Twitter in “Pointless Babble” shock

The BBC reports that 40%  of Twitter content is “pointless babble.” Citing research by Pear Analytics, “40.5% (of Tweets) could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.”

The shock is that only 40% is pointless babble. I’m surprised it’s that low. There’s no mention of advertising, though I assume that that’s the spam figure. I’m also surprised that spam accounts for only 3.75%, given the clamour that agencies have reported in using Twitter to spam target audiences. Still, early days yet…

We’ve noticed a rise in the use of blogging by influencers over the past four years, though it’s not nearly as high as you might think. Some markets (e.g. web development) feature blogging influencers considerably more than others (e.g. accounting software). But there is a general rise, to be sure.

We’ve recently added Twitter activity to our analysis – what’s immediately obvious is (a) there are still very few influencers using Twitter, and (b) those that do Twitter do so at the expenses of their blogging activity. So Twitter displaces blogging as the preferred mechanism of publishing content.

We’ll continue to watch the uptake of Twitter amongst influencers, though personally I’m skeptical. Seth fears losing six hours a day if he Twittered – enough said.

(Hat tip to Richard Holway for the heads-up on the BBC report)

Now the FTC investigates paid advocacy

I wrote last month on the perils of sponsoring conversations on blogs and Twitter. How prescient was I?! The FTC in the US is investigating the use of such tactics as potential deception. Good thing too.

There are two reasons not to engage in this kind of paid advocacy ploy:

1. The lack of authenticity in the advocacy undermines the very point of doing it. It’s only useful if it’s genuine (or if an interest is declared).
2. Users don’t want to receive it. Spam is spam, irrespective of whether it’s delivered by SMS, email, Twitter or blog comments.

The secret to advocacy is quite simple, as Hugh McLeod explains:

Marketing starts with the product, and the product starts with marketing. If your product sucks then no amount of marketing will fix it. If your product is remarkable then people will talk about it anyway. Marketing is only really necessary when your product is like everybody else’s.

Nobody Tweets

You’ll know that I don’t Twitter. As Seth says, “I’d lose 6 hours every day if I was on Twitter.” Who’s got the time to Tweet?

Well, it turns out that I could be a Twitterer and not Tweet, and be in good company. Not many Twitterers Tweet at all. Check out this research from Harvard Business School. Skip past the interesting but (to this blog) irrelevant stuff on men following men. The key chart is at the bottom of the page. 90% of Tweets are made by 10% of Twitterers.

The implication is that, in the main, Twitter is used in a unidirectional broadcast way, like traditional marketing, rather than in conversations. The use of Twitter for marketing purposes may be more advanced that I thought.

Sponsored conversations are the price of being boring

As Andy Sernovitz says in his book, advertising is the price of being boring. I was reminded by this by Ruth at Brand Strategy, who cites Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saying basically the same thing.

It’s the way of the world that not everybody can have an interesting product – there’s only so much enthusiasm one can muster for the mundane (mobile phones, batteries, pencils, etc). But it is often possible to wrap an interesting story around a mundane product. A man eating pies may sound mundane, but if there are 92 pies and they are consumed in every football ground in England, then you have a sporting travelogue that is much more interesting (to footie aficionados at least).

The point is, marketers need to work at the story that sets the context of their product. Give the market something interesting to talk about and talk about it they will.

So I’m troubled by the Sponsored Conversation idea being talked up by Forrester. Essentially this is paying people to talk about your product. It’s happening on blogs and Twitter, as well as in the real world. We talked in the book about ‘Brand Advocates’ – consumers paid to recommend products to their friends and acquaintances.

Personally, I can’t imagine much worse than being pitched to by a friend. They wouldn’t be a friend for long, is my guess, especially if they made a habit of it. Yet this is the kind of thing we’re talking about, migrated to an online platform.

The key concept here, of course, is disclosure. It’s mandatory that anyone being paid to advocate discloses this fact.

Disclosure is fine for transparency but taking payment undermines influence, the likelihood that someone will make a buying decision based on what an advocate says. My suspicion is that sponsored conversations – aka paid advocacy – simply won’t be effective because they won’t be believed.

Which kind of makes the exercise pointless.

Much better to get free advocacy by creating remarkable products and services.