As you may have seen this weekend on Techcrunch, or Read Write Web, Twitter is preparing to raise another round of capital, probably at least $20M. Based on the funding, its valuation is now $250M. Not too shabby in a weak economy! Techcrunch is reporting that the new investor is Institutional Venture Partners. Jeremiah Owyang performed a quick analysis and determined that each active Twitter user is valued at $73.52. As Lidija Davis states on Read Write Web, the only way VCs would fund Twitter in our current economic climate would be if they could see a clear and detailed business plan that solidifies its revenue model. Hopefully, we will get to see that revenue model pretty soon! Louis Gray even has competing posts, Twitter is worth a lot more than $250M and There is no Way Twitter is worth $250M. Talk about playing both sides!
Rather than speculating on the revenue model, I’d rather recommend some missing functions and other investments that Twitter desperately needs. My fantasy baseball friend, Don Reisinger, wrote last week in his CNET column, 5 Twitter Improvements we’re still waiting for:
Andy Brudtkuhl went even further and wrote, 11 Twitter Analytics Features I Want:
Louis Gray has called for Twitter to implement OAuth, the open protocol that allows for secure API authorization, as a way to mitigate some of the recent security issues in the ecosystem due to users having to enter their password on third party sites.
Personally, I think they are all great ideas. Who can’t agree with improving security and making it more difficult for spammers? If I had to suggest a few other things it would be:
How do you think Twitter should spend the new investment? What features would you like to see Twitter add? Which deficiencies must be fixed for you? What new features would really enhance the overall experience?
Andy Nulman is pretty creative. President of Airborne Mobile and founder of Montreal’s fantastic Just for Laughs International Comedy festival (okay, Camille Laurin and the language cops, Juste pour rire), is known for using surprise as a powerful component of any marketing campaign. His current campaign to build awareness of his new book is a perfect example. Andy is giving away 200 free copies of POW! Right Between the Eyes: Profiting from the Power of Surprise, to any blogger that writes a post and asks for it. I learned about the offer from my friend and amazing marketer himself, Saul Colt on his inspiring marketing blog.
Andy seems like another Andy that I’m friendly with, Andy Sernovitz, who always recommends doing memorable, surprising actions as part of your word of mouth marketing strategy. Seem like two peas (or Andy’s) in a pod, don’t they? As a fellow McGill grad, I certainly want to see Andy Nulman do well. That’s why I have some advice for the surprise guru, from the Twittermaven.
Great campaign, but where’s Twitter? Ok, there was one tweet, but a great campaign like this deserves better treatment on Twitter. Let’s spread the word and get some retweet’s going!
A lot of great things have already been written by many people like about the exciting fundraising that the Twitter community experienced Tuesday night when David Armano asked his friends and community for a favor.
Many great posts have been written about that night, the impact of social capital and how Twitter’s community changed. I found Kate Niederhoffer’s post Re-tweeting Altruism: also altruistic and Scott Drummond’s How is your relationship balance sheet, especially insightful. I will leave the community insights to those experts. Instead as the true analytic that I am, I will focus on some of the numbers that helped to drive those impressive results. So let’s start with the big picture: 512 contributors donated $16,020, an average of $31 per donation. The Armano’s exceeded their modest goal in less than 2 hours!
Let’s take a look at the work behind that.
All of these activities resulted in this.
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A lot of great discussions around retweets on Twitter, so I'd like to share a few of them (and some other posts) that you may have missed.
How do you use the retweet? Do you find it an important development in your Twitter usage? Is it a positive direction?
And separate from the retweet discussion,
There you have it, some of the more interesting recent stories about Twitter. Were there other ones that you found unique and interesting? I’d love to learn about them.
I’d like to address another component to this great story of a community working together. Many of us have spoken, tweeted, and blogged about the value of participating on Twitter for companies. We’ve also pointed out some of those companies that get Twitter and do it well. I think it’s only appropriate for the brands that participate as part of the Twitter community to give back and help Daniela’s family. So Wholefoods, Comcastcares, Popeyeschicken, Starbucks, Zappos, Delloutlet and all the others, what do you say?
UPDATE!
We have the account working now. Please refresh your browser. And we are freaking out.
I've been at this blog for nearly 3 years now and have never asked for something like this—I hope I've earned enough trust to be able to ask something back from you. Above is a picture of Daniela and her family. Brandon, age 6, Daniela, age 9 and little Evelyn age 4. Daniela recently divorced her husband after years of abuse. In recent years her mortgage went unpaid and she's lost her house.
As of this moment, Daniela's family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in. With Evelyn, her youngest having Down's Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).
Daniela cleans houses when she can leave her family. I'm not even going to tell you what she gets paid—it's obscene. Right now her options are pretty limited, aside from an apartment, there is only a group shelter. Not very pretty.
Here's what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it's tight as we have no basement. We've committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places. I'm asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn't have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.
I know this is the worst possible time to ask for anything. But would you consider the following:
1. Giving whatever you can ("Chip in" uses Pay Pal and it's very easy to donate and it's secure)
2. Spread the word. Please, please blog this, tweet this, re-tweet this.
3. Help find a donor (maybe a generous company or individual)
I don't have anything to offer back. Not an ego list or top donators directory. I can only hope that this thing we call "community" puts its money or heart where its mouth is. Please do whatever you can.
Respectfully, David and family
PS, if you don't feel comfortable using Pay Pal, please e-mail us here and we'll figure it out. And thank you.
My friend, Eric Weaver was asked to help out for a good and novel cause. I followed Weave’s advice, signed up for the conference email and now am republishing his request.
Originally published on Branddialogue, which I encourage you to read, by the way.
Ahh, dear readers. I really dig connecting with you here and hope to god I’m not spamming you to death with updates and notes and links and STUFF. Our lives are full of “stuff,” aren’t they? Things clamoring for our attention and time. As you know from my 2009 resolutions, I’m trying to use my time more meaningfully and have fewer things of better quality in my life.
I’ve been approached by Lee Dryburgh, who organizes the eComm Emerging Community Conference. This conference covers primarily mobile technologies, with topics like Open Handsets, Mobile Social Networking, social media, etc. Lee’s facing a similar conundrum to other conference organizers: how do I generate awareness of my event? Normally one would pay for an email database and blast away hoping to snag some subscribers. Lee had another idea: rather than buying names, he’s reaching out to social media types to ask for their promotional help. For every person who joins his mailing list, he will donate 50 cents to the Shelter Network.
If you’re a frequent conference goer and you dig the mobile space, that’s a bonus. For those of you with too much stuff in your life, the conference, or an unwanted email, may not be very interesting.
There are a million good causes out there. A million issues nagging for our attention. When things get rough, we tend to retreat - and that’s exactly the time when kids like these need us the most. Just click here and sign up for the email. Even if you don’t read it or you unsubscribe, you will have helped a child with that simple action.
Homelessness is a growing problem that can easily be solved, if we just faced it. And no one likes being asked for money. So here’s one way we can help others without touching our pocketbooks. I hope you’ll take a moment and sign up.
I promise I’ll always be sensitive to your time and attention.
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Does the minutiae of Twitter have any real meaning? What if you could learn from your “I’m having a ham sandwich” Twitter moments by plotting your snap judgments and feelings on a graph?
One of the things we love about Twitter is the ability to lifestream our personal digital history and share it with our friends and followers. Although we are creating lasting digital moments by passively documenting our lives, we feel that this history of our minutiae is pretty much noise. However, is that really the case? A new application, Plodt, was created to help make sense of our personal history. According to Plodt, the little things actually are interesting and by ranking these moments on a timeline, one can find insights in our daily activities.
Plodt was founded by Mike, Demetrie, and Amanda of Seawinkle who created Plodt because they don't think of Tweets as so much noise or ephemera, but rather as valuable details about your life. Developers Mike and Demetrie are former interns from the Microsoft Research lab who met at NYU’s School for the Arts. You may recognize the third founder, Amanda Hesser. Former food writer and food editor of the Sunday Magazine for the NY Times, Amanda has been lifestreaming and documenting her life for several years in print, for example, via the Food Diary columns that she wrote from 2000-2002 and her best seller, Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes.
By adding a category and a number to the end of your tweet, Plodt is able to graph your history and help you get more value out of your daily tweets. In the sample Plodt chart below, you can see that Amanda has had a pretty enjoyable food (purple) period with the exception of a mediocre croissant on 12/19 (3) and what must have been awful french fries and beer on 12/30 (.3).
Based on Amanda’s background, it should be no surprise that there is a strong food element to Plodt. Each week, fans of Bravo’s Top Chef share their impressions of the contestants with Twitter and Plodt. It reminds of the commercials rating game that Jeremiah Owyang organized during last year’s Super Bowl. Just think how much easier it would have been if we could have graphed the commercials with Plodt.
Twitter is the closest social media ever gets to a stream of consciousness whereby we document what we think, what’s in our mind at the time, what we think about our daily life. Now with a tool like Plodt, we can make some sense out of it all. So the challenge is what would you like to learn from your Twitter stream, what would you want to measure and if it could be measured, would you tweet any differently?
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