Over the weekend I wrote about Ian Schafer, who sold advertising space on his Twitter feed for a month on eBay; the item closed at $1,082.01 (see post here). This experiment interests me for a couple of reasons:
Ian’s Twitter feed is followed by 520 people and so this works out at about $2 per person the advertising will reach over the month
The advertising space was sold by auction and there was considerable competition for it. The final price appears to be one that the bidders felt appropriate and as such represents the market value of this advertising space
On one hand I was surprised by the relatively low fee paid for the advertising - with Twitter, people with similar interests and background tend to follow each other. So I’d expect Ian’s followers to be a fairly discrete group and one that could suit really targeted advertising. But the auction on eBay was open and included a number of bidder, so it may be that this is a fair price.
So, an open auction sold off advertising space that would effectively reach an individual’s social network. If we believe that this is a fair indicator of value of this space then it could be that this value is in fact the current true market value of advertising to Ian’s social network on Twitter. In other words this value is a reflection of the influence Ian has.
I’d love to repeat this experiment with a range of other users, or indeed on other social networks. Flooding the market in this way would, of course, have an impact on the prices paid, but it would be the relative prices that interested me most. There is much talk about measuring influence in social networks, and to me allowing the market to decide a fair price for advertising on somebody’s page would be an interesting proxy for such measurement.
The more influential somebody is, the more people that will follow them, the more those that follow them will return and the more trust they will put in what they see there. The price that somebody is willing to pay to be associated with such a person, and with their social media presence, could be an interesting commentary on the influence people believe they have. Letting the market decide the (relative?) value of somebody’s presence and contacts in social media could allow us to start to understand influence.
You’ll remember a post last month showing a great picture of the Groundswell theory in picture format (see here). I was reading another interesting post today on the Groundswell blog.
Josh Bernoff looks at the ways that people can build buiness models for Web 2.0 and suggests that the most likely future successful models will be ones which make use of the technologies to help businesses with their objectives. Making reference to the Groundswell objectives, these include models that help organisations to:
Listen - private communites that help organisations listen to their customers, or brand monitoring organisations (such as BuzzMetrics) organisations that monitor the buzz around a brand
Talk - campaigns that use social media to talk to customers. This is the route that many PR firms are taking as they attempt to digitise their offering
Energise - ratings and reviews increase exposure to and likelihood to purchase items from ecommerce sites - just look at the success of Amazon’s rating or the contribution TripAdvisor makes to Expedia’s sales
Support - support forums and communities make it easier for customers to find the solution to their problem, are less costly than call centres and other ways of supporting customers
Embrace - customers have great ideas and some great companies harness them, either through their own online research communities or through sites such as Innocentive that match those with problems to those with solutions
I think this is an interesting way to start to analyse and segment the activities that organisations are doing in the Web 2.0 space. I think, however, the picture might be more complex - with some solutions and services actually taking from a selection of these objectives. In fact, I think the greatest opportunity for Web 2.0 is to help brands have ongoing conversations with their customers - not just listening, but talking. With elements of supporting and embracing. And energising from time to time. Understanding how these objectives combine to support businesses will be where the real business models come from.
