trendpreneur

Yesterday I had the mixed pleasure of getting up at the crack of dawn to head to Aberdeen for my third NESTA Starter for 6 workshop. S46, as it’s affectionately known, is a scheme whereby aspiring creative and technology entrepreneurs get some solid hands-on training in the various skills needed to run a successful business.

This month’s session was on marketing, run by two seasoned professionals from The Value Innovators. Obviously defining and then approaching your target market in the right way is crucial to a young business’s success, as startups rarely have the cash or even the time to absorb wasted marketing efforts.

The session focused on four key aspects of marketing: product, customers, promotion and PR.
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The Twitterverse is currently abuzz with a small change that’s caused a big noise.

Since the start, you could view your Twitter stream in three ways – server-side, so this affected whichever method you used to browse Twitter. The options were to only show ‘broadcast’ messages, i.e. nothing starting with an @; to show @-replies between people you were following, i.e. only conversations where you knew both parties (the default); and to show all messages, including those @-replies directed at people you didn’t follow.

Quite sensibly, Twitter looked at the user behaviour – almost everyone kept to the default. Having tried out the ‘firehose’, ‘everyone’s tweets to anyone’ approach I’m not that surprised. Even when I was following around 100 people, my stream became vastly noisy and unmanageable. The idea of being able to discover new people through seeing half their conversations was nice, but without any client that can pull in the rest of the conversation, it was like overhearing a phone conversation on the train — annoying and unnecessary.

Product management decision ahoy: ‘let’s remove the option, nobody (<2%) uses it and keeping it there costs money without translating that cost into value’.

Enter TechCrunch, stage left, and suddenly — apart from a bit of whining that TC should shut up about Twitter, which is fair enough — it’s cool to demand the ‘firehose’ of @-replies back. The angle that ‘we’re not smart enough for it’ was very clever, and also downright underhand. Spinning a product management decision so that most of the product’s users, who were previously unaware of the feature’s very existence, now demand for it back… I guess it causes pageviews, but it’s simply ridiculous.

There’s a bit of a terminology hiccup which isn’t helping, in that people are getting the idea that their actual ability to reply to people they don’t follow will be hindered – it won’t – or that they won’t see replies from people who don’t follow them – er, no. Even the discovery aspect isn’t really a big problem, as there are plenty of conversations/RTs/etc that don’t start with an @ and introduce the username later in the text. Those’ll still show up.

Twitter will almost certainly have to reverse the change, and those complaining loudest about it and yelling ‘#fixreplies‘ from the rooftops will go back to not using it. In fact, I wonder if the canniest thing they could do right now is to put the @-firehose option on – the one that everyone’s complaining about missing out on – and watch the majority of users drown in confusion for an hour or two.

It’s every CEO’s nightmare: waking up to find mails and tweets pointing out a new competitor, someone who — at first glance — appears to have pipped you to a particularly juicy post. Thus began my morning when I was alerted to Twendz, a new sentiment-based Twitter monitoring app.

However, I actually think Twendz is a good sign. To be boisterously arrogant, the app itself doesn’t hope to compete with what I’m working on in terms of technology, as it’s using the most naive of sentiment classification techniques. (OK, so it could incorporate more advanced classification, which might get worrying.) It also doesn’t really show any useful information — sure, you can get a barometer based on the last three hours or so, and there’s a jolly pretty waterfall of tweets, and the tag cloud is a nice touch, but beyond that? It’s candy, not something you can sit and digest and act on.

The fact it’s been launched by a PR firm is nothing but good, though. It’s a clear sign that at least one firm acknowledges the value of sentiment and opinions in social media, and sees a need for better ways to search and track them. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of press the app gets and it’s certainly alerted me to something that was hit home quite squarely yesterday: think small, not monolithic, release early, and see what happens. If I’d coded this up months ago, which I certainly could have done, who’d be getting the press now? Lesson learned.