(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *)

Posted by brian tiong at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

People generally love sharing things, and Twitter has made broadcasting updates to anyone who cares to care on what you’re doing, wearing, reading, commenting on, eating, using, etc. a breeze; in 140 characters or less, even. It’s only natural to see so many users also share which music they are listening to at any given moment on Twitter, as this has been a fairly popular use of status feeds on other social networking and communication services for years (Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger leap to mind).

Here’s a number of ways to use Twitter for just about anything related to music:

* Blip.fm - dubbed the “Twitter for Music” when we first reviewed the service, it got its own API in late 2008. Blip.fm enables anyone to start their own music station and broadcast tunes to Twitter and other status sharing services where people can interact with the choice of music.

* Twiturm does much of the same - upload music and share it with all your Twitter followers in a heartbeat. Intended for artists who want to share their own music, hence the name (”Twitter Ur Music”).

* Twisten.fm - Escape Media Group linked its music discovery service Grooveshark and its URL shortening service TinySong with an application that crawls Twitter for messages about music (and “then you listen to them”).

* Twt.fm (anyone see a naming pattern here?) - type in an artist, track, and your twitter username. Twt.fm will then generate a track page for you using your twitter page design and you’ll be able to tweet it to your followers.

* Tweetj - include a #tweetj tag in your tweets when you’re listening to music and it’ll be posted to a public playlist. The playlist allows you to discover new music and immediately purchase tracks on Amazon.

* A similar service is WiiZZZ (yes, that’s the actual name) - it allows you to listen to entirely random songs that have been posted and shared by Twitter users on any given day.

* Play Twitter - allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on Twitter or Identi.ca. MP3 links will automatically become playable right on the page.

* Tra.kz - this “URL shortener for all things music” was cooked up by MixMatchMusic and does exactly what you suspect it would do and therefore competes with the above mentioned TinySong and alternatives like Song.ly.

* TwittyTunes - Firefox extension that comes with another Firefox extension, Yahoo’s FoxyTunes, and allows you to instantly post your currently playing songs to Twitter with just a click.

* LastTweet - enables you to embed a widget with your latest tweets into your Last.fm profile

Also worth checking out, even if not directly related to Twitter: Nabbit (”connects your cellphone to your radio”), MuseBin (music news and reviews in 140 characters, like Blippr but music only) and Twones (the “social music feed”).

Did I miss any other apps, tools and websites worth noting?

Share them in the comments and I’ll be happy to update the post.

Update: it’s not Twitter-specific, but you can use Favtape to put together your own playlists / online mixtapes and share them on Twitter.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

This is what you get when you use a slick tool like Wordle (try it!) to run all the words used to make up the Terms of Service agreements of seven notable internet companies: cool visualizations that somewhat capture the essence of their content.

Pointless? Very. Cool? Definitely.

Here’s how Facebook’s Terms of Use agreement comes out (at least for now):

Yahoo (Terms of Service)

Digg (Terms of Use)

Google (Terms of Service)

Twitter (Terms of Service)

MySpace (Terms of Use)

YouTube (Terms of Service)

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(* Source: Lee Ryan *)

Lee says...

I noticed recently that there was new material uploaded recently about youth, including youth in Asia. I am not sure about the term millenials (which may or may not have two n’s). Some things don’t change - youth consistently have the same core requirement of this lifestage - to both fit in and stand out, and as a client commented to me after a global presentation - “Youth are always bored.” Last year i was in a home in Ho Chí Minh observing a teenager take us through her media collection, and there were connections for me with Catcher in the Rye (it’s amazing what a yahoo 360 site can trigger). Yet observing youth in the same city in internet cafes playing some extraordinary blend of Karaoke and dancing games reminded me of nothing else in the world. Expressions of different needs are constantly changing, and it’s always intriguing to see what are the emergent trends and regional & country differences.

So again - i have compiled a collection of links and sites on the basis of where i would send some young qualitative researchers. It is work by people in their industry, and it ranges from global to Asia. Some of it is a bit older because i believe the site has some good thinking. I have tried to choose a range of different examples. Please comment if you can add to the list (click on post title and scroll to the end of post to add comment). If you haven’t already seen it scroll down to see the deck on slideshare about Korean B Boys and audience 2.0 (thanks Guy for this link).

Digital Youth Research is an academic research project carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California exploring how kids use digital media in their everyday lives. The research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth digital media use to date. They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. Key highlights are available on the site.

Danah Boyd has also investigated how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube which has caused some discussion on the net.

Flamingo is an international qualitative research consultancy and youth is one of their specialisms. They have some excellent pieces in their Thinking section.

Barking Robot by Derek Baird, was voted by mobileYouth as a top marketing youth blogger as was Paul MacGregorand Lisa Li Yi.

Universal Mccann research into social media, uploaded to slideshare regularly provides rich sources of data on young people

Insites Consulting has some interesting updates around their work with youth including a piece about authenticity, and their explorations with netnography. Useful because of their attention to methodology

Being Young Ian Stewart has released some excellent pieces from his time at MTV, on widgets, a fundamental piece about trends in Asia from a couple of years ago, and of course on music matters..

Posted by brian tiong at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *)

Erik reports...

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

Whether you want to know how people are mentally gearing up for this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or what they are thinking about today’s Ireland vs. Italy rugby match, searching Twitter will give you a pretty good smattering of sentiment and opinion. It is also a lot faster at getting out the essential details about breaking news, such as the Mumbai attacks or the plane that landed on the Hudson.

Twitter’s search engine is powered by Summize, a startup it acquired last July. But it also developed a feature called Track, currently disabled but coming back soon, that allowed people to follow the mention of specified keywords. John Borthwick, an investor in Summize (and thus now an investor in Twitter), explained in a blog post earlier this month ago why he thinks that “Twitter search changes everything.” Excerpt:

Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.

. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,” “Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.

Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:

If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.

Doing that would require Google to “affirm Twitter’s dominance in this category and the importance of the Twitter data stream,” contends Borthwick. But so far, Google has pretty much flubbed this opportunity to open up real-time search. It bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, only to shut it down. And now it is hoping to create a counterweight to Twitter’s growing strength in real-time data by open-sourcing Jaiku. Good luck with that one.

Listening to Twitter’s investors gives a good sense of how they think Twitter can become a game-changer in real-time search. While it is instructive, it is also important to note that much of this vision has yet to materialize. Twitter’s current search is extremely crude, as Borthwick readily admits. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. There is no ranking or clustering beyond that.

An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.

Posted by brian tiong at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.

So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.

Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years - it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.

And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0″ doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.

Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered - relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time - gives an even better overview:

Posted by brian tiong at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)

Jason reports...

In an effort to monetize the growing number of music videos on its site, MySpace has just launched a new pilot advertising initiative that places attractive overlays at the bottom of some clips, allowing users to buy the song they’re listening to or immediately jump to the artist’s homepage.

The new initiative stems from MySpace’s partnership with Auditude, a content detection and management company that can identify copyrighted content and serve relevant advertising, even on user-submitted video. Now Auditude is applying the technology to music videos, which in the past have largely relied on banner ads and static text links to music stores for monetization.

On Wednesday the site, in a partnership with Warner Music Group, placed an overlay ad on a video for My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row. Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos. Today the site began displaying advertising on U2’s new single Get On Your Boots, with plans to expand the program more broadly in the near future.

Much of the overlay’s success probably stems from the fact that it doesn’t look too much like an ad - it actually shows informative content like the album the song came from, the year it was released, and a link to the artist’s profile. I wouldn’t say I like having it there, but MySpace could have done a lot worse. And frankly in the current economic climate it’s encouraging when companies can find advertising methods that actually work without being ridiculously annoying.

YouTube launched a similar program three weeks ago, allowing content owners to insert overlays for products into their videos (MySpace’s overlays are significantly more attractive, but they both serve the same purpose). YouTube wouldn’t provide any exact numbers, but a representative confirmed that in general the site has seen significantly improved clickthrough rates when ads are embedded in videos themselves, as opposed to appearing in surrounding banner ads.

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(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)

Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, and while you’ve still got plenty of time to stock up on chocolates and other goodies, come February 14th there’s a good chance you’ll have forgotten about the big day entirely. That is, until your dearly beloved springs an incredibly thoughtful gift on you and you’re left wondering if you can somehow regift the Tony Bennett CD sitting in your closet without getting caught.

Fortunately, Animoto has you covered. The site has put together a new Valentine’s Day card that allows you to submit a handful of photos of you and your loved one to automatically a generate a great looking video-slideshow set to the music of an appropriately sappy love song. It only takes a few minutes to put together, but to anyone who hasn’t been exposed to Animoto before it’s pretty impressive - at least, it’ll buy you enough time to run down to the store and grab something a bit more tangible.

In conjunction with the launch, Animoto has also announced that users will now be able to include stock imagery in all of their slideshows (not just the Valentine’s ones) through a partnership with iStockphoto, which could come in handy if you don’t have pictures of roses and hearts lying around.

Check out a sample video here

Posted by brian tiong at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 (* Source: Valeria Maltoni *)

The news business is not what it used to be - with digital media, it's much closer to the people who read and comment on the news these days than (almost) to the action. In fact, when it comes to Twitter, it is often the people (formerly known as audience) who find themselves in the middle of the action and who do the reporting.

Business Week

Twitter Name: @johnabyrne

Media Person: John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief, BusinessWeek.com. I met John in 2003 when he was editor-in-chief of Fast Company magazine and had the opportunity to spend time with him at FC Real Time conference as well as the magazine in NYC. John is a good listener and learns fast. I'm not surprised that he'd become comfortable on Twitter so quickly. His stream is a good mix of reporting from events, personal interaction, and highlights from BusinessWeek.com. I published an interview with John here a few months ago.

Stats: follows 1,256 / 5,946 followers / 1,847 updates

The rest of the organization: There are many other journalists and editors from BusinessWeek.com on Twitter (you will find them on the wiki linked above). This is an organization that has really started participating in a distributed fashion stretching from blogs now onto a different, public platform. Update: here's the twittering gang from BusinessWeek.

One thing: the one differentiating characteristic of John's stream is pointing out the day's "most-read" story at BW.com.

TechCrunch

Twitter Name: @TechCrunch

Media Person: Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. This is a startup and tech news blog network. Michael Arrington has announced that he is "taking a break" from blogging on TechCrunch.

Stats: follows 557 / 54,427 followers / 6,595 updates

The rest of the organization: Erik Schonfeld, co-editor at Tech Crunch is also on Twitter.

One thing: TechCrunch breaks a lot of news on technology. Yesterday, for example, we were barely realizing that Google has a problem and the site already had 122 comments on a post about Google flagging the whole Internet as malware.

Wonkette

Twitter Name: @anamariecox

Media Person: Ana Marie Cox,is a Wonkette emerita, political junkie, self-hating journalist and occasional grown-up. That's how she describes herself on her personal blog. She used to blog at Time, and that is what caught my attention at first. Then I spent more time reading her work and was pulled in by her style.

Stats: follows 151 / 17,888 followers / 1,916 updates

The rest of the organization: Perhaps a news publication is looking into enrolling her help with their digital property.

One thing: Her Twitter style is very conversational.

MarketingProfs

Twitter Name: @marketingprofs

Media Person: Ann Handley, editor or head of content as she puts it, Marketing Profs, where she also wrangles a team of bloggers of which I am part. This reminds me I ought to write something for the DF soon, before I get booted out. I interviewed Ann for this site as well.

Stats: follows 14,230 / 14,075 followers / 7,147 updates

The rest of the organization: Marketing Profs is a fine online publication and I was lucky enough to meet some of the people who make it possible at the B2B Forum in Boston last June. I like the idea of making the content come alive with events.

One thing: In addition to the great sense of humor, Ann is a community builder. It is clear from her tweets that she enjoys highlighting the good work of others.

GigaOm

Twitter Name: @om

Media Person: Om Malik, founder and senior writer, GigaOm. Malik was a senior writer for Business 2.0 where he focused on broadband and its impact on our lives and prior to that senior writer at Red Herring where he focused on telecommunications. He was part of the founding team at Forbes.com. That's quite a bio. I smile at myself. The first time I linked to GigaOm, I had no idea of who he was. I was observing his reporting skills in a post I wrote about the Skype Outage. Then I wised up and concluded that his reporting was better than the WSJ.

Stats: follows 528/ 17,420 followers / 2,712 updates

The rest of the organization: The Network of sites provide one of the leading daily online news reads for the key influencers in the emerging technology market place. As you can see from the tweet here, the team members from GigaOm are on Twitter. Looking at the team bios, I cannot help but think that indeed new media publications is where many journalists may find continuity to their work.

One thing: Malik retweets and shares a lot with others on Twitter. He is someone I would enjoy meeting for sure.

Posted by brian tiong at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Marketing Charts *)

Though top marketing execs believe that good customer experiences and positive word-of-mouth can increase loyalty and brand value, they admit that their companies are failing to properly integrate customer voice and experience into key business and marketing processes, according to a new study by the CMO Council, sponsored by Satmetrix.

The study, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume,” reveals that 38% of the 480 senior marketers surveyed say their companies have no programs in place to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth among customers and only 29% say their companies rate highly in their ability handle and resolve customer problems or complaints:

Moeover, 58% say their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics.

Deficiencies Detract from Brand Value

The study found that though many companies realize the importance of  collecting feedback from customers in various ways - including online, there are several critical deficiencies in the way they measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth.

The CMO Council cites the following shortcomings:

• Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization.
• Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities.
• Lack of internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy.
• Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities.
• Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains.

Customer Interactions Viewed as ‘Problems’

Customer listening, learning and leveling are critical qualities that need to be part of an institutionalized corporate culture, the CMO Council said. Yet, survey data demonstrates that most companies treat customer interactions around service situations and incidents only as problems that need quick resolution:

• Just more than one-third (38%) of companies gather customer insight from customer engagement situations.
• Less than one-third (32%) look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 15% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.
• Less than two in 10 (17%) use customer interaction opportunities to identify and cultivate potential champions and advocates.

CMOs See Customer Experience as Important

While companies have a long way to go in turning detractors into brand advocates, senior marketers are clearly aware of the importance of customer experience, the CMO Council said. In fact, an overwhelming 83% of respondents said it is either “essential” or “increasingly important” to have consumers as such advocates. In addition, 84% said positive customer experiences and word of mouth have helped their brands and businesses grow, while 44% of respondents admitted that high-profile negative customer experiences had at some point compromised their brands.

Companies Getting Better at Listening

While only 31% of marketing execs rate their company’s commitment to customer listening highly, another 35% say it is “getting better:”

In terms of taking steps to better integrate and analyze customer data in recent years, nearly half (45%) of respondents say they have done this, while 34% have not. Among ways companies have tried to improve:

• 39% say they have increased personalization and intimacy in their customer communications.
• 20% say they have embraced intelligent internet analytics
• 18% are capturing real-time information at the “point of pain.”

Other  findings from the study:

• Nearly two-thirds of companies do not have a formal Voice of Customer program in place.
• Only 13% of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback.
• While 74% say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23% say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages.
• The majority (58%) of marketing execs say that the internet and social networks have changed customer expectations for their brand, but only 14.5% track word of mouth on the internet.

• Only 12% are using a word-of-mouth marketing platform to drive online customer advocacy.

“Customer experience is one of the most critical determinants of brand strength and business growth. Yet, most organizations and senior marketers suffer from major blind spots and gaps in the way they interact, handle and respond to customer issues or problems,” said CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May. “CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement. We are missing a major opportunity to turn customer pain into competitive gain at every touch point through better use of web and contact center technologies and processes.”

Posted by brian tiong at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)