21st Amendment Beer-Tasting & Hiring Party, 12/20
Like everyone else in the Bay Area, we love Github and we’re hiring engineers! Unlike everyone else, our office is located next to San Francisco’s best micro-brewery, 21st Amendment, and we’ll be hanging out and talking beer, Ruby, and Rails on Tuesday December 20th.
Brews on tap:
- South Park Blonde
- Baby Horse
- ./script/lager
- Red Dwarf
- Fireside Chat
- Eager Loading
- Back in Black
- Two Rivers Cider
- has_many glasses
Does talking Ruby make you thirsty? Get your ticket now from Eventbrite
Who is 140 Proof?
We’ve built a super-performant recommendation engine using the best tools (Rails, GitHub, Hudson, Memcache, NewRelic, Redis, Resque, etc). We’ve also contributed several gems back to the community, like the Twitter gem, Rails admin, the monetization libraries, and scalable Twitter buttons.
We’re seeking full-time Rubyists, Rails developers, and dev-ops’ers to join our team (these are full-time jobs in San Francisco).
To learn more, check out this amazingly tall page: http://labs.140proof.com, or ping jm3 on Github or on Twitter.
(If you’re reading this after 12/20 and still want to grab a beer at 21A, contact us at jobs@140proof.com)
Twitter Flatters Facebook by Revealing User Activity
Hidden in the Discover tab of the new Twitter design is a stream called Activity, designed to generate more activity and keep people engaged with the site. Said Twitter, “It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow.”
Emphasis on discovery: by surfacing more activity — and offering calls to action via Follow buttons and Retweet links — Twitter hopes to raise engagement and time spent on site.
Tech blogs read this keep-them-clicking move as Facebook flattery and point to the Facebook News Feed, which supports Facebook’s “incredibly low bounce rate.” Expect to see follows, retweets, and favorites increase everywhere across Twitter, as discovery multiplies the eyes on your brand.
Your Brand’s Activity Is Being Broadcast — So Make It Count
Because the people who follow you now have an easy way to keep tabs on all your activity, make sure all your activity is relevant to the brand. Everything your brand does on twitter — not just tweeting — is visible to people.
This means that in addition to tweeting the wrong thing — as Kenneth Cole learned during the Egypt uprising and when Chrysler dropped the F-bomb — a brand can be publicly shamed for following the wrong thing or saving the wrong thing to favorites.
Imagine the following headlines:
- Ford Fires Media Agency for Favoriting Road Rage Jokes
- Whole Foods Follows Monsanto on Twitter — What Does It Mean?
- Juicy Couture in Bed with Advertising Age Reporters?
So follow people who reflect well on your brand, and favorite only the tweets that back up your brand’s core principles and values. Everything else? Do it with an unbranded account.
by Jon Elvekrog, CEO
Carol Bartz’s abrupt departure from Yahoo has a lot of people talking about how this moment gives the struggling portal the chance to become a media company again. Ideas are swirling: Should Yahoo buy Hulu? Should they merge with News Corp.?
Those intriguing possibilities make great headlines for the trade publications, but this line of thinking – Hulu, News Corp, or becoming a media company – is a mistake.
Yahoo is in the business of providing information (you might actually say it’s a portal to information) and it’s really good at this business. Yahoo Finance is great. Yahoo Sports is pretty nice. Yahoo Games is pretty strong among the social game companies that have not kept up with Zynga. Messenger and Mail are both strong franchises as well. This information attracts an audience, which Yahoo can sell. But it needs to stop there, rather than try to become an enterprise that produces the media it tries to sell.
Yahoo is a company that creates cool products and uses technology to organize information in ways that build a loyal audience. It’s not Hollywood, and that’s why Terry Semel was a bad choice to run the company for most of the 2000s.
Yahoo needs a product CEO who can leverage technology to grow new or existing audiences. That’s not possible in search, which Yahoo should probably outsource to Google like they did in the old days and start making more money than they currently do with Microsoft.
By freeing itself of search and making additional profit, Yahoo could actually go out and acquire valuable companies to bolster its product offering. Around a year ago, Google bought the social gaming company Slide for close to $200 million. Just last week, Google killed all of Slide’s products to concentrate on Google+. It surprised many people in the Valley, but for me it seemed like a huge missed opportunity for Yahoo.
Had Yahoo gone all in a year ago and bought Slide, it would have inherited a cool set of products along with Max Levchin, a smart technology lead who could have transformed the company from a stumbling “media” empire back into a company with killer products. But that didn’t happen, Google killed Slide, and now Levchin works for neither company.
Hypothetical or not, Yahoo needs to capitalize on these kinds of opportunities. It’s fairly easy to understand why the media are having fun prognosticating about Yahoo’s future as a media company – Yahoo itself is confused about the matter. In reality, we need to think about Yahoo not as a media clearinghouse, but as a conduit to a great audience.
Media companies develop and generate content, like editorial copy or video. Newspapers are media companies, and the current idea of a “newspaper” can easily be split into two different models. There are papers filled with investigative reporting, such as The New York Times and The Economist, and then there are content re-packagers who modify and reconstruct existing content in new and interesting ways, like Huffington Post, TMZ and Bleacher Report.
In reality, the former group will only exist via a subscription model, because they have to cover overhead costs. Investigative journalism takes months of reporting and the ability to cover stories both near and far requires international and regional bureaus.
The re-packagers, meanwhile, have such a low cost structure that they can easily survive on fewer page views and smaller audiences. TV networks operate in a similar fashion by developing content in the hopes of attracting a big audience they can sell to advertisers.
But Silicon Valley is not the newspaper industry, nor is it primetime TV, and big technology companies like Yahoo cannot create the same hit-driven content that we expect from TV networks or traditional newspapers.
But Yahoo is already a hit-driven business with several successes that already attract large audiences, including mail and games. If it wants to survive on ad revenue, Yahoo can’t focus on manufacturing media. The struggling portal can sell its technology audiences and compete for advertising dollars, and that’s the end of the story. Technology and media companies are not the same, so let’s stop expecting a cat to bark.
by Jon Elvekrog, CEO
With its rapid growth, Google+ has been hailed by many within the digital media industry as a potential Facebook killer, just like every other buzz-worthy social platform that came along in the past few years. Google+ is growing at a faster rate than any other social network, so surely it has the power to unseat Facebook, right? I don’t see that happening.
A few years ago we saw the same thing with Twitter. Skyrocketing growth and mainstream acceptance had Twitter hailed as a potential Facebook killer, and Mark Zuckerberg’s network even tried to buy the messaging platform when it was still plagued by growing pains and fail whales. When Twitter rebuffed Facebook’s offer in 2008, the larger social network just copied some of Twitter’s features. Both platforms still exist today, and savvy users often have accounts on both platforms, for very different reasons.
Twitter is a place where users share things with their followers. Twitter is where users turn for news, media and entertainment, almost like an RSS feed where they can talk back and share their own content. The relationships aren’t always one-to-one, and the people whom users follow can differ drastically from whom they follow. Users may follow Barack Obama, but their tweets are not intended for the commander in chief.
Facebook, on the other hand, is a place for friends and family, a network built on one-to-one connections, where sharing in public means sharing with your entire network. As business relationships increasingly creep onto Facebook, users are actively thinking before they share, with the knowledge that everyone within their network has a chance of seeing their posts.
Now, which of these models does Google+ more closely resemble? It’s very clearly Twitter, because of the asymmetric relationships between users. But Google+ goes one step further and lets consumers define these relationships – called Circles — and then pick and choose how they want to share content and news with those relationships. Users are essentially building buckets and then deciding how they want to share and interact with those buckets of friends or contacts.
This unique feature of Google+ could be a major tool for advertisers, due to two factors. The first is that the clustering of users into circles actually makes it far easier for ad targeting. Entire companies specialize in building audience segments based on similar interests and behaviors, and then sell these segments to advertisers. In the case ofGoogle+, users are performing the grouping themselves. All these users obviously have one common link, whether it’s just the single user they’re connected to or a shared interest. All Google has to do is look at the kind of content shared in the circle and use that interest graph data to target advertising to specific audiences.
That’s a huge coup for big G, but there’s a big ad opportunity for brand advertisers as well. Google+ was created for sharing, whether it’s with the family, friends, co-workers or loose acquaintances. Brands haven’t really become part of the Google+ experience, but when they do, it’s very likely that consumers will share branded messaging as well. Research shows that users are comfortable sharing ads with their friends and family if they feel the ads appeal to them, which is good news for brands. If successfully implement, this approach turns paid impressions (the original ad served) into additional earned media (the shared ad that other users see).
Rumors are constantly flaring up that either Facebook or Google will still buy Twitter, but there’s no reason to think that all three social platforms can’t peacefully coexist. Google+was built to fix some of the sharing mishaps that can occur on the other major social platforms, and it encourages sharing more than any other platform.
By targeting appropriate ads to receptive audiences, Google+ opens the door to more appealing and relevant advertising for brands, in a non-intrusive way that can appeal to users. What remains to be seen is how well Google can pull it off, and whether the network’s meteoric growth can continue.
Popular Mac blogger John Gruber AKA Daring Fireball dissected the latest iteration of the Twitter for iPhone app, released Thursday.
Gruber analyzes thoroughly the user experience and design changes in contrast to the app’s predecessor, the much-loved Tweetie by Loren Brichter. Tweetie was acquired by Twitter in 2010, and Loren Brichter stayed on with the company until November of this year.
Gruber echoes the remarks of other commenters, who conclude that the new Twitter for iPhone is great for new, low-engagement users but buries advanced functionality too deeply.
Says Gruber:
“I don’t care for the new Twitter app much at all. But I switched to Tweetbot on my iPhone months ago. And I stopped using the Twitter website for much of anything years ago. Native Twitter clients, all the way. So I’m not angry, or even aggrieved. I am, though, a little sad…because Tweetie was truly a great app, and today’s Twitter is no Tweetie. I wouldn’t hesitate to hold Tweetie up as one of the best iPhone apps ever made, period. It was every bit as polished and clever — if not more so — than Apple’s own apps. No app is perfect, no app will please everyone, but Tweetie came damn close.”
Read Gruber’s full user experience analysis. And for the highly detail-oriented and curious, we recommend Jeremy Stanley’s blow-by-blow recap of all the versions of Tweetie/Twitter for iPhone so far.
We at 140 Proof were fans of Tweetie too. We recommend Echofon for iPhone and Tweetbot for their excellent user experience and rich feature set for highly engaged users.
AMC Achieves Spine-Tingling Performance for Walking Dead Premiere
Walkers are back. The AMC zombie TV series “The Walking Dead” debuted its second season to critical and fan acclaim in October, ravaging basic cable records and biting off a third season commitment from AMC. TargetCast and 140 Proof partnered to promote the show in the social stream, achieving performance twice the network average.
140 Proof Engages Zombie-Focused Personas
AMC and its agency of record, TargetCast, sought to target the 18-34 demographic to grow awareness around the season premiere. 140 Proof took the plan a step further, adding interest-based targeting to reach AMC fans, zombie fans, and Halloween fanatics in the social stream.
The campaign drove social stream users to watch a 30 second trailer for the premiere, and users on smartphones were treated to a fast, native video experience within their social apps.
“The Walking Dead” Breaks Broadcast Records
The season premiere of “The Walking Dead” drew 7.3 million viewers, breaking a basic cable record for the 18-49 demographic.
140 Proof and TargetCast have teamed up to promote three other winning dramas for AMC: Breaking Bad, The Killing, and the newly-launched Hell on Wheels. Since AMC began investing in original programming in 2006, net ad sales revenue has grown 76% and affiliate revenue has increased 49% (Adweek).
Read more about the social strategy for AMC shows on MediaPost »
Choosing who to follow is part of cultivating your brand’s image. To look smart in the stream, who should you follow? Keep it simple and follow the cream of the crop:
- Prominent thinkers in your space
- Respected industry press
- Companies doing exceptional work in related fields
- Your big partners and potential partners
- Your coolest customers
- Your big side projects (we follow our good works project, @140Causes)
Note: If you find you want to keep track of accounts that wouldn’t reflect well on you (such as your direct competitors), follow those accounts with a private Twitter list or via a separate, unbranded account.
We advise brands to minimize the total number of people or companies they follow. We’ll explain more in a future post.
What’s your philosophy about who a brand should follow?
The Bundler, Darth, a Georgia Peach, and “Late for the Train” crossing Second Street in San Francisco on the way from 140 Proof HQ to Centro for coffee.
