Twitter goes Freemium.. and finally:)

Twitter has become a buzz word , where once having 1000 odd followers would have gotten brands to chase you as influencers today you would need 20k+ followers. After deferring attempts at being acquired, and being constantly questioned by press, media, experts etc... Twitter finally has unveiled premium accounts and that is the title of my post.

Let me explain what Freemium means. Free + premium = Freemium. In Web 2.0 world , these are the new business models followed. Organisations struggle to build a base of loyal customers, a sort of cult following. In fact the valuation of any company in web 2.0 world would be as follows

Value = Customer base * Customer Lifetime Value.

So to have a higher valuation you would want to enhance either your customer base or increase lifetime value ( CLV).

So the mantra is like this, offer a vanilla service free on the net, get customer hooked onto it and then when your customer base has become substantial , add in more features to the vanilla service and charge a premium . LinkedIn, Flicker etc have gone the premium way. Why forget gmail. Gmail also has a freemium business model. Now Twitter has finally entered the arena.

So coming back to twitter. Twitter has just unveiled its premium account types. They came in 4 categories each differing at the level of extra services and the rates you pay. An obvious service they could offer with premium accounts was extending the word limit, because most tweeters feel restricted with the word limit. Now each of the four levels have differing word limits. One thing I had not thought of for premium accounts was that buying each package gets you random followers. Some packages also offer random celebrity followers and embellishments.. Now it seemed absurd to me when I read it first. I sincerely hope that would a rumour. If not then Twitter would probably lose it hard core fan following and would ultimately lead to brand dilution. Also a recent thing I noticed on my twitter page, nowadays there are ads to promote twitters own products like twitter search, widgets etc. Twitter definitely has a long way to go!

Read the complete article here.


http://www.bbspot.com/News/2009/03/twitter-unveils-premium-accounts.html

Measuring online influence

http://mashable.com/2009/03/02/measuring-online-influence/


Good read to follow up on my prev post. Measuring online influence!

Influencer Marketing

While at Microsoft , as an intern I was working on a project " Influencer Marketing". This deals with identifying high profile people on the web( preferably) who can influence the entire community about Microsoft, tools and technologies. typically these are avid bloggers, people with huge no of followers on twitter, high recommendations on LinkedIn etc ... While companies are increasingly interested in engaging with such high profile influencers and keep them happy, they are forgetting the layman out there who is equally capable of starting " Ihatedell.com" and make it popular.
There have been instances of these high profile inlfuencers using twitter as a tool for their cribs and complaints. Say you are one of these and you have a problem with your Vodafone GPRS. You have just tweeted it and before you know it, the social media division makes a note of it and it is escalated and in no time your connectivity is smooth and noiseless. Talk about Customer Satisfaction. you tweet and blog about how responsive Vodafone was. Now imagine you were a tweeter with 50 odd followers, your cribs and complaints are doing rounds inside the call center itself.

The age old philosophy of the customer pyramid as shown. Here Gold tier customers were a meager 20% of all your customer and brought in 80% of the revenues. However there is a paradigm shift with the introduction of the Long tail concept.
For Eg :-
Even if X is a great influencer, he might not even be on Vodafone. He could be on Airtel, but blog about the positives of Vodafone and he would be on the radar of the company more than you 10k plus billers. This is because X is helping Vodafone cater to a huge community and spread positivism than a 10k plus customer who has no circle of influence beyond family and friends.

Well, I do not know if this is the right thing to do. I personally do not agree with this. A company should try to achieve operational excellence and ensure that their most loyal customers are kept happy and in fact all their customers must be kept happy. A company must measure its responsiveness of customer service and delivery through servicing time for any customer, not the top notch revenue contributors or influencers. Because if your existing loyal customer base itself is not happy , the blogs and tweets would look engineered. And how logn does it take to start a viral on the web? When a company is due to come on campus, we look up their consumer complaints. Information spreads fast ,especially when it is negative, albeit it is definitely more trusted and valued if it comes from your favourite blogger or critic or tweeter.