The Case for Public Replies on Twitter (... or at least the .@ convention)

Recently, there was a big fluff up over Twitter replies--messages that users direct at each other in public using the @ symbol.  Now, you only see public @ messages if you follow the person being spoken to.

It used to be that you had a choice as to whether or not you saw replies that were directed at you or people you followed. The default had most recently been set to off--meaning that you didn't see many of the public messages that your friends sent. Most users didn't even know this was a setting, so few changed it.

How can we know that most users hadn't known about it versus liking the way it was? We can't know for sure, but the fact that *most* users have trouble catching on to using Twitter in the first place and that *most* users will just leave the default up on any feature in any web service is a good indication that this was not a conscious vote for the setting.

In fact, many were unaware that they weren't seeing all of the Tweets from their friends--I certainly didn't.  These were people they had signed up to follow the conversations of.  It would be an odd assumption to think you weren't seeing all public messages.

The effect?

Discovery of new people to follow has gone way down. One rarely encounters the usernames of new people they don't follow anymore.  It goes both ways as well.  Not only is my own discovery of new people way down, but since the change, the number of relevent, interesting people who have found me has gone way down.   No offense to recent followers, but now I hardly look at who follows me, because it's often people I have no connection to who never chime in on conversations--because they can't see conversations.

Instead of a more organic discovery mechanism based on overheard conversations in your close proximity, most new followers come from recommendation services, PR lists, and WeFollow.  For whatever reason, the quality and relevence of these followers seems to be much lower.

I'd be willing to bet that, across the board, the follow back ratio of new followers of popular people has gone way down.  The lack of discovery is making relevent connection difficult and unlikely.

Fred Wilson argues that hiding public replies increases signal to noise--a big problem for him given the number of people he follows on Twitter. That's true--tweets not directed at Fred or people he knows are less likely to be relevent to him.

So who does this affect?  What is their preference and what are the alternatives?  Also, how does it change Twitter usage?   Also, how does this relate to the overall core value proposition of Twitter?

In Fred's case, not seeing replies increases his signal to noise, but is that really why? What makes something noise? The average Twittter user sends about a quarter of his messages as replies. Chances are, most of those are going to people they know.  While Twitter networks can often have a fair bit of overlap, let's say that 2/3 of my replies are directed at people he doesn't know. That means that 2/3 of 25% of my tweets--or 17% of them--are his issue.

But, even then, is it really true that every tweet I send as a reply outside of Fred's network isn't relevent to Fred? What if I'm writing "@frozen2late I don't think Carlos Delgado is going to come back this season"? Fred's a big Met fan, too. It's hard to believe he wouldn't want to weigh in with a "@ceonyc Josh thinks if we don't get Delgado back, we're screwed."

Here's an example, albeit on Facebook, of how someone else got value from a conversation that wasn't intended for them:

 

Some of these replies are very relevent to Fred, judged on content alone. There's no reason why anything I write in a reply would be any different from a relevency perspective than any other Tweet.  Sure, I might occasionally tweet out "@zoedisco Funny!" and that's a meaningless tweet to Fred--but is it any more meaningless than when I tweet out that I'm going to bed or that I ate some ice cream--not directed at anyone in particular.

What's also important is what is good for Twitter as a service and a community.  There have been stories about Twitter's engagement issues--that most people join and don't Tweet at all, or stop soon after they start.  This isn't any different from any other site.  One thing we do know is that on any site where there are network effects--the benefit to finding more people that you know or feel are worth following is clear. 

It's no different than walking into a party late.  If no one shows you around, you need to be able to insert yourself in other people's conversations otherwise you're just going to feel left out and leave early.

So while someone following 400 people might feel like replies are overwhelming, those following 3 people really need those public replies to discover new people.  People need to remember that there are many more people *not* using your service than users.

So what's the solution?  I think we should default back to public replies and let people like Fred who follow 100's of people opt out of them--because he represents the minority.  Not only that, but I'm sure he has a few people who are the worst offenders and maybe he just needs to unfollow them altogether.

Or, you could perhaps do give people the choice to opt out at the app level--which would also solve Fred's problem because he's reading these tweets on his phone half the time--and that's probably when it's most annoying.

In the meantime, I've circumvented the hiding of my tweet replies by throwing a period in front of them--the .@ convention for public replies. This way, the person sees the reply and so does everyone else.  I'd like to see more of this, because I want to see who my friends are talking to and discover more people that way.  I think it's also important to the growth an engagement of the service overall.

 

Trending down: Popularity lists without filters and reputation are a Twitter cesspool

Twitter trending topics had become a good way to play celebrity deadpool--only now every legitimate celebrity death is followed up by a fake one.  After Michael Jackson died, we had fake rumors of Jeff Goldblum, Rick Astley, and Billy Mays. 

(Wait...  Billy Mays is actually dead?  Jeez.  How's anyone supposed to confirm anything these days?  Does Twitter need Verified Death tweets?)

Now, almost every day, I see trends starting from people who are clearly gaming the system or that just aren't interesting at all to most people.

Aircraft Loadmaster anyone?   WTF is this?

 

If you're going to make Twitter trends relevant again, you need to start focusing on who's creating the tweet (influencer versus some job posting bot vs a bot that just picks out trend names to get in the flow) and what their reputation is.  

Trends have become a mess--inviting spam, gaming, marketing and combinations of the three.  Kill it for now and come back when it's fixed and it's not so easy to glom onto it.

The Startup Revenue Experiment - Go sell it

Consider this theoretical exercise...

I met a company the other day with a live social networking product that could be easily whitelabeled for brands and publishers.  They were also looking to raise between 500k and 1m. 

My suggestion to them was to go out and charge some brands to whitelabel their product at 50k a pop--generate revenue instead of raising capital. 

Here's the thinking:

If you're telling me that gathering your audience or doing whatever it is that you do solves someone's problem, than selling it is really the only proof.  What happens when a big company has a problem that costs them 200k a year?  They budget out 50k of either internal or contract resources to fix it if there's no good solution on the market.  In other words, they pay money to a team of people who haven't built product yet to fix their problem. 

On top of that, interactive advertising shops get paid tens of thousands of dollars all the time to build microsites and apps for brands and publishers.

Therefore, the idea that you can't get *somebody* to pay for a future solution to be delivered in a few months seems like a flimsy argument, given the right terms.  Sure, they won't pay a fifty dollar a month subscription for a product that doesn't exist, but they routinely pay 50k for custom built solutions.

Here's the problem with that, and what you need to convince companies out of.  Custom solutions are always a nightmare to maintain.  Domain expertise on what companies build internally is nearly non-existent, so you'll always be overpaying to retain employees to maintain it.  There's no direct incentive and certainly no budget to continually improve and iterate on the product, so it's bound to get stale and become obsolete.  The problem is so bad that you have to imagine that companies might be better off seeding lots of little ISVs to build efficient, flexible software that other companies could use rather than attempt to homegrow anything.

And that's your pitch:  Pay us to do this--we'll be focused on it, iterate on it, incorporate the good feedback from other customers, and in the long run, we'll be cheaper to maintain.  Perhaps with that comes some warrants, options, or even some equity. 

If you scour the market and one out of the top 100 companies isn't willing to pay you for your solution or to attach their brand to you, then I have to wonder one of the following things:

Is this just not enough of a pain point for these customers or their audience? 

Does this other company not see your tool as a compelling enough way to monetize their audience--which is also your audience--one that they know, conceivably just as well if not better than you?  If it was, you'd have to believe that some kind of revenue share or equity agreement would make sense to them.  If you're doing something amazing for the auto market, and Car & Driver doesn't want to be a part of it, you have to wonder how amazing what you're doing is.

In this or any economy, you need champions--and your best champions are your paying customers.  Angels and VCs don't mind being second in line behind someone actually paying to use the product that will ultimately drive your success.

Are there exceptions to this?  Sure.  There are certainly pain in the ass situations where you're doing so much custom development all day for other people that you're no longer actually selling you're product--you're a development shop.  Still, the exercise of talking to customers and seeing what they would pay for is sure to be an informative one.

Beantown VCs shorting Boston and going long NYC?

Has anyone noticed the increased interest that Boston VCs are taking in NYC these days?   It's not just Bijan from Spark anymore--Beantown investors are flocking to NYC in a big way, and being very public about it.

In addition to deals like .406's investment in EnergyHub, Boston firms have recently shown a penchant for participating in NYC community events and support--perhaps even more than NY firms have.

General Catalyst sponsored Alley Insider's Startup 2009.  More recently, a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs have gotten together to great a venture education and mentoring program called First Growth Venture Network right here in NYC, not Boston. 

Check out the Sawx-lovin' VC firms on the executive committee:

Flybridge Capital Partners

Polaris Venture Partners

North Bridge Venture Partners

Charles River Ventures

Battery Ventures

Highland Capital Partners

 

On top of that, there are a number of firms putting feet on the ground here.  Mo Koyfman of Spark is based out of NYC.  General Catalyst give Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes the nod to hangout in NYC and drum up some deals.  MIT MBA candidate Amanda Peyton is in NYC for the summer on behalf of New Atlantic Ventures--a recent backer of Brooklyn-based Pontiflex to go with their investment in NY's ContextWeb.

Claire Cain Miller asked whether or not Boston was dying as a VC hotbed, but positioned that it was being abandoned in favor of the valley after Greylock went out west.  It seems more logical to me that any Boston exodus would naturally lead down I-95 first before it jumped across the country.

Unfortunately, and typically, the continuing buzz (which is what... three years old now?) around NYC's surging startup economy seems to have escaped the WSJ's Scott Denne, who covered the First Growth story by leading with the following: 

"...start-up founders in New York City are a relatively solitary lot. With fewer firms and no particular geographic nexus, entrepreneurs rarely have the kinds of chance encounters that can jump-start a start-up."

Dear anyone who can't find the NYC tech scene or still doesn't know it exists...   You are cordially invited to join nextNY, the NY Tech Meetup, show up at a Digital Dumbo, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable, or follow @shakeshack.

 

Who are all these people?? The human capital locked up in your fans and followers and the potential for recruiting on Twitter and Facebook

You've spent lots of time and effort cultivating a fanbase of thousands--on Twitter, Facebook, even on your own applications.  Yet, when you need new employees, how much of your efforts are directed towards people across the web that don't know you or who aren't nearly as passionate as your existing employees are.  You might even need to pay a recruiter to help make your salespitch.

Meanwhile, among your biggest fans and most passionate users are developers, marketers, accountants, public relations professionals--people from every industry imaginable who would probably jump at the chance to come work for you.  The only thing is, you don't know who these people are, short of their tiny little Twitter profiles which you can't search at scale anyway. 

You could try tweeting all youropenings, but not all of them are going to be relevent to your whole audience, which will degrad the quality of your livestream.

Christa Foley from Zappos agrees, “It wouldn’t fit within our culture to be salesy/pushy... we’re not blasting on Twitter every job opening... To me, that feels like spamming, which I think goes against what Twitter was meant to be used for.”

Just publishing your openings in social networks is a very 1.0 broadcast way of approaching a very 2.0 environment.  The problem is that all of the recruiting tools and social spaces are silos.  You can't search the resumes of your Twitter followers, and you can't search LinkedIn and filter by who follows who on Twitter. 

Having people put links to their resume in their Twitter account might be a start, but that wouldn't be easily searchable by structured search--plus it might look a little odd to their bosses. 

Coming at it from the other way, from Reid Hoffman's keynote at the Social Recruiting Summit, it seems pretty certain that LinkedIn is more worried about keeping the "noise" from other networks out than the free flow of data.  He didn't seem too pleased about Plaxo's attempts at syncing and he's always referred to behavior on Facebook with some disdain--associating it with zombie bites and electronic hamburgers.  This misses the opportunity to capture a lot of useful data on candidates, like their interests, affinities, and what companies they follow.

Path 101 is working on this problem now, and in about a month or so, will give you the tap for the keg of human capital that use your social media fanbase.

If you're interested in recruiting your followers, comment below or reach me at charlie@path101.com.

The end of the social media consultant?

I got a note this morning (complete with its own press release attached) from Stephanie Agresta telling me that she had moved to a fulltime gig at Porter Novelli.

She writes, "My move to Porter Novelli is symbolic of the fact that the agency gets it: PR has changed forever."

It reminds me of Tara Hunt's announcement that she was moving to Intuit.  She was super excited about getting "a little schoolin’ on corporate America".

PR has changed?  Corporate America exciting?  What kind of social media bizarro world did we enter?

I think if you read between the lines, you'll realize that when two such prominent personalities in the social media world jump to the corporate side, it's a market signal: 

There just isn't enough money in social media to be a fulltime consultant. 

This is also what I heard recently from a very prominent social media expert who told me that actual dollars paid to her for her expertise were tough to come by.  Sure, there are going to be a few exceptions, but when some of the top folks are moving to big firms, if you don't believe this is a market top, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

And hey, I don't blame them.  They landed great jobs!  It's a tough economy and seeking shelter in the stability of a big firm is a smart move--just don't expect me to believe how psyched you are to leave independence for the joys and challenges of the Cube World.  

More people should get out while they can, because, in this economy, if you're not showing companies how all this stuff can directly contribute to the bottom line in real dollars, you're seriously screwed. 

Advertising and PR is becoming much more integrated.  Messaging is going cross medium.  You can't really survive at the strategy level if you don't understand all of the aspects of both traditional and interactive advertising--direct marketing, SEO/SEM, sponsorships, event marketing, etc.  That raises the bar for what it takes to be an advertising expert of any kind--let alone just in social media.  And thank God for that... seriously.  There are too many people going around with social media on their business cards where you say, "I don't get what that person does for a living--what do they actually do again?" 

So if you're smart and you see people like Tara and Steph--successful consultants who had real clients and a track record of success--going corporate, maybe it's time to hangup your "Social Media Expert" hat.

Why more channels equals more relevance

I've clearly been blogging less these days...but when I do, the overall quality (or at least effonrt) is up at a pretty high level.  I'm a writer--I still love writing essay length posts and always will. 

But since I started using Twitter and more recently since I started using Tumblr for real, not only has my publishing splintered across mediums, but I realize engagement with my community of readers is up.   Before Twitter, I would write the occasional micropost, but I'd feel like it went into a void.  It would be a quick passing thought and it would take too long for my daily RSS reading blog audience to receive it for the kind of quick response it might garner.

At the same time, I'd occasionally post ridiculous things--things few people found as funny as I did.  It seemed a little out of place to blog a College Humor video after a serious piece about entrepreneurship.  I didn't really want to use Tumblr, though.  Mainly, I was actually being  somewhat hypocritical because I was focused on having my blog as the central place to find and consume the published me on the web but I constantly criticize Friendfeed for killing the context and nouance that comes with each individual platform.  Additionally, I firmly believed that different people wanted different slices of me--and to force them to all consume the same sausagelike feed was borderline abusive.   That's why I don't usually friend my professional contacts.  I may find your professional presence in my life worthwhile, but please don't make me look at your kids photos.

I started using Tumblr for real a few weeks ago.  I say for real because I used to just publish a feed from my blog to it.  It got very few clickthroughs and hardly any followers--no reblogs.  Certainly no one was going to pass along around my content if it wasn't tailored towards the audience.  Like a dying marriage, it's as if that audience knew I wasn't putting in the effort so why should they? 

Now, I pass the music I listen to through Tumblr as well as the occasional drunk Kung Fu Panda.  I clip the quotes from my blog I think will appeal to that audience.  Now, I not only get more followers, but I get more engagement as well. 

Media outlets need to realize that.  If you're CNN, you can't just blast a link to the CNN homepage everywhere.  You need to maintain a unique, curated presence everywhere your audience is and engage them in a unique way. 

When I worked in private equity, I learned about the buyout of Gaylan's sports.  The concept there was to build a big box retail space for sports, but to make sure that each individual section of the store was as good or better than the speciality store equivilent.  Therefore, the golf section of Gaylan's had to be as good as your local golf shop.    This was very different from places like Modell's, which are decent options if you want to buy a generic set of golf balls, but you're not going to find any premium items or anyone who knows anyone at golf.

If you're a big media outlet and you're going to be publishing into social spaces, then your Twitter account needs to be as engaging as the alternative individual that I would subscribe to.  There's no sense being @ComedyCentral if you're not going to be as funny as @dickc.  If you're going to have a CNN Tumblr, then you need to be as good at curating content as Soup.  Esquire, if you're going to be on Tumblr, you need to be as smart, sexy, and funny as Meaghano. 

Don't throw this "social media stuff" off to your youngest social media intern.  Go to these communities.  Go meet with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace, all of 'em and ask, "Who gets it?  Bring us to them so we can learn."

Big media: You suck at Google

How many people did the following search for Obama's speech this morning?

Ariana got all the traffic and the rest of the big boys had nothing to show me.

 

Internet Week NY: Celebrating NYC’s Tech Scene, One Social Media Seminar at a Time (from Amanda Peyton/Save Me From B-School)

Amanda hits this one right on the head:

"THE NOT-SO-GOOD - Where are the Developers?

There are few events that involve actually learning how to code and/or build stuff (exceptions here and here). From what I can tell, the best way to lock down job security if you work in print media/traditional advertising is to beef up your knowledge of the digital side. If you’re a content ninja, wouldn’t having a working knowledge of rails, php, python or even wordpress provide a huge advantage?"

 

It seems like the powers that be are making a bet... that the future of innovation around the web in NYC will be powered by advertising supported content--an economy run on digital pennies.  So much for NYC building the next Google.

There are exactly three entrepreneurs on the 45 person Internet Week Executive Council with companies whose current or future business models are not depending on ad supported content: Caterina Fake from Hunch (I imagine that's going to be a data biz of some kind, Scott from Meetup (subscription), and myself (Path 101 is working on candidate search and self promotion tools.)  In fact, the whole thing is co-sponsored by the Mayor's Office of "Film, Theatre and Broadcasting".  

Is this really where innovation is going to happen--by moving all the broadcast content to the web?   I agree with Amanda--we need more people building, and less people broadcasting.

Venture Realities: Startup financing news from the frontlines

I had a fascinating conversation with an early/seed stage investor yesterday who basically described the market as follows...

He said that, over the course of all of their deals (over 50), they've done a very good job figuring out what a team will need to do to raise venture capital.  Their investments are basically meant to supply a team with about 9 months of capital to go out and build something and "jump 9 feet", because that's the milestone they see for VC--whatever 9 feet is for that particular comapny.

That had been going pretty well up until deals that were done in the first half of last year--right around the time that Path101.com got it's first angel financing.  Now their companies are coming back into the market, as planned, for financing.  They're reporting that instead of the 9 feet they were training for, they're now being asked to jump 15 feet by the VCs.  Somehow, companies are supposed to get straight from product to revenue--without iteration or even traction in between.

If you're an investor and you can get a Series B company--one with revenue traction--for Series A prices, why would you ever do a Series A?  It's not unfair--it's just good business.

Welcome to raising capital in 2009.  Go straight to Series B or do not pass go.

This investor was basically doubling the size of the rounds he was doing--splitting them with a partner fund--in order to give companies longer runways to actually make it to sustainability.  He described your angel/seed funding like a rocket ship.  You need to decide how big of a fuel tank you need to take you into orbit, because, these days, if you run out before you get there, there's no refueling mid-flight. 

We'll be talking to our board tomorrow and the theme of the conversation is more or less "If financing happens, great, but we're not going to wait around for it."  We're still in conversations with investors, but our product plan has prioritized immediately monetizable features.  We're shooting for 45 days, give or take a few bug fixes here and there, to launch both recruiter and candidate services we can sell.  We've cut our burn pretty low and we're working on some in person job search seminars to help extend the runway.  We're not going to disappear tomorrow, that's for sure--but we want to still be here six months from now and beyond.  That takes a solid plan and some rolled up sleeves.

What am I telling startups now?  Forget raising 250-500k.  If you can raise a million, do it--because the chances of you creating a break-even business on 250k-500k is pretty low.  If you can't raise a million, then only focus on building something that a customer is willing to pay for TODAY.  (That should focus your product roadmap just a bit.)  Anything in between will be a bridge to nowhere. 

UPDATE: Fred wrote this post yesterday about becoming the default behavior for your market--ahead of figuring out how to monetize it.  I think the problem with that thinking is that it basically only gives you one shot.  You're playing startup Russion Roulette when your goal is to become the default activity and you have no Plan B.  At least of you monetize in some way, if it takes you two or three tries to become the default, you have the runway to iterate.  We're all aiming to become the default activity for our consumer base and the service we provide--but it's not always clear how to do that.  Lots of people wanted to be the Google of events--it never happened, but not for lack of trying.  In new markets, it's not always clear what model wins out, and often times the last one standing wins.  It's hard to be the last one standing if you're not making money.  The key is to make money in a way that doesn't hinder your growth. 

In hindsight, I wonder if perhaps we at Union Square Ventures did the world a disservice back in 2005 when we started blogging as a fund--opening the kimono on the world of venture capital and making it seem like it was within arms reach.  Maybe the world was better off when businessplans@venturefund.com was the black hole where your ideas went.

We have a new black hole where all the ideas go today--but this time we call it the economy.

Before all the transparancy, those who really wanted to pursue their ideas, out of necessity, went and got paying customers for their business day one.  If you built a great business, the VCs would find you, but short of that, you didn't have all of these conferences, bootcamps, etc. making you feel like you're just an investor away from the next big thing.

People would tell me, "Oh, you're lucky that you used to work for a venture fund, because you understand what they want."  In hindsight, I don't know about that.  I might have been better off not knowing that venture capital existed, aiming for profits from the beginning--and then just being nicely surprised if some dude shows up at my door with a few million in cash asking to buy a minority stake in my business.

Venture capital is like winning the lottery.  Somebody wins, but statistically, it's not you.  Don't wait for an investor to go build the business.  We're not--not anymore, anyway.