Recently, I’ve seen a rash of comments on various social media networks that talk about the mysterious “recovery” that few small businesses are seeing the effects of. 248creative has seen some pretty exponential growth over the past couple quarters, so this started my mind wandering. Is this feeling really as prevalent as it seems when you look over entrepreneurial forums or is that just a vocal minority? After talking to a few more people, I’ve gained some perspective on some of the problems that many small business owners seem to be going through and this is what I’ve come up with…
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On April 13th, 2010, the social juggernaut twitter.com announced its first attempt at monetization with the promoted tweet platform. Initially launched in 2006, Twitter has built a worldwide membership of over 75 million users (22 million or so of which are actually active). The problem, however, has always been how to make the service generate revenue.

With the announcement of promoted tweets, Twitter thinks it has the answer. The system will initially be available to only a select group of national brands, including Starbucks, Virgin, Sony and 7 other internationally recognized brands.

The response to the launch has been generally positive, although questions are being raised as to why it was so restricted to such a small initial base of corporate advertisers. One has to ask, considering Twitter is such an edge technology with most of its user base as early adopters and technophiles, why it took such a conventional approach with this launch. It seems like a much more appropriate first run of the service would be open to a larger advertising community. Allowing access to smaller companies would introduce considerably more diversity to the promoted tweet landscape and generate more results that had much less of a “spammy” feel.

Regardless, this development should be lucrative for both Twitter and their advertisers… what do you think?

I try to travel to entrepreneurial hotspots as often as I can to keep my motivation and skill set high. The run is usually between the east coast (usually nyc) and Silicon Valley. This year, as business tends to be slow in January anyway and I have no real interest in winter, I headed off to Mountain View, CA for several weeks to immerse myself in meetups and demos. I love places like Mountain View. Normally when you go to a bar and sit down on a stool, the lateral chatter you unintentionally field has to do with sports, alimony or the mundanities of whatever job the chatterer is tired of. When you sit down at a Mountain View bar, even a rowdy one like Molly McGees on Castro, all the conversations around you things like “…it sounds really interesting, but how is he going to monetize…” or “…they got seeded by YC and they’re working on closing their second round with Sequoia…”.
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I give a lot of presentations on blogging and social networking and a theme that seems to consistently recur is people telling me “I’ve tried to use social networks, but I don’t ever seem to get any result from them.”. Looking a little deeper into what they’ve been posting and how they’ve been using social media has given me some insight into why they’re not getting the kind of results they’d like to see.

What I’ve seen is that, even though people are using social media, they’re not changing their paradigm in respect to what they’re posting. Social media won’t work if you just use it to push the same old tired marketing messages. YOU CAN’T WRITE COPY AND EXPECT RESULTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA!
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Google recently rolled out their offering to the social media landscape, Buzz. If you’ve already been using Gmail and the Google App system (Documents, Calendar, etc), then you’ve no doubt noticed, as they’ve deployed it to everyone’s Gmail already (or at least they are in the process, if you haven’t seen it yet, you will). You will be prompted to add it to your inbox as soon as you log in.
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