Month: July 2008

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Summize helps marketers peer into the attitudes of a million+ Twitter fans

How is this for stating the obvious? Data mining is helping marketers better understand and cater to consumer behavior. Examples abound — even here, in Digital Solid. But this fact is worth repeating considering this latest example.

As reported and discussed in this GigaOm post, Twitter is likely to purchase Summize, which is a popular third-party application that searches and reports on keywords embedded in these 140-character packets of text. Om Malik of GigaOm conjectures that the reason for the purchase is less about search, which can be interesting, but about understanding consumer behavior, which can be useful to marketers.

This is an understatement.

The biggest question surrounding Twitter has been, How can this seeming toy ever break through and become a profitable business? This week’s news suggests a research product that, in its beta phase, is already quite good. Go to its Sentiment Analyzer and type in a phrase. Malik typed in keywords related to the acquisition of Summize by Twitter. Here was his result:

Analyzing what Twitter fans think of the Summize purchase

Sentiment is “Bad.” Obviously the majority of people Tweeting about the buy-out aren’t Summize’s soon-to-be-wealthier founders! If you want to see really bad, however, type in “Gas Prices,” as I did here:

Twitter Sentiment surrounding \'gas prices\'

It’s a fun toy. But the real time market research implications are huge.

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Maybe the web site’s just not into you

Here’s a useful tool for when you try to visit a favorite web site and discover you can’t. As the name implies, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com tells you if your inability to browse a “dark” site is a local, regional or universal problem. If the first part of 2008 is any indication, expect to use it more and more.

Surging web traffic is placing bigger demands on sites and servers. So it stands to reason that more frequent outages are inevitable.

At least now you can get a better idea of its origins — whether they are a network firewall blocking your access, at regional internet outage, or a full-out site failure.

And one of the sites this tool gets used for?

The notoriously buggy Twitter, of course. According to a New York Times piece on the frustrations of unexpectedly dark sites, “Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April — by far more than any other major social networking Web site.”

Yep, it's you

But take heart. Umang Gupta is quoted in the article with some reassurances: “There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world … These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.” I can add to Gupta’s comments that sites managed by groups such as mine are also doing extremely well, in terms of near zero downtime. We are currently using some of the most reliable network connections and web servers out there, so our down times have been almost nonexistent.

Coincidental to his mention in the NY Times piece, my team actually uses Gupta’s services. We use them specifically to catch and minimize these types of problems with a site. He is chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors the web performance of client web sites.

Quietly at work 24/7 on all of our sites, Keynote’s Red Alert monitoring service lets us know immediately if any are faltering — often before a problem becomes apparent to users. It’s all an effort to ensure that sites such as DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com don’t wind up fielding many questions about our sites!

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Podcasts and the public radio revenue model

On Monday Ira Glass posted the message below on the web home of his outstanding This American Life radio program. He faces a common multi-channel marketing challenge. In his case, it’s this: How do you keep a version of your radio show available on the web for free, but also not tick off the public radio affiliates who pay a lot of money to run the programming over their airwaves (and consequently receive more donations from listeners come pledge time).

I’ve listened to the podcasts since they’ve been made available in MP3 format, and it’s been fascinating to track the various “we need your financial support” pitches proceeding and concluding the podcast episodes. He was initially asking for support of the originating radio station. Now, as the following makes clear, it’s time to subsidize this channel of distribution as well.

Help Keep Our Podcast and Streaming Free
Hello, listeners.

It’s been a year-and-a-half since we decided to offer our show as a free, weekly podcast, and that’s been a crazy, whopping success. But because so many people—sometimes more than half a million—are downloading and streaming our show each week, the Internet bandwidth to distribute the program this way costs $152,000 per year. We want to keep offering This American Life for free. You want us to keep offering the show for free. Our home station, Chicago Public Radio, doesn’t need to make money on our podcast, but they can’t lose $152,000 a year on it, either.

We think we can cover the whole cost by coming to you, hopefully just twice a year, virtual hat in hand. If you listen regularly over the Internet, please pitch in a little cash. To all the people who gave six months ago, a sincere thank you, and please consider giving a small amount again. A dollar from every Internet listener would more than pay for everything, but of course not everyone’s going to give, so consider a $5 donation. It’ll cover you and a few other people for a year of listening. If you donate more than a few bucks, you can choose thank-you gifts—including some stuff you can’t get anywhere else. One of the items is a CD of “The Giant Pool of Money,” our incredibly popular, recent episode about the mortgage crisis, which many listeners wanted to purchase as a gift.

Our dream is that we’ll get you and most of our Internet listeners to chip in at the $1 or $5 level, and that’ll cover everything. We’d love to take care of this expense with a flood of little donations from the people who actually listen to our show this way. And of course, if you feel that getting an hour of our show every week is worth more to you than a dollar a year, we’d be grateful for anything else you’d care to contribute. We really want to keep the podcast free.

How long will it be before we have a micro-payment account (aside from PayPal) that we can set up to allow for quick and spontaneous donations of funds, to support all of the “free” content that is enriching our lives?