Sorry I haven’t posted for a while folks – busy building something for a change. Here is a quick one (idea) – enable small businesses and individuals to tweet-in ads or classifieds during a TV programme. The solution could also be extended to cover online video, especially live ones.

Assuming you actually care what your Twitter followers think about your tweets, wouldn’t it be useful to have an app that does the following?

1. Analyses your followers’ tweets and streams including the links they contain, to determine their interests and then tells you the strength of tweet you are about to post in terms of its correlation with those interests.
2. Regularly displays fresh blog posts and tweets to you that your followers might like but that the majority of them have not tweeted about yet or seen in their streams.

I know, I know it’s a bit sad and if you really need a tool to tell you what to tweet then you probably don’t deserve any followers. If you are using Twitter for marketing though, as one or two (or 10 million) people do, I imagine you could find this really useful. Besides would you really bet against this sort of app becoming popular? Oh and for revenue, the app could use a combination of a freemium and ad-based model. A free ad-supported model that analyses only half your followers for example and a paid full version. Come to think of it, perhaps Twitter itself should build this tool.

1. Trash Twitter on your blog and all but swear to never use it. (See my post here)
   
2. Realise that no one cares what you think and that they all continue to rave about Twitter
3. Quietly try Twitter to see what all the fuss is about
4. Eat humble pie and admit publicly that you were wrong – Twitter does seem to be mildly useful after all (See update to same post above)
   
5. Now that the awkward admission and guilt are behind you, begin using Twitter with reckless abandon, dropping hashtags and RTs everywhere (My Twitter Profile)
   
6. Install Twitter widgets for your blog and begin auto-tweeting all your blog posts
7. Become a full-fledged Twitter evangelist and write a guide or two for Twitter newbies.This will be my next post.
   

By the way, it is not unusual to find that the transition from step 3 to 7 takes place considerably quicker than that from 1 to 3. Such is the power of the force called Twitter.

Still on Facebook and conversion, what if people who click on your Facebook ad could be greeted with “Dear John” (or whatever their name was) when they arrived on your landing page instead of a generic “Dear Facebook User”?

Facebook would of course need a user’s permission to do this and if they hadn’t received it, Facebook could let you include a ‘Personalise this Page’ button on your landing page and you could throw in an extra discount or some other incentive for users who click it. When a user clicks the button, the generic “Dear Facebook User” greeting could then change to “Dear John” and in addition, you could optionally prompt them to invite their friends who might be more interested in the offer etc.

As a marketer I would certainly pay for something like this. Wouldn’t you?

I am new to Twitter so I am still learning to tell my RTs from my @replies, DMs and hashtags – or is that #tags? Anyway, I think there might be some combination of all these Twitter elements that might enable it to support the implementation of a tool that I have long wished was available. Basically I want to be able to request a notification of the occurrence of some future event. E.g:

#TweetMeWhen: #android G1 enables app installs on SD Card; or

#TweetMeWhen: #CSI Season X is out on DVD

I would then want other people who are also interested in knowing this to be able to ‘follow’ the event somehow – note I use the term ‘follow’ loosely here to mean track. I would also want, along with all other followers of the event to receive a tweet when someone reports the event as happened.

I suppose everyone interested in an event could just favourite it and periodically monitor @replies to it but that does not really do the job. Any of you Twitter veterans out there have a better idea about how to achieve this without building a dedicated application for it?

One of my favourite products from this year’s Demo show was Zuora’s Z-Commerce for Facebook. With Facebook having failed to give application developers a way to sell their apps to users a la the iPhone’s app store, most of the developers have had to resort to free, frivolous apps that they then look to monetise through ads. This for the most part hasn’t worked. Enter Zuora’s Z-Commerce which apparently enables developers to plug-in tools for charging users for the use of their apps.

The Zuora Demo finished with the presenters asking the audience to think of a Facebook app that they would pay for. One might be forgiven for thinking that because Facebook users are already accustomed to free apps, they would be unlikely to want to pay for any apps. This may well be true but here is an idea for an app that I would seriously consider paying for if it were technically feasible and implemented.

The app I am thinking of would serve as an automatic birthday greeting messenger. In other words an app that would allow me to schedule birthday greetings and/or gifts to be sent to each of my Facebook friends as and when their birthdays come up. I don’t want to receive reminders about people’s birthdays so that I can manually send them greetings – I want the app to just send them.

Now I think the reason that such an app does not appear to exist currently (I dida cursory check) is that it gives users very little reason to revisit the app, which means the app would score low on Facebook’s scale of app popularity – number of monthly active users and more importantly, means that the app will make very little revenue if any from advertising. As a paid app however, a developer might care less about the number of monthly active users. Besides, you could always prompt members to come back to schedule greetings for newly added friends.

I do see one potential issue for such an app though – it might struggle to achieve viral growth because as a user of the app, I wouldn’t want recipients of my greetings to know that the greetings were auto-sent. This means that the whole value proposition of the app – hassle-free greetings – cannot be explicitly expressed in the Facebook News Feed and other viral channels. Still, I would gladly pay something like $4.99 a year for an app like this and perhaps pay upfront for 3 years.

Just watched the demo09 presentation by the company 7 Billion People. They operate in the space that I have repeatedly suggested Facebook should focus on – Conversion. My thinking is that assuming it is technically feasible, adding Facebook data to the algorithms that 7 Billion People currently uses in customising e-commerce user experiences could significantly increase the already impressive conversion rates that the company is claiming to deliver to its customers.

I have always feared that the much-hyped phenomenon of location-based services was destined to join a long line of technologies that never quite lived up to their hype. Of course I always hoped to be proved wrong but when TechCrunch ran a post last year inviting readers to send in their ideas for location-based services, a detailed review of the submitted ideas only served to underline my fears. In my opinion not one of the ideas had any serious substance to it – not any of the winners and not even my submission which got an honorary mention in the results.

Now I’d like to say that I have come up with a great idea for a killer location-based application but sadly I can’t – all I have is yet another potentially useful but not quite killer idea.

My idea is for a mobile (iPhone / Android) app that enables its users to help each other track prices of products in real-life shops, i.e. as opposed to online. It would work as follows:

1. User A goes into a store and finds a product that she likes. She however thinks its price will come down soon – perhaps in the sale. She therefore bookmarks the item using our app, optionally taking a photo of it and adding it to the bookmark. She also tags the bookmark and names it. Perhaps, User A can just scan the tag on the item and gets the name and description that way.
2. Two weeks later, User B visits the same store that User A went to. The application recognises this based on location and alerts User B that a fellow user has asked for an item in that store needs to be price-tracked. I know this assumes that User B has GPS turned on, which could be an issue.
3. User B locates the item and enters the current price.
4. User A is notified of the current price and if it is favourable she may return to the store to buy the item.

Of course the above begs the question as to what the incentive is for User B to help User A in this way. If the store were somehow involved in the process, then the store could reward User B in some way. If the store were involved however, you would have to ask why they wouldn’t just notify User A directly. I don’t have all the answers I’m afraid. This one is just a seed of an idea – perhaps someone else can pick up from where I’m leaving off.

As for how the app would realise revenue, that’s easy – User A’s interest in and intention to buy a particular product is registered and therefore the app can target ads to User A. As always, the problem with an ads only revenue model such as this is that the app would require serious traffic in order to make significant revenue.

Happy New Year. It’s been a while since my last post, in which I explored conversion as a potential alternative revenue model to advertising for web startups. In this post I want to explore a way in which Facebook could make money from conversion.

Remember that like Google, Facebook already enjoys a large user base because of a free product that it offers to its users – social networking. As I have posted before, what it now needs to do is to leverage that user base and traffic to offer a service to businesses for a fee – preferably a service other than advertising and therefore away from Google’s turf. I am suggesting in this post that such a service could be conversion – i.e. helping its paying clients convert eyeballs to users once visitors arrive at those clients’ websites.

With 150 million active users and rising and a great share of overall Internet-user attention, Facebook certainly has a major asset in its hands, which it can leverage to offer a service to businesses. With its “Login with Facebook” service, Facebook is already well on its way to doing this. Apparently Govit.com, an early adopter of Connect, saw 58% of new users choosing to login with Facebook. That is huge. However the problem Facebook has is that it can’t charge businesses for this service. If it did, adoption would be very low. To build on the feature, my thinking is that Facebook could enable visitors to a website to see which of their friends or friends’ friends already use the service and request to see or ask them what they think of it. Each of such requests by visitors could then be charged for by Facebook, or perhaps only when a response is received.

The beauty of using Facebook for this as opposed to something like Twitter is that the former is stronger for identification purposes and any abuse by users should be relatively easy to police.

As a revenue earner, I think the potential is huge here for Facebook, although I suspect that takers will be limited to businesses who actually charge customers for their products/services. I don’t think conversion through Facebook would offer much value to a blogger for example, whereas the same blogger might be willing to spend on Adwords in order to attract eyeballs to his/her blog. Some might say because of this that Facebook Convert (there I’ve even named it for them) can never be as big an earner as advertising. I say perhaps not as big as advertising is for Google but certainly better than advertising will ever do for Facebook, because as many have noted before me, whilst advertising perfectly compliments search, it is not such a good fit for social networks – it is just not that well-aligned with the user’s purpose for being on Facebook or any other similar site.

Continuing my train of thought on finding new alternatives to advertising as a revenue model for web-based businesses, it occurred to me recently that yet another greater business need than exposure (which is what advertising gives to a business) is conversion – converting eyeballs to users or buyers. Businesses collectively pay billions to Google to get new visitors to their websites but what happens once they get there? Beyond relying on their own copy-writing skills, what tools are available to businesses to help convert those visitors to users?

I did a little bit of research consisting solely of a blog search on tools for converting visitors and the only two tools I found were a very interesting service called EyeView and another called Involver. From what I can make out, EyeView and Involver seem to let you build interactive and direct calls to action into your tutorials and adverts respectively. Personally, I like EyeView’s tutorial approach better – you teach visitors how to use your service or product and right from within the tutorial, you enable them to begin using it. It appears that EyeView supports an option to pay per conversion. Wonderful!

I started to think that given the right execution, market conditions and guidance; and provided they don’t get gobbled up along the way, either of these two companies or some other similar one, could well become the next Google. However, I soon remembered that Google did not become so successful by simply providing a service to businesses and charging a fee for it. Instead, and as I outlined in the post I linked to above, it first met a basic consumer need to generate traffic and then leveraged that traffic to meet a business need. The awesomeness is in the combination.

Wow, this is a Eureka moment – for me at least; since we don’t have a choice anyway, let’s leave Google to continue to dominate advertising and let’s focus instead on Conversion as the next big opportunity. Why didn’t I think of this before or more to the point why aren’t more start-ups operating in this space?

Perhaps in my next post, I will look at how Facebook or Twitter might take on the conversion problem. I already feel an idea coming on.