The study tracked development of Twitter from 2006 to 2009 and found that two major factors played into the micro-blogging platform’s adoption in the U.S.: geography and media coverage.

The Contagion Process

Calling this a ‘contagion process’ because of its similarity to how pathogens spread and assimilate in populations, the MIT researchers pinpointed Twitter’s early growth patterns.

The platform seemed to grow fastest in areas where it was adopted early and had close-quartered urban support to allow for real-world social networking to help it spread. In areas like New York City and Silicon Valley, it was adopted at rates many times higher than it was in other urban, but less connected areas like Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah.

This contagion-like process continued through the four years of the study’s focus. The more socially connected an area or group of users was, the faster Twitter use spread amongst them. Cyberspace is often closer to home than we realize.

This social networking, of course, includes celebrities and news media outlets.

The Media’s Role in Spreading the Twitter Disease

Rapid spikes in Twitter adoption were directly related to news coverage locally and regionally. When Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to see who could get a million Twitter followers first, both accounts saw huge influxes of followers with Kutcher winning by only half an hour.

As the news coverage increased and became more common (and terms like ‘tweet’ and ‘follower’) became part of the nomenclature, the social network exploded in size.

The Study’s Conclusions

Rather than looking at the social network as a constant in terms of use, the MIT study focused on how it was used in terms of spikes and valleys of popularity. By doing this, they found many correlations between the happenings of a geographic area or demographic of people and Twitter’s usage trends.

Initially, Twitter grew fastest amongst the tech-savvy, younger users of Silicon Valley and New York City. It spread in this way to other tech centers around North America before gaining more widespread acceptance amongst everyday users.

Today, Twitter is virtually ubiquitous and most connected devices have either built-in or readily available apps to connect with the micro-blog’s system.

The MIT study can be found on MITnews

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For complete details goto http://bfmp.kajabi.com/

Or click the image…

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Here’s something I wrote called the Whistleblower Report: A Short Story of Success With A Long Tail

It ruffled a few feathers when I published it because it outlines my approach to marketing and how I convinced CAA clients that aliens were responsible for a rash of dead car batteries at Christmas.

I even explain why eBay staff thought they had a corporate mole they heard about my special coupon marketing idea. All fun stuff.

No opt-in required. You can download it from Scribd. Enjoy, and remember if you like it – share the link on your social network.

Thanks!

James

PS. If you like this content, SUBSCRIBE to my email list for more.

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Who then owns the profile?

A lawsuit happening in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania is asking just that question.

The Back Story

Before we look at the suit itself, let’s look at the story behind it. A startup called Edcomm was purchased by another company, Sawabeh. Shortly after the buyout, the founders of Edcomm were fired. This quickly lead to a lot of lawsuits.

The lawsuit dealing with a social media account specifically involves Dr. Linda Eagle, PhD. Other allegations include breaches of contract and so forth. It seems that there may have been an agreement with Sawabeh that Edcomm would remain autonomous and retain its corporate officers (namly Dr. Eagle and two others).

The social media account in question, though, is Dr. Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

The Allegations

Both sides have different stories. Sawabeh says that it was Edcomm policy to create and maintain, at their own expense, social media accounts on behalf of their employees – specifically corporate staff and sales. Eagle says the opposite is true and that the account is hers.

The other founders involved in this case also had LinkedIn accounts, but are not, apparently, being included in this case because neither of their accounts were accessible by Edcomm employees when the company terminated them. Eagle’s however, was.

Sawabeh alleges that when Eagle left, she continued to use her LinkedIn account (which they claim as theirs) and that she took other items associated with it (a phone number she transferred to another phone, etc). Again, Dr. Eagle denies these claims and says the phone number was hers as was the laptop they say she took.

What’s really at stake here are the contacts made and networking achieved through Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

Social Contacts and Ownership

The real issue, as far as the LinkedIn account is concerned, are the contacts it has. When Eagle left, the company immediately changed her profile to hold the name of another employee and their photograph. This was what started the lawsuit. The company claimed ownership of the account, but was not claiming ownership over Eagle’s likeness or profile, just her contacts list, it appears.

That says something. The issue isn’t whether or not someone owns their LinkedIn profile, but whether or not they own the networking contacts that can be made through it. In a more broad sense, this would apply to all business-centered social media accounts.

So what do you think? Should a company be able to own the contacts lists their employees have on their social media accounts if those accounts are maintained at company expense? How far does this reach? If you are accessing your social media from work and even contacting business clients through them, you are in many ways using corporate resources for those accounts. Doesn’t that mean they have some kind of ownership interest in them? Or not?

These are hard questions, but it’s obvious that they’re going to become more and more common with the rise of social media in our daily personal and business lives.

Technorati Tags: employment, marketing, social media

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The pen is mightier than the sword. What a great line. Written no doubt by a pacifist I’m guessing, because I’m all for the power of the word (in the beginning there was only the word…) but facing someone in battle armed only with a ballpoint pen… I’d run a mile – unless of course I was Bruce Willis or Stallone, then I’d win no matter what.

But what has that go to do with the price of fish? Not a great deal other than the fact this annoyingly cute saying is in fact correct. Granted in physical combat it’s a no-win, but in todays wired world where we communicate at the speed of thought the sword is no match for the word.

And once you accept the power of the word – spoken or written, you begin to understand the true scope of its applicability to our very nature. The nature to which I refer to is that of our social qualities, the act of gathering together and exchanging stories, values, ideas and sharing perspectives and opinions.

The town square and village pub were slowly replaced online by the bulletin boards of the 1980′s and then again with the power of the Web and email. Today the next evolution has occurred with websites like Twitter, Facebook and other social networking venues. And if you think that these websites are just for kids talking about how cute someone is – you’d be wrong…very wrong.

Today many of these social networking ‘watering holes’ get more daily page views (traffic) than Google. Yes you read that right – MORE THAN GOOGLE. This watershed moment happened in the summer of 2007 and it’s been rising steadily since. This shift in “influence” has happened very quickly. The biggest surprise in the traffic game has been YouTube. This site now gets more daily traffic than Google by a very healthy margin and a visitor spends on average at least 15 minutes experiencing the content.

The other sites like Facebook are currently matching Google (however this is changing monthly and may well be higher by the time this goes to print.) You can see for yourself if you’d like by visiting www.alexa.com and typing in the names of the sites you’d like to compare.

Is this rapid rise of social marketing a surprise? Not to me. It’s human nature all over again. And if you stop and think about what this means to you, well it can be good or bad depending on how this new ‘force’ is applied. Today with Web2.0 and Social Marketing gaining momentum like never before, I’d have to agree that the pen is truly mightier than the sword – yet again.

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=== Spotify’s Platform

At a press event in Manhattan, Spotify revealed its new direction. The company is opening its popular freemium app to developers through an application programming interface (API). This will let developers create apps that can work inside Spotify in much the same way games and plug-ins work on Facebook or your Firefox browser.

The apps will be natively in HTML5 and ‘live’ inside Spotify so that no special installation other than asking Spotify to activate them is necessary. This means no downloads and that Spotify will retain control over privacy concerns.

At launch for this new way of doing things, Spotify showed off apps from Rolling Stone Magazine, Last.fm, TuneWiki, The Guardian, and more. These apps allow Spotify to ‘upgrade’ itself for users without having to develop the changes themselves. They also mean that users have more control over their Spotify client, since you can choose which to install and which to leave off.

The Rolling Stone app, for instance, links to magazine content related to the band or artist you’re listening to. The Last.fm app lets you stream your Spotify playlists to Last.fm so your friends can listen in radio-style and the TuneWiki app links to artist and song information from the popular music wiki.

All of this means Spotify is moving to the next level and positioning itself to become a first choice for music online.

=== Senzari to Dethrone Pandora

If you’re into less active music listening and prefer to listen radio-style – just choose a genre (or genres) and listen to whatever comes up – then you’re probably a Pandora streamer. The service, however, is limited with less than a million titles and is available only in the U.S. and Canada.

Senzari is a startup that just received $2 million in funding and has already secured webcasting privileges in the U.S., Brazil and Spain. This means it can stream nearly any radio-edit song available from any distributor, making its catalog huge.

It integrates heavily with Facebook, so you can not only share with your FB friends, but it also scours your ‘likes’ to see which bands you like, tailoring content on your listening channel to your preferences. You can also listen in on other user’s public ‘stations’ to discover new music or listen with friends.

Senzari is currently in private beta in the U.S. and Brazil and plans to open beta in Spain this month.

It definitely has what’s needed to supplant Pandora as the Internet radio option of choice.

Technorati Tags: online music

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The New Interface

It’s important to start with the interface changes, which are not insignificant. These changes are causing a rift amongst a few current Twitter users, but are by and large being accepted it appears. For those interested in Twitter as something other than a way to send out tweets about your latest exploits in whatever MMO you play, these changes are a great thing.

The changes have made the service accessible to just about anyone, no matter their tech savvy. Someone once said that once a technology can be dumbed down enough that even your grandmother can use it, it will find commercial success. Personally, I’ve known some pretty smart grandmas, but the theme of the phrase still holds: when anyone can use it easily, everyone will be able to use it.

That’s generally the first big hurdle for most new technology: becoming easy enough to use that everyone will be able to use it, thus making it mainstream. It’s also often what kills the service, since this very thing can cause a core crowd of users to start trash-talking it once it ‘sells out’ and find a new favourite service instead.

In Twitter’s case, I don’t think it will destroy it because Twitter’s core users are varied, spread out over market segments, and many are using it for business purposes.

The New Business Focus

Now that the social part of Twitter has upgraded for the better, the business side needed to do so as well. With the announcement of their new brand pages, Twitter has finally done that. The question here, though, is whether it’s too little, too late.

Facebook and Google+ both have brand pages. Both are doing very well and were met with a lot of acceptance, despite a few rocky rollout problems. Having a presence on Facebook is considered mandatory for business today and G+ is poised to become that way within a few months.

What about Twitter then? The problem here is that the business presence on Twitter is already very heavy. Most businesses have been using the micro-blog service for a year or more. All that changes now is that their landing page when someone clicks on their username will look more branded. Is this a big thing?

Yes and no. It’s a big thing for those businesses that rely on users falling on their anchor page and then clicking that ‘follow’ button. It’s no big deal to what appears to be the majority of Twitter business users, however, who rely more on friends of current followers seeing their messages and clicking the ‘follow’ button from a myriad of places – none of which are the company’s landing page on Twitter.

Should you build a Twitter brand page for your company? If you already have a Twitter account, then absolutely. You lose nothing by doing so. Should you expect it to greatly enhance your presence on Twitter? I wouldn’t count on that.

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So how has iTunes fundamentally changed the industry and are those changes good or bad?

1 Singles Reign Again

In the days of radio, singles were the name of the game. Record promoters used a single off an artist’s album to sell the album to consumers. In the beginning, this was mostly a good thing since most albums were good stuff. Eventually, however, this gave rise to the one-hit-wonder bands that made one great radio-ready song and had 12 other worthless tracks to go with it. Consumers got tired of buying a full album at full price just to get one song in their library.

Although singles on record, tape, and eventually CD might have changed that a little, iTunes changed it a lot. Now, more singles than full albums are sold and the market shows no signs of letting up on this trend.

2 Album Lengths and Content

To go with the singles changes, albums have fundamentally changed as well. Song lengths are no longer limited to the 4-minute radio blurb as a built-in requirement to get air time. Producers are seeing these trends and re-formatting albums to match. Today, most albums have 3 or 4 radio-edit songs at the front followed by the planned first hit single at centre and then longer or less marketable songs towards the end of the album.

Many consumers are becoming song-savvy and are previewing albums on iTunes and Amazon. Numbers show that most of them will listen to the first four or five song previews before purchasing the whole album. With the price point as it is, consumers believe that if only one or two songs are good, they’ll just buy the singles, but if several are good, it’s cheaper to buy the whole album at once. Producers see this and are therefore pushing albums as a single unit by organizing the songs most likely to be played as previews at the front. By the time the potential consumer hits the current radio single, they will be sold on buying the entire album instead of singles.

3 Brick & Mortar No More

The old brick music store and the music store as a hub of the shopping centre are nearly gone. New technology making for instant downloads and easier marketing and distribution have meant fewer and fewer physical sales of albums. In fact, most physical sales are now through online outlets such as Amazon rather than in tangible stores.

4 Portable Listening Is In Vogue (Again)

After a huge amount of popularity in the 80s and 90s, portable music players and listening seemed to die off. The iPod changed that a little bit, but not until the popular uprising of electronic formats, spearheaded by iTunes, did it take off once again. Recent years have seen many portable devices including music playing as an expected feature. Phones, tablets, and even cars are now able to play portable electronic music formats as part of their built-in repertoire.

5 Big Labels Losing Sales – The Rise of the Indies Commences

Big record labels are increasingly seeing lower and lower revenues as a failure to keep up with the new trends and bad public relations from lawsuits take their toll. Many artists are turning to independent or even self-promoted labels to distribute their wares, made much easier and cheaper thanks to the Internet. A band or small label can easily distribute through iTunes, Amazon, or even Facebook and MySpace.

Artists are turning to socially-promoted festivals (‘Festy’s') as a way to both promote themselves and quickly (and cheaply) schedule live performances. While physical album sales can happen at these events, they are usually used to promote websites or other means of getting electronic downloads of the album instead.

The iTunes revolution has fundamentally changed how music happens in our daily lives.

It’s a great thing to witness

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