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Congratulations (sort of) Motrin:You are trending on Twitter!
Congratulations Motrin…
I’m going to take a wild guess that McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a Division of McNEIL-PPC, and their agency of record (Taxi NYC, from what we can tell at the moment) are not carefully monitoring Twitter right now. I’m also going to guess that you’re going to hear a thing or two more about this in the business press (WSJ, Forbes, AP, NYT) before it subsides.
The Fuss.
Many moms (and dads) who blog and tweet and are fans of “babywearing” are finding this Motrin ad (currently it’s right on Sunday afternoon it was pulled from the Motrin.com home page, which was more or less down for the next 16 hours and now displays their apologia) patronizing and disrespectful of the practice of babywearing. It’s kicked up some relatively strong feelings among the community, and a resulting loud racket on Twitter and blogs. (I’ll disclose: 1) I agree the ad is a bit dumb, 2) that I was a babywearer, and 3) that frankly, carrying those g-dmn “bucket style” infant carseats wrecked my back way more than any of my slings and backpacks ever did. But that’s not the point.) UPDATE: Follow the Twittering here. Skimbaco (Katja Presnal) compiled the Twitter screenshots and babywearing photos video below, and collected a long list of blog responses, including her original post. (Found via Jet With Kids)
The Reponse.
On Twitter right now, nothing has appeared from Johnson & Johnson, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Motrin or Taxi.
Huh.
The Lesson.
Even if your brand or agency isn’t ready to engage formally and integrate the business applications of Twitter throughout your campaigns, community building and other market engagement efforts, you need to get clued in — fast — to the reasons, times and ways that you can listen. Maybe you’re not even ready for full-time social media monitoring. That’s your call. But not tuning in while you launch a new tactic borders on gross negligence, in this day and age.
Rolling out a new tactic is THE most important time to lend an ear. Smart SuperBowl advertisers could have gained instant consumer feedback on their efforts during the game last year. After every ad Twitter lit up with opinions. Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang prepared this formal analysis based on responses sent to his experimental account @superbowlads. His colleague (who co-authored Groundswell) Josh Bernoff shared his assessment here. Searching or watching Twitter’s search tools for your brand at the moment your ad aired would have yielded even more results.
I’ll update this post as I hear more, and when the companies involved begin to respond. Meanwhile, if your company doesn’t have a good understanding of how your full range of market engagement needs to be informed by sensitive consumer sentiment engines like Twitter, you might want to give your agency a call.
Coda
(Evolving: I’ll spare you all the “UPDATE” notations)
We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad.
UPDATE: The delete function has been restored, but you should still be smart and careful posting to Twitter for the reasons discussed below.
This is a fairly urgent warning to business users of Twitter that applies to everyone. Currently you cannot delete your tweets should you make a mistake that you wish to remove from your profile page.
Be careful.
To some extent, the ability to delete tweets in the first place is a false comfort. Once published, ALL tweets remain searchable in search.twitter.com, even if you delete them. Also, those following you by SMS and most Twitter clients receive the tweet immediately, or at least before you can delete it. As with email, “recall” is an illusion.
That said, it’s still nice to be able to remove typos, misdirected “dm’s” and other undesirable information from your profile page and the web-based stream, and at the moment you cannot. There used to be a trash can icon below the star next to each tweet. If you click through to the individual tweet (the unique URL that contains only that tweet) the icon still appears, but it does not work.
ALWAYS be smart and use common sense about what kind of information you relay via Twitter, and think twice before hitting submit. This applies double to dm’s sent using the syntax “d username message” for if you fatfinger the “d” by accident, your post will show up publicly in your stream.
We’re waiting to hear back from Twitter on why the feature was disabled, and its future status. The feature was restored Friday.
To Claude Malaison and his team at Webcom Montreal, congratulations on a successful conference and thanks kindly for the privilege of speaking.
I spoke (no shock) about microsharing, interpreting some of the “big picture” business potential for this audience of Canadian business and government leaders.
My slides are below. I’ll add the video as soon as I can get it to offload from my camera.
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The Adoption Problem
An E2.0 application only works if enough people use it. To me, this is the single biggest reason that abrupt rollouts or “adding microblogging as a feature” to existing software seem doomed to fail.
When people organically find a microblogging platform to be powerful for them, perhaps as it opens significant opportunities in their lives, it is hard to assess the precise hows and whys of how they got there. They no longer care, for having experienced the benefit, their buy-in is strong enough for them to persist. Others looking at their case will struggle to understand it and find universally applicable lessons.
But it takes time, luck, critical mass and enough of a network for the reaction to get started.
So if microsharing is introduced all at once, or stapled on as a haphazard feature to existing platforms with various rates of adoption and user buy-in, can the same powerful network effects be created?
I’m skeptical.
Adoption Solutions
1. Convey compelling, appealing use cases
2. Discover and seed the natural talents
3. Encourage “softer” functions to habituate employees to the tool
4. Recognize and encourage those making creative use.
Specific advantages and their inherent “use cases” are exploding. In an enterprise build of microsharing, it seems better to scale this down to a handful of really compelling, really salient use cases. Be direct and persuasive with the adoption pool about what they can do with it and why they might want to, but also do a good enough job expressing some clear, actionable, useful habit that will become possible. There needs to be a “slide” on the otherwise strange-looking playscape to get kids started playing.
Once a critical mass of people engage, network effects mean that the benefits grow stronger and stronger and become more obvious. Word-of-mouth adoption and uptake spreads. “Pied Piper” types — who draw others in closer by their creative and compelling uses of the platform should also be discovered within the organization.
Off to Defrag, but here is a quick peek at enterprise microsharing late entrant Co-op, which launched October 20th and narrowly missed inclusion in the Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison report we released this morning.
My first impression is that Co-op is a bit like Status with time-tracking and an agenda view, but until we can dig in more I’ve added them to the matrix under the pure-play classification.

Integration with Iridesco’s other tool Harvest means time tracking in Co-op can be used for invoicing. They point out that microsharing can eliminate or reduce routine “status” meetings, and the agenda feature looks especially helpful for this.
Here’s the run-down:
Name: Co-op
Company:
Description: Co-op is a “casual” communication tool for small teams with built-in time tracking capabilities.
Inside Firewall: Will consider if there’s demand
Directory Integration: No
Twitter’s Functions: Most
Groups: Yes
Location: No
Sharing: Links
SMS: No
IM: No
Desktop Client: Future
Smart-phone App: No
Twitter Integration: No
Underlying Software Platform: Ruby on Rails
API: Soon
Twitter Compatible API: Future
Largest Company: N/A
Largest Group: N/A
Pricing /month: Free
Additional Notes: Integrates with Iridesco’s Harvest, a time tracking and invoicing tool. Agenda feature allows teams to plan out their days together, sharing who is working on what and what they will be working on later.
Related posts:
Want to talk to us about enterprise microsharing for your company? Please let us know.
WE HAVE LIFTOFF
This post officially launches our first research report on the 19* applications vying to bring Twitteresque networking and communications inside the enterprise.
Download the .pdf here or use Scribd to view, embed, share or download. You are welcome to share it freely within your organization and networks.
Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008
Read All About Them (coverage of each application, from all around the web)
This post is an (evolving) index to blog and media coverage of the applications profiled in the report. It’s striking how much more coverage some applications have received, and while we’re not sure that’s a reliable mark of their suitability for the role, it’s certainly a marketing advantage.
What We Did
We compiled 19 criteria and basic information from 19 applications. Our work combines survey results, independent web research, verification of new features and analysis of how the 19 applications relate to one another and the marketplace.
We did not yet fully demo each application and we’re not choosing favorites in this preliminary comparison. We do mention observed advantages and reservations, and suggest six categories to distinguish between the applications.

We’ll cover much more on the rationale for enterprise microsharing, use cases, case studies, trends and future speculation in future research, on the TouchBase Blog, in speaking engagements and in client work. For the time being, I’ve compiled an Enterprise Reading List which ran as a post last night and has a permanent home under the Microsharing menu, above.
Have Your Say
Please ask questions, discuss the report and suggest future criteria and research topics in the comments here.
APPLICATIONS ON PARADE
Nevermind what we think, what have the pundits said?
Pure-Play Microsharing
So much has been written about Twitter, Let Google be your guide.
Present.ly
Webware review, CNET by Rafe Needleman
Present.ly Takes On TC50 Winner Yammer, TechCrunch by Don Reisinger
Present.ly packs a solid punch against Yammer, ZDNet By Jennifer Leggio
Is Yammer Bad for Business? Robert Richardson
Communote
Enterprise Microblogging Ein Neuer Hype? by Dirk Roehrborn
Communote Presentations on Slideshare
Microblogging for the Enterprise, SocialMediaCamp, London
Iron Feed (nothing available)
Enterprise Microsharing
ESME
ESME Enterprise Social Messaging Within an Enterprise SOA Framework, ZDNet by Oliver Marks
ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like?, ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick
ESME Enterprise Microblogging and Real World Business Problems, by Dennis Howlett
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment by Anne K Petterøe
BlueTwit
Big Blue Embraces Social Media, BusinessWeek by Stephen Baker
Social Networking: The Twitterverse Debates
Porting Twitter Script for Ubiquity to BlueTwit
Twitter Behind the Firewall (Photos on Flickr)
OraTweet
OraTweet: Tweeting in the Enterprise
OraTweet Bot, an XMPP/Jabber Listener for Twitter
Social Observations, OraTweet Edition
On OraTweet and Open Social
OraTweet, Oracle’s Enterprise Microsharing Application, TouchBase Blog by Laura Fitton
Open Source Microsharing
Identica
Taking on Twitter With Open Source Software Daniel Terdiman, CNET
Twhirl Gets Pushy with Identica, CNET Webware by Rafe Needleman
Cooking With Linux: Warp Speed Blogging Marcel Gagne, LinuxJournal
Open Source Microblogging May Become Twitter Fallback, Ars Technica
Identica Federated Twitter, ReadWriteWeb
Identica is More About What Comes Next, by Chris Brogan
The Problem with Identica is…, TechCrunch
Jisko
Jisko the Open Source Microblogging Application
Jisko: Competition for Identica?
Jisko: Twitter Clone
Yonkly
Major Update to Yonkly: Widgets, Ads & More
Yonkly Groups and new Look
Backup Your Twitter Messages @ Yonkly
OpenMicroBlogger
OpenMicroBlogger Monetizes with Opening of App Store
Psuedo Microsharing
Prologue
Twitter - Public Timeline = Prologue, Mashable by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins
Prologue Theme for Wordpress: is it a Twitter Killer?
Part Twitter, Part Basecamp, All Business, VentureBeat
Integrated Microsharing
Socialtext Signals
Socialtext 3.0: Will Wikis Finally Find Their Place in Business?, BusinessWeek By Rob Hof
SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise, TechCrunch by By Steve Gillmor
Exclusive video: SocialText brings enterprise Facebook and Twitter to wikis by Robert Scoble
Socialtext co-founder: Enterprise Twitter isn’t enough By Rafe Needleman
Socialtext Signals Marks Wiki Provider’s Entry into Enterprise Microblogging By Clint Boulton
Socialtext enters Twitter for the enterprise sweepstakes By Larry Dignan
Socialcast
Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business, CNET Webware by Rafe Needleman
USA Today (Quotes client Hot Topic)
Intranet Journal: Socialcast Harnesses Power of Online Conversations
NASA Case Study Presentation from KM World
A Social Function, Business Trends Quarterly Magazine by Analyst Jon Arnold
HeadMix
Best Buy’s Enterprise Twitter, ReadWriteWeb by Laura Fitton
Self-Serve Microsharing
Yammer
Yammer Launches at TC50: Twitter for Companies, TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld
Yammer, a Twitter for the Enterprise, CNET by Rafe Needleman
Hmmmm Yammer, by Daniel Siddle
Mahalo on Yammer
Yammer TechCrunch50 Profile
TechCrunch50: 10 to Watch
QikCom
QikCom Adds Its Own Twist To Enterprise Twitter
Five Questions With: QikCom
Mahalo on QikCom
Competition Heats Up in the Enterprise Twitter Market
*And then there were 20. Not getting off easy, nope. In a perfect illustration of how dynamic this segment is right now, we noticed Iridesco’s Coop just as our research went to press, but were unable to get in touch with their team over the weekend to administer the survey. More to come on that soon.
Our report comparing 19 tools that can be used for enterprise microsharing is now “unofficially” available. (Look for a launch post tomorrow morning with lots of links to articles about the different applications so that you company can start to kick their tires.)
But we also have a whole new page here at the site I thought I would also share on TouchBase. It’s a reading list of blog posts, case studies, use cases and a brief history of the “internal Twitter” conversation. Enjoy!
Some Good Overviews:
Clint Boulton: Gartner reports that Twitter and Facebook are being used productively in the Enterprise. They also argue against banning Facebook and Twitter use at work.
So How Does This Work?
After reading Something New Under the Sun and How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye by Andrew McAfee, I scrawled:
Wow. This so precisely aligns with my thinking on the potential value of enterprise microblogging. What he’s put into words about weak ties, querying the corporate “social network” for business intelligence, having spaces for unstructured collaboration, could all be done in a corporate microblogging space. The importance of ‘converting a potential tie’ and helping people stay on top of their networks of loose ties maps perfectly onto the Twitter “Village”/Fox Taming metaphor that I’ve talked about before.
Case Studies
How Twitter Can Work in a Corporate Environment FastForward Blog on Zappos
Best Buy’s Enterprise Twitter on Read Write Web
Microblogging in the Enterprise Case Study: (Janssen-Cilaq and Jitter)
Product Posts With General Descriptions
Mainstream Media Coverage
Some History
With all this “new” talk of Enterprise Microsharing, it’s funny Twitter itself started as an internal communication system for the guys at Odeo. It worked so well they shifted focus to produce Twitter.
But it was a while later before serious discussion of “Enterprise Twitter” crept into the conversation. Like any good innovation, the idea pops up in parallel in many minds at once. Here is Niall Cook writing in June 2007 about internal business use of Twitter.
Bill Ives wrote Twitter Enters the Enterprise on September 5, 2007, but the blog and post he’s responding to are gone. JP Rangaswami writes in late December 2007 about the inherent difference in communicating via microsharing vs. email, and follows that up with thoughts on Publish-Subscribe and ways collaboration could play out. His thoughts in Twitter and Agile are worth quoting:
Shortly after, Daniel Siddle provides examples of how an enterprise Twitter could be used, including something like the status channels - information feeds employees will want to check regularly - that we recommend to drive use, especially in early stages of deployment. Dennis Howlett covers one of SAP’s early experiments with Twitter in the Enterprise and reflects on some uses, and Curt Monash shares what improvements he would make and how Twitter could be useful in the Enterprise. His follow-up Enterprise Twitter includes a good index of other posts until then.
Over at Mashable, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins describes the latest “Cash for Tweets” scheme Magpie:
I find this new method of Twitter monetization to be just as interesting, and based on the routes that the Magpie folks are taking, I think that it’ll do pretty well, assuming they’re able to keep a lid on those that would try to game the system and run them into bankruptcy.
My comment:
You rightly point out that some people will weigh the quick buck vs their social capital and credibility in the community and maybe decide to grab for the beer money. But those amounts are surprising for a reason. There’s just no way they are sustainable.
I’ve been watching clickthrough rates on my tweets for a long time via Tweetburner. They’re highly context sensitive and fine-tuned to the degree of genuine usefulness in the tweet or implied in the link.
Twitter readers don’t care who you are or how many followers you have when it comes to click-through-credibility, they care if the link sounds compelling.
So as the advertiser, paying magpie what sounds like a fairly high CPM, is probably NOT going to be happy with results and continue the advertising at that rate. The platform on the other hand (your tweet stream) will go down in value by losing followers and by losing click through credibility among followers. We’ll go blind to the #magpie tag just like we are to banner ads. For that matter, Twitter clients will probably offer settings to simply filter out the adtweets.
I believe, firmly, there are ways for Twitter to make money and for people and businesses on Twitter to make money, by working within the cultural system there.
Had I gone on, I would have pointed out that the clickthroughs I do see frequently depend more on “re-tweets” which are pretty unlikely unless Magpie obtains some amazing ad inventory. I do give them credit for transparency though, each ad begins #magpie. It’s not hard to imagine that imitators will follow that (try to) hide the adtweets.
So, How Many Clicks Would a Magpie-r Click?
Despite nearly 8k readers, I generally see just single or double digit click-throughs, with 200-300 for a blockbuster link. Tweetburner reports that I’ve shared a little more than 500 links through them and generated about 39,000 clicks, for an average around 75. (65 without the one @ZeFrank contest link with 5,000 clicks) System-wide, tweetburner is measuring about 5 clicks per Tweetburner link. Notably, many of these “per link” clicks are for unique links that were repeated numerous times when a Twitter post was “re-tweeted,” so the real numbers are even lower.
I really doubt significant traffic could be generated by paid advertising links, even if they could scale the service up enough to have a font of genuinely “fun and useful” ads to contextualize into Tweeters streams.
What’s a Tweetworth?
Even if making your Twitter use profitable is important to you, my guess is that your Tweets are worth a lot more than what Magpie, uT.ag or Twittad are going to pay you for them. We’re talking about your credibility and integrity. Your reputation and relationships on Twitter are a valuable asset. Think about it.
Whether you meet clients on Twitter, solve business problems faster and less expensively, find new opportunities to learn and grow, develop your personal network or any number of direct business applications on Twitter, you’re probably getting way more value in the long run (better jobs, more clients, new opportunities) than you might be able to extract in the short term by trading on your good name. Heck, even if talking with friends on Twitter replaces the cost of going to a movie or another expensive form of entertainment, would you really want to dilute the quality of that interaction to make a buck?
And so?
I frequently point out that Twitter was designed as a nicely self-correcting ecosystem. Yes there will be spammers and unwanted ads and ways that functions we enjoy may get mucked up and out of balance, but our ability to refuse to follow that which is not interesting is powerful. Our ability to block, pass word and choose to remain amongst those we know and love is significant.
Ads and other revenue schemes will come to Twitter, and they will work where they work and with whom they work. And much like the world outside, individuals will move and connect and read and express themselves in the neighborhoods most suited to them. Social pressures within the system will alter the flow of who follows whom, and what level and type of commercialization is acceptable to the localized culture.
Revenue approaches that serve a thriving community will flourish. Schemes that aren’t sustainable, won’t. And I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb’s Rick Turoczy weighs in with a similar POV.
Guest post by Gary Koelling of Best Buy and Blue Shirt Nation fame, linking to a wonderful business use case for Twitter that he wrote. Ironically, it also wraps up the reasons for Pistachio Consulting’s shift from presentations to microsharing with a tidy little bow.
Perfection is not only overrated. It’s dead. The pursuit of perfection inside the corporate enterprise has largely been a function of the tools we use. The most misappropriated of those is PowerPoint. It is the tool that we have pressed into service for all manner of things from presenting an idea to recapping an event. But most tragically we’ve been using for creating and collaborating. With predictably mediocre results. Well, I think I can see the end from here…
Best Buy contractor Cam Gross also wrote about the #bbycds “Twitter” meeting experience.
TREND WATCH: Live event/meeting backchannel discussions via Twitter are tremendously powerful. Ideas move more freely, participants connect better with one another, and innovations can be captured and nurtured on the fly. More ideas from a speaker’s perspective, for a short event, and for event and meeting planners. Best Buy used Spy to display the interactions. Twitter search and eventtrack are other tools for this.
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I’m just going to give you the words of the ProBlogger himself, Darren Rowse. Remember, Darren makes his living helping readers understand how to blog professionally, drive traffic, spread ideas and generate revenues. After the runaway success (1423 comments) of his “pitch your blog in 140 characters” meme on Twitter this weekend, he wrote:
Twitter is Amazing
I put the success for this project largely down to Twitter. As I posted my invitation on ProBlogger I also Tweeted an invitation for my Twitter followers to get in early and pitch their blog. This tweet was retweeted time and time again by readers. I didn’t expect this wildfire of tweets (in fact people retweeted the retweets of others) and lost count at the number of people who ’sneezed’ my post throughout the Twittersphere. When we hit the 1000 submissions mark I tweeted about it and again the tweet was retweeted many times. An hour before closing it I tweeted and again it was retweeted many times over.
I’ve experienced things going viral online before but this one was explosive. Over 1000 of the submissions came in the first 20 hours - not bad for a weekend.
Oh, and our pitch? Easy.
TouchBase Blog: Microsharing for Business.