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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Texts to Twitter, Instagram’s NFT Integration, Podcast Listening Dips in 2022

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are having a great fall as we are now in October!  This is my favorite month of the year!  I love the weather, I love the colors, the falling leaves, and Halloween!  The best time of the year, in my opinion!  Here’s 3 marketing/business/web3 stories I read over the last week that caught my eye:

 

The Twitter account @techemails is absolutely fascinating.  They release text messages that have been made public via the proper filings.  Recently, they shared some text messages that Elon had with both Twitter’s current CEO as well as one an exchange with one of its co-founders, Jack Dorsey.  Dorsey’s comments about regretting that Twitter became a company were very telling. Dorsey said that Twitter should have stayed a protocol. One of the issues that has dogged Twitter throughout its history is its rocky relationship with developers. Often, Twitter would encourage developers to build apps and functionality on top of its platform, then either cut off API access with no warning, or buy an app, then cut off API access to any apps with competing functionality.  For instance, years ago Twitter bought livestreaming app Periscope, integrated it into the platform, then cut off competitor Meerkat (which was arguably more popular at the time) from having API access.  Twitter bought Tweetdeck, cutting off competitors like Twirl, and bought Summize, hurting competitors as well.

Elon seemed very intrigued by Dorsey’s vision of having Twitter as a protocol and wants to pursue moving the platform more toward decentralization. In my opinion that could only happen if Twitter went private. Even then, it would be messy.

 

Meta recently announced that it will allow Instagram and Facebook users to integrate their existing NFTs with the platform.  Why is this important? My guess is Meta would like to eventually develop an NFT marketplace.  Adding a shopping functionality to the sharing of NFTs would give creators another revenue stream, but it would also do the same for Meta, as it would likely want a cut of sales.

 

Podcasting listening is projected by Edison Research to dip slightly in 2022.  This is a bit surprising, but as Edison points out in its findings, the dip for 2022 still puts listening levels at marginally higher than 2020 levels.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute.  Apologies for the late arrival of this post, seems there were some issues with my hosting service.  Will have a pretty interesting post up on Weds (again assuming no more site issues), so try to check it out in 2 days.

Hope you have a wonderful week, you deserve it!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute:Ethereum’s Merge Completes, Twitter Shareholders Approve Musk Purchase Bid, Fashion Eyes the Metaverse

Happy Monday,y’all!  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Marketing Minute.  Here’s 3 business and Web3 stories I’ve read over the last week that caught my eye:

 

Ethereum’s merge from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake is finalized. If you are like me and scrambling to figure out why the merge matters, Ali has a great thread on why it’s important, and there’s a good podcast that delves into what the transition from PoW to PoS means, and why it’s so important to the development of Ethereum and the entire web3 space.  Yes, all this gets in the weeds a bit and will no doubt be a bit confusing to many, but I think it’s worth investing some time in learning why this move matters.

 

So the on-again, off-again Twitter bid by Elon Musk is…..still off?  Twitter shareholders voted to accept Musk’s purchase bid, but that likely won’t matter. At the heart of Musk’s backpeddling from the Twitter deal is Twitter’s inability to clarify exactly how many of its claimed users, are actually bots.  It has long been contended that Twitter’s bot problem is far worse than it lets on, and Musk backed off the deal when the company could not give him hard numbers on exactly what percentage of its claimed users are actually bots.  At this point it seems the purchase won’t go through, but who knows for sure.

 

Of the many industries that are eyeing a jump into the metaverse, the fashion industry seems to be making the biggest splash so far. Given that some experts are predicting the market cap of the metaverse to top $50B over the next 5 years, this shouldn’t surprise.

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday Marketing Minute! We’ll return next Monday, and in the meantime if you see a story that I should be covering or that you want to share with everyone, feel free to email me!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Twitter Takeover Back On, Twitter Re-Embracing Devs, What Makes B2B Content Memorable

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone has a wonderful and productive week! Here’s some business and marketing stories that I’ve had my eye on over the last week:

 

So it seems the on-again, off-again bid by Elon to buy Twitter is back on. Multiple sources are saying that the Twitter board is reconsidering Elon’s latest offer to buy the company. I would caution that just because it’s being reported that Twitter is close to a deal with Elon, that doesn’t mean they are. Control of Twitter is a BIG BIG deal, as its become such a massive platform to create and shape public opinion. The company and its shareholders want to continue to control that.  So does Elon.  We will see how it plays out.

 

Years ago, in a time where Twitter let 3rd party developers access its API and build tools on top of it, one such tool called Monitter existed.  At the time, Monitter was one of the most useful social media tools out there. It gave you the ability to search Twitter VIA TARGETED LOCATION. You could see, in real-time what people were saying on Twitter, at a particular location.  It had amazing potential, say you were a restaurant that offered delivery, you could search Twitter for people tweeting ‘I am hungry’ within the last hour, in your neighborhood.  Or if there was a breaking news event at a particular location, you could search for tweets from people at that location, reporting live as the event was unfolding.  It was amazing.  But like many promising apps, Twitter cut off access to its API, and they went away.

Well now they may be coming back.  It seems Twitter is reaching back out to the same developers it once turned its back on.  This may end up being a case of too little too late, but hopefully Twitter will embrace developers building on the platform’s functionality as it once did.  If so, Twitter’s users will be the real winners, and Twitter can always just acquire any successful apps that emerge.

 

New research from Demand Gen gives insights into the types of content that B2B buyers prefer. Specifically, B2B buyers gravitate to content that relies on research and data in presentation. Research and data lends to credibility for the buyer. When it comes to shareability, buyers said that being able to quickly distill key insights derived from the data made the reader more likely to share the content. This is why it’s a good idea to summarize lengthy content with ‘Key Takeaways’ at the start of the post. Readers will often use these insights when sharing your content.

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday’s Marketing Minute! At some point I want to do a deeper dive into Elon’s flirtations with buying Twitter, and what it really is all about. I might do that later this week, or I may wait until we see if his bid to buy the company actually works or not. I haven’t decided yet. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to read, and I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous week ahead!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon vs Twitter Continues, Baby Boomers Still Hold the Cash, AM/FM Radio Still a Thing?

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a fantabulous day and ready for an even bigger week!  Here’s some business and marketing stories I’ve been watching over the last week:

 

The Elon vs Twitter saga just keeps getting weirder and wilder. Since we talked last week, Elon made a very generous offer to buy Twitter outright, offering $54.20 a share. The move was blocked by existing shareholders. Elon is now rumored to be building a consortium of investors to make an even bigger offer.

What I find revealing about Elon’s overtures to buy Twitter, is how users and personalities on Twitter are reacting. Elon has long been critical of how Twitter moderates content, and many feel if he owned Twitter he would bring sweeping changes to how content is moderated on the site. This has sparked outrage among many Twitter users and personalities, and suddenly Elon and his company Tesla are under a microscope.

I think what this story proves, more than anything, is that both Elon and the outraged users understand that Twitter is not a free speech platform, it is a platform for shaping speech. Via moderation, any message that the owners of the platform want to see highlighted, can be highlighted. Any message that the owners of the platform want to see suppressed, can be suppressed. This makes Twitter’s value far greater than anything you will see on a balance sheet.

Elon understands that.  So do the ‘outraged’ users and personalities. This isn’t about protecting free speech, this is about some people wanting to ensure that their speech continues to be protected.

And I suspect this story ends either with Elon owning Twitter, or being suspended by Twitter. We’ll likely find out sooner rather than later.

 

Half of US wealth is in the hands of Baby Boomers, while their Gen X children now control 30% of the wealth. Millennials control 6.4% of the wealth, but it should be noted that for this survey, millennials are everyone born after 1981. So everyone in the US 41 and younger.  That’s a pretty big group, you would think their share of US wealth would be at least 15% or so.

 

I found these results on ad-supported audio interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I was honestly surprised that AM/FM radio had such a large share, but when you consider that the figures include listening to audio while driving, it makes sense.  AM/FM radio accounted for 88% of the ad-supported audio that we listened to while driving in 2021. Podcasts at 11% actually seems like a fairly strong number to me. Podcasts lag behind traditional radio in terms of monetization options, unless the podcasts are run through a larger platform like Spotify that has ad network capability integrated into the offerings.

Still, the takeaway from these numbers has to be that modern marketers shouldn’t overlook that traditional AM/FM radio in car still has a lot of potential for generating sales.

 

So that’s all for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! I hope everyone has a wonderful week and we will see what craziness awaits us in the coming days!

 

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon/Twitter Drama, NFTs Coming to Facebook, Traditional TV is Dead

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you have a fantabulous and productive week! Here’s some marketing and business stories that caught my eye recently that I wanted to share:

 

In a bizarre statement explaining a surprising move, late last night Twitter’s CEO said Elon Musk will NOT be joining Twitter’s Board of Directors. A couple of things seemed odd about the statement; first Agrawel said Twitter was excited to bring Elon on the Board, but then said it was for the best that he didn’t join. Huh?  Also, I found it interesting that Agrawal made a point to say that there were ‘risks’ involved with letting Elon have a seat on the board, and the clarification that Elon could only be accepted to the Board after passing a background check.  It almost sounds like Agrawal is trying to give the impression that Twitter’s background check found something and Elon bailed before Twitter announced they couldn’t accept him on the Board as a result.

But there’s an interesting legal point to all this: If Elon had taken a role on the Board, his agreement with Twitter would hold that his stake in Twitter would be capped at 14.9%.Meaning, he couldn’t increase his current position owning 9.2% of the company to more than 14.9%. This, coupled with a tweet from my brilliant friend Carol Roth, makes me suspect that Twitter might be engaging in some smoke and mirrors here. Either way, this remains a very interesting story to follow!

 

Facebook/Meta is exploring adding NFTs to its ecosystem. Facebook is set to start a pilot program for introducing NFTs in mid-May, and according to this article. What I found very interesting, are claims that Facebook will soon after start rolling out the ability to have Facebook Groups tie membership to owning a particular NFT. I will be writing about this more this week, but NFTs are going to become the Digital Membership Card for business programs and organizations.  If you have the NFT, you can access the group/program, and its associated perks. This move by Facebook will also be a shot in the arm for mainstream business adoption of NFTs. Facebook embracing the technology will give a lot of businesses the courage to explore NFTs as well.

 

In a sign of the times, less than half of US households are forecast to have traditional pay TV in 2023.  Most of the losses will be customers migrating to ‘virtual multichannel video programming distributors’ (vMVPDs) such as Hulu TV and YouTube TV. I suspect streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Max are eating into that number as well.

 

 

So that’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! I hope you have a wonderful week, and if you want to share your thoughts on these stories, feel free to leave a comment below! I have to admit, Twitter’s response to Elon not joining its Board suddenly has me a lot more interested in this story.  What do you think about it?

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon Apes Into Twitter, Livestream Purchases, Paid Music Streaming Grows

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you have a wonderful week ahead of you, we have some breaking news and some other stories I enjoyed, so let’s dive right in!

 

This will be the story of the day and possibly the week. Elon Musk just bought a $3B stake in Twitter, and is now the company’s largest shareholder. For reference, his stake is almost 4 times that of Jack Dorsey’s. There will be a lot of commentary about what this move signals, I’m already seeing a lot of chatter about how Elon will stop shadowbanning and ham-fisted censorship, etc.  Let’s take a step back and remember: Elon’s Twitter account is essentially Tesla’s marketing. So this is simply about Elon getting more control over his company’s primary marketing channel.  That’s all this is, a smart business move. Do I think this signals that Elon is coming in on a white horse to save Twitter from itself? I do not.  I think he is going to use his ownership stake to push for changes that make it easier for him to use Twitter as a platform to market himself and his company. That’s it.

 

Facebook and Instagram are the dominant players when it comes to driving purchases via livestreams. This isn’t a huge surprise, but I think we will see a lot of growth in the coming years from YouTube in this area as the platform is seriously trying to up its streaming game.

 

2021 was another strong year for growth in paid music subscription services. As I’ve talked about for the last two years, covid and the ensuing lockdown changed consumer behavior and purchase patterns. Certain industries and products benefited greatly from these changes, and music subscription services are one of them. To be fair, paid music subscription services were already seeing solid growth prior to the pandemic, but that growth was only accelerated by customers spending more time at home, for both work and play.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! I hope you have an amazing and productive week!

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I’m Ready For Web 3.0 to Give Me Twitter 2.0

Two weeks from today will mark my 15th year being a user of Twitter. Twitter likely had less than 500k users at that point, so it’s safe to say I was a very early adopter to the platform.

Twitter, warts and all, remains the best social platform we have for creating and participating in free-flowing conversations. This is almost completely due to the determination and ingenuity of Twitter users. When Jack, Ev and Biz started Twitter in 2006, they were very clear about their intentions for Twitter.

Twitter was designed to be a broadcast and promotional platform. You broadcast what you are doing.  You promote what you are doing. But organic conversations springing up around those broadcasts? Not a big care for Twitter. Users engaging their networks organically and making connections and creating new conversations on the platform? Again, not a priority for Twitter.

Twitter was designed to be a broadcast and promotional platform.

For a decade, I ran the most popular chat on Twitter, #Blogchat. It was not uncommon for #Blogchat to generate over 100M impressions in ONE HOUR every Sunday night, and create thousands of tweets. I had people refuse to join the chat as a co-host, citing ‘I can’t keep up with how fast it is’. At the height of its popularity from say 2010-2012, #Blogchat was the top trending topic on Twitter almost every Sunday night.

#Blogchat generated hundreds of organic conversations on the platform every Sunday night.  It drew thousands of people to the platform.

Twitter never once reached out to me about the massive engagement that #Blogchat created on its platform every Sunday night. Never a thank you, never a we see what you are doing, keep it up. Nothing.  Actually, I take that back.  Twitter did reach out once about #Blogchat; to let me know about its options for running a PAID PROMOTION to help #Blogchat reach an even larger audience.

This story is offered to illustrate that Twitter has never viewed its platform as a way to create conversations. Which is a shame, because the platform remains the best place in social media where you can create and participate in conversations.

Twitter is a better networking tool than LinkedIn will ever be. I have been saying this for 15 years. Just yesterday, I left a tweet. Someone who I follow, but have never interacted with, replied to me. We started chatting. Now we are connected. It’s that simple and this happens EVERY day on Twitter.

It’s time we apply the potential of Web 3.0 to create Twitter 2.0

The promise of Web3 or Web 3.0 is that creators will own their content and have shared ownership of the platforms that they help create and grow. In Web 2.0, the platforms take our content and monetize it. In exchange, we get back Likes and RTs.

The promise of Web 3.0 is that our activity on a Web 3.0 platform would reward us with tokens that would grant us ownership in the platform itself.

With this in mind, let’s consider if we created Twitter 2.0 using Web 3.0 technologies. Let’s say we created a platform similar to Twitter, that was focused not on broadcasting and promoting content, but instead its focus was on helping people create and engaging in organic conversations.  I talked about this yesterday, of course on Twitter:

Think about the possibilities. Everything on the platform would be based around creating and contributing to conversations. Think about how much easier it would be to meet new and interesting people! You could meet people who shared both your personal and business interests. You could use it to dive into personal conversations around your life and hobbies, or use it as a professional tool to grow your business or career.

To be fair, Twitter was very much like this in its first couple of years. Conversations were free-flowing and organic. You could easily lose yourself for hours on Twitter just by scanning your timeline and finding so many interesting conversations to jump into.  And it was so easy to pull someone else into a conversation as it was happening.

But eventually, Twitter began courting investors and investors wanted more revenue and that led to pushing for more promotional content and fewer conversations.

We have a chance to get back what we lost from the early days of Twitter. Back before our timeline was 90% link sharing.  Back when you made new connections every single day on Twitter due to the conversations happening on the platform.

Think about a Web 3.0 platform similar in functionality to Twitter, but designed from the bottom up to facilitate the creation of conversations. It’s a digital happy hour, a chance to meet and engage with new people every single day.

And if you perform the desired actions (creating and participating in conversations on the platform) then you are rewarded with tokens, not Likes and RTs. These tokens have monetary value, but also give you ownership of the platform and let you participate in the platform’s governance. So you can either hodl the tokens, or sell some/all of them.

Either way, the users who are working to grow the conversations, and by extension the platform facilitating those conversations, are being rewarded monetarily for their work. That makes us more invested in the platform and seeing it grow.  The more successful the platform is, the more valuable our tokens become.

But the reality is, the conversations themselves have far more value. The ability to meet and connect with people from all over the world was the promise of Web 2.0. That promise has been met with gated access and platforms taking our content and monetizing it to grow itself.

It’s time for Web 3.0 to realize its promise and give us Twitter 2.0.

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Twitter Should Be Bigger Than Facebook

I can show you why they aren’t in two tweets.  More on that in a minute.

I joined Twitter in March of 2007. I actually started hearing about Twitter from online friends in the Summer of 2006, soon after the site launched. At the time, I was working hard to grow my first blog, and wanted to focus my attention there. But more and more friends told me to get on Twitter.

Then SXSW happened in 2007. Twitter made a very smart decision to have a presence at SXSW, because the startup knew that many of its more influential users or potential users would be there.  TV screens were set up all in the hallways in the convention center showcasing tweets as they happened.  Anyone who has been at SXSW can tell you, the hallways are where the magic happens.

After SXSW in 2007, EVERYONE I knew online was gushing about Twitter. I finally relented on March 31st 2007, and joined Twitter.

If you joined Twitter after say 2010, you honestly do not know what you missed. Twitter from 2007-2009 was amazing. It was the most incredible social site I’ve ever been on. Nonstop organic conversations with the most amazing people, from all around the world! At its peak around 2011 or so, I was spending up to 10 hours a day on Twitter, every day.  DMs essentially replaced my email inbox.  I met new friends, made new contacts, did business deals.  All on Twitter.

I loved Twitter in the early days.  The days before the celebs and the media and the trolls found it.  Everyone did.

But the reality is, Twitter never loved us back. I specifically remember a conversation a group of a dozen or so of us had on Twitter, sometime in 2009. As most conversations were at the time, it was organic, and lasted for at least an hour.  It involved several ‘power users’ of Twitter, who all had 10,000 to 50,000 or so followers.  And this was in 2009, when you didn’t see Twitter users with over 100,000 followers every day, if at all. So we are talking pretty big and influential users.

The focus of our conversation (on Twitter) was how it was time for Twitter to officially hire a Community Manager. We wanted Twitter to make an effort to LISTEN to its users, and incorporate our feedback to improve the experience for all. At the time, Twitter was growing like mad. It wasn’t mainstream yet, but it was on the cusp. You had so many smart, passionate users that were so hungry to see Twitter explode. We had so many amazing ideas for how Twitter could become huge.

And what infuriated us, was that Twitter completely ignored us. I think our pleas reached Twitter, because shortly after, Twitter put out a statement clarifying that Twitter wasn’t a conversational platform, it was intended to be a ‘discovery’ or ‘broadcast’ platform.

Twitter said they never intended for the platform to be a place where people went and talked all day.

We were crushed. How could such a popular company totally misunderstand how its core users use and love their site?

But Twitter always has. Twitter has so many creators who have gone out of their way for over a decade to evangelize the site for years.  Twitter has done little or nothing to highlight these creators.  For instance, at its height, #Blogchat was regularly the Top Trending Topic on all of Twitter during the chat each Sunday night.

Twitter never reached out to me or any popular chat host (that I know of) to even say thanks for bringing people to our platform.

They just never seemed to care. That has always frustrated me.

Now about those two tweets…

Ever since Twitter launched in 2006, users have begged Twitter to add a way to edit tweets. This is by far the most requested feature that Twitter users have ever asked for. And Twitter, as Twitter seems to always do, has always ignored completely that its users have wanted this feature.  I can’t even remember a time when anyone in Twitter leadership has ever even addressed the feature request or why it hasn’t been implemented. It comes across as if Twitter simply doesn’t care that its users want this feature.

So imagine my surprise (and frustration) when I recently saw this tweet:

https://twitter.com/TwitterBlue/status/1458110348880343041

Twitter is finally giving users a way to edit tweets (sort of), but it MAKES YOU PAY FOR THE FEATURE.  It’s only available if you purchase Twitter Blue’s monthly subscription.

To Twitter users who have begged for the ability to edit tweets for years, this comes across as such a slap in the face.  Totally tone deaf, yet somehow completely consistent with Twitter not understanding its core, passionate users.

Now let’s look at the second tweet:

https://twitter.com/Clubhouse/status/1460367376721924102

While Twitter seems to go out of its way to ignore its top creators, and always has, Clubhouse goes out of its way to promote and highlight its top creators.  And for extra irony, they are doing a lot of it on Twitter, as you can see above.

This matters. One of the most pressing problems that startups face is growing a community of passionate users who will help the startup’s service or products grow. Many startups bootstrap their core operations at first. Marketing is one of those areas where the startup typically tries to give it a go themselves due to a lack of funds initially. So community management is vital to the early days of the startup in order to retain and grow the customer base.

Clubhouse understands this.  Clubhouse knows if its creators/room organizers are successful, that the platform will be successful.  So Clubhouse is investing in supporting its creators via its accelerator program, and also by promoting them on the platform and by having constant ‘townhalls’ on Clubhouse to discuss what’s happening with the platform, and to review user feedback.

All of this communicates to Clubhouse users and creators that the platform hears them, and appreciates them.  Clubhouse has done more to listen to and engage its users in the last year, than Twitter has in the last 15.

And that’s a shame. As well as a huge missed opportunity.  If Twitter had started in 2006 with the same commitment to engaging its users and listening to their feedback, then Twitter would easily be the biggest social platform in the world right now.  I have zero doubt in my mind.

 

But even though I hate how the platform keeps its passionate users at arms length, I do love the people I’ve met on Twitter, and the conversations that happen there. Speaking of which, I’ve been asked by Social Champ to join their weekly Twitter chat as a co-host. Our session is tomorrow at 10 am Central, hope to see you there!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: LinkedIn Exits China, Twitter Spaces Spark Program, Coinbase Gets Into NFTs

Happy Monday, y’all! Fall has finally arrived in the Deep South, and not a moment too soon! Temps are now in the 70s and sunny, this is my favorite time of the year! Here’s some stories that caught my eye the last few days…

 

And then there were none. LinkedIn will pull out of China, marking the departure from the country of every major American social media platform. They will maintain a jobs board, but this is still pretty big news.

 

Twitter is adding an accelerator program for Spaces, called Spark. This will be similar to offerings from Clubhouse whereas accepted members can get access to mentoring and cash to maintain and build their Spaces.

 

You’re about to see a lot of talk here and really everywhere about Web 3.0. You can ask 10 different people to define Web 3.0 for you, and likely get 10 different answers. Here’s how I think about the progression of the internet:

Web 1.0 : Fewer platforms and websites. Websites are mostly a luxury for businesses, limited content creation options for the individual, typically tied to major platforms like Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.

Web 2.0 : An explosion of content creation options for the individual, but far fewer monetization options. User data is owned by major social media platforms, who are the huge benefactors of content created by users.

Web 3.0: Users will reclaim control of their data, and communities will control and support platforms. Power will shift from the social media companies and platforms, to the individual.

The potential power shift from the corporations to the individual is what has so many people excited about the possibilities of Web 3.0.

If you haven’t already begun to educate yourself on the movements and technologies that will drive Web 3.0, fear not, you still have time, as it’s still early days. But you owe it to yourself to begin to educate yourself on things like cryptocurrency, the blockchain, NFTs and the like. I will be creating more content around Web 3.0 in the coming months.

If you’re on Twitter, I have created a List of experts in Web 3.0.  Following this list will get you up to speed on what’s happening in the space.  You can subscribe to the list here.

Exciting times, to be sure! Hope you have a wonderful week, I’ll see you next Monday!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: B2C Dominates Social, Clubhouse and Twitter Add Key New Features

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is ready to have an amazing week. Here’s a few marketing and digital stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

According to eMarketer, all of the Top 10 categories of businesses that generate social media activity are B2C businesses. The top category, Apparel and Accessories, commanded over half the social activity, more than the rest of the Top 10 combined! This isn’t that surprising when you consider that B2C businesses have far more customers that are creating content and engaging with these businesses, than B2Bs do. Still, it’s interesting to see which categories are generating the chatter.

 

Very interesting new features coming to Clubhouse, revolving around letting users and room owners share audio clips of the content created in rooms. This will greatly help discovery and promotion for room creators. Twitch streamers have been doing this for years.  The most popular ones will do a stream, then go through the hours of content they just created, and pull out the ‘highlights’ and then repost them as shorter videos for YouTube. Which they then monetize as well. Most of the bigger Twitch streamers have hired people to edit and produce their shorter ‘highlight’ videos, so I could see room creators on Clubhouse making similar moves.

 

Are we noticing that all social media is beginning to slowly blur together?  Twitter is now offering profiles for businesses. This is also aimed at ‘creators’ who want to offer newsletters and monetize their Twitter usage. This continues a sincere push by social media platforms to lock down popular and high profile users onto just their category.

 

So that’s it for this week, I hope you are enjoying the cooler Fall weather as much as I am! A quick thought: If you deal with an upset customer this week, just remember that 90% of their frustration comes from the fact that they don’t feel ‘heard’. If you communicate to them that you hear them, and have sympathy for their feelings, you are more than halfway home to handling their issue. Just remember that everyone is going through something, and we all want to be heard.

See you next Monday!