Why Twitter May Never Be Financially Viable

Leave a Comment

spacer

spacer

spacer

Tara Hunt, Author/Startup Founder @missrogue

Tara Hunt, author of The Power of Social Networking: Using the Whuffie Factor to Build Your Business, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss the borderless world of the social web, monetizing Twitter, and why she unfriended her boyfriend on Pinterest.

Read on for some of the highlights or listen below for the full podcast.

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:
 

Download the audio file:

socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/b6qcq9/SocialProsEpisode45.mp3

The RSS feed is: feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast

Find us on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy).

Social Pros Highlights For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

spacer

A Boggsian Prelude

Jay: Your company Argyle Social was originally named such because of the North Carolina argyle uniform pattern, I believe. But now you’re no longer at Argyle Social, you’re off to do other Eric Boggs-ian things.

spacer

Eric Boggs on how to shoot a basketball.

Eric: That is true. It’s kind of funny. People would ask us about the name of the company and it really was that we named the company after the Carolina Tar Heels basketball uniforms, and my best partner Adam Covati was okay with it.

I have ended my day-to-day role as the CEO of Argyle. The team and the investors and I are all still on good terms, and of course I wish the company nothing but continued success. I’m going to be taking some time off, reading some books to my son, and doing a bit of freelance social media and marketing and sales consulting type stuff, and kind of stepping into the great beyond. And it’s exciting to figure out what’s next.

Jay: And a new addition to the Eric Boggs family is also on the way.

Eric: Yeah, we got some really exciting news this morning that we’re having a baby girl in May. So change all around at the Boggs household for sure.

Jay: You now have two fifths of a basketball team.

Eric: Hopefully either my son or my daughter will be like some six foot, eight Lebron James-esq player and we can just be good enough with one. But the odds are long on that. I was pretty slow when I played. I was a chucker and I’m still a chucker. I was pretty good when I was in high school and I was even better when I was in college, but yeah, athleticism was never my forte.

Jay: We need to find a YouTube video of Eric Boggs shooting crazy 25 foot jump shots somewhere out there. Surely it exists.

Eric: There is actually a YouTube video of me talking about shooting a basketball.

Accumulating the Whuffie Factor

Jay: We do have an amazing guest on this week’s show Tara Hunt who was actually really, really good at social media before the word was actually coined. An absolute pioneer, a visionary in the industry, also the single most impressive person to ever come out of Saskatoon, thank you very much for being on this very special of Social Pros.

You have been kind of all-around North America in the last couple three years right? You were in Montreal and then you were in San Francisco but now back in Canada. You’ve sort of done that cross-border circumstance.

Tara: Yeah. So I sort of did a zig zag. I started in Calgary where I went to university and had my first business and then moved to Toronto and then over zig zag again to San Francisco and now in Montreal finally. So I like to do cross country moves. They tend to somehow happen for me rather than something simple like couple cities over.

Jay: Do you find that the social media community differs quite a bit from city to city? San Francisco’s probably an outlier because it’s home base to so many of the technology companies that power all this, but do you find that it’s a big difference depending on where you are at?

Tara: I guess it depends on how advanced each community is. They’re way ahead of the game in San Francisco versus other places. In general I think we’re creating an online nation where we’re coming together and sharing a lot of the same values in the way that we approach the world. And so I find a lot of the characteristics go across locations.

spacer Even when I’ve traveled to various conferences around the world, the people that spend a lot of time online and in social media tend to share a lot of the same hopes and dreams and frustrations as you and I in North America.

Jay: That’s one of the premises of your outstanding book, The Whuffie Factor. If you have not read it, Social Pros listeners, you absolutely need to buy and read it. It is a foundational text in the world of social media and personal influence.

One of the premises is that if you are a good person and you area a helpful person, you will accumulate – whuffie is what you call it – that personal trust. You can be influential outside of your geography now using technologies in ways that were unthinkable, even ten years ago.

Tara: Oh absolutely. First of all, social media broke down the whole process of raising your influence and being heard by an audience of people. It gives regular people the tools and takes away any gatekeepers that previously stood in the way of us growing an audience and then, yeah, it feels like a borderless world.

There are a few differences in language around the world, of course. Recently I did research on different fashion bloggers around the world and there are really strong Asian markets of fashion bloggers, as well as Italian markets of fashion bloggers that have quite a large following in their language. We wouldn’t necessarily know about them in North America because they do not blog in English. So, they’re able to then to create a big following for themselves as well, even if they aren’t speaking the lingua franca of the web.

Social Graph vs. Interest Graph

Jay: And you were involved with fashion online with your startup Buyosphere, which is a place that people can ask for fashion advice and curate fashions using a very photocentric layout.

spacer

via Buyosphere

How do you feel about that kind of interest-based site where people are coming together based on a particular topic, in this case fashion, as opposed to people coming together on a broader channel like Facebook? How do you see that social graph versus interest graph push/pull playing out over time?

Tara: The social graph has been amazing in ways of connecting us to old friends and keeping us valiantly connected to people that we meet along the way and that we share interests with. But I noticed this many years ago when I was using Last.fm, for instance, that when it comes to personal tastes and style, that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the kind of people that you like to hang out with on a daily basis.

We hang out with all sorts of people with all sorts of different style profiles. I have a lot of friends that like to wear jeans and t-shirts and I myself am a little more eclectic, whimsical dressing. They don’t like me any less. I don’t like them any less. It’s just the way it is.

When I connect with somebody online, I’m going to want to connect with people with the same fashion tastes, the same interests that I have on that side. There are a lot of sites now that are showing how valuable the interest graph alongside the social graph, and Pinterest is one of those sites.

Jay: Well doesn’t Pinterest straddle both because it’s broad enough now that it does tap into a social graph, and it’s an interest graph? It’s sort of a collection of interests graphs that make a social graph, now that it’s getting so broad.

Tara: I haven’t done any rigorous data collection on this subject, but what I have heard anecdotally over again and over again is people saying that they’ll unfolllow their best friends because they’re “polluting” their visual stream. I myself will follow people that, I just have come across a couple pins that are beautiful. I don’t know anything about them personally, but I do love their pins and when I open my Pinterest page, it better look beautiful. I actually unfollowed my boyfriend, Carl, last week.

Eric: Tara, you’ve hit on an interesting point. I have followed people on Twitter also, but to me the thing that surprises me is how closely I’ll follow complete strangers that I’ve never spoken to in real life because of some sort of overlap that we have.

Jay: The overlap is topical, right Eric? I’ve seen data that shows that a significant percentage of many people’s Facebook connections are people you went to high school with, people you went to college with, or people in your town.

And so it’s that shared history – or to some degree shared place – that connects people together on Facebook, whereas to some degree Twitter, definitely Pinterest, and certainly more micro-interest networks like Buyosphere are not about those historical connections but more about, “What can you do for me today?” And that’s how you ended up unfriending your own boyfriend.

Eric: Even taking that a step further, I read a personal blog post about Facebook being this anchor of some past identity because you’re there with your friends from high school or your friends from your hometown where you were a different person than you are today. They know the you of the past, whereas on these newer sites there tends to be more of a create-as-you-go. You are your last 30 tweets or your last 30 pins. That creates a different dynamic too.

Tara: I look at it similarly but a little bit shifted time wise. I said, I wrote a post on this a little while ago and I said, “Facebook is who you are but Pinterest is who you aspire to be.” So, people will pin like these gorgeous beach houses that they’ll laugh in the comment and say, “Okay. I’ll never be able to afford this but, oh my God. This is my dream.” Whereas on Facebook, you’ll be talking about your current renovations or you just got engaged or what you ate for dinner at that fancy restaurant. That sort of thing.

Twitter: A Social Force and A Public Utility?

Jay: What is your take on what Twitter has done so far to monetize their system? Where they’re going and whether or not that’s going to be a plus or a minus for users?

Tara: This is something I actually have thought about a lot, actually from the beginning because I’ve been a Twitter fan since before it had vowels. I’ve been a big fan of the medium and the simplicity of it for a long time. But, I’ve always wondered because I know it’s an expensive business to run, even though most of the data is text based, even as simple as it is. And their efforts to monetize it, through sponsored tweets, sponsored hastags, the various different branded, the branded subject pages.

There is a lot of potential for making money, but because it’s such an expensive business to run, there’s a ceiling to their potential on making money. But there doesn’t seem to be a ceiling on the amount of money that they’re going to be spending to make that business continue to function.

When Jay and I started talking about being on this podcast, I’d just crunched a bunch of numbers, and no matter how I was crunching the numbers, Twitter was never going to be the size of business that Facebook is. But the thing is it has a bigger social impact than Facebook has.

You don’t need to have a smartphone to interact with it. It’s aided revolutions around the world. The social impact is humungous but maybe they, internally, know a bit better about what they can do. Somebody on Twitter suggested that they embed affiliate links, but I’ve done a lot of research on that side of things, and even if they were to parse out every single product that is linked and were able to collect certain affiliate revenue from it, it still wouldn’t sustain the network.

Jay