Three great quotes from him during the interview:

1. “Adversity and unexpected speed bumps are the price of innovation.”
2. “Some of the biggest challenges our company has faced are a result of intuitive decisions we made about what was important to invest in.  And we bet the farm behind it.  And it turned out to be much harder than we thought.”
3. “Technology and innovation don’t always come out in linear ways.”

I hope you find this 38 minutes as compelling as I did.  Enjoy!

Much of the research in the marketplace suffers from pretty wide information gaps in the Twitter data.  The one that I (and other pundit-types) find a little shaky in the Sysomos report is their extrapolation on the topic of Twitter users’ age.  While it seems to skew right where you’d expect it – 65% are under age 25 – it’s based on the self-reported data of 0.7% of users.  Not exactly statistically significant, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Here are three key realties every marketer should keep top-of-mind:

Twitter is New:  It might seem like you the marketer has just discovered what everyone has known for the last two years, but Twitter literally has exploded in the last five months – specifically March and April 2009.  To put it all into perspective, 72.5% of Twitter users have signed up in 2009 with 22.7% in March and 19.7% in April.  Growth has slowed since then, but the trend was set.

And what tipped the scales?  You guessed it, the vicious circle of celebrities and media exposure.  Between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, the mold was cast.  Twitter’s newness should lead marketers to somewhat ignore the existing ‘rules of the road’.  Take a hard look at where your organization can benefit from direct customer interactions, and build a Twitter presence around that.  So go for it – you could be the one who develops Twitter’s next killer app!

Most Twitter Users are Not Active: Sysomos laid out a couple especially surprising statistics (at least for me).  First, 21% of all users have never posted a tweet.  Conventional thinking points to a URL-style land grab for names, but my opinion is this is just a ton of tire kicking.  You have to sign up to see the content, and perhaps this is simply more evidence the world is full of voyeurs.  While I’d expect some people to just browse by, knowing that one fifth of the audience is not engaged at all points to the utter fascination with social media.

The second stat that turned my head was simply a quantification of what we all know to be true – a vocal minority contribute the majority of the content.  Statistically, it turns out that 5% of the audience contributes 75% of the content.  Broken down, the research shows 85% of the audience tweets less than once a day, while 1.1% tweet more than 10 times a day.  Also interesting is the correlation between number of followers and tweets per day.  The true tipping point is somewhere between 800 and 1,000 followers when the average tweets per day rise from three to six.

For marketers, this means layering in a quantity versus quality scale.  Ideally you should be aiming to reach about 500 followers who have an active following themselves of around 300-500 each.  And you’d better plan to deliver 4-6 tweets daily from the beginning to solidify your audience.  This enables the core of a Twitter network that can influence buying and other decisions critical to your company’s success.  And, by the way, only 1.4% of Twitter users have 500 followers so you’re in pretty rare air.

Twitter is an English Thing:  While we all recognize 140 characters in German is crazy different than 140 characters in English (my old translations friends always put about a 2.5:1 ratio on German to English), I actually expected more globalization from Twitter.  Almost 79% of content comes from the US, UK, Canada and Australia – in that order.  The first non-English country is Brazil at 2%.  Really? Portuguese is no lightweight language for character counts either…

The surprise for me was both Japan and China are sub-1%.  Looking at the prevalence of mobile devices and the popularity of text messaging in Asia, it’s fair to say this region represents the most growth upside for Twitter.  And if you have a business that lends itself to social marketing in those countries, you’d better be deep in research on how Twitter can help you achieve your objectives.  I’d suggest virtual focus groups, and a deep understanding of the texting trends by county.  This channel could be the turbocharger needed for an Asian product launch.

All in all, the Sysomos data sheds interesting light on the Twitterverse.  As with any research, consume it wholly and then make good, solid extrapolations for your business.  Lay it against your customers’ most important needs and desires to best determine how to grow your business.

Recent goings-in within the technology world – most specifically the advent of Twitter user names and Facebook’s vanity URLs – has resurfaced the discussion around URL strategy. Traditionally, marketers have been mostly focused on what their main URL is and/or should be. Many of us have endured the battle of someone else owning our brand’s domain, or needing to change a URL during an acquisition or name change event.

The most complicated URL conversation over the last 3-4 years has been how to ensure secondary systems – ala your email service provider’s landing pages – match up with main URL. Then along comes Social Networking and its draw for companies. (We’ll save the entire discourse on URL shortening services for another day.)

At the highest level, there are two ways to think about your Twitter username or your Facebook vanity URL: if you’re locked-and-loaded with your current brand and URL, just match them up. Your customers will appreciate the consistency – and your SEO and SEM programs will continue to bear fruit around your already-optimized terms.

If you’ve got aspirations of changing your URL (and your customers can clearly understand the new nomenclature), then move to your new brand in the social media space and continue working on your main site’s URL. The best case here is when you’re migrating to a new nomenclature based on customer feedback – think when the Gap dropped ‘The’ from the brand.

While this is the simple approach, many creative marketing folks have gone a step further and truly embraced social media as more than just another marketing channel. They’ve developed specific personalities (real or created) that serve as a concierge within social networks. The best example I’ve seen lately is @HyattConcierge on Twitter. This extension of traditional tasks into the social media realm represents an interesting shift is how marketing and customer service is managed inside big companies.

Overall, your first consideration for URLs should be ‘Can my customers find me intuitively?’ Taking their view is not only recommended – it’s required. No matter how great you believe your value proposition to be, users simply will not go to complicated lengths to find you. Meet them where they expect to find you.

And if you’re just starting a business, place serious weight on being able to secure matching URLs between your site and social media sites. Given you’re starting with zero awareness, every dime spent on brand building should be geared around a single name.

As I wander the digital universe, I see promising signs things are moving back toward normalcy.  As I prepared to check back on one of the precious few IPOs in the last year, I expected OpenTable to have gone through the hype cycle in late May and be back in the $14 range.  Imagine my surprise to find it still moving in the $29 range a couple weeks later – a nice surprise to say the least.  Add to that the treading-water ride for RackSpace and SolarWinds over the last year, and things seem to be improving.

At the same time, I ran across this cartoon on one of the smarter blogs I follow: Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups.com.  It gave me a moment of pause as I cringed about the old days of vaporware and sky-high valuations.  Please tell me these winds aren’t blowing again!?!?!  It also reminded me clearly that those days might be fondly recalled by a few, but the competition for funding has moved well beyond the ‘deck-and-a-dream’ realm.

The reality is investors have their choice of almost any company or idea in this market – and there are very few premiums for anything!  You might have the greatest idea in the world, but raising $1M to build it on spec becomes really difficult when there are established businesses needing capital to remain solvent or reasonably expand.

So the real question for founders is this: Are you geared up for long-term viability? Can you self-sustain for a longer-than-normal window given the economic climate?  OpenTable built their business for 11 years before cashing-in during 2009.  That’s the sign of a healthy, well-run company that has weathered the ups-and-downs of the market – all while solidifying their single value proposition.  Here’s to hoping we see more tech IPOs that reward those who work hard, play smart and have great long vision.

Do I really have to call a ‘specialist’ who refuses to interact with me unless I’m a fellow agent?  Or will jump directly to: ‘Do you have a realtor’? Funny, you’d think someone trying to sell something might actually speak with someone interested in buying it – radical, huh?  And does the average real estate agent really know more about complex Boolean searches in arcane databases like MLS than someone who’s worked in technology for a couple decades?  The answer is clearly no on both counts, but why is it still commonplace — and more importantly, how can we change it?

Part of the solution is we must be more informed consumers, and take a more proactive role in these areas.  If you’re like me, you’ve probably offended your share of realtors and car salespeople when you show up knowing more than they do about a neighborhood or an option package. If not, I challenge you to apply it once in the next 30-60 days and see how it affects the outcome.  It’s a bit old school, but remember the heat apparel retail Sym’s took 8-10 years ago for their tag line, ‘Our best customer is an educated customer’?  Bravo to an early proponent of the mindset even if the outside analysis completely missed the point of using the word ‘educated’.

So back to today’s positive interaction — and specifically how really smart people are helping us help ourselves.  For the first time ever, I saw a Remax sign with an SMS short code and a reference number for a specific property.   And guess what?  I had the information I wanted in less than 10 seconds.  And the realtor now has my cell phone number.  A completely fair exchange of information that allowed him to meet my needs (without committing his actual time) and gave me a direct line to him to accelerate the conversation to the next level if I’m interested.  So I get the info, he fields the request and we both have a much more serious second conversation if that’s in the cards.  Quite an achievement for something that lasted about 8 seconds!

So ask yourself at some point today: Am I responding to customers as intelligently as possible?  Do I have a solid, two-way dialogue that meets both our needs quickly?  If not, look to technology to help.  You might be surprised who is willing to drop an SMS message (think 100 million votes for the American Idol finale!).

According to the company, there are now 20 hours of video uploaded every minute — yes, every minute!  Or call it 3 hours every second — any way you slice it, that’s surreal.  And as another data point, Nielsen this week released numbers for online video usage and they’re up 53% over last year.  Good thing as all that uploaded content has to be watched by someone to make it at least minimally relevant to the cosmos.

And don’t fall into the trap of believing it’s all high school girls lip-syncing radio hits.  Big brands like Lions Gate Films, Wired Magazine, the BBC and the Mythbusters guys are all using YouTube Channels to distribute their content in yet another format.  This functionality begins to move YouTube toward consideration by marketing managers across multiple industries.  Investing in a YouTube channel — primarily the content production costs — could be the just the competitive differentiator for a retailer looking to set themselves apart.

And now the downside of massive content: bandwidth costs.  According to an April report from Credit Suisse, YouTube is potentially staring at a $470M loss in 2009.  While digging hard on paid deals with brands like ESPN, the bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day — or 51% of expenses. WOW!

I’ll leave the Google-YouTube analysis for a later blog entry, but suffice to say it’ll be amazingly interesting to see if YouTube executives can create a monetization strategy that outruns their bandwidth costs.  The “build audience now, monetize later” strategy certainly has a tipping point where things get incrementally harder.

At the same time, I refuse to join the lazy group of people who say traditional advertising is dead — it’s not, it will simply serve a larger purpose.  There will always be large consumer-facing brands who need to (and can afford to) market past any intermediate channels, and take an ‘anthem’ message to the people.  Some will do it to brand-build and sway corporate buyers (see the Cisco ad below) and some will attempt to influence public opinion in their favor (see the Exxon ad below).  But make no mistake, they will all pay dearly.

So what does this mean for every other company that can’t spend millions to produce and air these beautiful creations?

It calls for a lower, faster set of integrated channels that have the potential to add up to more than their natural sum.  And the most recent piece of this puzzle is a social media strategy.  While considering the true business impact of Facebook, Twitter and other smaller sites, many marketing people won’t also consider how these new channels should affect their current web and email efforts.

Here are five key questions to ask your marketing folks:

1. Other than ‘being cool’, why should we commit people time to social media?
2. Do we have a credible position and message for social media?
3. Are you (and your group) prepared to author 8-10 daily Twitter posts and manage replies?
4. How do our customers want to hear from us?
5. How does social media coexist/enhance with our current MarComm strategy?

But perhaps the most interesting business decision to make is around channel cost.  The traditional advertising machine consumes $100 bills by the millisecond.  If your budgets have been slashed over the last 12 months (like most have) perhaps it’s time to reconsider how that money is spent.  Take a more direct response view of what ads you can afford (if leads are your currency) and move aggressively into direct-to-customer communications like email and social media. Hint: you can get 2-3 social media ambassadors for the cost of one NY creative director

Comments?

But never fear, not everyone has this kind of raw creative juice — or development skills.  The key to eclipsing your employment arch-rivals is to bring more knowledge and value.  Sounds simple, but the ‘new world’ requires you to consume, analyze and operationalize information at warp speed.  You likely need to spend at least 4 hours daily consuming information and constantly evaluating your views and opinions.  Any less, and you’ll risk missing the early signs of change embedded in the information flow.  And quite frankly, there are a ton of ultra-hungry 20-somethings who now have an equal chance of writing the rules for the next 10 years.

For an impressive example of this, drop a Twitter follow on Evan Williams (@ev).  Yeah I know, he’s the CEO and has ~725K followers but he’s an incredible example of 360-degree focus on the business.  And don’t forget this is run #2 — Evan brought Blogger out of the ground and managed it through a Google acquisition.

Hey, if Adam doesn’t get the Murphy-Goode job, maybe he’ll join the Fred Squared clan…