Tracking Retweets: A Brief Look Inside Twitter Conversations
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
I tracked a sample of 60k+ retweets. After removing some of the common words used in English language (like ‘the’) and some of those short words used a lot of tweets (like ‘lmao’), I came up with the following tag cloud of those retweets:
It’s interesting to see that that Apple owns the twittosphere as both ‘Apple’ and ‘iPad’ are common words appearing in retweets. Facebook is also mentioned a lot. Could it mean that Twitter and Facebook users are kind of the same people?
Something stroke me: the word robot. I guess this is growing concern among Twitter users since automatic applications are increasingly annoying people.
I also noticed that people talk a lot about news and guess who…Obama! After all. Twitter is not just pointless babble.
Internet, Social Media and Consumer Shopping Behavior
One area in which the Internet has no rival is in the dissemination of information. Consumers have learned to to use this tool when shopping for things. An interesting trend these days is that people use the Internet as a source of information about local products or services. This is a real change in consumer behavior and is really not so intuitive from traditional marketing point of view. Indeed, it was long thought that people trust other people more when they are physically close to them. We now see that people use different sources on the Internet before they take a decision about local business. It is as if the opinion of those people we don’t know also matters when it comes to assessing local businesses.
With the web 2.0 and social media, the scope of Internet has extended to the dissemination of knowledge, emotions and personal experiences. Web 2.0 means that people aren’t only performing searches anymore. They are actually communicating because the read/write feature of web 2.0 now enable users to share their thoughts in interactive ways. This interactive communication isn’t quite as effective as face-to-face communication, but it could be very close to for people who have similar ways of thinking. This similarity in taste, thoughts and personal experiences are actually a key point that make social media so powerful. Similarity in different areas compensates for physical distance. People are not bound to be face-to-face to communication anymore. If their life experiences are similar enough, they will be able to understand each other through social media. So let’s see
Surveys show that social media have a strong impact on shopping decision. Here, we can see that people ‘find’ each other through brands. Their liking or disliking of a brand is actually something they are similar about. So those who adopt certain technologies like to be in touch with other people who use those same technologies so they can share their personal experiences and knowledge about the technology. What’s more important is that future decisions about a brand are going to be more likely influenced by those who initially shared the same attitude. This has a great impact in terms of customer retention and loyalty. Social media act like consumer unions. A bad review from the community means boycott of the product or brand. One thing social media marketers need to do is monitor what is being said about the brand so they can intervene when public opinions is trending towards the negative. The good thing is that social media leaves traces. Everything is written and is more or less open depending on the platform.
A common place for consumers to ‘hang’ are Facebook fan pages. Facebook pages are where people meet and discuss about all kinds of stuff that don’t always have to do with the product or service. However, they hint about their favorite brand by giving subtle clues of what they are using or going to buy. These clues are not always conscious and could be the result of new urban expressions such as ‘Googling’. Something important to remember here is the principle of consistency where people tend to make take action in line with earlier actions. That’s why when a consumer becomes a Facebook fan for a product, he or she is likely to purchase the product. It’s like the person has an internal conversation that goes something like this: “I am a fan of product XYZ. I will buy product XYZ because I am a fan of product XYZ.”
So the recommendation goes for businesses to set Facebook fan pages and push people to become fans. Since they will have to be consistent with themselves, they are going to adopt the brand or product. Isn’t that great, Creating business only with creating a Facebook fan page? Of course things are not that easy and the real difficulty is in getting people to become fans in the first place. For entrepreneurs, it means using all the networking firepower in your hands to get as much people to use the product. The point here is that great effort should be spent on selling the fan page more than the product itself!
Facebook Number One For Christmas
Facebook got more traffic than Google for Christmas. I guess this is the best gift they could have dreamed for. This is somehow normal if we take into consideration that 1) Facebook has more than 300 million members, that 2) people keep more in touch with friends and family during Christmas. Of course, this is to be expected for special holidays where people spend more time sending each other good wishes. However, I believe there is more in this news than just something related to special holidays.
First of all, Facebook is not going to lose members. Therefore, the critical mass that is needed to become number one website is there to stay and will only get bigger. Second, certain features of Facebook offer benefits that other conventional means of communication do not offer. Therefore, Facebook is changing the way people keep in touch with each other, gradually supplanting traditional communication channels in the process.
So if Facebook will have more users who will spend more time on the website, then it will soon have more traffic than Google. This was somehow expected as major marketing analysts expect a rise of marketing spending on Facebook and other mainstream social media.
Social Media is Now Stronger Than Ever: It is Part Of Google SERPs
Starting today, Google will redirect users to social media through its new real-time search feature. This means more alignment between SMO and SEO. This is good for Google as it is good for social media websites that will see an increase in their traffic. Well, it is good for businesses that could use this feature to gt some of the traffic for important keywords that would otherwise be difficult to compete for. I’m talking about words like money, cars, flowers, etc. that drive millions of people everyday. While it is hard to get any of the traffic for those keywords through traditional SEO techniques, it might be more simple to get a very small portion of that traffic by optimizing for real-time search. One tweet shown for only a second could get some traffic and if that tweet gets retweeted, then it means more traffic. Isn’t that cool?
Content Adds Value, Therefore it has a Price
Variety.com will start charging fees for some of its content. This comes a little while after Murdoch announced his decision to block Google crawler. If you ask me, these are all signs that the Internet is cannibalizing the information market (uh..da!) in a way that traditional information providers have to move all their resources to that direction and move fast before they become dinosaurs. Since those resources have a certain cost, it is obvious that the output (the articles) will also have a price tag. My best wishes of luck to Variety.
The Disruptive Nature of Chrome OS and What it Means For Windows
Chrome OS is disruptive
A disruptive product would be one that initially under-performs other products on the market even for the simplest needs. Think of all those extensions that Chrome OS will miss, making it a less attractive solution that Windows + Firefox. Gradually, the new product will be enhanced by other components or optimization of those parts that make it under-perform. At a certain point, the new product will offer better performance other products that are at the low-end of the market. For example, lets suppose someone is using Windows + Firefox + Google Toolbar for surfing the Internet and sending/receiving email though Gmail. For this person, as soon as the Google Toolbar is available for Chrome OS, it would be better to use Chrome OS instead of Windows + Firefox because the former is a faster and lighter than the latter.
What it means for Windows
Too Much Innovation Can be Fatal: the Case of Google Chrome
In an attempt to prepare the introduction of it browser-OS, Google introduced a few novelties in its Chrome browser. These novelties all fall inside one category there is no toolbar in Google Chrome. Users are complaining about the fact that Google Chrome doesn’t work with Google Toolbar to the point that Google had to write a support page about using Google Chrome. The page explains how Google Toolbar functions are part of the browser but not in the shape of a toolbar. Taking into account that those using Chrome are early adopters, this seems to be just another case of too much innovation not being well received by the market.
Good timing is the recipe for success
An important factor playing in the success of an innovation is the timing of its market introduction. If a product is too disruptive, people won’t be able to connect with products they already use. Visionaries must therefore take it easy with their creative swing and not forget the today’s consumer. In the case of Google Chrome, things went wrong because people are used to have a very tiny browser that is extended with plugins. They are not yet used to the idea that the browser is going to be the operating system.
People are used to the tiny browser
To better understand this phenomenon, we must take into account that browsers weren’t the most used application in the early days of the Internet. As more web applications answered day-to-day needs, plugins were built on top of the tiny browser to provide a better and more productive user experience. Today, the Browser is the most used application and the Internet has evolved to a point were a browser is all we need. In tomorrow’s Internet, everything is going to be on the cloud. Our desktop will not do anything else that allow us to click on buttons that are on a remote server.
Being the Internet leader, Google is taking the right bet of getting the market rid of the heavy desktop client (Windows) and replacing it with something lighter (Chrome OS). Only the push seems to be a very clumsy one and has to work harder to bring innovation in a more fluid way.