Following up on my previous post A New Local Business Model for Twitter, I extend the idea of Twitter potentially employing a new hashtag for geographies to other categories.

To recap the geographical strategy:

1) Twitter first creates a series of geographical Twitter accounts with a new Twitter name coding system that uses, say *, instead of @. For example, *Berkeley_CA or *Boston_MA. Start with metro areas and expand into smaller cities: *Waltham_MA and neighborhoods: *BackBay_Boston.

2) Each *Twitter account curates the best Twitter feeds within the geography, and is automatically set to retweet local feeds with the type of local information that communities want to see: News, Things to Do, and Deals. Curation is best done manually on-the-ground by a local; this person could be recruited as a volunteer who wants to serve their community in the same way About.com populated their experts. The *Twitter feed would look something like this:

3) The third step is the key departure to Twitter’s general strategy – building a Twitter based application (note Evan Williams doesn’t mention anything like this in his October “What’s next for Twitter” interview). Twitter should build hyperlocal websites similar to Patch.com for each *Geography, and create an automated overlay similar to http://paper.li/breakingsfnews/community-news or FlipBoard:

4) The final ingredient is monetization. Just like Patch, Twitter can now build a national network of hyperlocal websites without the HR expense of hiring editors. They can now leverage their local media presence to deliver Deals and coupon based advertising. By using deal syndication networks, Twitter won’t even need to hire a massive local sales force.

A new Twitter business branding model

Now extend this hashtag concept to business. One of the commenters on the mirror article on Social Media Today, Timo Platt states:

To truly differentiate its capabilities in the Local market, Twitter must offer new communications capabilities to reach targeted audiences, and to expand Twitter’s leadership in the micro-blogging B2B space to the broader C2C and P2P sectors, which marketers covet.

New messaging capabilities would thus help Twitter extend its user base and offer a more attractive audience to marketers.  When coupled with messaging that enables brands to engage in continuous conversations with consumers via targeted messaging that is tightly integrated with their diverse and varying on-the-go daily lifestyles and activities, Twitter would gain a competitive advantage vs. Facebook, FourSquare, Groupon, Where, Yelp, etc.

What Timo is proposing for b2b, retail and other business focused Twitter agendas can potentially be collated within a second hashtag, namely $, as in $walmart or $goldenstatewarriors or $cisco (note, Twitter will need to extend their character limits for both businesses and geographies). The revenue opportunity here is obvious, collect recurring fees for the subscription of $ hashtags.

What’s the difference between @ and $ for a business? Twitter can provide new features (all of course for additional fees) including:

1) Enterprise privacy – only qualified vendors can follow $walmart or $cisco. This could be a simpler enterprise solution to Yammer.

2) Loyalty programs and coupon distribution. Registered followers of $officedepot can redeem coupons or check out using a QR code off their mobile Twitter feed.

3) Leverage Twitter lists to curate $business feeds into directories. For example, The geographical hashtag *SOMA_San Francisco can develop lists of $businesses by category: companies, restaurants, things to do, etc. To make it easy $businesses would be able to include themselves on these kinds of lists (included in the fee arrangement) via an online self service page. Granular local curation is powerful, CRM systems can be overlaid across curated data.

There’s more

Twitter can continue to create categorical extensions with hashtags. For example, Twitter might develop a Quora.com alternative of their Q&A framework by having the Twitter community ask questions and provide answers to Twitter created feeds that mirror Quora topics like ?obama, ?socialmedia, ?Twitter, ?Twitter(company), ?PaloAlto, all preceded by the “?”.

Now Twitter can develop a comprehensive hashtag strategy:

* = geographies, places

$ = business

? = topics where Twitterers can ask questions  along the same lines as Quora

It would be best to limit the number of hashtags that Twitter employs simply due to confusion, but the hashtags for the three categories above are intuitive.

Related: A New Local Business Model for Twitter

Since Twitter is finding it difficult to create a bona fide business model based on its platform alone, they should look into developing broad new applications based on Twitter

First, look at what Twitter does best: breaking news. The Twitter platform is natural for disseminating local news right down to the neighborhood level. Ev Williams has discussed this before: “Twitter to start serving local news to users – March 7, 2009“, but the lack of a viable revenue model has crimped the execution.

Twitter has had the opportunity to own social local market for a couple of years, but now Google “Google Exec: Local is our Top Focus – Dec 8, 2010” and Facebook “Facebook’s Emily White details Local Efforts – Dec 10, 2010” are hard charging into local; not to mention Groupon’s potential $950 million war chest. It’s crunchtime.

So here’s a recipe for building a local business model based on Twitter:

1) Twitter first creates a series of geographical Twitter accounts with a new Twitter name coding system that uses, say *, instead of @. For example, *Berkeley_CA or *Boston_MA. Start with metro areas and expand into smaller cities: *Waltham_MA and neighborhoods: *BackBay_Boston.

2) Each *Twitter account curates the best Twitter feeds within the geography, and is automatically set to retweet local feeds with the type of local information that communities want to see: News, Things to Do, and Deals. Curation is best done manually on-the-ground by a local; this person could be recruited as a volunteer who wants to serve their community in the same way About.com populated their experts. The *Twitter feed would look something like this:

3) The third step is the key departure to Twitter’s general strategy – building a Twitter based application (note Evan Williams doesn’t mention anything like this in his October “What’s next for Twitter” interview). Twitter should build hyperlocal websites similar to Patch.com for each *Geography, and create an automated overlay similar to http://paper.li/breakingsfnews/community-news or FlipBoard:

4) The final ingredient is monetization. Just like Patch, Twitter can now build a national network of hyperlocal websites without the HR expense of hiring editors. They can now leverage their local media presence to deliver Deals and coupon based advertising. By using deal syndication networks, Twitter won’t even need to hire a massive local sales force.

“Twitter : One-to-many real time broadcast”

from Mary Meeker, Web 2.0 presentation, November 16, 2010

Twitter has evolved into an efficient online broadcast media that it was destined to be. In fact, Twitter has become a broadcast platform akin to any communication media – i.e. radio or TV. It’s a utility. It’s the reason why Twitter struggles with creating a business model.

Typical utilities charge for usage or bandwidth. Electricity is metered, TV air time is brokered. Twitter doesn’t have a business model in place that creates a simple to explain recurring revenue model They have tried advertising models, even pulled a Daily Deal model called @earlybird because its users apparently thought copying Groupon wasn’t in the innovative spirit of Twitter, but realized the social media doesn’t tolerate 140-character ads. I’m sure they have deconstructed every pay-per-use models like API usage fees or user subscriptions. It’s hard to even name an independent Twitter app that has a business model beyond the freemium model. If one evolved that made consistent money, Twitter would have copied it (for now they copy the functionality of other non-revenue models like Seesmic).

The business beneficiaries of Twitter are simply the brands (and everybody is essentially a brand on Twitter) who use Twitter as the most efficient means of reaching and communicating with a mass audience of even millions. No other social network does this as efficiently because they are either closed (Facebook) or too niche focused (Yelp). Twitter remains enigmatic among social networks.

Techcrunch posted this video interview in which Twitter product manager Shiva Rajaraman discusses how Twitter using its @earlybird couponing channel can work with brands to offer perishable deals on the fly (something we discussed last week):

At first blush, Twitter faces three hurdles:

1. @earlybird is positioned as another Groupon/LivingSocial/BuywithMe/etc., and couponing is becoming commoditized. So far, @earlybird hasn’t differentiated itself to be anything other than a Groupon clone.
2. Brands can leverage Twitter (the platform) itself to develop perishable deal opportunities; companies or ad agencies don’t need to contract with Twitter for additional advertising leverage, they can contract more efficiently with the appropriate media channel. Twitter remains the platform but isn’t necessarily the ad distribution media. For example, real time perishable deals, like same day hotel rooms or air travel, or concert tickets, are generally localized opportunities. It makes more sense to work with hyperlocal media channels and their Twitter feeds to offer these kinds of deals to a market.
3. Following up on 2), Twitter and @earlybird are essentially national channels. @earlybird will be best positioned to offer deals for global, not local coverage. Although Rajaraman offers examples on how brands can potentially create on the fly campaigns, it’s hard to imagine any ad agency or corporation being able to sign off quickly on an instant national deals. Again, on the fly deals work best on a local level.

Get ready for the commercial social media...

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The latest Facebook metrics are powerful: 400 million active users (7% of the world), 50% of them logging on each day and spending more than 55 minutes daily on Facebook.

The sudden concentration of traffic on the social media led by Facebook has caught business by surprise. In particular, small and local businesses don’t quite realize their consumer is now spending a majority of their time on the social media, but they continue to rely on the old online standard: their website. Websites and blogs are critical as marketing collateral, but local businesses need to develop an online marketing presence that spans across the social media ubiquitously.

With all the buzz around Foursquare and Gowalla, why is hyperlocal media suddenly hot? Geolocation is changing the social media by providing nothing more than the tagging mechanism to define social networks by localities. Geolocation facilitates the development of a new, more practical, more intimate Twitter/Foursquare network of friends who just happen to be living down the street. It’s far more compelling to build a social network of folks you can have coffee with than the national networks than generally evolve in Twitter and Linkedin. I myself see this… I am starting to socialize with San Franciscans…

The Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunity

So we’re seeing social apps like Twitter and Yelp quickly adopting location “check-in” functionality, with Facebook in the wings. And this presents a huge opportunity. It’s a no-brainer for local retailers and businesses to see that they need to provide the most effective online venue for their local customers to “check-in” to. The new local “websites” are the Facebook business page, the new local advertising vehicle is the Twitter coupon, and the new reviews column is Yelp.

You haven’t seen them yet, but Facebook is primed to evolve into a massive Sunday advertising circular for local businesses:

And why not? It’s free. Enterprising local media publishers (for example, Breaking News sites) will curate and compile these merchants into local online directories.

Twitter will develop hyperlocal couponing systems that will be online equivalents of PennySaver coupons and Valpak:

And why not? It’s free. Couponing is effective because it is perceived by consumers as “found money” while straight advertising may now be considered “spammy”. You’ll see the advent of new local social media based advertising agencies that will create turnkey Twitter / Facebook / Foursquare couponing campaigns for merchants. And these campaigns will be accepted because online data is more efficient for tracking and analysis than traditional advertising channels like radio / TV or inefficient direct mail offerings like PennySaver. There is a defined ROI.

Conclusion

2009 was the year when the masses found Twitter and Facebook. 2010 will be the year when local business begins to recognize the power of leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare et al to achieve a level of community engagement that standard “one-way message” advertising can’t achieve. It’s about being ubiquitous across the social media so your community of customers can find your services via their preferred channels – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Related slideshow: Ubiquity marketing (Jan. 2010)

Related webinar: I’ll be discussing “The Impact of Geolocational Media” on the Virtual Bar Camp April 6 at 2:15pm, Room #4. Register and join our discussion.

The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news media that will continue to grow in influence.

The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.

The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).

Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source.  If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.

Based on the web statistics presented in the previous slideshow, I’ve been asked for reasons why breaking local news receives 15+ clickthroughs per tweet across Breaking News Network city sites. With a little analysis, we discovered that the Breaking News sites are generally the first to tweet out a newly published article from local news media sources.

Entrepreneurs and web designers launched a slew of social real estate applications over the past two years – literally hundreds of social networks devoted to real estate, multi-author real estate blog/magazines, and a variety of listings sites. Most of these sites still plod along with plateau traffic volume.

Even a year ago, it may have seemed like a great idea to build a social application for the real estate niche, but today’s reality is a niche application can’t build any critical mass versus an established “elephant” competitor. Today, my good friend Deb Madey gave me the idea for this article in a discussion of various real estate agent review sites. Yelp, by virtue of the sheer numbers of reviews of real estate agents eclipses any smaller niche review site that have little traffic, few reviews,  and are hard to find. Social media user bases are consolidating to the biggest player in each space, simply because everybody is there. Facebook reportedly has an overwhelming 25% page view share and a hardy few can remember the names of Twitter’s early competitors.

This trend is one more strike against startups. Fast growing apps like Foursquare and Gowalla can hit a wall when (not if!) Yelp copies its features, like it did with Foursquare’s location “Check-in” feature. Twitter have implied that their strategy is to add geolocation features that may also rival Yelp and Foursquare.

It’s now harder to be a game changer when the rules of the game called social media are solidifying / consolidating. Two years ago, no social network really dominated its niche… now lines are being drawn.

We’ve often discussed how Twitter is positioned to become a hyperlocal advertising platform. 140-character sound bite based ad messages, particularly consumer friendly coupon and discount deals, can be targeted to a community and it’s free.

Here are three new examples of Twitter based local advertising models:

1) Mashable introduced Postabon yesterday. Simplicity is the key to finding local deals. Postabon, currently operative only in New York City, displays deals on a map and allows the community of users to rate them. Very straightforward.

Users need to log in to Postabon to submit their deals with time frame parameters:

2) Edhat is an independent Santa Barbara news service that has created Twitter-like ad banners for sale to local merchants:

Edhat offers advertisers to “put your Twitter tweets on Edhat” which points to eventually developing a self-service ad banner platform where the message can change based on the tweets the advertiser broadcasts.

Local Twitter ads can be automated AND free

Postabon requires that advertisers login and “post” their deals on site. The deal posting process would be much simpler if advertisers could simply tweet their deals automatically through Postabon, and not bother with the login process and manual input. Edhat has an advertising based business model, so it’s not free.

3) Breaking Seattle News, A2BreakingNews and other Breaking News sites have added Daily Deals and a Daily Blue Plate Specials page that allows local advertisers to tweet their deals automatically and free.

All they need to do is to get added onto the Twitter List for Daily Deals on each Breaking News Network city site simply by tweet request. If the Breaking News site doesn’t have a Daily Deals page, ask for it at #dailydeals.

Twitter Lists simplifies the aggregation of local deals and discount coupons so that any individual or organization can provide helpful information to their community.