Tweetmeme, Bitly, Retweets and Blog Comments

Even if a small change, it is telling that TechCrunch has added a Tweetmeme "retweet" counter to their homepage... directly beneath the comments counter (and visually more powerful). It is also telling that the reteweet numbers are often 5-10x the comments.

I am not suggesting that either onsite comments are disappearing or less valuable that offsite comments (namely Twitter and Facebook) - but it is a powerful, fast-changing dynamic... and clearly publishers and brands need to understand, encourage and facilitate activity both on and off their domains. In this example, the TechCrunch post saw 10,000+ pageviews arrive from Bit.ly-only URLs:

Of course, as the conversation continues to become distributed, data and measurement become tougher to collect and mine. Danny Sullivan has two good, recent articles on how Twitter may be delivering 500%+ more traffic to your site than you currently believe.

- Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think? - How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think

It is also important to remember that discussion and engagement themselves have great value... regardless of location and in ways measured beyond pageviews.

Starbucks: Four News Feed Interaction Lead to Three New Fans

Starbucks was named the "Most Engaged Global Brand" in Charlene Li's ENGAGEMENTdb study. I have written about Starbucks as a leading example of Facebook marketing ("A Lesson in Facebook Marketing and Engagement") - this document is helpful because it reveals Starbucks though process, team organization (six people with centralized focuses) and viral data:

“Recently, we found that for every four people that interacted with a particular news item, another three people are added virally as friends of those people.” Just to put it in perspective, the announcement of the mini-Starbucks card on Facebook drew 1,406 comments and 12,382 people “liking” the post so that it showed up in their news feed. Facebook is not only about messaging to the 3.5 million fans, but also allowing the fans to talk with each other about their love for the product and experience.

Contrast that to Twitter.com/starbucks where one person responds to inquiries, such as replacement blades for coffee grinders, or even questions from baristas about changes in the menu. With 250,000+ followers, Starbucks uses Twitter as an “in the moment” channel to deliver timely customer support and spread word about the latest breaking news and contests.

Other great brands to follow / study: - Zappos - Dunkin Donuts (my favorite Facebook brand) - Amazon - Jetblue (Southwest and Virgin are also good) - Redbull

ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media -

Bit.ly, Real-Time Analytics & Twitter as a Traffic Referral

Over a year ago, I wrote about the need for analytics for the real-time web (and the potential business model surrounding it): "Twitter and Friendfeed: Understanding Referral Traffic; Arriving at a Business Model".

Since then, the real-time web has exploded (thank you Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc)... and the need for deep data, filtering and search has only become more glaring (a notion made very clear in Twitter's internal documents and memos).

I have also written about Bitly and the role it can play in this ecosystem. Recently, I have started using Bitly's sidebar and data more actively (Clicks, Referrers, Locations and retweets). I love it. It's a glimpse of: - what discussions and posts are active and engaging - where the traffic and discussion is beginning (email, IM and desktop clients like Twitterific are primary drivers) - where the discussion is occurring (for the most active topics, it is more off my site than on it... fascinating) - Twitter's ecosystem (in the below example, Twitter.com accounts for only 6.5% of the direct clicks)

The Real-Time Web, Authority Filtering & CrunchUp Themes

Yesterday TechCrunch put on the "Real-Time CrunchUp" event to discuss what has been billed as the real-time web. Alongside several product demos and company launches, the most prominent discussion topics were: - Business models and opportunities (Ron Conway provided his ten ideas)

- Businesses vs. Features: are these products able to sustain themselves as companies or are they features within larger companies

- Is the real-time web just beginning or is the lifecycle relatively advanced? And what does this mean for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big company's abilities to compete?

- Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Friendfeed and what each mean for openness, competition, user experience and, ultimately, the consumer

- Noise. A theme I have written much about: the real-time web is overwhelming. How do we filter the noise to arrive at what is most important and relevant. And does filtering mean that the web is no-longer real time? The last theme (noise) is most important to me because, as the real-time web becomes more popular (and it will), it becomes increasingly difficult to digest and decipher. This is where Facebook will have a major advantage (using the social graph and 'like' / commenting systems). It is also where Friendfeed has already done a great job by using activity, relevancy, social connections, etc to deliver the news that it considers most important:

Other companies that are well-positioned here (and that I have covered; click for coverage): - Tweetmeme - Bitly - Aardvark

And proof that filtering is especially critical for Twitter - even if, as many of the CrunchUp panelists argued, it delays the immediacy of the real-time web: beside the live-stream of the CrunchUp final panel was a Twitter widget displaying 'relevant' tweets (defined by hashtags). Spammers quickly and repeated followed. I added the below screenshot and blocked out the very graphic user icon:

Tweetmeme's Meteoric Rise Reveals Twitter's Search Issue

Techmeme has become one my primary navigational sources for daily reading / news (others include email, Google RSS, Facebook, NYTimes, TechCrunch, etc). Twitter isn't yet there because it is simply too noisy to be efficient.

Techmeme solves a specific need: revealing quality, trending content across a variety of blogs and news sources. That same need exists on Twitter... and it can be argued it is both a harder AND more important task (after all, there is more noise and less context).

Perhaps that is why Tweetmeme is surging: it solves an important need for an immensely popular service. And as Twitter grows, Tweetmeme becomes even more important, sources more content and services a larger community. According to Compete, Tweetmeme now reaches 3.6m monthly uniques - a hefty number by any measurement. Equally impressive though is that Tweetmeme's reach represents nearly 20% of Twitter's monthly uniques (19.7m). Furthermore, as Twitter's growth flattened from April to May, Tweetmeme's more than doubled (1.6m to 3.6m):

Is this to say that Tweetmeme is the perfect service? No.

It is important however because it demonstrates: - a glaring need / opportunity within Twitter (either for third parties or Twitter itself) - the difficulty that finding poses (both algorithmic search and social search)... particularly in Twitter's dynamic world of 140 characters - a clear demand from users (after all, Tweetmeme's monthly uniques are 20% of Twitter's!) - a threat for sites like Digg and Stumbleupon... which Tweetmeme (or Twitter itself) can effectively compete with - an opportunity for Bit.ly - which is sitting on a goldmine of data surrounding referrals and links

Bit.ly Adds 'Pass Through' Metrics - Hugely Valuable

I have written before that data around referral traffic could be a business model for both Twitter and Friendfeed. And as Twitter's growth accelerates, I believe this more than when I wrote the article one year ago. In fact, it is the reason that Bit.ly surpassed TinyURL so quickly: data. Bit.ly always provided metrics around clickthroughs - which proves to be a difficult measurement within Google Analytics (battle between referral traffic, direct traffic and the increasing usage of apps like Seesmic).

Tonight I noticed what appears to be a new set of metrics from Bit.ly: direct clicks and total clicks (what I am referring to as "pass throughs"). Retweet is a phenomenon on Twitter - but measurement is difficult because most people retweet with their own encoded URLs... consequently muddying the data and only representing a portion of the traffic. It is still incomplete data because it appears that Bit.ly is aggregating data based on the landing URL and it thus only represents activity for Bit.ly-encoded URLs... nevertheless, it is valuable for marketers in understanding the virality of shared content.

I still believe that richer analytics are valuable enough for marketers (who represent much of Twitter's activity) to represent a real subscription service... just look at how much businesses and marketers spend on sites like LinkedIn. Perhaps that means that Twitter acquires Bit.ly and expands on the analytics offering; or, perhaps it means that Twitter creates a service internally.

Bit.ly Goes Mainstream: URLs Included in Magazines

Services and brands enter mainstream pop culture when they:1. Reach critical mass, and/or 2. Provide value in a way that makes their usage critical

Use Facebook and Twitter as examples. From print to television, both are now routinely included as informational sources and communications tools (for instance, CNN's in-show advertisements for their Twitter accounts and ESPN / Sportscenter's ticker promotion for their Twitter accounts). Then there are services that have great online popularity but are far too geeky (or perhaps irrelevant) to go mainstream... and thus reach offline popularity. Despite being the most popular URL shortener - Bit.ly remains an online utility that is essentially a tool usage on more popular sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Perhaps that is changing. The below image is from ESPN The Magazine and includes a reference to a bit.ly URL. It serves a purpose for ESPN: it is there to save space (and likely also not directly promote the website's brand).

But do most people know what to do with this? There isn't even an 'http://' before the 'bit.ly/blueroom' mention!