To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?

So, my experiment with Twitter has started.

Twitter is either going to be the biggest Internet phenomenon of this year (think YouTube in 2006 or Facebook on 2007) or I will eat my hat. Well, it will be IF the tipping point is reached. Quite what this tipping point is I'm not sure, but when enough people get absorbed into it's crazy ways then it might just be a hit. It's been around for a while (I've been aware of existence for over a year anyway), but more and more famous people seem to be using it and celebrity endorsement never hurt any product, even strange social networking sites.

Might be a hit? Well, the great thing about Twitter is that not only can you track what your friends are up to, but you can also track the celebs. One of my favorites so far is Lance Armstrong, but plenty of others including the newly elected Pres of the US have a Twitter feed.

So - how does it work? Simple. If you know the "status update" tool in Facebook, imagine that, all by itself. Just status updates, and nothing else. You are meant to type in, in no more than 140 characters (that's one sentence or two), the answer to "What are you doing now?". Then, you select friends or other people you want to follow and they get added to your page so that when you log on, at any time you can see what they are up to. Kind of bizarre, strangely addictive.

According to Hitwise, Twitter traffic has grown by 984% in the UK in the last 12 months. That is fast fast growth. The tipping point might be coming soon.

Why do it? I really don;t know the answer to that. Everyone will have their own reason. If you get something out of it, you'll come back. If that something is keeping up with mates, colleagues or heroes, you sometimes need to give to receive.

This century, enabled by the Internet, one-to-one communications and business will take off. The Internet is the ultimate middle-man. Who needs Hello magazine when Jonathan Ross will tell you what he's up to in real time?

To Tweet or not to tweet? You decide.

Tips:

Use the TwitterBerry application to view or edit "Tweets" on the move

Use www.tinyurl.com to create short urls to save text

Use www.ping.fm to update your status on your different social networking sites at the same time

Getting Insight From Google Insights

Whenever Google launches a new tool or service there’s much chatter and blogging. What I’ve found though is that many bloggers just give you the news and don’t really discuss the implications.

One interesting tool that was launched earlier this month was Google Insights For Search.

You can type in a search phrase or a number of phrases and then see the trends of usage of this term over time.

Some fun examples; You can see how the phrase ’Beijing Olympics’ has massively ramped up in August (well, no surprise there then). Or how about the decline in interest for ’Tony Blair’ over the last year?

I think there are more interesting applications for an e-commerce business to consider.

Here’s 3 suggestions to get you started.

1. Competitor Analysis

There’s usually a positive relationship between a company’s brand recognition and the number of searches it gets on it’s own “brand” terms. You can use this to your advantage by comparing the volume of searches your own company brand is getting compared to your competitors.

For example, compare the following 4 flight/rail companies for UK searches over the last 4 years: British Airways, Eurostar, Ryanair and Easyjet. You can see the search spike relating to the launch of the new Eurostar terminal in November 2007, but much more obvious is the share of interest that BA has lost to Easyjet and Ryanair over the years.

2. Regional Demand

If you are entering a new market it’s useful to see where in that country your potential customer base exists. In which cities will you find your new customers?

For example, in the online restaurant reservations business, if you were to search for ‘restaurants’ by French region you’d see (as expected) that Paris is a top location. Which city would you have guessed as next most important? Of the other major cities it’s not Bordeaux, Nantes or Lyon where there are most diners online, it’s Toulouse and Nice. If you cross reference this data with population data, you get a good market research tool.

3. Seasonal Trends

Many businesses are seasonal in nature. If you a a growing business (and I hope you are), determining what parts of your monthly figures can be attributed to growth and what are caused by an underlying seasonal trend is difficult to gauge. Say we did well in August. Is that because more people are in the market for our product generally in August (compared to July) - or did we actually take a bigger share of the market?

For example, if you are a retailer selling gifts, what sort of trend do you see for gifts? A little spike in February (Valentine's Day), a big spike in November (Christmas). No surprises there then. If you are unsure of your seasonal demand trends, this is quite a quick and easy way to take the pulse of your consumer base.


So - there you are, a couple of different ways to use this great new tool. I'm sure there are many more. Please feel free to leave a comment if you've gained insights in other ways.

Mobile Online Restaurant Booking From fonefood (lastminute.com)

Booking a restaurant online on your mobile.

I'm excited. Today sees the launch of fonefood, a new beta mobile restaurant booking service from lastminute.com.

You want to find or book a restaurant. Nowadays one of the easiest ways to do that is online. You don't need to wait for the restaurant to be open, you don't need the restaurant to answer your call. You can book there and then online and in real-time.

Increasingly though people are taking the internet with them in their pockets and more of us expect to be able to get online anywhere at anytime.

That's what's great about fonefood. You can book tables on the move! You're on the train, you're in a taxi, you're at the airport. Wherever you happen to be it's easy to search and book with your web enabled mobile phone.

fonefood is available at http://m.lastminute.com/fonefood

Try it out. You are given descriptions of nearby restaurants, with currently over a thousand available deals, discounts and promotions. It uses Google Maps to show restaurants near your chosen location. Once you’ve chosen a restaurant there is no need to call, you just book directly on your mobile (for free!) and receive an instant confirmation via SMS. (This is especially handy if you're abroad and don't speak the local language).

It is available in 12 countries and gives users access to over 6,000 restaurants. The restaurant reservations technology is powered by Livebookings Network.

lastminute.com even put a cool little video together on Youtube to market the service....





I love progress!

How Much Should I Get Paid?

Increasingly, employees want to make sure that they work on a good team, and on the winning team. It's not enough to get a great job title, a fancy office and a big salary.

Good people need to work with good people. Success breeds success.

Personally, I believe in really working hard on getting the right people on board. If you recruit well, everything else follows. However, it's not just about you finding a person to do the job well. The best candidates need to find a company and team that they really want to join. It's a marriage every time you hire. If done well, the divorce rate is low (few people leave).

So, I was very interested to see a website that is helping prospective employees find out about prospective employers. It's called glassdoor.com.

Sign up to the site and you can rate your current and previous employers. You can also find out salary ranges for each company by job type. The catch? To read reviews or to see salaries, you need to add a review or leave your salary details.

If this takes off, we could have a free, easy to access salary benchmarking service. Working out whether you get paid the market rate becomes easier and easier. HR teams will have a cheaper source of compensation data for benchmarking. Asking for a pay rise though will still be nerve racking.

I'm cautious. I certainly won't be posting my current salary or giving feedback on my current company, mainly because there's only one of me (COO) and so it'd be pretty obvious who left the comments. I would probably leave comments on previous employers though, given that the risk of getting into a comprimising situation is lower.

It's defintely one to watch. I think it will take off in the UK simply because we're so nosy about each other.

In the long term it could change the job market in that workers will have a totally transparent view of what it is like to work for a company before joining them. That can only be a good thing: employers will create a reputation by actually being an effective organisation, not by marketing HR hype.

Asia By Bike

This is why I love the internet.

Good things being done by good people. Who was it that said "happiness is only real when shared"?

My brother and wife are off soon on an epic cycle journey from Kyrgyzstan to Vietnam.

You can check out the neat site that they created here: Asia By Bike.

I'm looking forward to following their progress, online (of course!)