• New design. The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.
• Media. Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
• Related content. When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: @replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
• Mini profiles. Click a @username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

(Source: A New Twitter)

From Tweets Stream to Revenue Stream

According to Twitter, 78% of its users tweet via its website. This figure should motivate Twitter to discover more creative ways to commercialize its tweets torrential stream. Apart from the aesthetic enhancements (new design layout and mini profiles), both embedded media and related content features open doors to greater monetization opportunities.

1. Viewing embedded media. This prevents users from navigating away from Twitter website. Possibly, pay-per-view media and analytics.
2. Displaying related contents in tweets: Promoted Tweets did not exactly catch on like wildfire. With the new reengineered design, the ability to deliver contextualized contents (ads) for specific tweets could possibly be the holy grail for Twitter.

RELATED: Who designed the new Twitter UI? [quora]

Uncaging New Twitter for chirpier tweeting and greater monetizing opportunities originally appeared on GreyReview.com on September 15, 2010.

In social web universe, you’re a smart transmitter:
- frictionless access to social technologies;
- social media designed for engagement;
- social media is more able to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time (rightcast);
- size does matter but influence matters more;
- delivers both reach (audience) and richness (interactivity and content richness).

In mass media, you’re a dumb receiver:
- mass media audience lack access to social technologies;
- designed for passive consumption, not active engagement.
- trying to deliver the one-size-fit-all message to many people at the same time (broadcast);
- size (audience) matters most;
- reach-richness trade-off.

Brand communication in mass media world is like a Ferris Wheel, where brand message originates from a center and broadcast to consumers.

Ferris Wheel of Mass Media

In the social media space, brand engages its mesh-like business web. Brand (blue circle in diagram below) joins the conversations to viralize its brand messages, leveraging its ecosystem of customers, evangelists and influencers (pink circles).

The Social Mesh

Image credits: Ferris Wheel sketch and mesh diagram.

In the Social Mesh, a brand connected to small army of influential evangelists is probably more effective than the brand connected to hundred of thousands of passive nonchalant followers/fans.

UPDATE: This post was selected for publication on SocialMediaToday.

Smart transmitter in social media vs dumb receiver in mass media originally appeared on GreyReview.com on May 21, 2010.

Competition is intense in Malaysian cellular market. Pricing no longer an effective competitive advantage; price war can only go so far. Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has eliminated the hassles of changing carriers. Differentiation takes different forms. Tactics are being deployed by three key players – Maxis, DiGi and Celcom – to enhance its ecosystems and content play is a popular one – DiGi with its DiGi Music, Maxis with Music Unlimited and Celcom with Channel [X].

Maxis venturing into applications with 1Store, quite similar to the strategy adopted by smartphone makers – Apple with App Store, Nokia’s Ovi, BlackBerry’s App World and Google’s Android Market. Smartphone players use the apps to enhance the perceived value of their phones and enhances lock-ins; Maxis is planning to use applications to enhance the perceived value of the Maxis ecosystem and ultimately, increase subscribers and decrease subscribers’ churn rate.

Expect Maxis to continue to use its scale to corner the market with first-mover advantage and DiGi with late-comer strategy i.e. let the market play out and then find missing gaps to position itself. Think Broadband Done Right campaign. DiGi is a late-entrant in the Malaysian mobile broadband market but the company is gaining market share with its pricing and service quality. For DiGi, it’s launch-and-learn strategy with a twist – let-others-launch-first-and-learn-from-them approach. As for Celcom, it will continue to position itself as No. 1 in all Celcom territories.

Maxis Unveils Its Platform Play originally appeared on GreyReview.com on January 25, 2010.

Fans Growth of AirAsia Facebook Fan

On December 8, 2009, Southwest started its Fans Fly Free campaign. With less than 100,000 fans beginning of December, Southwest is currently galloping ahead and fast approaching 600,000 fans. That’s half a million new fans in about 2 weeks! Not bad for sweepstakes that offer only 100 pairs of roundtrip air tickets. With the sweepstakes ending December 31 2009, Southwest will possibly breach the 1 million mark before New Year 2010. What do you think?

Southwest’s Campaign on Facebook

Anyway, here a rundown of the top 5 most popular pages by Airlines on Facebook (as of December 20, 2009):

1. Southwest Airlines – 584,219 fans
2. AirAsia – 109,496
3. JetBlue Airways – 98,922
4. Royal Caribbean International – 89,548
5. Onur Air – 80,203

(Source: Inside Facebook)

AirAsia the First Airline with 100,000 Fans on Facebook; Southwest Will Be the First with 1,000,000 Fans originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 21, 2009.

• Twitter, a water cooler chat. Facebook Page, a community canvass. On Twitter, people want to interact with you e.g. complaints and ideas for product improvements. Unless you are a news organization like CNN and The Economist or a celebrity like @Alyssa_Milano, @The_Real_Shaq and @BritneySpears, it’s hard to get away with just tweet-casting without being called inept user of social media. On Facebook, your community want to interact with you AND among themselves. So, it’s relatively easier to get away by not interacting with your fans. Facebook Page can be used by fans as a community wall, for public display of affection towards a brand. In essence, it provides user-created online context for fans to connect with one another, share thoughts and propagating the allure of the brand.
• Social media is interactive. So, be inventive. Toys r’ Us uses its Facebook Page to “to distribute coupons, announce unadvertised deals and solicit feedback.” Others used social media to announce arrival of new products e.g. fresh bakes from oven @AlbionsOven. Some use it effectively as a broadcast tool e.g. @cnnbrk. Depends on needs and context, social media can be used to support your brand building infrastructure or obtain customer feedback or source for talents or ..
• Easier to grow community on Facebook than Twitter? It depends. Coca-cola has the most popular Page on Facebook, with over 4 million fans; on Twitter, Coca-Cola is followed by only over 12,000. It’s the reverse for JetBlue Airways. It has over 1.4 million followers on Twitter and its Facebook Page with over 60,000 fans only. The world’s best low-cost carrier, AirAsia with 15,000-plus followers on Twitter but its Facebook Page is fast approaching the 100,000 mark.The EveryoneConnects campaign by TM started its Twitter and Facebook Page on 19th October 2009. Today, its Facebook Page with more than 23,000 fans but Twitter with just over 500 followers.
• Social media can energize both established and new brands. Blockbuster and niche brands alike can use social technologies for various purposes. Blockbuster brands refer to established brands like Coca-Cola and Nike and usually established over the years via traditional media. Niche brands usually with its band of evangelists. These brands can be either already established offline or those nurtured solely on social media space. It is common for companies to use traditional media to direct people to their social networks.



• Community Size Matters. Like it or loathe it, number of fans/followers is the overt indicator of ‘status’ in social media sphere. Those with low fan-base will tell you that they prefer quality and relevant people following us. But I bet they won’t mind if their fan-base grows thousand-fold, overnight. Also, look at the many ‘follow us to win’ contests out there! On social media, you have richness, in terms of engagement and interaction with your community. Reach, a.k.a. community size, matters too!

Images: Both Coke bottle and Carl’s Jr. burger images are used without permission.

5 Things You Probably Already Know About Social Media Use originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 3, 2009.

When it comes to building a community of evangelists, most companies naturally start by going ‘outside’ the corporate wall i.e. engaging with influencers, bloggers, etc. Why not start with employees? Use them as seeders and spreaders of your brand story. After all, there’s a blurring of work and play in the social media space. Leverage on what you have and can control. Organic evangelism, it is!

A Good Use of Twitter List by P1 originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 20, 2009.

• Despite being branded a failure, there are 350 million PCs with Vista.
• Windows 7 been winning positive reviews.
• Bing is gaining market share at 9% of search share. When Yahoo! started using Bing across its many properties, Bing’s search share could jump to 30%.
• Despite the economic downturn, Microsoft can still afford to spend $9 billion on research and development.
• Various versions of Windows run on more than 95% of all PCs; the remaining are being shared by Mac, Linux,..
• Microsoft to spend up to $11 billion on its new search engine, Bing.
• Microsoft still with annual net income of $15 billion; many expect Windows division to earn $11 billion in profit for fiscal year 2010.
• It has CASH reserves at over $20 billion.
• It has market capitalization of $230 billion (Google with $158 billion).
• Browser IE still with over 60% of market share (Firefox in distant second at 23%)

All (almost) of the above details were derived from an article in the latest Fortune mag (Oct 26 2009 issue), titled Microsoft Reboots.

I Don’t Use Windows, IE and Bing BUT I Don’t Think Microsoft Will Give a Shit originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 22, 2009.

Song as teaser, Twitter stream on website and profile pages on social networks – ingredients for brewing a groundswell? At the time of this posting, Twitter, Facebook and Friendster pages are still relatively empty. Search the Whois database and the record shows the domain ‘www.EveryoneConnects.net’ was created on September 29, 2009 and is registered to Monster Interactive Sdn Bhd (the interactive agency for this campaign?).

‘Through My Window’, part of Microsoft Windows 7 campaign? Or is it for a music-centric social networking site? Or is it by a communication/colloration software solution provider? Or is it… Anyway, let your imagination run amok and enter your wild guess in the 1Question Survey form below.

Through My Window, I Can See A Silhouette of A Social Media Campaign originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 19, 2009.

On October 2 2009, it launched ‘Follow and Retweet us on Twitter‘ contest. Weekly winners get free Amazon.com vouchers; monthly winners get free stays at the hotel. But I think its Grand Chrismas prize is the main attraction: 3Days-2Nights stay at its newly renovated Executive Room, MacBook and iPod.

RoyalPlaza sent me ‘this might interest you’ tweet, informing me about the contest. Most likely, @royalplazatweet remembered the past conversations I had with them and noted my interest in their hotel rooms. I found the tweet relevant to me (so will its customers and prospects).

Key takeaways:

• Branding through conversations Twitter allows companies to stay in touch with its customers and prospects. Through conversations with customers and prospects, you can impress upon them your brand promise and image. This posting is mainly motivated the pleasant conversation this author had with @royalplazatweet. Probably, with more great conversations with more people, more mentions in social media space. Result: Free publicity.
• Serve contextual tweets Over time, you can get better understandings of your community members on Twitter. Each with specific needs and interests, in relation to your products.
• Response to tweets, fast Be responsive in your tweets. Even when you don’t have the answer with the queries, it’s good to let those who tweeted that you’ve read their tweets and will get back to them, as soon as they can.
• Growing community needs enticements Contests seem to be a popular method to entice people to increase Followers count on Twitter. But its effectiveness is still debatable, as it works for some but not others. For @royalplazatweet, its number of Followers has been steadily increasing since the contest started.

Don’t Know Much About RoyalPlaza on Scotts Hotel But I Think They Serve Good Tweets originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 3, 2009.

Malaysians love Social Networking too

There are about 16 million Internet users in Malaysia and IDC Research projected Malaysian Internet users will reach 20.4 million by 2012. In March this year, the number of Facebook users in Malaysia surpassed the one million mark. Recently, a brief survey by YouthSays, Malaysia’s largest youth community website with over 160,000 members, showed 95% of a total of 900 respondents have Friendster’s account, 90% with Facebook and 38% with Twitter (This survey was presented at the recent Malaysian Media Congress 2009).

In Malaysia, the social networking penetration rate was 66.6% in December 2008 (see Table below), behind only to Singapore (74.3%) and South Korea (68%). See Table below.

In terms of Average Minutes Spent on Social Network(s) Per Visitor, Malaysia ranked second at 181.2 minutes after Korea (277.8 min) and ahead of Singapore (175.6 min), Hong Kong (127.7 min), India (110.4 min) and Japan (72.8 min).

Top Social Networks in Malaysia

Like elsewhere in the world, Facebook and Twitter are the superstars these days in Malaysia. Besides these two, what are the other popular social networks Malaysians spending their time these days? Alexa and Google Ad Planner can provide some answers. Alexa Traffic Rank measures website popularity and calculated using average daily visitors and pageviews over the past three months whereas Google Ad Planner is “based on an automated analysis of millions of search queries and site visits” and Unique Visitors refer to number of people visiting the site over a specific month.

Based on the Table below, Facebook is the top social network in Malaysia, followed by YouTube and Friendster. Twitter is the 8th most popular social network in Malaysia.

Top Malaysian Social Networks

Despite the phenomenal popularity of Facebook, etc., there are a handful of Malaysian social networks offering localized contents and services. Some of the notable local social networks are Ruumz, eKawan, GoEatOut, Circles99, FriendX, eMeiMei and Pacmee.

So, how popular are these social networks? For a starter, these social networks are nowhere near global social network brands like Facebook and Friendster, in terms of Malaysian users. Launched in February 2009, Ruumz is today’s most popular Malaysia social network, followed by eKawan (social network for Malay-speaking community) and GoEatOut (dining guide-cum-social network). See Table below.

Discussion

Facebook is replacing Friendster as Malaysian top social network; Facebook outranked Friendster in Alexa and also, Facebook with more unique visitors from Malaysia compared Friendster (Google Ad Planner). However, according to a Friendster Summary Fact Sheet posted on TechCrunch, the social network boasted a total of 2.1 million active users in Malaysia compared to 1.1 million Facebook users in Malaysia.

Malaysians are using global social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster compared to local social networks. Only a few countries are dominated by homegrown social networks, namely Mixi in Japan, Cyworld in Korea, QiQi in China, Cloob in Iran, Maktoob in Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai, Kuwait), StudiVZ in Germany, Hyves in The Netherlands, iWiW in Hungary, Nasza-Klasa in Poland, and Vkontakte.ru in Russia.

How do these local social networks compete? Sites like Pacmee, Friendx, eKawan and eMeiMei tied its social networks to mobile services and deliver value-added services e.g. posting photo via MM and receive status updates via SMS.

Ruumz offers different blend of value-added services on its social network. For example, online music subscription, photo printing and photobook services. With its unique brand positioning and services, Ruumz can differentiate itself in the local social networking scene.

But will it be able to dent Facebook’s armor? Quite unlikely in short-term. Rather than competing head-on with the social network giants, local social networks can thrive by offering different social networking experiences. Facebook and Friendster, for example, are typically broad-based type social network and offer culturally relevant experience is probably not their strong suit. Herein lies the opportunity for Malaysian social networks.

And maybe Malaysian social networks can learn something from the ascendancy of Old Town White Coffee, a Malaysian-based coffee chain. Amidst the crowded marketplace dominated by global brands like Starbucks and Coffee Beans, Old Town able to differentiate its offerings and capture marketshare in Malaysia (and elsewhere in Asia).

Conclusion

This article offers a snapshot of social networking activities and the popular social networks in Malaysia. The leading social networks are Facebook, YouTube and Friendster whereas top Malaysian social networks are Ruumz, eKawan and GoEatOut. Local social networks provide diversity in the social networking landscape and offer choices to Malaysians. Possibly, local players can eventually offer more culturally relevant social networking experiences with localized contents and services.

Snapshot of Social Networking in Malaysia originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 28, 2009.

Clown that ‘Sheesh!’

On May 7th 2009, all came undone. It started with a tweet at 11:05 AM and its downward spiral for @McDelivery from thereon. (A little background information: May 7th is declared as ’1BlackMalaysia Day’, related to the political stand-off in the Malaysian state of Perak. For more, read here).

The Twitter Page of @McDelivery

Insensitive to the sentiment of the day, @McDelivery tweeted “I think everyone that is so caught up with the Perak case should chill and have some McDonald’s.” Quite a number of Malaysian Twitter users were not pleased with the tweet. They responded to @McDelivery and also RT (retweet). Not willing to back-off, @McDelivery went on to deliver its lethal blow to itself by unleashing a second tweet: “Recommending some good meals vibes for everyone is tasteless? Sheesh!” Such sarcasm added fuel to the already burning bushfire and we have Forest inferno!

The following offers blow-by-blow account on what actually happened, narrated with selected Tweets posted:

The following day, McDonald’s Malaysia Facebook Page confirmed, “We’re not on Twitter yet”. The truth is out. As of the afternoon of May 8th 2009, the fake voice of McDonald’s Malaysia, @McDelivery stopped twittering and the Twitter page no longer exist.

Conclusion

Prior to the face-off, @McDelivery is doing a favor to McDonald’s Malaysia through its interesting tweets and interactions. If it weren’t for the incident, many would still think it’s the official voice of McDonald’s on Twitter.

Those who are managing the McDonald’s Malaysia Facebook Page should also need to monitor other social networks. Also, it’s a great lesson for brands is to avoid tweeting about issues that can polarize your customers and audience.

Probably, the biggest mistake of the fake voice is he/she didn’t know when to back-off. So, for social media engagements, get someone who are capable of maneuvering tense situation with finesse. And It’s always wise to stick to your brand story. On Twitter, it’s all about branding through conversations.

How Brandjacker @McDelivery Upset McDonald’s Customers on Twitter originally appeared on GreyReview.com on May 13, 2009.