The House Organ: Traffic Signals Blog

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Highlights of Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s Speech at Webster U

A beautiful September day in St. Louis was the perfect setting for Twitter chairman and co-founder Jack Dorsey to talk about the beginnings of Twitter and what he’s up to now. Dorsey is a St. Louis native and talked at Webster University here.

#jackatwebster actually turned into a trending topic on Twitter during his speech, so this town is definitely getting its social feet underneath it. I won’t give you an exhaustive rehash of the speech, but there were a number of interesting highlights:

• Dorsey, as so many great entrepreneurs have done, started with an obsession. In this case, it was maps, which hung all over his room as a child. He had an obsession with cities, and in this case, St. Louis provided a perfect ground for his imagination. Dorsey acknowledged the great history of the city but also sad and tragic missteps, and he wanted to know how a city worked. As a cityphile, he also loved Manhattan, and he transferred to NYU for his senior year of college, where he helped program dispatch systems for emergency personnel who had to give their location at all times (this was pre-9/11).
• Dorsey talked about how users are instrumental to the creation of Twitter, and by extension underlined just how important crowd-sourcing is to innovation. With characteristic humility, he said, “We didn’t have all the ideas.” The @reply, re-tweeting and even the word “tweet” came from the user base.  Dorsey said it took him a couple of hours of coding to add the “@” function.
  

  Twitter creator and St. Louis native Jack Dorsey

• Regarding the use of the word “tweet,” Dorsey said that he and his team were “senstitive to it” for a long time. “People cringed” when they did interviews, until eventually they adopted it, too.
• The first official name they considered for Twitter was actually Status. What can I tell you, said Dorsey, I started in dispatching. Next was “Twitch,” until someone researched related words and came up with Twitter. “We wanted to evoke a physical sensation with the name.”
• Dorsey got the idea for Twitter at his then-employer Odeo, which specialized in the budding area of podcasting.  Odeo gave him two weeks and another programmer to put it together. “We thought it would be great for kids and teenagers. As it turned out, it was the best thing ever for old Unix hackers with beards.”
• Dorsey said that his two greatest Twitter moments were seeing the live tweets of house and senate members during an Obama speech, and visiting with the deputy prime minister of Iraq at the request of the State Dept. The deputy PM started tweeting three times a day, inviting a whole new audience into the Twitterstream.

The best part for those of us in St. Louis is that Dorsey is now focusing on a new company that will share the same obsession with “immediacy, transparency and approachability” that Twitter does. It will involve St. Louis and healthcare, to name but one industry, which Dorsey labeled “a mess.”

You can see more about the event by searching for #jackatwebster.

Facebook and Twitter Already Dying? Right.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece about an “exodus” from Facebook, and suggested that its demise may be fated “like a college clique.” Now, I have been a Facebook critic for a long time, and it was only recently that it really became more useful for sharing information with family and friends. It’s also been great for monitoring the conversations my clients are having with their customers. Before taking up the cry that Facebook and Twitter are dying, critics will want to check out a couple of charts that Fred Wilson throws out from comScore. Wilson, who is an investor in Twitter, says:

This reminds me of all the Twitter Quitter stories I’ve read. People do quit Twitter. A lot of them. But here are the July comScore numbers for Twitter. In the month of July 2009, about 52mm people worldwide visited Twitter, up 1880% over July 2008 and Twitter is the 47th most popular website in the world according to comScore.avc.com, A VC, Aug 2009

For me the bigger story here is Twitter, which has recently taken some heat for its lack of popularity with teenagers and the fact that not everyone uses it. Well, a lot of people still do, and will continue to.

Media Atomization and Its Discontents (or, are the days of the supergroup over?)

Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about in our present state of media evolution. Is the supergroup, as in musical supergroup, like U2, The Eagles, The Stones or even The Beatles possible these days?

I can’t be alone in feeling that music has lost something since the end of the century (god bless you, Joey Ramone). I used to think it was for a lack of talent, but I’ve been disabused of that hum-buggery. No, I think it has more to do with the collective weight of attention, or lack thereof. The cultural landscape is being acted on by the evolutionary force of atomization.

Consider The Killers, my favorite (new) band (meaning in the last 10 years). Unbelievably powerful, with a superlative debut album and a foll0w-up that  I think puts the band in the pantheon of Springsteen and other American poets. I think it must have taken a Vegas-based band to put into a blender 80’s pop, hard rock and punk and turn it into something both eclectic and electric. But, of course, that’s just me.

Germany loves The Killers, too

And that’s the point. There is no barrier to anyone who wants to create a website or blog or Facebook page devoted to the music (or books or movies) they love best. A guy just out of high school starts a music review site and ends up being one of the most important tastemakers of the decade. The zeitgeitst has bounded over the riverbanks of radio and MTV and spilled all over the Internet. It ain’t going back.

It’s not just media. As a former English professor of mine once said, writers had to start looking over their shoulder as soon as Homer put an oral poem on parchment. At this stage in our cultural history, talented artists have taken the work of other talented artists and blended them up, just like The Killers. Beck is a veritable reference library, and so is just about any rapper. Nowadays, the sheer volume and variety of music — some of it really good — is staggering. And I wouldn’t have found a lot of it had my twentysomething brother not doggedly burned CD after CD to turn me on to bands like The Arcade Fire and The Decemberists.

Perhaps the question is really about collective musical taste. We can’t all be listening to the same thing at the same time. And we may now be so individually selective that the supergroup is obsolete, anyway.

Here’s the thing: I’m not any different from anyone else when they have a favorite band. I want everyone to love The Killers, and they have an undeniable following but, somehow, they feel a little… niche. The Killers are almost to that point in their careers when U2 started headlining arena shows. A friend told me earlier this year the band had an opportunity to play the Scottrade Center here in St. Louis but didn’t think they could fill it (they ended up playing a great show at the Fox). They still have time, but…

Can ANY post-grunge bands really be considered to have attained “super” status?  The end of that era marks the beginning of this Web-created one. Coldplay seems to play best to college graduates who think they like philosophy and literature but don’t. Radiohead? Brilliant, but something of an acquired taste. No doubt there are superSTARS, Eminem, Kanye, Justin Timberlake et al that have undoubted cross-audience appeal, but groups? The kind that can take hold of a culture for years?

Will our generation be marked by what astrophysicists call “minor stars,” rather than supernovas?

The Heart of Social Media

What does social media truly mean for brands?

For some time now, those of us in the media industries have been run over by a tidal wave of punditry, advice, exhortation and “guru”-ism on social media. Seminars. Books. White papers. Webinars. The endless chain of invitations, events and emails multiply by the day.

But with everyone obsessed about how to Twitter and set up a Facebook page for their company/newspaper/you-name-it, what gets lost is why any of this is important. Many executives and companies are keen on bright shiny objects and the latest thing, but smart companies will know to ask why they should waste their time. “You have to connect with your customers” doesn’t quite cut it.

Countless folks have taken a crack at summing up social media’s import. But yesterday this quote knocked me over the head. Writing in MediaPost, Catharine P. Taylor criticizes ESPN’s recent company memo that imposed restrictions on employees’ participation on Twitter and other platforms. She says:

As any social media person can tell you, part of the power of social nets is that they humanize – and humanizing brands makes brands stronger.

Amen. Participation in social media is not just about figuring out ROI, or how many followers you can attain. Companies need to act and (more to the point) communicate like people. Participation in social media is more than making sure that not every Tweet is about your latest product or chest-beating achievement. It’s about language, and the language of social media is the language of the everyday.

For PR folks, this should be an especially important compass-point. Drop the corporate Klingon jargon and talk like a human being. Relate to people. And assume that the folks reading your news releases appreciate clear speaking without the fluffy adjectives. We have more communication channels than ever before, and they need clarity.

Sometimes the clearest and best ideas just need to be better articulated.

The Newspaper of Tomorrow

A great post today from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and author of the well-known “A VC” blog. I have come to believe more and more that the media who survive/succeed will come to be a fusion of professional content — long form articles as Fred points out — and user-generated content. This is kind of what the local Examiners are doing, but Fred hits the nail on the head by emphasizing the need for curation:

If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.A VC, Jun 2009

If the New York Times is doing it on their home page, you can bet on it.

To Twitter or Not to Twitter

It was probably inevitable. The incredible rise of Twitter has already led to predictions of its demise.

I will admit that I think often about the value and meaning of microblogging. In the last 24 hours there have been some excellent posts by Joe Marchese and social media columnist Catharine Taylor at MediaPost, the former with some sharp ideas on how Twitter can offer unprecedented real-time information (as in the case of earthquakes), and the latter on just murky the value of social media, especialy Twitter, can be.

So is this 140 character thing just a fad? Let’s remember that Twitter has been around for two years.  Journalists, experts, analysts and many others have been using the service for some time.  The problem, I think, is that so many newbies have found Twitter that they’re not quite sure exactly how to use it and what the point is. And Twitter is about as free form as you can get.

In answering this question for our clients, we do believe Twitter is the real thing. First and foremost, Twitter is literally an open feed into the consciousness of the Net and the country. I’ve caught all kinds of stuff that interested me. And when it comes to humor, Twitter is creating a new art form – more than a one liner, less than a monologue.

Just off the top of my head I can think of a number of ways I use Twitter:

• Breaking news – For breaking news on big events, Twitter is lightening quick.
• Data referral – This means nothing more than getting news, articles and information you wouldn’t have if someone hadn’t touted it on Twitter.
• Instant focus group – Any subject, any trend. Especially valuable for companies.

With more and more people on Twitter, though, I think we’ll need to see an evolution (and soon) in how to go about managing it. The single-column stack contains only a sliver of the folks I follow, for instance. Here, then, is my modest proposal to make Twitter even more valuable:

• More powerful, fine-grained search. Why do searches only go back a couple of days? There needs to be better “advanced search” options that allow us to capture tweets that go back in time and that filter out those that aren’t relevant.
• Platforms like TweetDeck that make it easy to organize and sort the vast amount of tweets out there. Having just started using this, it has renewed my faith in the ability of Twitter to deliver value.
• The ability to better manage and organize those you follow and those who follow you.  Have you ever tried to scroll through all of your followers for list hygeine? I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who follow thousands.

I think what we will see is an entirely new etiquette surrounding the Twitter-verse, in which people are much more disciplined in who they follow and what they post. We also will see more TweetDeck kinds of applications that allow us to wring even more value from the service.

If you want more, here’s MIN’s take on best-in-class Twitter practices.

What do you think?

Pontiac, Perception and Premature Death

Today’s news that GM will put Pontiac out to pasture probably does not come as a surprise to most people.  My wife, when we saw it on TV yesterday, said, “It’s about time.” And that’s probably the sentiment of a lot of people.  But if you’re wondering whether today’s GM can ever build great cars again, amigo, rest assured they already do.

Working with Motor Trend, Automobile Mag and IntelliChoice.com in recent years has given us a ringside seat at the drama playing out in Detroit. One of the biggest impressions we took away is the great strides that GM has made at Chevrolet, Cadillac and, yes, Pontiac, in building not just quality cars but great ones. Last year, the Motor Trend staff spent time with the Pontiac G8, a powerful sedan derived from GM’s Holden division in Australia. The G8 was designed to serve as an American super-sedan or bargain priced BMW. In a one-on-one comparison the Pontiac G8 GT bested the Nissan Maxima, and according to Motor Trend editors was “one of the great driver’s-car values on the road today.”

It will have to be chalked up as a moral victory. Aside from the credit crunch, the problem facing GM and Detroit is one of perception built over decades. Anyone who drove in the eighties, as an entire generation of car buyers in their thirties and forties did, will well remember the anonymous and terrible-looking boxes that Detroit churned out. If you showed some of those cars to me today without their badges, I doubt I would be able to name the manufacturer, let alone the model.

One car from the eighties does stand out, at least to me: the hot-s**t Pontiac Bonneville owned by Brendan Finnigan’s Dad. The car had crazy bells and whistles before everything was connected to the Internet, and on those nights when J.T. was crazy enough to give Brendan the keys, a couple of high school seniors put that car through the paces. Riding in it was like gliding.

So long, pony boy

 

All is not lost. If GM and now Ford can continue to build on the foundation they’ve poured in the last few years, more Americans will get the chance to discover cars like the Pontiac G8. That, and only that, will change the way a lot of people think of U.S. automakers.

The Death of SpiralFrog (but not Ad-Supported Music)

So our former client SpiralFrog has finally succumbed, and music industry pundits and reporters are taking the news as a flier for the death of ad-supported music.

This is a mistake.

SpiralFrog had its share of problems, as we well knew when we took on the business in the summer of 2007.  By then, the company had gone through a wrenching management change, a missed launch date and a turnover in investors.  The service itself set out to legitimize music downloading by attracting enough users (the benchmark was 10 million) that SpiralFrog could charge high enough CPMs to brand advertisers that the music would pay for itself.

Keep in mind that SpiralFrog got more than halfway to its goal, at one point garnering 6 million monthly uniques, and was building a nice grassroots following.  It simply ran out of runway.  Based on the feedback we received from journalists and analysts, as well as my own observations, here are the top three reasons SpiralFrog didn’t take off faster as a service:

• It didn’t work with iTunes.  Forget the iPod for a moment.  iTunes has proven to be the de facto media UI for just about all of us, whether we get our music from Apple, eMusic, Amazon or wherever.  Even if you’re downloading your music via Limewire or other P2P networks, you’re still using iTunes.
• It had only two of the four major labels.  The Frog was never able to capture the Warner and Sony catalogs.  If you search a couple of times for music you want and don’t find anything, you’re probably not going to be inclined to come back.  Blame that on the labels who are still refusing to do reasonable licensing deals.
• Search and discovery was frustrating.  SpiralFrog had a nice home page and kept the flow of new music coming, but even I found the search function frustrating.  To be fair, SpiralFrog never was able to add the features — concert listings, merchandise sales — that founder Joe Mohen envisioned for it.

One thing that SpiralFrog did NOT set out to do was be an “iTunes killer,” another favorite media trope.  Joe and his team understood that the service’s incompatibility with the iPod somewhat limited its audience.  But there are lots of folks out there without an iPod, and millions of kids whose primary listening device is the PC — just a fraction of those users would have been enough to propel the Frog. It was a compelling and well thought out business plan.

SpiralFrog did excel at one very critical element of digital music.  The company built a very sophisticated back-end system that matched the holders of the recorded music rights with those who hold the publishing rights.  A lot of folks don’t understand this is a critical distinction in building an online music service.  Publishing rights are notoriously hard to source and manage because there can be many people who own the rights to a single song.  The fact that the Frog figured this out and built a sophisticated system to keep both sets of rights holders happy is one of its most valuable legacies, and sooner or later, someone will figure out what huge value there is in this system and bid for it.

Is there a market for ad-supported downloading of premium content, especially music? When you remember that a vast majority of Internet traffic — more than Google’s total traffic — is devoted to file-sharing, I think the answer is a qualified yes.  Someone’s going to do it.  It’s just a matter of when.

Don’t Be a Skimmer

A few months ago, The Atlantic did a cover story on whether Google is making us stupid.  I don’t know about that, but if we’re not careful, Twitter might.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Twitter, and when I’m able to give it the proper attention, I’ve gleaned some interesting and sometimes very funny observations, thoughts and articles from it.   The problem is that 140 characters threatens to become (if it hasn’t already) our new attention span.

My friend and mentor Barry Collodi asked me the other day if I had read an article in the Times.  Yes, I said.  Or, rather, I skimmed it.  Leave it to Barry to cut through the crap: “That’s what EVERYONE is telling me.  They’re skimming.  They’re not actually reading.  You have to READ.”

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures not long ago wrote an interesting piece about how status is the ultimate social gesture, allowing anyone to put forth a constant stream of information, be that posts, pictures or a potpourri of links.  For that matter, RSS feeds are similar.  In many ways, our access to information is a little TOO easy.  You can skim the headlines, but where’s the beef?  With the torrent of information on Twitter and elsewhere, one’s media diet can be both voluminous and anemic.

I’m struck by how many Twitter updates are links to blog posts and articles.  I’ve done it myself plenty of times, but I wonder how many folks actually read the articles they’re linking to.

In our rush to keep up on Twitter, Facebook, etc we can’t forget the essential act of paying attention.  Everyone, and especially those who work in the media business, need to make it a priority for ourselves and the cultures that we work in to stop, drop and read.  Barry’s suggestion: as soon you get a magazine, scan the ToC.  Mark it.  Save for later.  Read.  But read you must.

What a pleasure it was to skim the latest issue of Fortune with a cover story of Meg Whitman and a profile of the world’s largest hedge fund.  I can’t wait to dig into my dog-eared copy.