The Social Web Tastes Like a Rainbow

What’s the first thing you do when you need information on a company as a consumer or an investor? Check out the website of course (if you answered “Twitter”, you’re as far gone as I am!)

So it takes particularly iron-clad set of dangly bits to redirect your primary website to a branded page with Tweet results, but that’s what Mars candy company did with its Skittles website. The move was designed to connect and drive buzz amongst its core demographic (teens mostly). What makes the chewy fruity candy web experiment is its boldness – no mainstream marketer has embraced social media to such a great extent. Social media and news sites have already covered the chaos of course (The Wall Street Journal, Techcrunch, Mashable, and others), but there’s a small twist to this blog post. I’d like to contrast what Skittles is with lesser-known LessAccounting. The differences in Twitter strategy are worth writing a case study about. 

Social Media to Build a Brand: Contain the Rainbow

Some hail the Skittles move, while others think the move is foolhardy. There’s no question either way the message Skittles is sending. The message is “What consumers have to say about our brand is more important than what we have to say to you about our brand”. By any rational measure, the Skittles experiment went far off the corporate website paradigm very quickly. However, as marketer Dave Berkowitz notes, ”Skittles.com isn’t exactly a top destination online. Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends respectively report the most recent month’s Skittles.com unique visitors as 18,000, 15,000, and too few to track.” Apparently the bold action drove attention.

Image courtesy WSJ.com

The problem is the way this move was implemented. First of all, why Twitter? It doesn’t make much sense, considering the core teenage demographic spends more time on Myspace and Facebook than Twitter, which caters to an older (busier?) demographic. The other oddity is why Skittles didn’t create a more elegant API-based social media environment to filter out the garbage (“noise”).  When Skittles opened up the main branded website to Twitter, they created an environment ripe for pranksters and jokers to hijack the message. To illustrate, here is the result of a hastily created , lazy link to the Twitter search page:

 

PIcture courtesy of the L.A. Times

I doubt Skittles wanted the brand message to include soylent green. Or drug references:

By the middle of the day, Skittles switched over to a Facebook-powered main website link, with Twitter as an option one could navigate to using the “chatter” button. The results were similarly hilarious: 

Non-existent API integration and poor choice of venue took an otherwise smart idea and made Patrick’s quip the brand message for me, when I logged on to the Skittles website. One Twitter user’s analogy seems to summarize the situation for Skittles new website launch:

True enough. A bit of preparedness and a more elegant integration could have avoided Skittles the embarrassment.  the L.A. Times notes that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (@biz) agrees that the final product isn’t as innovative as it could be. “The implementation could be done in a more elegant way using our APIs,” Stone said in an e-mail, referring to the tools Twitter makes available to outside programmers. “We’ll get in touch with them and hopefully make some improvements.”

 

Social Media as a Competitive Weapon: Unleash the Horde

While Skittles should have controlled the message, LessAccounting understands the power of the social media chaos and launched social media as a competitive weapon. LessAccounting is a small business accounting package which competes with the larger, better established Quickbooks. As expected with a larger, entrenched competitor, a large user base is an asset. But that asset can also be a liability if leveraged by a savvy competitor who funnels Quickbooks complaints to a website called WeAllHateQuickbooks.

Here’s what happens when a company creates a portal delivering all discussions (complaints included) about a competitive product:

 

The above Tweet reads “Can someone walk me through Quickbooks? My memos are not printing on the checks again. Can’t remember the fix.”

Memos not printing on invoices? Sounds important, and may just warrant a deeper look when a bookkeeper or Financial professional might have otherwise picked up Quickbooks off the shelf at a local Staples. Even better, the bookkeeper can click on the Twitter user to speak directly to them about the problem and understand the limitations of the Quickbooks product. Brilliant.

I’m probably stirring up a hornet’s nest and will catch heat for this, but social media can also be used as an effective weapon. The key seems to be to deliver a raw, uncut and unedited message directly from frustrated customers using a competitive product. Contrast this with the Skittles brand-building exercise where filtering out the noise is critical. The genius of WeAllHateQuickbooks is authenticity – by design it encourages the accounting product market to search out and talk to people who are unhappy with the competing product.

 

Key Learnings 

Is the traditional corporate website dead? Yes and no – the corporate website as is today is dead, but will continue on in a different form. Corporate sites sans interactivity is quite likely to go the way of the dodo in the next few years as the GenY and millenial generations become more influential to marketers. These people are used to interaction and static websites are every bit as anachronistic to them as wind-up automobiles. There seems to be three key learnings to take away for marketers who need to get their corporate sites up to snuff quickly:

1. Know your demographic.  This should be obvious. Skittles should have targeted Myspace to attract younger social media participants. Instead they drove a good deal of conversation about the place of social media and corporate websites (not a bad thing but not really what Skittles was likely aiming for).

2. Contain the Rainbow to Build Brand Awareness. I’m a big proponent of not censoring conversations, but filtering out the jokesters and the noise is critical to providing a company’s customers with a place to stay and chat with other like-minded customers about products and services. Many companies have succeeded in this regard. The Skittles example demonstrates how a lazy social media embrace can be costly. Instead, use APIs to pull social media site data to provide customers with meaningful conversations (both praise and legitimate complaints). If using social media to build your brand, the key is to filter out the raw noise and provide a comfortable conversation space for your market.

3. Unleash the Horde Against Your Competition. Again, I’m going to take heat for posting this, but let’s be honest here. A competitor creating a negative-marketing platform will provide the disgruntled with a rather large megaphone to voice out their frustrations. The WhywehateQuickbooks.com example demonstrates how sticking your head in the sand is not a viable social media strategy. Can Quickbooks sue or otherwise take action to remove the site? I’m no lawyer, but I doubt it.  LessAccounting is simply a conduit for customer complaints, and taking down customer complaints, even if used by a competitor, would seem petty. The only defense is to take control and participate actively in the conversation. If using social media as a competitive weapon to tear down someone else’s brand, the best strategy is to deliver raw noise without filter.

How Not to Inhibit Mitosis: A Spore Case Study

I started to blog about things I’ve learned from the recent fiasco with Electronic Arts’ release of Spore, only to find the post started to look less like a timeline of events and learnings and more like a case study. So I figured I might as well try my hand at writing one…

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From Cheers to Jeers

As Tim reached over to pick up his ringing mobile phone, a quick glance at the caller ID info was all he needed to see. He had seen the reviews of Mark’s new production, and he knew exactly where to begin the conversation. “So, just how bad is it Mark?”, he spoke as he picked up the call. “I feel like I’m on one of those free-fall amusement park rides” replied Mark, not missing a beat.  “I mean, what the heck is wrong with these fickle gamers – they better damn well understand we’re a business!”

Mark and Tim had been close friends since they bunked together in college, and often bounced ideas off one another. Now Mark needed someone to talk to as customers reacted overwhelmingly negative to his newest game release. As senior producer of the much anticipated game Spore, he was responsible for distribution of the most talked-about project in the gaming market all year. Mark worked for game publisher Electronic Arts (“EA”), who placed high hopes to extend a rebound from lackluster Q4 2008 results, after reporting a 400 million increase in sales in Q1 2009. There was still the nagging issue of a net loss for Q1 2009, but EA expected as high as an 80% margin on Spore, in an industry where 30% margins are more the norm.

Spore was also poised to capitalize off the two hottest trends in the market. Gameplay involved the creation of an alien species, which a player must guide through stages of evolution and social development – from single cell organism to complex society. Some called Spore a “god simulation”. The game concept lends itself to user generated content, which was accepted as a “must have” feature for any successful release. Spore also capitalized off the concept of Internet play, which had been the driver behind more than 50% of EA’s Q1 revenue increase. Players would be free to create a species and upload their creations to share with friends. Will Wright, the creator of Spore felt that the nexus of rich user-generated worlds which were sharable on the internet would lead to the next big hit. Most industry observers lauded the direction he’d taken.

High Expectations

Mark and his team carefully tied a limited release to the July 14th E3 show in Los Angeles; one of the big showcase events the industry. While Mark figured he would have to compete for attention share with other game titles debuting at the show, he knew no one has the kind of buzz Spore had going in. The Spore trailer debut at the show was welcomed with thunderous applause and only heightened the feeling that he was on to something big.

Mark and lead designer Will also carefully devised a timed release of the game to better forecast how well received the game would be. The game came in two parts: the first was a creature creator, where players could construct the look of their aliens, and the second is the game itself, where players could interact with the creatures of their own design. The first part of the game was thus a barometer for the second (and main) release of the game. The results were over 1 million new player creations by mid June, and the top selling game for the month, more than doubling the number of games shipped by anyone else.

The Piracy Tradeoff

“I still don’t understand why the game release has gone sour, Mark..”. Mark let out an audible sigh and then began to speak in hushed tones. “We knew buyers would distribute copies to their friends, Tim”, said Mark, “so we had to put something in place which would prevent gamers from sharing their game copies with their friends. We originally had the game connect to our systems every ten days to perform a validity check. A game copy deemed illegal would alert us as well as shut down the game.”

“Hold on Mark”, Tim interrupted. “What about people who don’t have internet access?”

“Well, we had to nix the plan after we realized it would report back too many false positives. We figured it would also spike our customer service calls with angry customers if game players weren’t connected to the Internet. Instead we opted to have the game install a maximum of three times, after which the game would not install anymore.”

The Release Date Crash

Mark knew something was wrong as he began to read the numerous reviews on the morning of Spore’s launch. To his surprise, the reviews mostly talked about the anti-copy measures taken as opposed to the actual game content. It appeared as though many game players were in full revolt, and were either refusing to buy the game, or were actively trying to return the game title for a refund. One game critic website in particular caught Mark’s attention:

“No matter what people think about the actual game play, the story now centers around the DRM scheme EA built into the title, and a grassroots movement has begun to tell gamers just how bad the DRM sucks.

The method? Bombing the comments on Amazon.com. Right now the game has 222 customer reviews, with 194 of them giving the game one star (out of a possible 5).”

Mark quickly navigated over to internet retailer Amazon’s Spore webpage, where he found an overwhelmingly negative rating on the game, followed by scores of buyers and would-be buyers complaining about the anti-piracy measures. Mark knew carpet-bombing Amazon would be particularly nasty way of protesting the anti-piracy measures, since casual gamers who aren’t aware of the “protest” may not bother to read the content of the reviews and only assume the game isn’t very good. A quick call to his team confirmed his worst fears: early revenues were not shaping up as expected.

Mark turned back to the Amazon website Spore page and began to read through the reviews to try to understand the uprising. Two feedback posts in particular seemed to sum up the mood:

“I upgrade my computer often, and still play some old favorite games. I wouldn’t be able to do this with Spore unless I stop upgrading to newer computers. This is more of a resell to paying customers package.”

“This basically means that you are actually RENTING the game, instead of owning it. The game WILL stop to function in the future. That’s inevitable, because even if EA keeps the activation servers going, there IS going to be a time when EA will simply cease to exist because of financial issues or federal laws (like most businesses eventually do). “

Turning it Around

Mark was becoming increasingly irritated the more he thought about it. “We never intended for this to get in the way of legitimate buyers, Tim. All we want is to make sure is that everyone pays for what they use. What’s worse still is that copies of the game are out on the Internet anyway. What a catastrophe.”

Mark picks up a drink and takes a sip, beginning to speak again after an uncomfortable pause: “I expected complaining to come from would-be pirates, but this is just irritating.. it’s affecting our bottom line. It’s not unreasonable to want to install the game after buying a new computer, I guess, but gamers will just have to compromise.”

Tim cleared his throat and replied “Well, maybe that’s the point Mark. Customers hate to be told what they can and can’t do with things they buy. You’ll need to find a better way, because it looks like they’re not just voting with their wallets anymore.”

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Why AT&T’s IPhone 3G Launch Failed.

Like everyone else who is afflicted with gadget fever, I rushed out to buy an iPhone 3G on the friday release date. I spoke with an apple store friend and was told there were plenty of phones in stock, but I took a brief swing around a nearby AT&T wireless store on my way to the Apple store. While fulling expecting the AT&T store to be out of stock, it doesn’t hurt to ask of course. My 2 minutes spent with the AT&T sales rep left me absolutely flummoxed.

Apple Store in Palo Alto, CA

(photo courtesy of Elliot Ng)

A little context first, as there’s something to be learned from this. You’ve no doubt looked up at the header and noticed “Sales 2.0″ at the top there. It’s not just a cute phrase. To me, Sales 2.0 is sales and business development as it exists today in a world of network effects. For those new to this, Web 2.0 is all about network effects: when you upload a picture to Flickr, you’re not only creating a value by sharing pictures with your friends, you’re indirectly creating value (network value) for Flickr, whose repository of pictures and associated metadata (tags) is now larger (and thus more valuable). The full story of how Tim O’Reilly and others started this is beyond the scope of this post and even this blog, but you can read all about it if you like.

The point here is that in a network effects world, crowdsourcing becomes your primary sales lead generator. This is just common sense – most people making a big ticket purchase scour the web to take the collective temperature of existing owners.I’d go so far as to say that if you work for a sales VP who believes in buying lists and cold calling, then you need to find a new job.

So when blogger Chris Pirillo tells anyone reading that he feels stupid for trusting AT&T wireless sales reps, the network effects immediately and permanently act against AT&T’s sales success. Which brings me back to why I was flummoxed when I spoke to the AT&T wireless sales troglodyte yesterday. Here’s an impressionistic transcript of my exchange with an AT&T sales troglodyte:

Me: “Hi, I’m here for the same reason everyone else is.. are you out of stock?”

Troglodyte: “Yes we are…”

Me: “Ok thanks, bye.”

Troglodyte: “Wait! By now every store in town is likely sold out completely. We’re are already taking orders for the remaining shipments, and we’ll reserve those for folks who sign up. If you don’t sign up, I’m afraid it may be a month or more before you get one, as even the manufacturers are depleted at this point. Trust me, there’s no faster way to go.”

Me (incredulously): “Umm.. I’ll go to the Apple store, thanks.”

This is laughably transparent self-interest on his part, and has generated sales-stalling network effects for AT&T. Sure enough I picked up a phone from the Apple store, who had plenty in stock. So guess where I’m taking my wife when she’s ready to switch to an iPhone?

Now I submit this is what should have happened:

Me: “Hi, I’m here for the same reason everyone else is.. are you out of stock?”

AT&T guy: “Yes we are…”

Me: “Ok thanks, bye.”

AT&T guy: “By the way, you might get lucky with the Apple store up the road. Check with them or with Apple’s availability website if you’d like.  Their lines may be long, however. If you would prefer to not wait in line for hours, I’ll personally order one for you and get it to you instead as soon as possible. Here’s my number in case you strike out over there.”

Now granted Apple probably sent AT&T smaller shipments, and their running out couldn’t have been avoided. However, the point here is not availability but relationship management. Had AT&T sales management trained its staff to be sensitive to the network effects of linked customers, the result would have been trust gained, possibly a relationship developed. They’re not dealing with isolated consumers here. They’re dealing with a smart mob.

Are you listening AT&T?

Squatting 2.0

As many of you know I’ve recently joined Aria Systems, and have been deep in the bowels of billing and activity management for SaaS and gaming companies for about 3 weeks now (aside: it doesn’t surprise me we’re in a pretty unique niche position, since this stuff is hard to do right). Being of course the web 2.0 geek that I am, my immediate thought was to reach out to folks at Aria as well as customers on Twitter, Socialthing, Friendfeed, Linked in, etc.

As it turns out a bunch of us are on Twitter, including our CEO. Unfortunately, I was unable to pick up the @aria identifier, because as it turns out there’s a fellow in Teharan who was first in line. About a week after my initial foray into the name land grab, this tweet from Kingsley Joseph at salesforce crossed my Twhirl stream:

So basically nobody in Salesforce.com knows who @salesforce is and nobody at Dell knows who @dell is.

That’s when it hit me – we’re revisiting the days of URL squatting all over again. However this time marketing folks have to worry about not just one URL, but a bunch of identifiers strewn about the social web. While folks like Shel Israel claim it’s silly to have companies on social media communities because one cannot have conversation with a Coke bottle, these identifiers are a good way to reach someone at an organization when you don’t quite know who to reach. So I figure it’s only a matter of time before marketing types start having serious discussions about this.

So, here’s what the questions I’m taking out of this:

- Should we be able to extend trademarks and branding to social media communities as we have with URLs?

- Can an organization take legal action person who registered a trademark on a social community for trademark infringement? Will URL squatting disputes long past be considered as ammo for stare decisis?

- How do we even find the people who registered Aria, Salesforce, Dell, and other trademarks if they used a hotmail account or something of the sort? What would we do if we could contact them?

- How long will it take before an aftermarket develops for Twitter identifiers?

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear from brand managers as well as Twitter/Socialthing/Friendfeed internal folks if you happen to come across this post.

Update: Looks like ExxonMobil was “brandjacked” on Twitter, which goes beyond mere squatting. Javier Heredia has a humorous take on what kind of damage brandjacking could cause.

Monetizing Ubiquity: A Twitter Case Study

How do you monetize something that was built to accommodate universal free sign ups to gain market share ? There’s a number of excellent blog post lists of monetization mechanisms. Rather than just beat a dead horse and come up wit my own list, I’d rather drill down into what is shaping up to be an interesting case study in leveraging the ubiquity of your community. Monetizing the community via monetizing ubiquity by the way is one of the three models I find most promising (the other two are membership versioning and micro transactions, which I’ll cover at a later point in time on this blog).

The case study in the making is an announcement the time and expense web application Harvest will now be “powered by Twitter”. Peel away the marketing ballyhoo and you’ll find a synergistic gem here. What this means is users tracking time and expenses in Harvest will now be able to enter in expenses by sending direct messages, or punch in and out while on the road by sending direct messages to Twitter. In other words, Harvest is eschewing development of a mobile app and simply piggybacking on Twitter to provide that connectivity. The monetization in practice is simple: Harvest collects a membership fee, gives Twitter a residual. Instant revenue for Twitter, and Harvest not only saves on development costs, but more importantly increases exposure without having to resort to direct advertising.

Here’s the punchline: So how much is the value of selling your ubiquity? Ask Harvest what their cost of sales would have been had they not partnered.

It’s pretty obvious Twitter is promoting the visibility of third party add ons to develop future revenue streams, and Harvest is just the beachhead. That’s why they are promoting Twitterholics on their blog and CEO Ev is promoting apps like Tweet what you eat. This is of course the launching pad for other similar monetization partnerships. Congrats to Ev and the team. It’ll be fun to see where they take “Powered by Twitter“.

Want to talk monetization strategy? Add me on Twitter here!

Social Web Cartographie

I found a curious cartogram of social network usage across the globe on the French newspaper Le Monde this morning. Check it out:

A few thoughts on what this means and the limitations of the map:

- The world is fragmented along the lines of old mercantilist relationships in some cases (France and Cote d’Ivore) and not in others (UK and India).

- Primary correlation between countries on a social network is language (Myspace/Facebook is all over the English speaking world), but the inverse isn’t true (Brazil and India are hot on Orkut). Also note Myspace is player in all continents. The punchline is that first mover advantage seems to apply in droves here.

- The Western Hemisphere seems to have entrenched players

- Combine the above two points plus an untapped China, and you reach the incontrovertible result that everyone in this space in 2008 will be focusing their efforts Asia for growth in new users.

- I’d be curious to see what European adoption looks like if you take out Ireland, where Bebo is ubiquitous. Seems as though users are dispersed evenly.

- Noticably absent are quasi-socialnets like Twitter and Flickr. Pete Kaminski tells me Flickr is huge in Saudi Arabia, and may make that the default social network there.

- The color scheme is a bit deceiving. Let’s do a little quick math here to see how. Assuming 75% of Canada’s 33 million population is on facebook, and none are on Myspace (unlikely), that means that there are about 150 million Facebook users in the U.S. compared to 223 million myspace users. That means at most, the ratio of Myspace users to Facebook user is 3 to 2. Yet the U.S. is firmly colored with “myspace”. I’m sure similar dynamics apply elsewhere.

The High Cost of Free Parking

If you’ve never passed by upstate New York, you should – it’s literally a living museum of late 19th century America. It’s a mix of old towns left for dead by career climbers fleeing to NYC or snowbirds moving to southeastern US suburbs who left behind beautiful architecture and dwindling small communities. Mayors of these old towns are trying to revive the small businesses in their city centers and need to build consumer traffic to do that. Free downtown parking is something most mayors don’t blink at – drive traffic without incurring any additional cost.

Enter the Tragedy of the Commons

Of course, there’s no such thing as free (even if you’re talking about GPL). As soon as they turned off the meters, the towns began to accumulate a collection of antique cars. Not the kind of cars you’d find at an antique show, but another kind of artifact altogether. Try visualizing streetfuls of “vintage” automobiles which look like this:

Eventually the city had to incur the cost of pulling these heaps off the road, which were making the city sidewalks unattractive to would be customers they tried to draw in. The additional tax revenues vaporized, leaving the city in the red on the whole move. It’s a typical tragedy of the commons story, but it doesn’t end there.

Opportunity (Cost) Knocks

To accommodate the sudden increase in demand for downtown parking, some cities predictably responded by opening up parking lots. Many of them displaced farmers markets from city owned lots to spaces further outside the city, dropping the return on investment of the land now used as car storage. The city could instead have leased that land to a local business, those revenues representing the opportunity cost of that land.

The High Cost of Free Parking

Most of us have learned about the tragedy of the commons, and anyone who’s done a stint of high school economics has heard of opportunity cost. The two come in tandem almost by definition, and I call the combined effect “the high cost of free parking”.

This phenomenon works the same with enterprise software. I’ve spoken to a number of I.T. shops who figure a low cost or “free” consumer wiki works just fine for their needs. In practice, CIOs I’ve spoken to who have sanctioned “free” or “low cost” wikis have found them multiplying like rabbits. Once that happens, I.T has three possible choices: support the morass of wikis, ignore user appeals for support, or convince them to standardize on something I.T. establishes. All three in some way combine the tragedy of the commons (the commons being I.T. time and resources) with opportunity cost (the amount of time spent on departmental tech projects instead of core competencies).

The end result is far from ideal, despite all of the resources spent. What’s strange is the very tools designed to foster collaboration become handcuffs when departments contain collaboration to their own departments. When there’s no strategic drive behind collaboration software, you end up with knowledge fiefdoms contained within departments, but which do not cross-pollinate. The cost of these knowledge fiefdoms of course is “free”, as in the high cost of parking.

How high is the cost of free parking in your organization?

Social Superbowl, Social Elections

Something strange happened to me last Sunday; something I believe CIOs (and knowledge workers in general) will be talking about for years to come. Not the specifics of Eric’s life mind you – I’m talking about the social-mediaization of our society’s venerable activities in general such as the Superbowl, and the elections process.

I had a wonderful time this Sunday with Brian, Jeremiah, Ben, and a number of other terrific folks watching the Superbowl. Like everyone else, we cheered, we ate wings, we laughed at commercials, and we cheered some more. But the superbowl itself and the commercials took a bit of a backseat to the rumble of communication through Twitter throughout the country we were also watching. It was funny watching a NY player make an amazing catch, and watching the reactions roll in. It was even funnier watching some of the reactions from the disappointed New Englanders. Forget the networks’ vision of interactive television – interactivity is here, right now.

Fast forward two days to an American election primary, and sprinkle on a bit of Google magic on top. What you get is a mashup where each time someone sends out an “I voted” missive, you see where they are on the map. I’ve been watching about 10 – 15 messages a minute roll across the Google map on my screen. Here’s one example.

Some of them are pretty entertaining:

I realize this is hardly the pulse of America, but this better. This is the pulse of early adopter Americans, which are Americans likely to vote.

So back to why knowledge workers will be talking about this: insight. Take a look at the work of Jeremiah and Josh at Forrester have compiled. Their summary of tweets sent during the superbowl is a “poll” of viewers instanly reacting to content. Now ask yourself the following:

If you’re a sales and marketing pro, would you like to access the wisdom of the crowds for free?

If you’re CEO spending 2.5 million on a 30 second superbowl spot, wouldn’t you like instant feedback?

If you’re a political candidate on a tight budget, wouldn’t you want an aggregate mood ring of the electorate for free?

If you’re a grassroots campaign worker, wouldn’t you want an easy way to find and connect with local voters?

Wacky Wacky Web

It’s always fun to see the mainstream websites adopt tools like Ajax, RESTful Web Services, widely in use by Web 2.0, especially since I contribute my bit to spreading the gospel in the enterprise. But sometimes things can get a little wacky unless you plan your work and then work to the plan. I coach prospects and clients to envision the end goal in terms of metrics (20% increase in customers, 30% less time wasted, etc.), then work backwards from there to develop a workable plan. In other words, Ajax for the sake of ajax makes no sense.

The folks at Hema (Holland’s Target) are either brilliant, or have been hitting the cannabis a bit much. They’ve put up a pretty wild website, which is viral on one hand because people are blogging about it, but also annoying because you can’t skip the circus and head straight to the buying.

The screenie below is what the default website looks like – click below, load the website, and give it a few seconds before all hell breaks loose on your screen.

By the way, notice their word for portable radio is “ghettoblaster”. Hysterical.

Twitterpitch?

The subject line here could also be titled “What I, a sales/biz dev guy, think about Twitter’s market position”, but I’m going with a punchier title. I’m totally addicted to twitter, but I feel like there’s something missing here – what’s missing goes beyond the obvious scale issue everyone else is talking about.

Twitter has been a bit of a whipping boy lately on the social software circuit. Some choice samples:

Mike Arrington: “Twitter downtime on the upswing”

DA Howlett: “.. while Twitter has great utility, it could be so much more”

Jeremiah Owyang: “The cracks are starting to show”

Allen Stern: “Is Twiter F’ed?”

There’s even an open letter out there to twitter from Shel Israel. With all due respect to him, claims that tweeters are mostly talking about twitter and the chatter is not positive is quite overstated. That said, the trend is decidedly from twitterpraise to twittergripe.

But let’s put this in context – Twitter hasn’t had much competition since the Goog bought out Jaiku and basically put them in cryostasis. That’s changing, and fast. SAP is on the move. The Automattic team will likely capitalize off the wordpress community to build adoption of their Twitter-like tool. Other vendors are likely to follow as well.

Michael Porter’s five forces model is an instructive if aging benchmark to identify areas where any organization is competitively vulnerable. I would submit the following “back-of-the-envelope” analysis is instructive despite being MBA-ish:

Threat of Supplier Influence – Low. Twitter is on an OSS/RoR stack.

Intra-industry Rivals – Low. Rivals are fairly marginalized right now.

Threat of New Competitors -High. There’s quite a bit of interest in casual awareness of activity, which seems to be a key pillar of the social graph. I expect a whole lot of activity jumping in during 2008.

Threat of Substitutes – High. We’re already seeing a number of social graph players flirt with casual presence applications mixed with other core competencies. I expect more to follow with features like conversation threading.

Buyer Propensity to Switch – Medium. My take from geeks leaving Facebook in droves is that social graph users are fickle lot (I know I am). However it’s easier to port yourself than to port everyone you speak with, so I’ll call this an orange level threat.

What falls out of this analysis is that Twitter’s challenge ahead will be differentiating itself using something other than “We were first”. There’s more than just a business model or monetization model to consider. I’d be interested what your own napkin-analysis of Twitter is based on Porter’s Five Forces, and your takeaways from it.