branding, credibility and message are key. Get help with this! Contact us or another talented firm. There is both art and science to making your web site sell for you.
5> Do it over again. All these media will keep evolving and changing. It is constant learning and testing. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, either change your approach or stop doing it. Just makes sense – doesn’t it?

So after all this, our client asks, “Who has time for all this?” The answer is that most business people are busy focusing on their own business and don’t have the time, expertise, or even the inclination to do all this. But it is worth it! If you are not doing it, you can bet your competitor is and grabbing all that business.

[Warning: shameless self-promotion!] That’s where we come in. Pathfinder not only designs and develops winning web sites, but will set up, manage and maintain your social media sites, blogs and Email and triangulate them for results. Maybe we can help you?

T(w)eens Don’t Tweet? They May Start Soon

[For the original article from ReadWriteWeb, click here]

“Teens don’t tweet.” Over the past few weeks, this fact has been reported time and time again from analysts, bloggers, and even mainstream media. Why the obsession with the teenage crowd on Twitter? Perhaps it’s simply because adults can’t believe that, for once, they’re the group responsible for the birth of an internet phenomenon and not the other way around. But before all you adults get too comfortable with your Twitter dominance, take a look at the recent data from comScore. It appears that the youngest Twitter users – those in the 12-24 bracket – are now the fastest growing segment of Twitter’s population. So the kids don’t tweet? Looks like they may start really soon if this new data is to be believed.

Kids Don’t Use Twitter

According to a recent article in the New York Times, teens are more likely to use text messaging than Twitter for keeping up with their friends. Today’s teens feel somewhat uncomfortable with the public nature of the communication that takes place Twitter, and, besides, they just don’t see the point in broadcasting what they’re doing to the whole world. Yet even without this age group’s participation, Twitter has seen amazing success, proving the point that a new technology does not have to be adopted by this young group of users in order to make it big.

Twitter’s Youth Sees Growth

Although Twitter didn’t attract the teens from the onset, that could still change. In fact, it looks like that change may already be underway. A newly released chart from comScore breaks down the age groups of Twitter users and plots each group’s growth over time, relative to audience. The most surprising revelation from this chart is the steep incline seen in the age group 12-24. Over the past few months, this group’s participation levels have been increasing dramatically.

In reading the chart, a score of “100″ means that the age group on Twitter is represented in perfect proportion to how much that age group uses the rest of the Internet as a whole. Go over 100 and that means the age group is represented more heavily on Twitter than they are represented on the rest of the web. In July, those aged 12-24 scored a “121″ – a score that was only in the mid-70’s a mere six months ago.

Statistics Can be Misleading

But wait – a quick glance at these statistics can be misleading. At first, it appears that the chart simply shows the increasing participation levels of the teens (and young adults) on Twitter. While that may be true, it’s important to note that the actual number of younger users on Twitter is still much lower than those of their adult counterparts. In fact, the New York Times recently reported that only 11% of Twitter users are aged 12 to 17 according to comScore.

Plus, there’s the fact that the age group 12-24 represents an odd way of breaking up the demographics. Why not 12-18 instead? With this particular slice of Twitter’s user base, there’s no way to tell how many users are teens versus how many are young adults in their 20’s.

Finally, what the chart is showing is audience growth as compared to the rest of the Internet as a whole. That’s also a an interesting way of charting the demographics of Twitter, to say the least.

All that being said, the data seen here is still valuable to some extent. It’s interesting to see this market segment’s growth, even if it’s sliced and diced in this odd way. But does this mean that teens are going to start tweeting sometime soon? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free

[for the original article from ReadWriteWeb, click here.]

Google just announced that it will now allow users to download over 1 million public domain books in the EPUB format. Google had already made this archive available to some of its partners, including Sony and Barnes and Noble, but until today users weren’t able to download these free EPUB texts from Google directly. Google will continue to make PDF versions of these books available for download as well, but users with eReader’s will find the new EPUB files far more useful.

If you don’t have an actual hardware eReader but still want to read these EPUB versions, you can install Stanza or a similar desktop reader to read these books.

EPUB: The One eBook Standard to Rule them All

EPUB is a free, standardized format that almost every hardware eReader or desktop software understands. Amazon’s Kindle interestingly, however, cannot read EPUB texts without using some intermediary software that converts these books into a format the Kindle can understand. While there are a few competing formats, EPUB has turned into the de facto standard for eBooks. Some vendors, like Sony, wrap a digital rights management (DRM) solution around these books, but others just publish completely open, non-DRMed versions of their books. The EPUB files from Google Books will not be locked down by a DRM solution.

It is important to note, however, that these EPUB files were run through an optical character recognition (OCR) system and weren’t edited afterwards. While this software has greatly improved over the last few years, there are still quite a few mistakes in most books. This post on the Google Books blog explains the conversion process in more detail. The PDF versions of these books don’t suffer from this problem, as they are just copies of the actual pages. This also means, however, that these PDF files are far larger and that users can’t, for example, adjust the size of the books’ fonts according to the size of their screens.

Twitter Wants to Make Money

How do you take a good, free service with a large and growing user-base and make money off of it? There are two obvious routes.

1. Take away the “free” aspect and start charging users or go halfway and create paid premium accounts which have more privileges than normal accounts.
2. Keep it free, but compromise the aesthetic with advertising.

Well Twitter, everyone’s favorite micro-blogging service, is looking to finally gain a revenue stream.

Biz Stone

Biz Stone, co-founder of the company, said in a May 2009 blog post that while Twitter is not philosophically opposed to the idea of advertising, “[...]the idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue.” Stone has repeatedly stated that he’d like to foster Twitter’s ability to bring businesses and consumers closer together, implying that he sees Twitter as a tool with potential to be more than just a venue for the chattering of the masses. Stone has said that “the service’s value should be judged, not by its traffic – which grew 131% in March to 9.3 million visitors – but as a tool to ‘facilitate connections between businesses and individuals.’” If Twitter succeeds in that goal, it may achieve lasting commercial value, and become more than just social media. So how can they achieve this? The people at Twitter have a few ideas:

1. Premium Accounts, or more accurately, “commercial accounts.” Twitter is considering making paid accounts which would appeal specifically to businesses trying to reach consumers through Twitter. The accounts would offer the advantage of sophisticated analytics to assess how well a company is Twittering.
2. APIs, once again being more  commonly referred to as “commercial APIs”. The idea is to create”business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a ‘commercial layer’ over the social network.” Presumably these would serve as more obvious means for businesses to sell through Twitter to consumers, rather than just talking up their new products on the service. An example might be an online store API which sits right in Twitter. Twitter is also talking about coming out with an API which allows latitude and longitude to be tied to any tweet. You could then conceivably filter tweets by location, allowing you to find out who’s at that concert with you, or who’s tweeting from the earthquake in China. Not exactly as useful a service for commercial applications, but still a good example of how the effective functionality of Twitter could potentially increase in the near future.
3. Certified Accounts, which presumably are tied in with premium accounts, are different as far as their specific purpose. A “certified account” would be an account to which Twitter gives its seal of verification, so that everyone knows they’re hearing from “the real Shaq” and not an imposter who’s looking to mislead a slew of basketball/Kazaam fans. Twitter has done this for a few celebrities already, and you can see how a “certificate of genuineness” would be appealing for brands trying to Twitter. Not only would it instill trust with consumers, it will probably also give certified users priority status when searching for related users or services. One drawback is that normal, public users might see it as a mark of a corporate account which is only trying to push their products, and immediately avoid such certified users. Still, I don’t think Shaq has to worry about losing his own unique brand of genuine Shaqness.

These are just a few ideas for how Twitter can start to make money. Regardless, Twitter has raised $55 million since the company started 2 years ago and made it past 44.5 million unique users in June, according to ComScore. In light of that information, Stone has asserted that Twitter has plenty of cash and is in no rush to develop a business model. As to whether or not you’ll ever find yourself paying for your personal Twitter account, Stone is quick to reassure users, “Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it, but we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.” So maybe all you free users can help Twitter make some money…by spending it on businesses that are using Twitter.

References

premium accounts

commercial accounts/APIs

Twitter staying ad-free

long/lat API

Stone’s advertising blogpost

The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines: How Mismanagement and Bad Business Brought Down a Company that was Ahead of its Time

For Gary Taubes’ original article, click here

A close-up look at a doomed-yet-brilliant start-up computer company that never quite grasped the basics of business.

Some day we will build a thinking machine. It will be a truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us.

– From a Thinking Machines brochure

* * *

In 1990, seven years after its founding, Thinking Machines was the market leader in parallel supercomputers, with sales of about $65 million. Not only was the company profitable; it also, in the words of one IBM computer scientist, had cornered the market “on sex appeal in high-performance computing.” Several giants in the computer industry were seeking a merger or a partnership with the company. Wall Street was sniffing around for an initial public offering. Even Hollywood was interested. Steven Spielberg was so taken with Thinking Machines and its technology that he would soon cast the company’s gleaming black Connection Machine in the role of the supercomputer in the film Jurassic Park, even though the Michael Crichton novel to which the movie was otherwise faithful specified a Cray.

In August of last year Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11. It had gone through three CEOs in two years and was losing money at a considerably faster rate than it had ever made it.

What caused this high-flying company to come crashing to earth? The standard explanation is that Thinking Machines was a great company victimized by the sudden cutbacks in science funding brought about by the end of the cold war.

The truth is very different. This is the story of how Thinking Machines got the jump on a hot new market — and then screwed up, big time.

* * *

Until W. Daniel Hillis came along, computers more or less had been designed along the lines of ENIAC. In that machine a single processor completes instructions one at a time, in sequence. “Sequential” computers are good at adding long strings of numbers and at other feats of arithmetic. But they’re seriously deficient at the kinds of pattern-recognition tasks that a two-week-old puppy can master effortlessly — identifying faces or figuring out where it is in a room. Puppies can do that because their brains — like those of all animals, including humans — are “massively parallel” computers. Instead of looking at information one jigsaw-puzzle piece at a time, a brain processes millions, even billions, of pieces of data at once, allowing images and other patterns to leap out.

While a graduate student at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, Hillis, whom everyone knows as Danny, had conceived of a computer architecture for his thesis that would mimic that massively parallel process in silicon. Hillis called the device a “connection machine”: it had 64,000 simple processors, all of them completing a single instruction at the same time. To get more speed, more processors would be added. Eventually, so the theory went, with enough processors (perhaps billions) and the right software, a massively parallel computer might start acting vaguely human. Whether it would take pride in its creators would remain to be seen.

Hillis is what good scientists call a very bright guy — creative, imaginative, but not quite a genius. He is also an inveterate tinkerer, whose work has always been more fascinating than practical. On the fifth floor of Boston’s Computer Museum, for instance, is a minimalist computer constructed of fishing line and 10,000 Tinkertoy parts. Hillis built it to play and win at tic-tac-toe, which it invariably does. His other work includes a robot finger that can differentiate between a washer and a screw but is flummoxed by a piece of gum; a propeller-driven jumpsuit that allows its wearer literally to walk on water; and a home robot constructed of paint cans, lightbulbs, and a rotisserie motor.

At the AI Lab, Hillis had become a disciple of legendary AI guru Marvin Minsky. The two were determined to build a connection machine as a tool with which to develop software programs for artificial intelligence. Because the cost would be prohibitive for a university laboratory, they decided to form a company. They went looking for help and found Sheryl Handler.

Handler had participated in the start-up of the Genetics Institute, a Harvard-based genetic-engineering firm. Her background was eclectic: she had studied interior design, held a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard, and at the time was pursuing a doctorate in city planning at MIT. She was also running her own nonprofit consulting firm, specializing in third-world resource planning. She had a taste for classical music and a fine appreciation for style. She’d even been the subject of a Dewars Profile that ran with the quote “My feminine instinct to shelter and nurture contributes to my professional perspective.”

Handler also had a talent for cultivating friendships with brilliant and famous people. One of her Genetics Institute colleagues later called her a “professional schmoozer.” She quickly proved her usefulness by connecting the people who would build the Connection Machine with CBS founder William Paley. Hillis, Minsky, and Handler pitched the idea to Paley and CBS president Fred Stanton in a meeting to which Hillis wore his customary jeans and T-shirt. Still, he managed to impress the television moguls, who with others eventually agreed to kick in a total of $16 million to the venture.

In May 1983, despite the lack of a business plan, the company was founded and took up shop in a dilapidated mansion outside Boston that once was owned by Thomas Paine, the author of the Revolutionary War pamphlet Common Sense. Hillis and Handler called their new company Thinking Machines because, says Hillis, “we wanted a dream we weren’t going to outgrow.” As it turned out, there was never much danger of that.