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.

I have been discussing over the past half year a new paradigm for capturing committed loyal readership to websites using “Breaking News”. Consumers contemplating any major financial transaction based activity – real estate, securities, cars, even retail – need continual flow of real time news to evaluate when to pull the trigger on the transaction. They need a ticker tape to make intelligent decisions.

It’s natural for any company providing transaction based services to add relevant news feeds to serve their customers. Better yet, leverage the social media and get employees and partners of the company to contribute to breaking news.

Financial services

Financial services giant Fidelity just turned on their news feeds (h/t to Paul Kedrosky ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.

Financial services giant ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahooggggggggggggggggg Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

Real estate

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision. Homescopes is the first real estate site to “broadcast” local breaking news for the San Francisco Bay Area housing markets. I discuss Homescopes in detail at sister site Transparent Real Estate.

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision

Enterprises

Our company, Domus Consulting Group, is developing news feed systems (we call it the Social Broadcasting System ) for enterprises (it’s free!). We coach employees in using the System to distribute breaking news about their company and industry via the social media. We do this via our web conference based Social Media Marketing Workshops. You can find more information about our workshops from various participants’ blog posts, and see the Twitter based discussions here. You can register here or contact me.

Related articles:

Real estate brokerage sites and broadcast media
The social media system
How micro-blogging will affect blogging
The new broadcasting real estate website (slideshow)
The new broadcasting brokerage website (text version)
Creating the conversational web (slideshow)
The Social Broadcasting System ( a kind of white paper)

Wired magazine’s article last month Twitter, Flickr, Facebook makes Blogs look so 2004 posits the “death of blogging”.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The mainstream media now gets this. Once the principal creator of “content”, they are firing their journalists/reporters, and moving into news and data distribution. They realize they can still capture eyeballs by republishing, aggregating and delivering content and data, created in-house or user-generated. It’s not a lucrative as before, when MSM controlled the content and viewership, and charged SuperBowl rates, but then the wave of user-generated content forced their hands.

At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve postulated how blogging is changing in real estate because the objective of a real estate blog – lead generation for the real estate professional – is inconsistent with the act of writing a blog. The average real estate agent just wants to get a blog up quickly while doing as little work as possible. Now, creating exhaustive content isn’t the methodology, it’s distributing the real estate data and information that’s already out there quickly to their constituency. It makes the act of “blogging” much easier when you don’t have to write original and compelling content, something that is hard to do on a real estate blog. (Most real estate blogs discuss hyperlocal issues, which is essentially irrelevant to any reader who lives outside that real estate bloggers’ domain).

Related articles:

Is Blogging Dead?

Nine tips for real estate bloggers on the “new blog writing”