Mike Maney

Tag: Twitter

  • The Other Bird Twitter Needs

    I still owe Marshall a post on how I use LittleBird, but an article popped in my newsfeed this morning that seems a bit more urgent.

    Twitter was all over the tech news yesterday with people reporting and analyzing yet another management shakeup. I’ve been in big companies. News? Eh, not so much. Yet, under the cover of the coverage (see what I did there?) was legitimate conjecture on why the company’s leadership has not been able to hit the user growth targets it has set. One of the reasons, as Owen Williams points out is that the onboarding process for new users is, well, not so good a lot.

    It feels like a missed opportunity to showcase other users that are active and having conversations with their followers, rather than famous people. The value in Twitter is not observing and it’s clear that this feature misses the point.

    Bingo. While I follow a few celebrities, the real value of Twitter is engaging with people who know more than me on topics I care about. Which is something Twitter can’t recommend in its current onboarding process. It just doesn’t have that data or ability to know its new users beyond their address books. It’s a missed opportunity because there is a way to make the onboarding process better and much more relevant.

    Imagine if, upon signing up for Twitter, you were asked “What are some topics you’re interested in?” And then, rather than spit back a suggested list of popular people to follow, it instead pre-populated a topical list of the most influential people on that topic? Helpful and relevant, no? That’s what LittleBird does. As Marshall says, it “focuses on relevant connections inside a community, not just the content people post and popularity they can fake.” I use it frequently (maybe too frequently) to discover who I should be listening to.

    If I were running the onboarding process for Twitter (or whoever is running it after this last shakeup), I’d look at finding a way to integrate LittleBird. While it wouldn’t fix all the onboarding problems (number of steps, etc.), it would make Twitter instantly more relevant to every new user.

  • If I Ran Google+…

     

    I’ve been pretty vocal about my views on how Google is blowing a huge, industry-shifting opportunity with Google+. Most of those views are centered around the company’s inability to know when to let professional marketers take the handoff from the engineers (and accept that it’s ok).

    This morning, my friend and fellow corporate misfit, Greg Lowe, posted his views on why he’s abandoning the Google+ party until it figures out how to make its various systems work together. Greg’s not alone. And that’s when it hit me: What would I do if I was running Google+’s marketing today?

    Would I allocate gobs of cash from my search business to promote this new product that — according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — has the potential to replace search as the backbone of the company? I could. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to make Google+ a household name like Facebook or Twitter.

    Would I pay a bunch of celebrities and brands bucketloads of moolah to make my new product look cool to people not immediately related to Robert Scoble? I could. Twitter has shown that tactic works pretty well.

    Would I initiate basic political and competitive campaign tactics to reshape how press, analysts and other influencers define the market? I could and would.

    No, what I’d do is much simpler.

    The biggest problem with Google+ right now isn’t that it’s UI is ugly or that people like Greg can’t log in from their different Google accounts. Google+’s biggest problem is that it’s marketing team isn’t harnessing the power of its most passionate customer base: those who take the time to complain about the product’s current shortcomings (early adopters who are core to the growth of the product).

    My fix? Have a strike team scour Google+, Twitter and the web for any and all complaints about the product. Capture them. Catalog them. Categorize them. Communicate them. And then turn the engineers lose fixing them. As each issue is addressed, check it off. Keep the list public. There’s a built-in, passionate product marketing department already built into Google: its customers.

    People want Google to be successful with Google+. The meteoric sign-ups show many are looking for something that builds on the early foundations laid by Facebook and Twitter. But unless Google gets some basic marketing religion — and gets it fast — their constant drumbeat of “It had potential…” flops will increasingly erode confidence in the company’s core geek foundation.

  • Yeah, you. You talking about my brand?

    Ford Motor CompanyImage via WikipediaFor those who still think what happens on blogs, Twitter and other social media networks is nothing more than a marketing echo chamber, think again.

    I posted an entry to this blog yesterday that included links to the great online video work Ford and GM are doing. I also included a line about “the ever-present knock of death” at the auto industry’s door. While I’m no fan of the bailout — and recognize that Ford didn’t stick its hand out for public funds — the work Scott Monty and Christopher Barger (and their respective teams) are doing is worth noting.

    Now, I don’t pretend that this blog gets a ton of traffic. Scoble I am not. However, no sooner did I hit post when a comment from Scott appeared to clarify Ford’s position on my death-knell comment. Again, in the wide realm of blogs out there, I’m quite sure Maney|Digital is somewhat low on the totem pole of authority and impact for the automakers.

    Which is why I wanted to highlight Scott’s actions. Somewhere in his toolbox, Scott has a trigger to alert him to any time Ford is mentioned on the web. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Scoble-sized mention or a lowly Maney|Digital-sized one. What matters is that Scott didn’t let a potentially (and unintentional) negative comment about his company sit idle for others to see.

    Companies which aren’t monitoring what’s being said about them online do so at their own peril. While the overall impact of a single negative post on a site the size of Maney|Digital probably won’t make much of a difference, the cumulative effect of others seeing it, posting on it, linking to it, will.

    Do you know what they are saying about your brand?

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