The new Browser Size feature from Google Labs is perhaps one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools when designing landing pages or home pages (or any page for that matter). Put simply, it takes the web page you enter and superimposes an opaque view of the area viewable by respective %s of internet visitors, based on average screen resolution.
This is exactly the type of tool I’ll use over and over again.
Check it out here: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
At a recent news conference in Tel Aviv, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, remarked that new advertising capabilities and strategic acquisitions will put the company in a position to finally turn a profit during 2010. As someone who has watched Twitter gain $155 million in funding over the last two years, it has always been very interesting to see just how this company will find it’s way to profitability if they indeed don’t go the route of being acquired.
While the company is keeping the details to themselves, Twitter’s new advertising platform is generating a lot of chatter in the social and capital spaces, and for good reason. Advertising generally is a very intrusive form of outbound marketing that has not found wide spread success in the social market (yet, at least). Stone did mention that advertising on Twitter will take a “non-traditional” form, and while that may be true from his standpoint in juxtaposition to traditional advertising efforts online, Twitter users will ultimately decide just how “non-traditional” this advertising is, especially since it will likely further clutter our already cluttered stream of updates. And yes, I am making the assumption that it will be embedded within the stream. In order for advertising to have any value to marketers, their messages must be able to hit the 80% of Twitter users that are using other applications (TweetDeck, iPhone, Seesmic, Blackberry, etc) to interface with the Twitter community.
More interesting for me is the role acquisitions will play in making Twitter profitable. Since the early days, Twiiter has opened up their platform and left much of the creative development to developers, who have in turn not only created applications with richer, more useful interfaces (from my standpoint), but have more importantly created applications that allow brands to follow and respond to what people are and aren’t saying about them. Social media has become the single most important force in Online Reputation Management (ORM), and the business-oriented applications that facilitate the follow-and-interact process, particularly across various social mediums, are particularly valuable to the market. Acquisitions of this nature could prove very beneficial to Twitter, especially if they are able to enhance the capabilities of these applications in ways only Twitter can.
In terms of looking at ways Twitter currently spends it’s cash and the potential for vertical integration, SMS technology could also provide some very interesting benefits by eliminating or re-organizing a large amount of their current costs. It will be interesting to see if they do anything in this space in order to help boost the benefits advertising can bring next year.
So there’s my two cents. What do you think about the acquisition possibilities for Twitter? Where do you think they will align themselves in order to secure long-term profitability? Or, should they just sell now to the highest bidder, particularly since they recently announced their search engine integrations with Bing and Google?
The following is the first article in a series published by eGaming Review in their November 2009 edition. Over the course of the next few issues, this series will seek to carve out the critical steps you need to deploy in your business in order to get more out of your retention programme. The copy below may differ slightly from the published version, as this is my original unedited version.
Most CEOs I’ve sat down with recently are facing the same major challenges: how will we differentiate our brand(s) and products in an increasingly commoditised, saturated gaming market? How can our offering be more compelling, our teams more productive, and our marketing more cost effective? If you are feeling the pressure, trust me, you are not alone.
As a result, more and companies are taking a hard look at their retention programmes, which have long had a strong reputation for delivering excellent business value through its relatively low cost of generating additional revenues. The numbers indeed support it: the cost of keeping a player is less than the cost of acquiring a new one (at least when done correctly and only for a certain length of time). However, most companies have a tough time realising the potential financial benefits in their bottom line.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with a lot of operators following my presentation on loyalty programmes at the EIG Expo last month. While there was tremendous interest generally about loyalty, retention and managing the customer lifecycle, there equally seemed to be a lot of focus on using expensive tools and developing complex schemes and processes that provide little more in terms of revenues than they do in costs for the business.
Retaining players and generating that much sought after additional revenue is critical for every business, but it’s not necessary to have a PhD. in Statistics or Financial Modeling on staff to achieve this (at least not to start). In fact, this is the exact reason why CRM has come under attack over the last few years. Companies are over investing their time, energy and money on complicated CRM programmes and business intelligence, resulting in an exponential growth in the people and processes required to support them, effectively washing the real value out of the end-result. While there are some businesses out there that can benefit from these systems, most companies, especially in online gaming, only get caught up in a quagmire of unmanageable products, data intelligence and lists.
Over the next few issues of Egaming Review, we’re going to look at the critical areas you need to consider and the steps you and your business can take to start realising the potential financial rewards straight away. Our goal is that by the end of this series, you and your organisation should have the practical knowledge necessary, a set of streamlined processes and tools set up, and be in an advantageous position over your competition to really make an impact on the bottom line. Meet me back here next month as we address the issue of where the real potential sits in your database and how to harness it.
Look for Part II to be published in eGaming Review’s January 2010 edition.
Just saw this seminar from the Inbound Marketing gurus over at Hubspot. Certainly some very compelling stuff in there, particularly related to using content and social media to drive leads. No, this is not another lame Social Media expert (i.e. the NEW life coach) showing you how to use Twitter. It’s actually some very thoughtful stuff on building concrete strategies to leverage this evolving marketing channel.
I encourage you to check it out: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/ceo-guide-to-internet-marketing-archive/
