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i think its one of our biggest comp advantages
Those who love StockTwits don't mind @StockTwits promoting your network, events, and products. To others, it's spam. Plain and simple.
Unfollow tweeters you don't care for. Blacklist domains and senders who spam your email. Done.
The ultimate goal is to give people what they NEED and for the platforms, brands, and businesses to be as invisible as possible OR make the person feel like the brand is a symbol of themself. This has always been the case and will be no matter whether it's on the internet or an ESP grid in the future.
And, "freemium" is just a cool witty convenient term for something salespeople have been doing forever: bait (with free, giveaways, treats, prizes, etc.) and switch (to the for-profit product). Again, nothing new here. Just different forms. But this is what keeps academics in business ...
I would suggest the ultimate goal is not to give people anything, except for an easier way to spread their own message. It is entirely unquantifiable, but I would love to know how many people with no prior experience just had a stab at recording some music because of how easy it was to use Garage Band.
At the end of the day, I don't think you should aim to give your customer something meaningful, you should create an environment where they can give something meaningful to you. To use the Apple/Microsoft example, MS is launching a campaign for Win7 based around having listened to its users, whereas I believe it is arguable Apple's platform tries to facilitate being able to listen to each other. A subtle but crucial difference.
Now, off to find a cushy job in a Think Tank!
(Written, for the record, on a PC. With a Mac to my left.)
I'm not actually a career advertising guy (thank God) having spent most of my life in start-ups. A few years back I ran product development for an Australian company called MyVirtualHome (http://myvirtualhome.com.au). We took what we knew about making video games (another story) and applied it to home design software, the idea being that every day users could create their own homes in 30 minutes or so in incredible detail, then use it to test out different kinds of lighting, paint colours, or see if the new couch from Ikea would fit where they wanted it to go before they bought it.
The rendering side of it pissed off some folk in the Auto-CAD industry who are very expensive to use. What we enabled though was for people to express themselves via this software and bring their own vision for their home to life. Which is a roundabout way of saying I imagine there'll be a general move towards democratization of almost any process that has previously been the domain of a chosen few.
Result..goodbye Acer notepad. Twitter, Google, Facebook people, wake up. I am already becoming annoyed at a spamming incident that may force me OFF of your service if I do not see correlary content improvement. All the information-hungry folk like me want is QUICK ACCESS. not frilly bells and whistles.
In the economy where 17% of people are not working. IPhones, notepads, and other luxuries could become dust. Get me the FAST CONTENT that I WANT, or you will meet the dustbin of history. If you do not understand this, your heads are up someplace I do not want to mention.
Twitter has already made me angry because of spamming and I am seriously reconsidering my use of it. I will not STOP my use of it, but I will only use it when it provides me with an informational advantage (and in a non-trading context, a marketing advantage related to true social contact) a marketing advantage. Other than that, I am going to limit my use of it and I mean really limit it severely.
Realize that 30% of the public believes Twitter is nothing more than a fad. If it becomes inconvenienced by digial sewage (spam and the like), that percentage number will only grow.
I will get over my current anger over spam and the inability to manage streams, but if it gets in the way of doing my business, I can surely live without it. The survey data I read seems to more than confirm that.
Social media people better wake up to that fact, or they will be on their bums when the next technological CAT 5 hurricane blows through.
Google needs to realize that too, or they might become the next Mister Softee.
(And with regard to filtering, I do not make money FILTERING, I make money trading and investing. If filtering is not made easier, once again, I will do a global form of filtering and stop using the service altogether.) I will not waste time going through a ton of contacts when I can only get rid of one at a time (ever heard of INDEXING, TWITTER?)
Twitter and I have had a bad couple of months, and this topic is quite apropos. Sorry for the rant :).
I still do not know about Facebook long term, but one thing I will say is I enjoy being able to go to that inbox and not have to worry about whether or not the content is from a trusted source. For you, waging battle every day on an open service like Twitter must make you pull your hair out in frustration, but if I may reference the same post of Tim O'Reilly's that spawned create more value than you capture, his first principle (that quote was the second) was "Work on stuff that matters."
You do that every day, so my hat is off to you.
any other...
Facebook is still the one social product that addds little value for me and
the stocktwits community and am racking my brain as to why, but one day
will hopefully fully understand it
advertising is hated more than most in the industry know ...
this has implications for business models based on it ...