October 2, 2009

Delete Your Facebook Fanpage—Now

I’m tired of people who pitch social media marketing as a way to make sales. Either they aren’t measuring the results they get for clients, or they don’t care. Every good case study is either about how someone used a famous friend’s endorsement to make new sales, or how they made a tiny number of low-profit transactions they probably would have made anyway.

I hate pitching social media marketing—but I still do it, because it does serve a purpose. But the most important part of the pitch is the warning: if you follow the convention wisdom, your social media presence is almost certainly costing you sales.

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September 4, 2009

Steganographic Typo-Based URL Shorteners: Add a Link With Zero New Characters

Watch out, j.mp! Back off, tinyarro.ws. You can shorten a URL down to zero characters by steganographically embedding it into the text. Think of it this way: how many potential typos could be autocorrected for a given sentence? You’ve got the off-by-one errors, like “typ[“, the random capitalization errors (“tYpo”), transpositions (“tyop”), and full-word off-by-ones (“yu[p”). The word “typo” alone has:

  • 24 off-by-one-character potential typos.
  • 9 random capitalization errors (discard all-caps and capitalize first letters).
  • 3 transpositions.
  • 6 full-word off-by-one errors.

This gives you 42 unique ways to misspell typo, and in all cases it’s fairly easy to determine that the original word was “typo.”

What I’d like to propose is a service that uses typos to encode URLs. You visit a site, input your tweet and URL, and get, as an output, a tweet with a strategically insert typo (or typos). Someone who sees this tweet can input the text into the site, and get the URL that’s mapped to that particular set of typos.

Imagine! Instead of reading something lame and garbled like:

@ev this is a neat microblogging service: http://bit.ly/xE2sK

You could say something clean and space-saving, like:

@ev yjod iS a neta micRolbohhing sevriCe:

Don’t think of it as transmitting 140 characters at a time—think of it as transmitting 1140 bits—meaning there are far, far more potential unique tweets than there are atoms in the universe.

(Note: I have no interest in implementing a steganographic URL shortener, but it might be an interesting exercise. It’s probably possible to have an effectively infinite number of embedable URLs without making things unreadable. Maybe adding some backend analytics could tell you which typos result in a click-through and which don’t. If anyone does anything like this, please let me know.)

August 31, 2009

Twitter is Overhyped—Which is Why It Will Succeed

In April, I decided Yelp would Make It. They’re growing fast (like lots of companies that tank), they’re offering a fun product (like about half a dozen competitors in their own industry), and their users love them (like, oh, everybody). But what Yelp did in April was simpler: they hired Cuil’s former PR guy. Cuil pulled off the PR coup of the decade when they managed to get portrayed as the Next Big Thing for about a week.

That’s the kind of advertising you can’t buy. Which is why it’s too bad they didn’t get their money’s worth. Google deflated the announcement by beating Cuil’s numbers, and talking numbers down. But what really killed Cuil is that you can’t build anything on it. When you’re looking at platforms to build something on, the most overhyped is likely to win. Read the rest of this entry »

August 28, 2009

Metcalfe Was a Pessimist

The value of a network grows at roughly the square of the growth rate of the users. That makes sense for telephone networks—add one more user to a network, and the number of new connections available goes up by the number of existing users.

Classically, this breaks down because the first people to add it get the most out of it. Maybe a phone was crucial for the first few people to use it—but the next phone sold today is probably going to replace an old phone, replace borrowing somebody else’s phone, or complement an existing Skype connection.

But Metcalfe’s law can break in the opposite direction, and I think we’re seing that in social media. In fact, I think we’ll see a lot more of it. Read the rest of this entry »