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The short answer, no. A more detailed report on Kawasaki’s panel of young people, and what online services they’re willing to pay for — some boys will pay for Xbox Live, and that’s about all — is written up at Amex OPEN Forum.
Murdoch’s declaration that NewsCorp will charge for all online news content sounds more and more insane.
In his latest post at the Amex OPEN Forum blog, Guy Kawasaki comes out as a Twitterhawk fan. Here’s how it works:
“you compose up to five responses to the tweets that it finds for each search condition and schedule the search intervals. An Audi dealer in Palo Alto, for example, can use this to find sales or maintenance prospects on Twitter. Twitterhawk will then tweet your responses for when it finds the right keywords in the right area.”
Twitterhawk limits subscribers to its service to sending 12 marketing tweets per day, prevents any subscriber from pinging a single Twitter user more than once based on any search query, and charges $0.05 per ad-tweet it sends, pricing that will likely limit outright spam.
“At this price and at this rate, Twitterhawk is hardly a spam tool. It is, however, a very powerful marketing tool if you use it sparingly and precisely. The Audi dealer, for example, might find that it sent out 100 tweets at a total cost of $5 and got one oil change customer out of it. That’s probably worth it — particularly if the customer returns for more expensive work or buys a car.
“Looking at it another way: How else can you find people within driving distance of your dealership who are interested in Audis? Radio, TV, and newspaper advertising? Don’t make me laugh. It’s certainly worth trying — although, in truth, you can try Twitter targeted-direct marketing without Twitterhawk by simply using Twitter’s search capability or most Twitter clients anyway.”
The key to Twitterhawk’s success, though, is how Twitter users respond. Technically speaking, I suppose automated reply-tweets (even if a business pays to have them twittered, like it would pay to have a junk-mail postcard delivered) aren’t spam. But if they give Twitter users a creepy feeling, or even if the Twitterhawk messages lack the authentic, personal voice that motivates Twitter users to respond to messages, that math won’t work out for marketers, and the Twitter community will have put the service out of business because it doesn’t add value to the conversation.
This week Amercian Express’s OPEN Forum blog launches a new section on Financial Management, with editorial contributions from Paul Kedrosky and the writers at Wisebread, The Simple Dollar, Recession Wire and others.
Gabriel Rossi @TheBrandBuilder tells his 1200 followers that Amex’s OPEN Forum blog is “one of the best social media efforts I’ve ever seen.”
Amazing (and widespread) credibility for a website that started as an ad campaign.
For most of the past year, the voices of the American Express OPEN Forum blog have come from outside business experts such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, Techdirt and the professors at the Wharton School of Business. Recently, American Express found its own voice and added it to the conversation. Not the voice you’d expect — “Hey, check out the Gold Card!” — but a voice that sounds like a human being with some advice for small business owners.
Related: How American Express uses Twitter to reach new audiences.
I agree with Godin that traditional advertising doesn’t and won’t work in Facebook or Twitter. Operative word: traditional. But I don’t agree that Twitter and Facebook — just because they’re designed for connecting communities rather than distributing traditional media content — won’t devise native experiences that will work well for their communities and for brand marketers at the same time.
Brand marketing doesn’t need to operate like “traditional advertising.” For example, with its OPEN Forum blog, American Express is using marketing dollars to create a credible small business publication, replete with editorial contributions from the leading names in business advice. Based on repeat visitor rates and links from other sites that recommend it to their readers, the SMB community is finding value in the OPEN Forum blog even though its content is funded by ad dollars. And because the contributors to the site, such as Guy Kawasaki and Anita Campbell, are given license to create real, editorial content (they wouldn’t participate otherwise), they’re alerting their Twitter followers each time they post something new. They are not paid to post these stories to Twitter; they’re doing it because they always Twitter new stuff they publish, whether the content appears on their own sites or at someone else’s publication.
I’d argue that American Express is using Twitter for brand marketing right now, and it’s working as well for Guy’s and Anita’s followers as it is for American Express.
Certain applications within Facebook, like Graffiti, have done the same: Developing ad-supported experiences that allow brands to enter the conversation without spoiling the conversation. Here are some exmples.
(Disclosure of sorts: Seth Godin is not officially affiliated with FM, unless you count our informal Seth Godin Fan Club. He is, however, a sometime contributor to the OPEN Forum site, the content of which FM manages.)
Earlier this week, I claimed that American Express’s OPEN Forum blog had been validated by the mainstream press as a legitimate small business publication. Now sites like Open Business are counting the OPEN Forum blog among the most influential blogs for entrepreneurs, alongside the leading editorial voices on the web: Matt Marshall’s VentureBeat, Arrington’s TechCrunch, MacManus’s Read/Write Web, Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World, Fred Wilson’s AVC, Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends, Blodget’s Alley Insider, and others. Open Business ranks the OPEN Forum site at 21 out of the best 150.
That’s not a total surprise, given that many of the above authors are contributors to OPEN Forum site, and that American Express has the good sense to let them write unfiltered editorial stories that have no direct relation to any American Express product.
(Disclosures: FM works with American Express on the OPEN Forum blog, and the above authors are all part of the FM family.)
I’ve viewed American Express’s OPEN Forum blog as a legitimate small business publication for a long time, but, hey, I’m biased. Amex partners with FM and top SMB authors and experts (Anita Campbell, Scott Belsky, Guy Kawasaki, John Jantsch, Mike Masnick, Knowledge@Wharton, the Techdirt Insight Community, et al) to create the editorial content published on the site. (More on the FM / Amex partnership here.)
Turns out, I’m not a alone. Mainstream business publications such as the NY Times, Entrepreneur, FT and Mediapost are four that sourced Amex OPEN blog articles — this week alone.
Last week American Express announced the launch of the Economy section to its OPEN Forum site for small business owners.
“the Economy section of OPEN Forum features blog and news commentary, expert tips and advice for surviving the downturn, personal experiences from business owners across the country about how they are managing in times of the downturn and polls about what the state of the economy means for small business.”
Several leading authors (and FM partners) such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, Mike Masnick, John Jantsch, Scott Belsky and the team at the University of Pennsylvania’s Knowlege@Wharton are contributing content.
American Express’s OPEN Forum Blog is built around editorial content licensed from leading business authors such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, Scott Belsky and others (more here Double Team movie full ). When a reader decides to share a particular story with a friend or a community like Techmeme, where someone posted this article by John Battelle, it’s American Express and the OPEN Forum Blog that benefit from the amplification.
Last week the OPEN Forum Blog won gold at the MIXX Awards.
