Founder's Roundtable

Twitter Roundtable: October 29th, 2009.

Below is a quick synopsis of some of the topics that were discussed at the October roundtable.

How Twitter Changing Business

MN – as startup, single person, can’t cold call and get to blue ribbon companies like Hasbro, Disney, etc.  Her reputation as a trusted source within a specific niche had them find her.  Had time to “create my voice” – authentic, true, being on Twitter since August 07 to build that and then launching site August 2008.  Companies then know what they are getting with the voice.  She always discloses if sponsored; rarely sell CPM – sell package

DB – What metrics do you provide, # of exposures to tweet?

MN – Mostly bought by PR than traditional media, so look less at response rates and metrics than bigger picture.  There are the basic tweet metrics – # of potential views is followers * number of posts; bit.ly can help measure number of clicks; number of retweets;respond to retweets, so talking about the sponsored CONVERSATION vs. just the sponsor when someone says “yes I really love those guys too” I’m going to react to that

CM – Don’t know many companies who could duplicate what Melanie has done, the single voice and authenticity; most companies don’t know what they are doing; thus TweetMix can assimilate a lot of that and help shape it

JD – Companies don’t know what works, how to leverage Twitter

CM – They don’t have the luxury of doing

TH – There is significant pressure to do something; people now expect some feedback; brand that took a century to be build can be broken down now quite quickly; it’s a terrible time to be a CMO

RE– That’s what Tlists tries to do, bridge that gap between publishers and advertisers.  Publishers like Huffington Post are creating lists of people interested around different themes; advertisers want to reach contextually relevant, find the closes fitting groups talking about a theme.  The issues for advertisers is stil how to integrate themselves INTO those feeds

JS – Most business models out there are brands pay but don’t know value; plus they are scared what comes out of mouths of users.  So instead of creating Twitter business models that focus on being paid by ads, need to find businesses or ways of getting people to spend money – reviews platform is sold to people who are used to having review.  Media people don’t know how to buy anything except on a CPM basis

PP – there’s a pre-set mindset of how to market the brand; over time companies that don’t get it will either be pulled in against their will or have a very large PR problem.  With Stocktwits we get a lot of comments around the stock price, but a lot of comments on company fundamentals as well.  [asks Chris if he has some sort of orientation for companies he works with when he takes them on]

CM– If you walk in and they don’t get it, walk out.  As a startup you don’t have time to teach and drag along a client; Duke basketball team: wanted to have a human face, give players chance to express themselves; they are trusting people with their brand.  The view it as good for fans and schools, looking at potentially expanding to faculty.  Is there ROI – It’s super cheap ($1K per month) and its experimental – a Twitter aggregator destination site.  They can do merchandising off of it; not a big risk

RE – Cant make money work as effectively because less mass audience – now all niche audiences and have to figure how to get to them, and some don’t want to be reached.  What conversations will be there in the future?  Do they care for brands in the conversation and how would they be integrated?  How do you make business work within that environment?

Is $3 million budget easier to spend because you have niches vs. $100 million budget?

Roy – People can’t make mind up on what niches are; there is a critical mass in the US, but no critical mass in  Euro countries so more difficult

D – For an enterprise software company, B2B, can’t reason that when doing social – the upper management want concrete (read traditional) way of measuring social

EK – Twitter gives us access to customer, initial thought is driven by greed – how can we sell; instead go for free feedback, help debugging products from savvy customers; at this stage you can’t use ROI metrics, but use intuition.  How do you quantify something that brings a new product feature?  Spending $3-5 million to explore

MN – Thinking of how Kodak uses Twitter, its leadership that has personality as well, users get invested in it and are rooting for you; Mashable can bring traffic and value in one tweet the companies used to spend millions of dollars to achieve; leadership can’t be behind the ivory tower.  Great opportunity for CEO/CMO to talk directly to consumers like never before; plus completely democratic in people can choose to or not to follow.  Companies that are most sincere are going to win.

JS – But what you are doing can’t scale.  And Kodak spending $3-5 million out of a huge budget is not scale.  How do you build scalable, investible business model around social media?  Hasn’t happened in mobile yet

MN – There is scalability in influence of a brand

DB – biggest challenge of social media is to decouple from paid media

JS – What Kodak is doing is a one-off basis; getting media buyer to try something on a one off basis?  Good luck.  Not going to pay because its not tested compared to what they know works in mass media TV budgets; selling one-offs is an impossible task

PP – We’re in an early stage of buying a new communication media and its painful and ugly and startups will get run over

JS– we need innovation and business models for social media

JD – we’re not just bean counting.  We’re not a tech company, but a marketing research company.  By talking as market research company, brands have the understanding/concept of research and a market research budget they can tap; use us because they want to know what people are saying

JS—Movie studios spend 40 million on ads to launch a movie; if they blurt after the movie, putting on a 1-5 scale during a test launch; and we add mobile phone prefixes to see where the movie plays well and where it doesn’t, now can tap those very real budgets that exist, help them tap into audience feelings to adjust the budget – that adds value.

JD – Anticipation vs reaction, Bruno vs Hangover

The Twitter Effect and Bruno

DB – most of my friends taste on movies are crap

TH – The Twitter Effect study – is it real or just hype; Twitter is only used by 10-12% of movie attendees and its at the bottom of the list in terms of influence, so really a minimal effect, but studios can’t let go of it as a reality.

RE – Buddy Media went through several iterations of business model – started to be heavy app developer but it doesn’t scale – hand to hand combat with brands.  Then when agencies realized they had to staff up around social to offer, so we targeted agencies for a great feeder effect; then focused on the metrics and infrastructure, now creating templates for Facebook pages to manage experience, promotions, etc.  They pay X, you can count the clicks

DB – we weren’t sure for a while whether you were an agency competitor or not, now easier to work with you guys

D – from B2B stand, it takes six months for a sale; we’ll do a little bit but wait for the B2C guys to figure it out first; ideastorm by Dell turned complaints concept and framed it as a suggestion box to make the company better – so out of customer support into product development

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