27 Sep, 2011
I follow Twitter with great curiosity (Twitter name is madcom, if you want to find me) as well as with some healthy scepticism. Friends, even those familiar with social networking sites, such as Facebook, ask me what is it all about. This is part of an answer for Twitter beginners.
Social network marketing
Twitter is a fascinating world, as is the whole online social networking universe. I won’t explain the workings of Twitter. It is simple and written about elsewhere (try Wikipedia) but what I will attempt to explain is how Twitter is operating in social network marketing and how it can be used to make money.
Twitter operates as part of the social media marketing machine so you need to understand social media marketing to understand Twitter’s uses.
Social network marketing or social media marketing are terms that are less understood and perhaps poorly defined. Social media marketing involves engaging with online communities to create brand awareness, to create opportunities through partnerships, to generate targeted traffic and, ultimately, to generate sales.
Back to marketing basics
To understand social network marketing lets start with the basics of marketing. Marketing is a process to match products or services to the needs or wants of the customers in a way that provides a profit for an organisation.
Marketing uses market testing methods to work out what the customers want, then develops a product or service to meet that want, and then promotes and advertises the product to attract the customers. Simple!
So how does Twitter help in these processes? Lets break the marketing process down to these three components: finding out what the customer wants, creating the perfect product, and then selling it. Looked at in these terms Twitter has a lot to offer.
Monitoring mindshare
Mindshare is a term that is being used in the online social networking world to explain what the recognition level of a product is in the population. By following keywords (identified by hashes) or other search terms on monitoring sites you can monitor the Twitterverse (all that is happening on Twitter) for every mention of your product or company. Twitter because of its immediacy is an important indicator of the online mindshare.
This is a metric for a brand’s share of the collective mind! There are lots of other and more sophisticated methods to measure keywords that are being used across the online world to include Google and other important search engines.
Developing the perfect product
Monitoring mindshare provides the intelligence or information to develop the product or promotional message that will make the product more saleable. This is the product monitoring and product development part.
Monetising Twitter
This is the Holy Grail for Twitter. How is Twitter going to make money out of the whole Twitter world. No-one really knows how Twitter will make money but everyone seems to know about how it can be used to make YOU money.
How to make money using Twitter
Twitter CAN make you money in quite a few ways. It is a medium for getting messages out there so can be used as a great promotional and advertising tool particularly for international brands. Therefore you should be using it if you work for an advertising agency.
Twitter is a good method for building international brand. It will not work so well if you are a local business or in a niche market unless, as in all things marketing, you are creative.
Direct selling on Twitter is not encouraged. This is not so much because it is rude but mostly because it is too hard sell and therefore ineffective. The Twitter tweet is a short message and therefore does not allow anything more than headline-style persuasion, it is soft sell. However, the tweet can be used to direct people to websites or blogs where a more persuasive, promotional message can be used to persuade people to buy products. This is, of course, all about creating and driving website traffic.
Affiliate marketing
Companies either use their own marketers to drive traffic or they use affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is where the originator of the traffic gets paid for each customer or visitor to the owner’s site. This is where many people seek to make money online.
Affiliate marketing on Twitter requires that the originating marketer has enough influence with the Twitter community that they can direct large traffic volumes. This is why developing large followings on Twitter is so important. (It is one of the contradictions in Twitter that there is an expectation of a mutual exchange of messages between users. Those that have thousands of followers are unlikely to read the tweets of their followers.)
Providing help and expertise
The other way to make money on Twitter is to provide help to others to make money out of Twitter. Expertise in social network marketing is a rare commodity and there are those offering to sell that expertise. There are social networking gurus who can help you get traffic to your site or your affiliate’s site (I am not pretending to be one of them).
Get Twittering for money
So what does this mean for you if you want to make money from Twitter? You have several options:
-
you can use Twitter as part of a larger branding and advertising strategy within your agency or company,
-
you can develop an affiliate marketing strategy by developing a large enough Twitter following that you can direct significant, qualified traffic to target sites, or
-
you can make yourself into an expert and sell your services to those that need it.
Thanks for reading this blog – no money required.
22 Sep, 2011
Petard is a word that survives in the modern world entirely in the expression hoist with his own petard, which means someone fails because of their own plans or because of their own deviousness. It is usually understood that its literal meaning is to be blown up with your own bomb. But there is a far more comical interpretation.
The expression is one of Shakespeare’s most descriptive—he used it in Hamlet III.iv.207 in 1605.
For tis the sport to haue the enginer Hoist with his owne petard.
The word, petard, in English, comes from the late 16th century and was used for a small cannon-like bomb used to blow in doors and breach walls. The English borrowed the word directly from the French who had coined the word pétard for this type of bomb. The bomb was made by filling a thick metal cannister with gunpowder, setting it against the wall or door to be breached and then exploding it by lighting a wick. Petards were quite unreliable and often exploded prematurely “hoisting” the engineer setting it alight high into the air.
Petard has a rather humorous ancestry having been derived from the Middle French word péter, which meant to break wind, from Old French pet for a fart, which originally came from Latin, pedere to break wind. The bomb got its name because its sound was fart-like.
When I first came across the expression—learning Shakespeare in my English lessons—I was very much impressed with the metaphor. However, I still cannot forgive that English teacher for not explaining that Shakespeare, who loved his puns and his double entendres, was probably also suggesting that the engineer was blown up by his own fart. This would have given the schoolboy me a much greater love and appreciation of Shakespeare than I had at the time.
12 Sep, 2011
Now, while the Rugby World Cup is dominating the world’s sporting news, we must use the opportunity to wrest back the word football from our soccer rivals. Soccer (Association Football) came into existence at least a generation after rugby football. At that time there were many forms of football around in England and around the world. The followers of Association Football have been trying to misappropriate the word football for many years without having any basis in history.
The world game
Harpustum
Football is a sport as old as history. There are forms of football in many cultures around the world that involve carrying the ball. The Māori in New Zealand played a ball game called Ki-o-rahi on a circular field throwing and kicking a ball called a ki. The Australian Aboriginals had a kicking and catching game, Marn grook, which in some places used a ball made from possum skins.
In Manipur, India, they play Yubi lakpi (meaning literally coconut snatching), a football game using a coconut, very similar to rugby.
In Europe the Romans played a ball game called Harpustum (from the Greek, harpazein, meaning to snatch) described as involving many wrestling holds. They took it all over their empire. The Georgians have Lelo burti (meaning literally field ball), a full contact ball game.
A game played on foot
A large misconception about football is that the word originated as a ball game that involved exclusively kicking the ball with your foot. Football got its name because it was a game played on foot as opposed to on horseback (there was a game called horseball that originated in 1700). This had an important class distinction in that the aristocratic sports were equestrian and the peasants played on foot. It may also have been a name used to differentiate forms of football from handball in medieval times.
Shrovetide footballs
Early English football games were played between neighbouring villages and involved an unlimited number of players on opposing teams (men, women and children), who would compete to carry a ball made from anything including inflated pig bladders to the objective (hence the goal).
These games are referred to as folk football, mob football or Shrovetide football (Shrovetide being the week before Lent). In the many royal proclamations that came out to ban them they were referred to as Fute Ball despite some of these games strictly forbidding kicking the ball.
There were many forms: the Irish had Caid (meaning scrotum of the bull, lets hope this was not a literal name); the Welsh had Knapan (Cnapan, Knappan); the Cornish had hurling to goal; the West Country of England (Devon, Gloucestershire, etc) had hurling over country; the East Anglians had Camp Ball; and the Scots the Ba Game.
- Calcio in Florence
The Shrovetide football game at Ashbourne in Derbyshire between the people from each side of Henmore Brook (the Up’Ards and the Down’Ards) is the origin of the term “local derby” for an intense sporting match between neighbouring teams.
The French had a similar version called la Soule or la Chole also played mainly on Shrovetide. Florence, in Italy, had a version they played in a piazza that they called giuoco del calcio fiorentino (the Florentine kick game) or simply calcio (kick). All these games involved throwing and kicking as well as a lot of body contact.
Killing the ball
The Vikings played a game called Knattleikr. In Iceland it was played on frozen lakes. According to Icelandic sagas the ball was hard enough that when thrown in anger at another player it could cause bloodshed.
Some of the English games were referred to as kicking the Dane’s head. While not suggesting a bloody ritual it might link the game to the Vikings and be a bit of folk revenge. In some forms of folk football once the ball got to the goal it was symbolically killed and the game was over—hence the modern sporting expressions dead ball and killing the ball.
Running rugby
An early game of rugby
Another misconception about the origins of football comes from the myth of William Webb Ellis. During a football game at Rugby School, he picked up the ball and ran with it to produce the game of rugby. But the revolution was not so much picking up the ball but running with it. They were not playing soccer because it had not been “invented” at that time in the 1820s. They were playing a school form of football that involved catching and throwing.
By the way, the game of rugby gets its name from Rugby, a large town in Warwickshire, in the west of England. The town got its name from the Anglo-Saxon Hrōca burh, or later Norman French, Rocheberie, meaning Rook Fort, from the bird’s name. Later the burh, for fort, was replaced, perhaps under the influence of Danish settlers, with -by, meaning village, to become Rugby.
Rugby Football rules
Organised games developed in English private boys schools during the 19th century when cheap rail travel meant inter-school matches became feasible. The schools all played football games with diverse and always changing rules but needed to agree on sets of rules when they played each other. Rugby School created the first set of such football rules in 1845.
Soccer
It took another 18 years before Association Football codified their rules, in 1863. This form of the game was called soccer, an abbreviation of Association Football (ie …ssoca…), and was a parallel formation to rugger, a common name of rugby at the time. Association Football did not allow all the players to pick up the ball, the lucky exception being the goalkeeper.
Aussie Rules
In Melbourne, in the 1860s, the Australians developed their own set of rules, Aussie Rules which was designed as a game to keep cricketers fit during the winter and hence is played on the oval field equivalent to a cricket oval.
All football rules
- Modern day calcio
The first official Rugby Football Union rules were adopted in 1871 for the adult game. American Football developed its distinct rules in 1880; Gaelic Football published their rules in 1887; Rugby League broke away from Rugby Union in 1895 and developed a few rule changes. Before the distinction between amateurs and professionals it was common for football teams from different places to play under different rules as agreed with their opposition.
Using the word football
In Australia where there is great competition between football codes, we talk about football when we know who we are talking to: whether it be rugby league, rugby union or Aussie rules supporters. Soccer is still soccer.
Association Football is claiming to call itself football as a distinction from the other forms of football that use their hands. Don’t be fooled as history tells another story.
del.icio.us
digg
Furl
Spurl
Technorati
Yahoo My Web