I'm here with all my friends! (from Barfly)

tag, you’re here

Facebook views the success of photo tagging as one of the most brilliant product moves behind its’ growth. Continuing to seek out and expand on personal hooks that take it deeper into the life and times of users is a central goal of FB’s new product development.  The feature of letting any person check-in their friends to a Place (the way you can tag people in photos) is the most controversial of the released features.  IMHO, Facebook is very unlikely to back off this functionality unless user backlash becomes a ton more prominent.

While the first thing I did when the product lunched was turn off the ability for friends to do this, I think it’s a very smart feature.  I learned awhile ago that the slope towards open life sharing is downward facing and indeed slippery. Facebook gleefully applies just a little more grease with every product release.

From a product viewpoint, the potential for place-based gathering and collaboration is tremendous, and bringing active friend sharing into the mix is a high quality product move – no matter how much I personally view some elements to have stepped over the line [notably, the pre-selected opt-in for applications your friends are using to have access to your location status.]

fun vs. function

Dennis Crowley is right in calling Facebook Places boring, when viewed side-by-side with the engaging experience of Foursquare. For me, Foursquare was JUST beginning the get interesting – it was beginning to reach a level of critical mass to occasionally find a friend unexpectedly nearby, and the content in “tips” was shifting from lame to mildly interesting.

I think it’s already game over for friend discovery.  However, the current user experience of FB Places for attaching comments and “stories” to a place is pretty stale. The “inside Facebook” user experience of Places may be an impediment to success, particularly for such a new visual user experience.

So, will FourSquare’s ability to engage consumers via competitive and fun user experiences be sufficient to sustain its’ growth and create the preferred place for check-in?  FourSquare will have to step up their game on user engagement (over monetization).  How new users introduced to location sharing via FB choose to adopt or ignore the service is mission critical.

Facebook’s Places API presents a double-edged sword in this equation.  On one hand, it allows the aggregation of all check-ins to Facebook’s Places, effectively giving FB the trump card of check-in data consolidation. On the other hand, it opens up a way to “layer” the fun and (potentially) commercially interesting activities on top of location notification to friends outside of Facebook Places.

turning off your friends

Google researcher Paul Adams’ epic discourse on real life social networks nailed what I consider to be a significant shortcoming of the current generation Places check-in. I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends, probably only half of which live in my state, and of those only a fraction of which could give a rat’s derrierre about where I am located day by day.

I’m interested in a more personalized way of sharing my location with friends and businesses I like (and trust); there are a group of friends who I’d like to know where I am when I choose to share it.  Until now, the concept of grouping friends into sub-segments seemed like an intangible effort with little or no return. Perhaps this changes that dynamic.

So for now, Places misses the mark for me as a blunt instrument that fails to capture the nuance of personal location sharing.

*as a sidenote, I’ll blog separately on blog.closely.com on the business impact of Facebook Places.

I’m been enthusiastically hammering my head against the wall of local media and small business revenue models for over a dozen years.  About a year ago, I strapped on my early stage start-up skates and wobbled my way back onto the ice.

the napkin phase

A lot has changed in the 6-7 years since I was an early stage entrepreneur.  While running a 150-person local media tech business keeps you contemporary with industry knowledge, rolodex and perspective, you forget the scrappy exhilaration and anxiety of a from-scratch business formed around a shining new idea. It also gives you a near carnal attachment to a clean cap table;)

learning to lean

I’ve read with a mixture of enthusiasm and marginal skepticism the lean start-up school of thought.  The “agile + listen to your market + pivot quickly” logic is high quality stuff for any start-up to seriously digest.

creating room to pivot

One tenant of the movement I’m currently living full throttle is the “pivot moment“. I find the notions and structures contained in Eric Ries’ excellent writings to be spot on.  As you absorb early customer learning and market movements, more often than not, you realize that your original napkin picture carried some flawed assumptions. Leveraging and pivoting “on top of the learnings” is an incredibly healthy process.

This comes back to a point I picked (back) up on this weekend from Chris Dixon, commenting via RWW’s Start-up Advice Column. Chris comments in his November blog post, that start-ups make the mistake of centering their energy on proving the brilliance of their business idea.

To me, the two most critical decisions in a new start-up are #1, your core team, and #2, the space you choose to tackle.  Choosing both wisely increases your odds of success exponentially! Pivoting within a great market space is naturally much more exhilarating than pivoting inside a narrow and cluttered one.

pivoting with delight

Agility is a very special frame of mind; In my experience, it’s way more rare than people think.  There’s a lot of faux agility in start-ups that I think of as a love for the adrenaline of chaos.  To me, the greatest start-up teams blend an infectious curiosity, deep problem solving chops, and a sincere delight in the learning from customers, competition & market movements.

More often than not, start-ups thrive on the adrenaline but lack the problem solving or the thirst for driving business impact. One of the leading symptoyms of this condition is an overt infatuated with bright shiny objects and industry buzz. Falling into the trap of measuring your movements by the compass of Techcrunch is an all too common problem.

being in “your know” not “the know”

One of the things I’ve learned, which I have to force myself to continually re-visit is the difference between being in the know – aware of general industry trends and activities, versus being in your know – being deeply connected to the information that impacts your company’s value creation.

Think about the time you spend on extraneous information, constantly challenge yourself to cut it down, and increase your participatory learning in information that impacts your business.  Know your critical assumptions and test their validity every chance you get.

balance and posture

Navigating the pivotal progress of an early stage start-up presents risks and challenges that will either damage you or build you up!  Surrounding yourself with the right team gives you the posture and strength to maneuver confidently.  Keeping a clear head full of the right context will enable you to pivot with confidence to an improved vision.

We’ve grown up to view online business reviews and recommendations as something that gets accumulated into organized sources of browsable content. TripAdvisor and Yelp represent two highly successful cases-in-point of the power of critical mass to reviews.

The dominating model of shopping behavior goes something like this…

search > initial select > search again for opinion to test your decision > transact

As noted in Search Engine Watch, “the search continues because search engines aren’t the consumer’s most trusted source of advice”. As we all know, we’re spending more and more time socially connected.  This creates a new whole stepping off point for shopping behavior. In theory, the potential exists to invert the experience and infuse trust and recommendations into the front end of shopping.

when your friends are always live

So, as the new generation of  live + social + local approaches – will it make these models increasingly obsolete?  It’s creeping up on us – perhaps the most visible example today is seeing your friends instantly react to your Facebook posts from their desktop and mobile positions. Clearly, your social graph is a live organism, becoming more and more ready to add value to your shopping experience every day.

But, do we really believe NextWeb’s headline? “Facebook Acquires NextStop, It’s Lights out for Yelp“. The message is basically that once Facebook turns up it’s Question application for organized Q&A, it will begin accumulating opinion at a breakneck pace, and facilitate personalized opinion content and live Q&A with your social graph.  Combining this initiative with the team who created Nextstop, and you begin to get a picture of how Facebook aims to collect and apply a richer model of relevant opinion content.

inside or out?

Facebook’s bold Open Graph move, to invert itself and be embedded into any web site or service, implies that it’s a neutral party in the question of “where will the consumer prefer to engage”.  To their credit, Yelp boldly stepped forward, with a Microsoftesque “embrace and extend”  approach with this new dev utility.  Yelp is clearly aiming to extend the lead it has with a large base of consumers and their organized opinions. It’s model will allow you to integrate your own social graph and sift and interact with your friends viewpoints, whenever you want.  Best of both worlds is the theory.

Facebook will ratchet up its owned and operated product approach to live question services. As NextWeb implies, Facebook will probably aim to convince consumers to not bother “stepping outside” to the Yelp consumer experience, employing low resistance user experience techniques together with some new tricks (virtual currency, etc.).   Since opinion content is most valuable for a few months to a couple of years (depending on the category) an advantage today can systematically fade with time.

The evolution of both of Yelp and Facebook  on the parallel inside vs. outside paths will indeed be worth watching closely, as a bellwether for the evolution of socially-engaged local shopping.  And, it will presumably shed a leading light onto Facebook’s “neutrality” position and business model.

A few people have been asking about my thoughts on GroupOn.  This post presents some general observations on their business model and the impact on local promotion marketing.  Soon, I’ll take a look at how we view and apply this learning in our business model at Closely.

As a consumer, and as an entrepreneur, I love GroupOn.  They have build real velocity into a large market need and space, executing exceptionally well on a quality business model.   I also am impressed how they have backed their brand strategy with real attention to customer service.  For those not familiar with GroupOn, explore here.

perfect timing

In 2008, consumers began a mega-shift to conservative behavior with their discretionary income.  GroupOn’s proposition hit at the right time, aiming straight into the heart in this shift – offering urban consumers a new way to treat themselves again.  Creating a model of daily deep discount savings to interesting local restaurants, salons and activities, they struck a chord. Delighted by the great new bargain venue, consumers connected themselves together into a large and powerful consumer social list.

GroupOn connects this consumer desire together with lead-starved local businesses who are anxious to pump up their volumes, but cringe at the risks inherent in traditional media spending.  Their business-side innovation comes in the form of a compelling performance-based model, where a business pays out of the proceeds of customer purchases.

social light

Industry analysts point to GroupOn as a next gen social media company.  To me, GroupOn feels more like a contemporary version of a traditional media model.  Let me explain.  Social media is certainly the foundation upon which GroupOn engages their vibrant consumer base.  However, to the participating merchant this is a performance based media buy.  Advertisers buy a distribution slot to GroupOn’s list, which is opaquely retained by GroupOn.  The business gets leads and it’s up to the business to convert those leads into customers and onto their own social lists.  This is a classic third party lead generation proposition.

the group that became an audience

On a related theme, I also don’t consider GroupOn to be about group buying, at least not anymore.  At the outset consumers were socially engaged to share deals with friends in order to hit a purchase threshold before everyone got to share in the deep discount.  Those days are long gone, GroupOn now has a mass local audience in most major metros, removing all group volume “risk”.

There is no disputing the company’s ability to aggregate substantial purchase behavior against deep discounts to interesting places.  However, GroupOn’s scale now positions it as a predictable engine for large scale purchase of discounted products/services. It’s a powerful weapon to be used by a business perhaps once a year, maybe 2-3 times at most.

the new local tour bus?

I find it interesting that GroupOn describes itself as a City Guide of sorts – viewing its product to be the impetus for people to get out and explore more new places. The brand is aiming at a somewhat curatorial style of their featured discounts. At the recent Kelsey conference, GroupOn’s CEO innocently snubbed Valpak with a comment to the effect that those kind of deals wouldn’t fit their brand.

Some restaurant and salon operators have voiced concern that GroupOn is creating a troubling behavior pattern with consumers that works against their ability to convert the GroupOn lead into repeat customers. Will they drop in and never come back, as the move on to the next deal? Is the GroupOn consumer more into drive-by consumption than loyalty?  While it’s probably just too early to judge, one thing is certain. The growth in GroupOn’s consumer list, combined with the rapid proliferation of copycat companies will most certainly give the consumer the opportunity to collect a drawer full of deep discount offers.

In some ways, GroupOn feels like the next Yelp, but with a dramatically better business model. It must be pretty annoying to Yelp investors to see their 10X audience generate revenue that is probably no more than 20% of GroupOn’s.  It’s highly predictable that Yelp and MANY local media companies are looking jealously across the GroupOn bow, with an intent to flatter the company with their own form of replication.

too much of a good thing?

From one lens, GroupOn is arguably doing too well.

A brief browse through recent deals show a scale of buying that is a runaway success in lead generation. However, the success formula relies on a deep margin risk to the participating merchant. The merchant appears to be averaging a net of 25-30% of the retail price on the consumer products and services, in low operating margin businesses.

To make the deal math work, the business has three critical ways to make the offer participation a smart decision.

1. Ensure that the average bill paid extends beyond the coupon’s value,

2. Convert the new leads into repeat clientele, and

3. Handle a deluge of reservations without sacrificing cost and/or consumer experience.

GroupOn appears to do a good job in working with their customers to ensure they understand this formula. These parameters, however, do make it more appropriate for some segments than others.

As a personal observation, I’m seeing more deals aiming for lower price points ($10 for $25, versus $20 for $50) which I suspect is a technique to drive achievement of goal #1. Perhaps it also signals a growing frustration with the “tour bus effect” of the GroupOn clientele.

In my experience Issues # 2 and #3 represent the things that many small businesses are ill- equipped to manage. If businesses cannot handle the scaled volumes, or cannot make the math work, GroupOn’s model will be challenged to evolve, perhaps in ways that make them vulnerable, competitively.

is this the google moment for local direct marketing?

There is one other piece of the business case that GroupOn is quick to point out to the merchant.  The size of GroupOn’s email list is now sufficient to deliver business visibility that is comparable to the scale of major placement in a leading local newspaper or zine.  This “budget savings” argument may well carry the worst news for incumbent media players.

If GroupOn (and their clones) continue to perform, the impetus to spend marketing dollars on newspaper, coupon services, and local magazine display could be stunted.

Traditional local retail and direct marketing spending feels like it is on the cusp of being challenged, hard, by a performance-based lead gen model. Sound familiar?

Out with “fan”, in with “like”.

So, Facebook is officially mothballing the terminology of Fan, in favor of the kinder, gentler Like.  According to All Things Digital, the decision has been made.

Sometimes subtle changes in terminology can drive meaningful impact and unintended consequences.  My commentary below  is on how this might impact a Business’ Fan Page marketing.

a soft handshake?

Fan has always felt like a term derived of celebrity worship, that has morphed unnaturally into business and brand following terminology.  While I do believe Fan is far from a natural term, the act of fanning a business feels like a more meaningful statement of support than does the term Like.  When you Fan a business, it feels like an implicit statement of loyalty.  Saying you Like a business is akin to a soft handshake, positive but less committed.

As pointed out in Mashable,

The change could make it easier for brand advertisers to accumulate fans quickly. But it also means that users might not totally understand what they’re opting in to.

While building a larger social graph is arguably good news for brands and businesses, I tend to be in the contrarian camp.  This creates a new problems that I feel will make it more difficult for businesses to know how far they can go in leveraging their Facebook connections. It will likely raise the overall noise, and it introduces uncertainty as to the implicit contract with your social connection.

i <heart> follow

Personally, I prefer the Twitter term Follow, when it comes to business-consumer relationships.  To a marketer, a follower feels more like a genuine opt-in consumer than someone who likes you.  It feels like an implicit request to expect offers or news. I feel this is most acute for small and local businesses, where the majority use case for your social network interaction is around promotion and simple information sharing.

Could this move potentially cede competitive ground to Twitter when it comes to small business marketing?  Perhaps.  As the Facebook user base revises their behavior, the new ambiguity will present challenges.

Meanwhile, Twitter followers feel like a more predictable lot, when it comes to their intention.  At the end of the day, business value will be driven by performance, and predictable intention in marketing is a definitive edge.

You may know I’ve been working on a new start-up for the past 6 months, pretty much heads down – stealth by default, not design.  Actually we’ve been very active in our market, just totally focused on product, not business cards or websites!

In a couple of days, we’ll be taking the wraps off.  We’ve been chosen to launch at the DEMO Conference, which is a great venue to jump off the ledge with new products.  I’ve done this once before; it’s a pretty intense and fun launch pad!

the evolution of an old idea

I was fortunate to be around for the formation of Jabber, with a group of visionary friends whose ideas still inspire me – guys like Doc Searls and Tim O’Reilly.  A decade ago they started my mind spinning about the future of the real-time web, where real-time data and geo-presence empower applications, people and crowds.

Over the past few years, I’ve been deeply entrenched in the local search space, as local advertising evolved through the lens of search services.  In the back of my brain, I’ve always been curious about the “other side” of local – direct marketing.  While the whole industry was busy adapting to the Google search ecosystem, promotion marketing seems to have been pretty much ignored, chugging along capturing tens of billions in local marketing spending.

With the emergence of the Twitter ecosystem, Facebook’s rise to ubiquity, and the mobile local world finally showing real formation, I knew it was time to put my energies in a new direction.  With my prior business operating nicely in good hands, I was so ready for a new adventure.

marking our territory

I’ve become a big fan of GroupOn, along with a few million other consumers! GroupOn has done a tremendous job of creating an audience for daily local offers, to which it sells placement slots.  It’s really a traditional direct marketing business, smartly pimped up with time-limited offers, social sharing, and the illusion of group buying. [Earlier on, you had to gather up your friends to win buying power].  To me, the real magic is in deep discount deals to cool places – it delivers a way for consumers to feel great as they save money getting out to interesting places.

I’m also a big fan of Twitter – not for its’ current consumer proposition, but for the budding beauty beneath.  This awkward teenager will continue to blossom into a central role in content distribution and following.  And, of course, Facebook, as commander-in-chief of the social graph, is equally critical in driving live consumer + friends connections.

I’d be remiss to not mention email marketing pioneers, Constant Contact. I’ve watched them since the early Roving Software days, admiring their tenacity in engaging small businesses, winning over 300K users on the value in maintaining constant contact with your customers.

Finally I’d bracket our space with the LBS darling, Foursquare.  I salute their bright discovery of game-based ingredients that triggers consumers to share their location and favorite places.

deep roots, firmly planted

I’ve pulled together a 7-person team, that I’m very lucky to be working alongside.  My two co-founders, Tom Bender and Karyn German both have worked with me before in the Jabber era.  Tom, engineering lead, is a serious math brain who has led engineering teams and architecture in Jabber/Webb, Digital Globe and Tendril Networks.  Karyn fearlessly led Product Management at Jabber followed by a four-year stint leading Product Development and Client Services at Newsgator.  The rest of the team, Jeff Davenport, Scott Davis, Brian Doyle, and Noel Graham all bring deep engineering and design chops rooted in small business marketing, real-time messaging, feed networks, email platforms, mapping and social media. It’s a wicked smart team, with a matching sense of humor, as you might expect!

I am also very excited to have the support of a group of top tier Angel investors and advisors who bring wisdom and insight to the space, led by Kendall Fargo, who remains very active with the company.  Kendall most recently ran Small Business Marketing Tools at Intuit, after their acquisition of his previous start-up, Step Up Commerce.

we’re close.ly

So, to pull this all together, Closely, Inc. is engaged around this problem/opportunity…

How will businesses create, disseminate and engage with local consumers around live offers?  How does a business reward their best customers, their customer’s friends and their neighbors for coming in or buying product when their demand is most valued.  How will consumers follow and and swarm around these specials?

Ultimately, live socially-connected marketing will extend deeply into the tens of billions in direct marketing media spending. It promises to turn direct mail, promotion advertising, and email marketing on their collective heads.

We chose the brand Closely because it captures the shared desires of local consumers and businesses – the desire for a business to be closely followed, and the desire for a consumer to stay close to offers that fit their interests.

Next week we launch our first step into this emerging world of live marketing.

If you’re interested, do follow closely

I was pleased and excited to see this week’s launch of Public Earth’s website.  Not just because it’s the home of a small cadre of friends that I knew would build something very interesting, but because I believe in the fundamental premise underlying Public Earth.

The Twitter synopsis of Public Earth sums it up nicely.

We’re the Wiki For Places, dedicated to delivering interesting, unique, and up-to-date place information in a personalized way.

after world domination

The scale of product investment and advancement commitment from Google and Microsoft in mapping these past five years has been truly impressive.  These brands deservedly unseated MapQuest’s sleepy position by moving the ball forward on user experience, on multi-dimensional content, and on developer tools.

Fact is though, we’re still at the utilitarian consumption stage in geo-experience, and the very thing that creates their current world domination could well be what weighs down their forward progress.  The “Anchor Tenants” of the consumer geo universe, perhaps. [for fun: Google = Walmart, MapQuest = Kmart, and Microsoft so wants to be Target].

deep ruts in the road

The major map services have build their positions on consumption of maps as created and presented by them to the consumer.  While Google can legitimately point to the MyMaps success, I’d suggest that 1) this is pavlovian behavior driven by the necessity/greed/leverage of SEO, way more than it is socially energized participation, and 2) as I’ve written before, Google is so poor in social user experience, it’s just painful to watch.

The real action on the horizon inverts mapping into a paradigm of user creation and crowdsourcing the collective knowledge of places, and creating maps that are at once personal and shared.  There is a thriving new ecosystem in formation that is decidedly different and unique, and it’s natively social and participative.

Sites as deeply entrenched in consumer habit as MapQuest and Google can be severely challenged when it comes to materially morphing their brand. Orkut was indeed a fine piece of social technology.  Nuf said? 

Google’s mapping pathway seems to be driven by its dominating mastery of a fully owned and operated local advertising stack. Undoubtedly, this is core to their investments in local map content.  The route that elevated Google Maps to its front line position could very well be what holds it back from jumping the next shark.

the people’s voice recorder

Someone has to step up and power the collection of the true local voice. Yes, Google is well positioned to be aggregating this content, but (my sense) is that the developer community is 1) on to the impact of Google’s increasingly controlling hand and squashing foot, and 2) leaning forward for an open alternative. This is unlikely to be “one place” that forms this, but rather a connected collective.

The people have not yet spoken, and the businesses that unlock and turn loose this voice will indeed become major playas in the mobile/social/local ecosystem.

under the earth

Public Earth has taken a long cycle of development to do many things that are elegantly tucked behind a nice user experience.  The back office is much more interesting than the presentation, in my opinion.  To developers using their API, it presents what I consider to be a deep and well thought out geo content management system. As Google educates the world on the concept of a Place Page, Public Earth sits ready as the engine for a parallel path, powered by the people.

I’d posit that each and everyone of us has “50 maps inside” of us. You have history, you have local context, you’ve got highly tuned very personal experiences. All but a minute sliver of this has been recorded. Opening this up feels very unlike what we do in mapping services today.

In the massive collective “mother earth reclamation project”, Public Earth wants to take a lead role.  I hope it finds a place of active cooperation with Open Street Map and a dozen related open initiatives quickly gathering steam.  If it does, it will be indeed be one to watch.

I guess I’ve reached that inevitable point of self-admission to being a serial entrepreneur, forced to work on things that get stuck in my head, and get me out of bed @ 4am.   I. just. can’t. seem. to. help. myself.

I have great memories from the last few years taking a business from concept through multiple cycles of growth. I’d be lying to not say I am also disappointed by some of the choices I led us through along the way.  And, like many (most?) companies do in the face of the dramatic shifts in market structures and valuations of 2008-09, we had to triage through a reinvention phase.  Thanks to an amazing team (employees, board members, clients and investors), this has advanced very well; I am very impressed with the clarity that the company now has going forward.  I sat at the last Board meeting witnessing a business that has matured and evolved very well under the new leadership team in 2009.  It’s a first class business with a bright future, powering the strategic progression of Yellow Pages businesses, globally.   I only hope the industry lets it unleash the potential underlying the impressive technology and team.

I’ve now confidently moved on to what I know I LOVE to do – creating a new business.  My passion is for opportunities that lie JUST ahead of the horizon.  I love to work in market spaces where the structures of consumer-to-business interaction are inefficient and capable of being dramatically overhauled with online and mobile models.

So, my next target:  Direct Marketing.

I’ll be announcing my newco when it’s more ready for public consumption.  I was initially intrigued with the idea of blogging my way through the experiences and challenges associated with start-ups, but I’m not going to do that.  There are enough quality entrepreneurs out there doing that, and adding more of the same just feels kind of pointless.

Perhaps I’ll return to my blog in the coming weeks, as I ruminate over the new space I’ll be occupying, we’ll see how things progress.   For those looking to stay connected, I’d suggest you follow me on Twitter;  140 character micro-blogging just seems to fit with where my life is at right now.

It feels like everywhere I turn there is yet another media company paying writers to crank out search engine friendly content, in thinly veiled attempts to please the google bots.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years looking into the content gaps in converting local to an informed and useful shopping experience. The quest for deeper local content is on the order of a holy grail epic challenge.

The standard by which most publishers currently seem to be approaching their content strategy is “whatever the google bot rewards”.

the inch deep dilemma

I REALLY get the business case for hiring cheap writers and blogging and writing the heck out of a category or place.  I’ve done it myself.  Having “been there” however, I also know that this kind of writing rarely drives community OR anything but transitory, tactical commerce actions.

Fact of the matter is, bots are dumb, people are smart.

For the most part, what I’ve seen scattered throughout local media sites is disingenuous and obvious content that rarely informs a consumer shopping decision.  To me, this runs a real risk that it will works against the (increasingly urgent) brand development needs of the media business. Authenticity is something consumers are seeking, and rewarding with loyalty and social media “juice”.  Conversely, gratuitous content diminishes the appeal of a site/brand.

If this is simply treated as “air cover” while a real hyper local or vertical content strategy is executed, than I’m ALL FOR IT.  However, to make this “THE content strategy” for a local media publisher is a dangerous and problematic approach.

At the end of the day, this is at the heart of a real core business identity issue for many local media companies.  It’s time to think like a consumer publisher, not (just) a traffic hungry sales channel.  Chasing consumers through the lens of a Google bot will blur your vision and stunt your growth in the long run.

beware, clicking on the link will take you to an infomercial!

Spam “validation” aside, this AdWeek article by provides an interesting discussion on how the ecosystem of Twitter is working to uncover and build business models from the platform.