On July 31 2010, Twitter passed the number of 20 billion tweets sent since the service was created in 2006. This is quite remarkable, considering that the threshold of 10 billion tweets had only been reached 5 months before, in March 2010. Currently, Twitter states that there are about 750 tweets sent per second and 65 million sent per day. From these figures it is easy to see that Twitter is even more quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with than we anticipated in our podcast on the business uses of Twitter.

Among the uses we identified was employing Twitter in PR and product announcements. The goal must be to get your message across to as many people as possible. So, having many followers is good, having many more followers is even better, meaning the more followers your Twitter-Account has, the more return on your announcements you will see. But this is only half of the truth. Even more important is the question whether your followers re-tweet, i.e. redistribute, your tweets – and in doing so spread your announcement further and attract new followers to your account. This is exactly what HP Labs Research tried to analyse in a recent study called “Influence and Passivity in Social Media”.

HP-Researchers determined that the average Twitter-user only re-tweets one out of 318 tweets he receives. However, this average does not tell the whole story, because the vast majority of users almost never redistribute messages, while a select few are very active in doing so. Now, seeing that in order to make your tweets as widespread as possible it is important to get your followers to re-tweet them, you could just measure the total amount of re-tweets you get. But if you consider the difference in activity across users, as mentioned before, such a total would be biased depending on which users follow you and their general likeliness to re-tweet messages they receive. HP’s study tries to amend this by introducing their IP-algorithm, a way to assign relative influence and passivity scores to every user. In this model, influence depends on the quantity and quality of the audience a user influences, and passivity is a measure of how difficult it is for other users to influence him. In short, HP-Researchers try to determine the degree to which a Twitter-user can get his followers to re-tweet his tweets and visit the URLs he links in those tweets – given that most users are passive by nature and not easily motivated to re-distribute or visit URLs they receive in the first place. In that sense, the attention a user gets from normally passive followers is even more valuable than that of generally active ones.

After analysing 22 million tweets with this method, HP Labs Research determined that the Twitter-account “Mashable” is the most influential one. This, as you probably know, is the account of Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable.com, currently rated second on Technorati.com’s Top 100 blogs worldwide. Pete founded his blog in 2005 at the age of 19 and has since risen to “must-read-status” on all topics concerning technology and social media in particular.

What is his secret then? It is very good content. In a world of social communications, wisdom of the crowd and the long tail it is not enough to simply have good content. Aside from being interesting to readers, very good content not only sparks the interest of people but is also wrapped in a form that stimulates reflection and comments on the topic – and motivates readers to tell their friends about it. As a business user, you need to keep this in mind. It is not enough to send out PR and marketing material clearly identifiable as such. Instead, you need to try to talk to your customers on a personal level, engage them in an open conversation. In so doing, you will not only develop a favourable reputation with customers but will achieve referrals, too, bringing your customer’s contacts and their contacts’ contacts into the conversation. Making the information you distribute viral, as the term goes. Aside from referrals, reputation gains and ultimately ROI, there is another use in engaging your customers (and your partners and employees, for that matter): In the true spirit of crowd sourcing, it could very well be that you will be able to gain additional insight into the mind of your stakeholders, harness their knowledge and experience and ultimately develop better services and products for your customers – all based on talking to them as equals.

Doodle was created in 2003 by Swiss computer scientist Michael Näf, a graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). Näf was later joined by fellow ETH-graduate Paul E. Sevinç and in 2007 incorporated Doodle in Zurich. They now have 10 employees.

The company is partly funded by venture capitalist Creathor Venture, who is engaged in more than 20 companies, mainly from Germany and Switzerland. Additionally, Doodle has also received funds from the Cantonal Bank of Schwyz (Schwyzer Kantonalbank) through that bank’s innovation foundation. In terms of income, Doodle offers targeted adverts that are displayed to users of the free basic service. Users can, however, buy “Premium Doodle” for CHF 28 to get rid of the ads. Another interesting service introduced in 2009 is “Branded Doodle”, which targets business users in particular and allows for a branded, corporate Doodle instance and offers additional efficiency and security features (CHF 480 for the whole package).

Doodle has created quite a buzz in the three years since its incorporation. The service has not only been featured in several big Swiss and European print and online media, but has also been recognized across the big pond. Doodle was mentioned in well-known blogs like Techcrunch, WebWorkerDaily or CNet and has even made it onto washingtonpost.com.

Among several national and international prizes, Doodle has also won Mashable’s 2008 Open Web Award in both the Places & Events and the Blogger’s Choice categories. In 2009 the University of St.Gallen, a renowned Swiss business school, listed Doodle as the third most innovative Swiss ITC Company, trailing industry heavyweights Logitech and Swisscom.

In May 2010 Doodle reported 6 million unique monthly visitors to their website, double the numbers of 2009. In June 2010 a new calendar view option was introduced to Doodle. The company described this as a major improvement and core of the next generation of their product. The main idea was to integrate Doodle scheduling into a user’s existing calendars (e.g. Google Calendar, Lotus Notes or Outlook Calendar). This is a smart move. It eliminates the need for checking both your Doodle and your calendar separately and also converts the traditional, old fashioned table form of Doodle into a more practical calendar view that users are familiar with. Still, it remains to be seen if Doodle can turn its success in Switzerland, a relatively small market, into a global success story.

Regardless of such future developments, Doodle is a fine example of how Web 2.0 and social communications is meant to work. First of all, a service needs to be instantly understandable and usable. Even if there is quite a lot of code, servers and what not in the background, users do not want to be bothered by lengthy introductions or hand books. Secondly, Doodle facilitates daily communications by a smart, non-intrusive way. People want and need to communicate, even if a day today does not have more hours than a day 100 years ago. The solution is to communicate more effectively. And that is what Doodle is all about.

So, let me ask you again: Do you still use email CC back and forth – or do you doodle?

I only came across this bold competition called mYprize 4G Developer Challenge today - it is run by YTL Communications, who belong to the Malaysian YTL Corporation. On their website they say about themselves:

The YTL Group’s core businesses are ownership and management of regulated utilities and other infrastructural assets, serving 10 million customers in three continents.

YTL Corporation’s strategy of providing “World Class Products and services at very competitive prices” along with its history of Innovation, has led directly to it recording a compounded annual growth rate in Pre-tax profits of 55% over the last 15 years, and an enviable track record of creating shareholder value. It has been paying dividends every year since it was listed on KLSE. YTL Corporation’s strategy has also resulted in it and its subsidiaries accumulating numerous International Awards in the process.

While YTL is not a long-time telecommunication company at all, they decided to build the country’s fastest 4G (2.3GHz WiMAX) wireless network through their 60% ownership in YTL Communications. Now such diversities are not uncommon at all in Asia and China. Many of the largest tech and telco companies originated from construction, ship building, food supply or e.g. container harbors. So not so surprising then that YTL itself is active in O&M Activities, Cement Manufacturing, Construction Contracting, Property Development, Hotels & Resorts, Technology Incubation, REIT, and Carbon Consulting.

Back to YTL Communications. They decided to run this competition collecting new ideas on how to use this new high-speed wireless network using a very nice social innovation community platform. In case you want to still participate, though, time is running out as submissions must come in by May 1.

Ever wondered what people were doing while sitting in front of their computer? You can now! All you need is a webcam and a little site called www.chatroulette.com. 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia set up this simple but intriguing way of meeting total strangers. Launched in November 2009, his idea has been featured in numerous news magazines around the world, including the New York Times, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and our very own 20min.ch here in Switzerland.

How does it work? You don’t need to register, just go the site, hit the “new game” button and chat away. If you don’t like who you see, click “next” and you get a new partner. As Robert J. Moore stated on techcrunch.com, 89% of participants are male, 11% female. There is an age restriction of 16 in place for the site, but no formal verification is conducted. This is certainly an issue, as chatroulette isn’t for minors. In fact, there are quite a few perverts taking advantage of the completely anonymous character of the service, as a sample of screenshots on tumblr.com shows.

Aside from such unfortunate encounters, which are a sad reality in cyberspace, there are a lot of  “relatively” normal people playing chatroulette as well. Compete.com shows a veritable hockey-stick-effect of pageviews for www.chatroulette.com, currently reaching nearly 1 million unique visitors, while Alexa.com ranks the site among the top1000, traffic-wise.

A quick ad hoc experiment by myself taught me one thing: The whole idea sounds quite fascinating, in theory. But after connecting to my first handful of random strangers, the whole thing started to bore me. And when my next “partner” revealed more than I ever wanted to know, I knew – this was my first and last chat roulette.

SWR3 is Germany’s favorite radio station, daily reaching 3.82 million people across the country. The program is accessible through FM, cable, the Astra satellite or web radio - so, theoretically, you can listen to your SWR3 everywhere there is internet. But that’s not all. The station also offers a social community to its listeners and fans, dubbed “SWR3land.de”, German for SWR3 country. Currently, there are 39139 members and 1246 groups online there.

Those groups are searchable by activity or by number of participants. Additionally, there are photos, forums, blogs, a chat and a studio webcam available to users. The groups are mostly topical, e.g. fan groups of certain shows and their hosts or numerous groups for lovers of cats, bbq or travel. Among the more unusual ones are one for singles, one to combat smoking and a continuous, user driven story about a character called Alfon Erbsengrill. This group actually is among the most active at the moment. It was started in June 2009 and already features 54 pages of forum posts, together making up one huge story - or fairy tale, as the original poster calls it.

This example shows the whole point of creating a social community and at the same time demonstrates what is needed for it to succeed: People need to be motivated to participate and fill the community with life - and thus be positively inclined towards the brand behind the community. Such a favorable opinion creates positive word-to-mouth advertising, or viral marketing, if you will.

Now, how to make this happen? Well, first of all the platform needs to be as open as possible, i.e. leave people room to express themselves and use the community in the way they want. Because who better to know which topics the users might be interested in than the users themselves? Nevertheless, there are certain to be some fail-safe, premier topics a company can create in order to seed activity in the community. In the case of a radio station these would obviously be fan groups of its signature shows, like SWR3’s “Wirby & Zeus” show for example. Reference the community group in your show, host “bring your own content” competitions, ask for listeners opinions and so on. Once the community gets under way, more groups will start to sprout and the users will “take over management” of the community content and activity.

What else is out there? The very popular KIIS-FM, from Los Angeles, also lets its listeners sign up online. The KIIS VIP club isn’t really a social community, though, more a straightforward means for marketing and marketing research. Users can earn points by participating in surveys, listening to the station and referring friends. Points can then be traded in for special prizes and promotions. In short, there isn’t much interactivity or user generated content. America’s most popular radio station, talk radio WABC from New York, offers a similar insider club, where people benefit from promotions and special alerts in exchange for their personal information. Additionally, WABC has an official fan site on Facebook, though only 1798 fans, which doesn’t even come close to the numbers of SWR3!

So, what can businesses learn from SWR3land.de? Well, certainly that it helps to have a positive and distinct brand to serve as a label for the community. But THE winning arguments for a community are its openness and the liberty of use it offers to users, as opposed to being “just” another marketing platform. People tend to notice this and are more inclined to participate if they feel that their efforts and opinions are genuinely appreciated. And that’s what viral marketing is all about. If people feel they are being coaxed into providing free advertisment or buying stuff, however, they won’t take part and the community won’t work.

Did you know that (depending which survey you read) between 25 and 54 per cent of the US companies block social networking sites such as Facebook at work. Eight per cent also fire employees for posting criticism of the company outside of work. That is one way to handle such problems, but in fact that is both wasting talent and squandering an important opportunity. The cause is misunderstanding that different generations work differently.

Companies are right to have concerns about how employees use work time and about activities that affect their brand. However, most of the time, the employee’s intention is not destructive - if it is, then there certainly is a need to act. But in the typical case the issue is not a breakdown in trust, poor work attitude or even inefficiency, but just different perceptions and habits. Young, highly social employees need to be thought of and treated differently.  There’s been quite a lot of research on this over the last year or two, particularly comparing “baby boomers” (now aged in their 40s to 60s) and generation Y,  aka “millennials” or the “net generation”. A company with a good mix of ages can gain from the strengths of both generations - but only with knowledge and careful management. Here are the key findings of the research:

What makes the generations different

• Generation Y like to share personal information and thoughts on social networking sites and make little distinction between company and personal stuff. Baby boomers  are more cautious.
• Generation Y often judge people’s abilities by their technical competence. For baby boomers, technical competence is more of an add-on.
• Baby boomers tend to perceive knowledge as a useful card to hold onto until needed - a private source of power. Millennials gain kudos by sharing it.
• For baby boomers, who had been brought up with a linear, teacher fronted learning style, knowledge is assessed by coherence and depth. Generation Y prefer to learn by selecting from a mass of information, and judged it more by relevance than coherence.
• Generation Y’ers are attracted to jobs by how interesting they are. Can they be creative, use their own technology, express themselves? Job-hopping is seen as normal. Baby boomers, on the other hand, are more likely to look at the overall employment package, and pay more attention to the promotion ladder.
• Generation Y are particularly intolerant of being told  “This is the way we do it. We’ve always done it this way” and like to experiment: new is good. For baby boomers, experimentation is what you do when the normal methods have been tried and found wanting.

Now a certain amount of this is simply differences that have characterised the generations for centuries. But there are deeper differences. Millennials have not learned about the world from books, but from the Internet. What they have been learning is changing year by year, requiring a different and more flexible attitude to knowledge.

Working together

The main thing is to value the different generations within the company so each learns from each other. How would that work in practice?

1. Safety vs. self-expression - employees need an outlet to share experiences and be creative but be aware of consequences for the company of careless online behaviour (they of course also need to understand and adhere to well deisgned policies).
2. Internet time is not downtime - many creative and younger employees use all kinds of resources for information. Imposing rigid rules about how to use the Internet at work will feel too restrictive and insulting, will stifle creativity and create resentment. If an employee wants to do a good job, they need the tools that suit them.
3. Balance different knowledge bases - wikis need to work alongside accumulated specialist knowledge in formal documents, and companies should not forget the institutional knowledge that senior employees have - which can be sorely missed when they leave.
4. Be transparent - being explicit about differences in work attitudes and openly seeking practices that make good use of all talent will motivate employees and increase their productivity and creativity.

The banking services branch of the Swiss Post, PostFinance, has recently launched “EventManager“, an educational game for kids and youths between 14 and 20. Its goal is to educate young people on how to be responsible consumers and manage their own finances. It’s designed along the latest didactic insights, conveys financial knowledge in an understandable way and is mainly meant to be used by teachers during class.

How does it work?
Students are asked to plan and run an event, real or fictional, using EventManager. In doing so, they develop knowledge and competencies related to running projects. Initially, you have to create your group or join an existing one. Then there are three different rounds of play: Budgeting, Financing, Investing. Each of these educational modules offers different clips for participants to watch, e.g. “account types“ or “my budget“. The idea is for students to work on these educational modules and clips and prepare for the event manager job. To give feedback and check on progress, there are five test questions to be answered afterwords. And then the actual game starts: Firstly, the event has to be planned by booking artists and providing infrastructure. Then the whole thing is run and, finally, the results of the job are analyzed and feedback is given.

I think that this is an interesting project, as it isn’t your typical one-size-fits-all social community.  Still, it shows the main ideas behind using social media for business purposes:

• interactivity; students budget, plan and run their own events, fictional or real
• entertainment; students are educated by guiding them through a game instead of just a textbook lesson
• benefit; educational software usually costs something while EventManager is free, making it easy to use for teachers
• viral; of course, PostFinance’s logo is there, but the game itself does not bear the typical hallmarks of a marketing campaign, giving credence to PostFinance’s claim of primarily wanting to educate young people on consumption and money.

What’s your take? Please comment here or send me a tweet.

Swiss energy and energy service company Alpiq has just launched a community-based website at www.immergenugstrom.ch (immer genug Strom means “always enough electrical current”), and at first glance this is a really nice initiative. There is a forum, a TV channel, surveys and lots of content. Quite a big move for a company of this kind in Switzerland, or at least at first glance. But, being Swiss, it is also a bit conservative, and actually not as social as it looks. So the good news is that it is a first, here; the bad news that it’s not all there and others will do it better, or maybe not at all if it doesn’t work!

What is nice about the site? For one thing, the design is nice and the separation into different content and activities is good. For another, there is lots of content, e.g. lots of videos to see on the “TV” link. So what doesn’t work? Well, the problem is that it is not a full-on social site. The “forum” section is not fully-featured, much more like the comments list on a blog site. There are four “threads” — basically just a paragraph with comments, and no user-generated threads. On what looks like a community video page, the videos are from their four in-house “Strom Scouts”. The TV page is a page full of short videos and clips, with no live content. They videos are all good for a job, but there is no shared comment feature — the “comment” button leads to a normal “contact us” page with no mention of moderation or what would be done with the comment. The Q&A section is a very nice FAQ page, but again with nothing user-generated.

Now, I suspect the half measures are partly because it’s a trial run, and partly because this is a very technical area so Alpiq are probably wondering about the role of user-generated content. But its attractive content and one or two real social features are more than offset by the lack of full social media tools that will get users generating content — and energy is a topic that positively invites this content. If it does not come from users, you end up doing it all yourself and not getting their active engagement, so where is the real point? I think this site will end up in disappointment for Alpiq, which would be a pity as it is in some sense in the right direction. However, what bothers me most is that other utilities and service providers may look at this venture as an example for social media in this part of the world and draw completely the wrong conclusions. There is little doubt now that social media works, but it has to be done in a wholeheartedly social way.

So why did it turn out like this? Overall it looks like it was done and driven by IT departments with some oversight from Marcom and the - financial - blessing from management, plus one staged video clip done by the CEO. The results show the shortcomings of this compartmentalized approach. Real success depends on a business-centred planning approach. To do social media well you need to have sales, marketing, operational, and often HR and other departments involved, doing excellent planning that cuts across the departments. Not something where IT companies or even PR companies excel, as they both miss important parts — and may well not even have noticed the site’s deficiencies.

Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.