Twitter Spam Fail

Takeaways:

1. 1) Spam made it through Gmail. Good for Spammer, bad for me.
2. 2) Profiles looked like actual people (no Hot2Trot69 profile name).
3. 3) Tweets consist of spam content.
4. 4) 9 Twitter requests from people I don’t know in one minute = FAIL.

Spammy Tweets

Most brand managers and merchants recognize the importance of targeting mothers for consumer household purchases. Web developers have been taking a similar interest in moms and consumer household spending and a wide variety of social networks for moms have begun to appear. Researching social networking sites for moms, I developed a tiered system that divided the social networks based on visitor traffic compiled from compete.com.

Top Tier: CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com

CafeMom & BabyCenter

CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com are by far the largest social networking sites for mothers. BabyCenter.com has on average 4 million viewers a month. Additionally, BabyCenter.com has seen year-over-year growth 12.7%.  CafeMom.com has an estimated 2 million visitors per month. CafeMom.com has declined in the number of visitors year-over-year by 4.2%.

Mid Tier: ParentsConnect.com, CircleofMoms.com, & MomJunction.com

ParentsConnect CircleofMoms MomJunction

The mid tier is comprised of sites with less than 1 million visitors per month. The largest of these websites, ParentConnect.com, is owned by MTV and sought significant boost in traffic in May 2008. ParentConnect.com had on average 300,000 visitors prior to May and approximately 800,000 visitors after May. ParentConnect.com year-over-year growth is an astonishing 280%.  CircleofMoms.com was launched in September 2008 and has grown 322% month over month with visitors in November 2008 to approximately 561,000 visitors per month.  MomJunction.com had a large spike in traffic in December 2007 to approximately 500,000 visitors but has on average monthly visitors of about 50,000.  MomJunction.com month over month number of visitors is down 23.1% and averages only 34,000.

Low Tier: Minti.com, MothersClick.com, & Moxie-Moms.com

Minti, MothersClick, & Moxie-Moms

Low tier social networking sites for moms are characterized as having under 100,000 visitors per month. The largest of the sites, Minti.com, has on average 55,000 visitors per month with year-over-year growth of 31.5%. Mothersclick.com is another relatively new social networking site for mothers with average monthly visitors under 20,000 and year-over-year growth of 93.9%. Moxie-Moms.com averages about 1000 people a month with year-over-year growth of 95.1%. Moxie-Moms.com is the only subscription-based website on the list.

While they are very similar to the sites on this list, we did not include mommy blogger sites such as MommyBlogger.com and MomForce.com. I will cover mommy blogger sites in a different post.

A recent article on Sphinn.com called Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million in revenue caught my attention.

When you take into account Dell’s total revenue, the contribution from twittering is negligible.  The development costs and management probably has a high return on investment even though the model isn’t scalable.  Consumers have to choose to follow Dell.  Dell can not interrupt consumers.

Mashable has an interesting article on Brands on Twitter.  The article boils down to the two strategies that enables a business on Twitter to resonate with users:

1. 1) Is the conversation on Twitter one-sided? A business should respond to users.
2. 2) Does the brand have a “personality” (I believe some marketers call this positioning).

The Mashable article has a nice quote that sums up my position:

“I think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time.”

David Wallace agrees with pairing a personality with a brand on Twitter and offers some additional suggestions for social marketing on Twitter in his article, Can Twitter be Useful for Business?

I think the most important thing to remember for a business is that Twitter is an investment in time (maybe more then you anticipate) and to be successful, you are going to have to commit to a long term strategy to reap the benefits.

The New York Times has a really interesting article, Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites, on Proctor & Gambles social advertising attempts via Facebook.

Five great take-aways:

• Seth Goldstein, wrote that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”
• Businesses still have to rely on either contests or expensive content to attract visitors.
• Just 3% of internet users would forward advertising information to a friend.
• Contests that feature user submissions historically has a low response rate.
• Seth Goldstein  describes a self-perpetuating cycle in social networks: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

There are two approaches that seem to work on social networks:

• Advertisers can be more intrusive, but the outcome will not be positive.
• Advertisers can create genuinely entertaining commercials, but spend ungodly sums to do so.