Photography: russelldavies

Twitter’s launch of @earlybird at the beginning of July, an official timeline channeling discounts to followers, suggests that the company sees a future in tweet-delivered marketing offers. Despite the name of their new timeline though, the company’s a bit late. Businesses have long been using their Twitter accounts to do more than build a community, broadcast their brand and deal with customer relations. They’re also selling their goods with mini discount coupons. So what makes for an effective Twitter-based offer?

The format is important. In 140 characters, you’re not going to have a lot of space to deal with objects, build desire or even write headlines, the key ingredients of successful copywriting. One @earlybird tweet reveals just about all that can be squeezed into a sales tweet:

Great deal from our friends @moxsie- Their best in shoes, headphones, apparel & more, for 30% off. Today only! http://t.co/NGizKAe

It’s brief, of course, but still long enough to include the items on offer, the size of the offer, the duration of the offer and a link that allows followers to make the most of that offer.

Repeat Your Sales Message… In a Fun Way

It’s also repeated, an important consideration for followers who follow lots of timelines. If you have hundreds of tweets flowing through your Twitter page, many are likely to be missed so sending the same message multiple times is an essential element of Twitter-based marketing.

The risk though is that followers who do see the same tweet repeated will want to unsubscribe, something that @earlybird has been bright enough to recognize. Although @moxsie’s offer was mentioned five times, twice as a retweet of the offer that appeared in the advertiser’s own timeline, each appearance was phrased differently, an easy way of avoiding reader boredom.

But the ads aren’t targeted – at least, not yet. Twitter has stated that it’s considering making offers location-based (they’re currently only available to US buyers), and also category-based so that followers will only see offers for certain kinds of products. While they’re testing the idea though (and building advertisers) the timeline is going to be filled with all sorts of products that the followers won’t want to buy.

Other sellers are already ahead of Twitter there. Amazon has an “official Twitter feed” but also runs several other timelines, including the general @amazondeals, which lists all sorts of quick bargains marked as “Lightning Deals!”, and specific category timelines such as @amazongames. That timeline contains a number of different kinds of tweets. The account’s 20,000-plus followers can read specific game-related “lightning deals,” news about product releases, and of course, cash in on offers that are time-limited, supply-limited or both:

Limited Time: Assassin’s Creed II for PC is $14.99 while supplies last. http://amzn.to/bH9Ac7

Tweets that are that specific might reach fewer followers than @earlybird’s 100,000-plus readers but the clickthrough rate will be higher.

The Relationship is as Important as the Offer

Creating multiple Twitter accounts to manage different product categories is an important solution for large retailers but it’s not one that’s going to bother smaller firms who sell only one type of product. For those businesses, the nature of the relationship is as important as the ability to squeeze in all the offer details and repeat them without boring readers. Twitter is a personal place and businesses do best when they can create real relationships with their followers.

Dell, for example, has become one of the leading commercial users of Twitter with a reported $6.5 million-worth of sales through the site. Even though its main sales timeline, @DellOutlet, is part of a large corporation, it still includes the name of the person who writes the tweets and provides a picture of her. The timeline also combines sales work with customer service representation by replying to followers’ questions, and most intriguingly, is sometimes able to direct followers to specific coupons. In reply to one request for M15x coupons, for example, Stefanie Nelson, who writes the tweets, tweeted:

@auzzebear There is a 15% coupon here that would work: http://del.ly/6016E6I

That kind of personal service helps followers to see that the company genuinely wants to assist them. Stefanie also noted that coupons are distributed by email as well, a reminder that while Twitter is a valuable way to distribute time-limited offers, it’s not the only method.

Building that personal relationship is a bigger challenge for large faceless corporations than it is for small businesses though. Coupa Café is a family-owned chain of café and restaurants with branches in Beverly Hills, Palo Alto, Stanford and Caracas. Their timeline consists mostly of conversations with regular customers, giving it a friendly, homely feel but some of the offers it scatters throughout the timeline are carefully targeted. Like many bricks-and-mortar businesses that can’t take online orders, Coupa Café provides a “whisper word” that followers can use when they visit the café to receive a discount. That word may be incorporated into a regular, limited offer:

Did you use the whisper word today? Tell your friends, first 25 to say “Bourbon” to our baristas get a free drip coffee!

Or the bargain may be aimed at a specific group of people:

Hi #sas10 attendees, walk over to Green Library’s Coupa Cafe for lunch and say “Bourbon” to our baristas to get a free drip

By using a hashtag rather than aiming at regular readers, the café is even able to reach people who aren’t following its timeline and who aren’t yet customers.

Creating and delivering effective limited offers on Twitter then isn’t difficult. You’ll need to squeeze in all of the offer’s details, including a short URL if you’re selling online, and a “whisper word” if you’re not. You’ll need to repeat it to make sure it’s seen (but do it in a way that doesn’t become boring) and target it to ensure a high clickthrough rate. And you’ll need to keep your timeline personal so that you can build a relationship with your customers and keep them engaged.

And, of course, you’ll need to have products that people want to buy!

The Old Spice ads, starring former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, might just have been the most popular viral ad campaign ever created. The original ad has picked up over 15 million views on YouTube, the follow-up just over 11 million, and according to Visible Measures, a firm that tracks the popularity of online video, the real-time responses generated almost 6 million views in 24 hours, beating even President Obama’s victory speech, President Bush’s shoe-dodging, and Susan Boyle’s singing. The staff at ad agency Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard and a model that other social media marketers — large and small — will try to follow. Most will come  up short, but the ads contain a number of key ingredients that can be incorporated into even the most budget-conscious of viral ads.

That might not be apparent in the original ad which began with Isaiah standing in a bathroom, showed him on a boat and ended with him sitting on a horse, all apparently in one take. In an interview, Craig Allen and Eric Kallman of Wieden + Kennedy, explain how that ad took three days to shoot. The bathroom was placed on a set and hoisted away by a crane, and a specially-constructed dolly moved Isaiah invisibly from the ship onto the horse as he talked to the camera. CGI was only used to turn a shell into diamonds and the diamonds into a bottle of Old Spice.

Seven Minutes for Every Video

The real-time responses too looked simple but a photograph of the studio on ReadWriteWeb shows just how complex the production was. There’s a team of staff, banks of monitors (apparently showing Twitter), a teleprompter and a host of professional gear beyond the budgets of most one-man businesses. Two social media experts were tracking responses, and a technical expert had built a workflow that identified the best questions, passed them onto the copywriters and allowed the film to be edited and uploaded quickly. The 180-odd videos that the team produced took an average of about seven minutes each to create, something that could only have been done with a super-efficient and well-prepared team.

Wieden + Kennedy haven’t spoken about the workflow they created, but that’s something that could have been done without too much expertise. Dashboards like Hootsuite allow multiple users to manage one Twitter account, broadcast messages across social media platforms and monitor mentions. Old Spice’s Twitter timeline consists mostly of short sentences and links to YouTube, rather than interactions with other twitterers, and tracking the comments on YouTube and Facebook could even have been done with manual refreshes rather than an API.

What was most impressive about the response videos though was the speed and number of films that the team created, and the variety of social media sites — from Reddit to 4Chan — that they interacted with. Again, that wouldn’t have been something that required great technical skills but it did require a breadth of social media knowledge that few people possess.

And that knowledge was deep as well as wide. Talking to ReadWriteWeb, Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, explained how his team chose the messages they responded to and what they did with them:

We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.

So a number of factors were going being considered as the replies came in, including not just how the scriptwriters might answer the questions but the “influence” of the commenter, something that would have been measured by the number of followers they have, the number of messages they receive or the size of their YouTube audience. It explains why so many of the videos were addressed to celebrities with large followings like Demi Moore and Alyssa Milano, whose interactions alerted other people on the Web to the ads and helped to spread the message.

Getting the Content Right

The technical side then is simple enough to replicate. A smaller budget — or no budget at all — might mean fewer videos shot in a day, a longer turnaround, less engagement with smaller social media sites, and clips that are less slick than Old Spice’s but the mechanics of tracking responses and choosing replies to questioners with the greatest influence is straightforward enough. To make your own ads, you wouldn’t need more than the following equipment:

• 1 Charming actor
• 1 Witty scriptwriter
• 1 Efficient director
• 1 Social media expert
• 1 Video camera and lighting equipment
• 1 Editing suite
• 3 Computers (one each for video editing/uploading, social media monitoring, and scriptwriting)
• 1 Hootsuite (or Brizzly) account
• 1 Tabbed browser open to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and any other social media site you intend to engage.

Much harder to get right is the replies themselves. Although they’re selling a man’s product, the ads are aimed at both men and women. Proctor and Gamble, the makers of Old Spice, knew their market and they knew that while men use Old Spice, it’s women who buy it for them. Throughout the ads Isaiah Mustafa refers to products that smell like lavender and daffodils as the competition, communicating to men that Old Spice is a product for them, while telling women that if they buy Old Spice, their boyfriends would at least smell like the star of the ads even if they can’t look like him.

To engage with that audience though, they needed to get the character right, and even Wieden + Kennedy had got that one wrong in the past. Other Old Spice ads, starring Terry Crews, went heavy on an attempt to include power in the brand but lighter on the irony. They were creative enough to win some popularity but didn’t do as well as Isaiah Mustafa’s self-awareness and self-parody.

But it wasn’t just that these Old Spice ads were absurdly funny, they also fitted the product’s notion of manliness, sophistication and confidence. They took an essential part of the brand and satirized it, allowing the audience to feel clever enough to see beyond the marketing message while still absorbing that message.

To make your own Old Spice ads then, you’ll need first to create an ad with a character that users show they like — and you might need to create more than one ad before you hit on the right one. You’ll need to set up monitoring systems across social media sites so that you can gather responses and choose the responders with the most influence. You’ll need to have a studio — however makeshift — ready to film the replies, edit them and  upload them. And most importantly, you’ll need to have a really witty scriptwriter who can mock your product without damaging the brand.

If you can get all those together, then you too can make your own Old Spice ads.

Photography: Markus Merz

Personal branding isn’t new. It’s been around the since the days of P.T. Barnum, since Buffalo Bill turned himself into a one-man sideshow, since Walt Disney decided to name the studio after himself, and it’s been a staple part of marketing Hollywood stars for as long as there have been movies. The idea that personal branding can be applied to anyone, that it’s possible — and essential — for even a corporate drone to create a self-image and market it, is new. That idea has only been around for as long as social media has made it possible for individuals to create personal profiles on websites and social media platforms, and put them in front of anyone they can bring to see them. Dozens of writers now have written books explaining how a personal brand can help to win jobs and build careers, as well as sell products and help entrepreneurs. But while the techniques and strategies of turning a life into a brand are clear, it’s much harder to know where to place the boundaries. What are the limits of personal branding, and how do you know when you’ve crossed them?

To some extent, the answer is personal. Different individuals will have different sensitivities to sharing aspects of their personal lives. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, both founders of Twitter, are happy to post occasional tweets that mention their wives (and in Williams’ case, his child too) but are miserly when it comes to details about the work that they’re doing for Twitter. Actor and technology geek Stephen Fry, on the other hand, has averaged just over eight tweets a day in the two years he’s been on Twitter and talks about his TV appearances, his charity work, his scriptwriting, speeches and product reviews. He regularly replies to tweets sent to him and comes across as open and direct, all of which have become important aspects of how the public sees him. And yet in none of his tweets does he ever mention his life with his partner, an agreement the couple made when he began using the site.

No Family and No Friends

Your own personal comfort level then will be one important guide to where you place the boundaries. There’s nothing wrong with leaving your family out of your personal branding — and certainly many people do — but there is a price to pay for that gap. Everyone has some form of family life so if it’s missing from a Twitter stream or not included in a professional Facebook page, the proximity to the reader is affected. The reader will know you’re not being fully open, and when someone has information he’s not prepared to share, he’s not just protecting the privacy of the people he loves. He’s also declaring the nature of his relationship to the reader.

He’s not as close to the reader as the reader might like to think.

The same is true of friends. Facebook pages, tweets and LinkedIn profiles will contain plenty of references to colleagues, partners and associates. But it’s less usual to find public information that reveals the relationship between two pals, and tries to use it for branding.

That’s a much more solid limit and one that’s particularly revealing about the factors that go into personal branding.

Colleagues bring something to the power of your personal brand. When you mention that a well-known figure in your field is a friend of yours, you win some credit by association. It’s why people name-drop, and it can be an important part of personal branding. Marketers, in particular, like to build their own reputations by attaching them to the reputations of others. It’s also a strategy though that fulfills the need to show that you’re a well-rounded, normal and popular individual with an active social life.

Just as people know you have family, so they’ll assume that you have friends — and they’ll become suspicious, or at least distant, if they’re not mentioned.

Talk about a friend who works in a completely different field however, and while you will come across as human and personable, you do nothing for your reputation as a professional.

It’s not possible then to place a limit on the mention of family without paying some sort of price in personal branding power. But it is possible to swap friends for colleagues, and keep your social life private.

Limiting Your Professional Life

There should be limits too within your own professional life. Personal branding, whether you do it through a website, a social media platform, or both, is essentially an advertising tool. It’s not meant to show everything you’ve ever done — including those projects that didn’t work out, the clients who fired you and the companies that made up for the loss of your intern work by hiring a coffee machine. It’s meant only to show what you can do. That means that while you talk up your successes and most significant projects, the work that failed or was insignificant can be swept under the carpet. It’s not something you want to hide or deny. But if it’s not worth mentioning, don’t mention it.

Personal branding then comes with its own paradox. It’s easy to construct and simple to maintain. It’s meant to show not just what you’ve done — which has always been the role of a resume — but what you can do and, more importantly, who you are. It’s supposed to be honest and open and comprehensive too. And yet, it’s also clearly a marketing piece, a kind of multi-platform brochure that can manage both advertising and distribution. Readers expect it to show every aspect of your life, both professional and personal, while still understanding that you’re only being this open with them because they believe you might have a position or a job that you’d like.

It is possible to place limits on your personal brand. It’s also acceptable and understandable. But the final impression should still be that you’re capable, reliable and likeable. Get that right and there are no limits on what your personal brand can do for you.

Photography: callisto

When you market yourself as a freelancer, you try to be as open as you can. You might launch a blog to bring traffic to your website and demonstrate the way you work. You hit up clients for testimonials so that leads can see you have experience. You put up samples and portfolios so that anyone can browse the work you’ve produced and see what you can do. It’s all a matter of trust. The more secure you can make a lead feel about hiring you, the more likely they are to get in touch and hire you do the job. But when it comes to the new clients themselves, the same openness doesn’t apply. Clients tend not to be as forthcoming about their identity, their ideas and their experience as the freelancers they employ, and yet there’s plenty of risk on the freelancer’s side too. You can find yourself working for the kind of business that doesn’t pay until it sees a letter from a lawyer, or you can find that because you have little idea about the firm, you have no idea how to please its customers.

Neither of those two pieces of information is particularly easy to come by. Some freelance websites do allow service providers to write reviews of the hirers, which can give an indication of whether a company is likely to argue about the bill — or not pay it at all. But not all sites offer this and even contributors have an incentive to be nice about the people they’ve worked for: if they’ve said something nice, there’s always the chance that they’ll work for them again. Reviews on freelance sites then tend to either very good or very bad.

Google Only Tells You So Much

Googling too can only bring up what other people have chosen to put online. Not every swindled freelancer wants to advertise the fact that a client disputed the value of their work, let alone name the client, so while a reference to no pay should set off a warning light, the absence of a complaint doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is okay with your new paymaster.

A website can be a reasonably good indicator of a client’s professionalism. A cheap, unprofessional site suggests that the client is more interested in saving money than creating results. A blog that’s updated regularly shows that they have an eye on the future and that they’re willing to put in the day-to-day effort required to maintain a business.

But social media can be an even more helpful guide to a client’s reliability. If a buyer has put a lot of effort into maintaining a Facebook presence, a LinkedIn page and a Twitter stream then they’ve built a reputation. That reputation can be quickly damaged by allegations that the client doesn’t pay his bills or disputes every invoice in the hope of getting bargains. That doesn’t mean that every social media user is reliable. But when social media makes damaging a reputation this easy, bad clients are likely to have taken those blows already.

Rather than trying to figure out whether a client is reliable though, which often boils down to a sense of whether a job feels right than a definitive piece of evidence that it isn’t, it’s always better to make sure that you have built-in safeguards: milestones for payment and delivery; escrow for large payments; samples to ensure that you’re on the right track before you reach the end.

No less important though is information that can tell you what you need to do to please the client’s customers — and please the client.

Who Are Your Client’s Clients?

It’s never enough to rely on the client’s own description of their target audience. They might have an idea that they’re reaching a certain age group and a certain way of living  but the client has hired you because you have an even better idea, and he or she thinks that you can appeal to it. If you didn’t have the skills to program software that his target market uses, if you can’t write copy using language that appeals to the company’s demographic or design websites that match their expectations, then the client wouldn’t be hiring you. He’d be hiring someone else.

Rather than rely on the client’s own characterization of their audience then, you’re likely to be better off making your own judgments based on the nature of the product, the style of their marketing material and your awareness of the market. This is a time when it’s more important to know yourself than know your client.

But you’ll also need to know how your client wants to work, and that’s something only they can tell you. Every client is different. While some are happy to work entirely by email, receiving the work when it’s finished, others prefer regular Skype chats and even the odd personal meeting if possible. One of the first questions you’ll need to ask of a new client is how they want to communicate. (And while you might have your own ideas and your own preferences, as long as they’re paying the bills, the client gets to choose the communication tools.)

Every new job comes with a certain amount of mystery. You don’t know whether you’ll enjoy the work. You don’t know what the client will be like to work with and whether he’ll pay on time, if at all. You don’t know how long you’ll be working with him or whether you’ll want to continue working with him for a long time. Those first points of contact then are a little like a blind date. You test each other out, try to get a feel for who the client is and how they’re likely to behave, and slowly you begin to build a relationship, forgetting the baggage of previous collapses and hoping that this one will work out fine.

Because if it does, you’ll have another testimonial to add to your marketing material and bring in even more new clients.

Photography: hawkexpress

For David Allen life is full of “stuff.” For people who have never heard of David Allen, never tried to read his geek productivity bible Getting Things Done, never wondered how to label a file or categorize their lives, that’s as unhelpful a truism as declaring that work is difficult. But for the followers of GTD, people who have been accused of regarding Allen as a kind of cultic leader (the same kind of leader he himself once saw in John-Roger, leader of the New Age Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness in which Allen remains a minister), it’s an eye-opening revelation. Employ a process that pushes that “stuff” out of the way and what remains will be only the most important elements. Instead of wasting their hours on life’s minutiae, they’ll be able to devote their time to the big things. They’ll get things done.

Mostly though what they’ll be getting done is the process of doing things – and that’s if they can figure out the process. Allen doesn’t just earn revenue from his best-selling book and its sequels. His seminars cost $695 per person, a sign not just that his followers consider his techniques valuable but that they’re so complex they have to fork out almost 700 bucks to figure out how to use them. Allen’s system requires multiple levels of categorization and treatment for every aspect of life from going to the dry cleaners and vaccinating the dog to launching a website and changing jobs. Every task has its moment, sometimes timed to the minute. Every chore receives attention according to its apparent level of importance, but only after you’ve put it through a system that awards it an appropriate priority level.

Getting Things Done, a System Dedicated to Geeks?

43Folders.com, a site dedicated to GTD, has argued that the system is ideal for geeks – people, it says, who tend to be disorganized but “love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world,” who “crave actionable items” but “have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff.” But that’s a narrow definition of a geek. “Geeks” today are more than bespectacled programmers with ponytails, beards and an unhealthy knowledge of Apple mouse designs. They’re specialists, experts in one particular field whether that field is Java programming, gardening or marketing coffee beans. They’re not interested in creating order in their day; they’re interested in seeing the results of their creation.

For followers of GTD, nirvana lies in the process of organization. For geeks, process is the means to an end and nirvana for them is in having nothing left to organize at all.

The difference lies in two key ingredients missing among the files, folders and labels of GTD: creativity and vision.

Every successful business begins with an idea. But ideas are common, successful businesses relatively rare. Between the concept and the IPO, the buy-out and the private Caribbean island lie years of small achievements: websites built and tested, products designed and prototypes checked, clients won, satisfied and retained. Those small steps are the sorts of things that GTD was designed to deal with, organize and prioritize, but while plenty of corporations have invited David Allen to put on his seminars to organize their workforce, it’s hard to identify a list of entrepreneurs who have relied on GTD to build their path to success.

GTD Gets Things Done, Outsourcing Gets Results

That’s because a successful entrepreneur develops a vision of his end goal and is able to maintain it all the way through the process of building success. The same creativity that gives them a picture of what they’re trying to achieve also enables them to see the obstacles that can prevent them from achieving it and the force to push those obstructions out of the way. David Allen has described his system as helping users to find their way through a thick forest in which the trees are “stuff” hiding the items of real value.

“Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry,” he explained once in interview with Wired Magazine.

But successful entrepreneurs don’t become successful by picking berries. They build success by having a vision of what lies through the forest to the meadow at the end. There may be “stuff” in the way in the form of emails that need to be answered or dogs that need to be vaccinated but the smart, successful types don’t waste their time writing those tasks down, giving them labels and filing them in special folders. They trust in their ability to achieve success, make an investment — and pay someone else to do it for them.

That’s perhaps the biggest difference between people who focus on getting things done and those who manage to achieve great things. David Allen might be the guru for the type of geek who wants an uncluttered life but a more appropriate guru for a geekpreneur who wants to turn their commercial vision into a functioning business might well be Tim Ferriss. His book The 4-Hour Workweek might have had a misleading title, and outsourcing your dating life to Indian underlings is taking things a little too far, but his approach of only doing the most important and valuable tasks yourself and leaving everything else to paid helpers is a system followed by more successful types than those who use GTD. In fact, it’s a system followed by just about every successful type who has ever turned a one-man concept into a thriving company. The system – if outsourcing can be called a system – requires an investment of time in the form of training, and money in the form of payments to freelancers, but if it means you don’t have to waste time on “stuff” or on organizing “stuff” then it’s more likely to free up the time to not just get things done but to actually do things. And that, after all, should be the result any productivity system.

Describing iOS 4 at the WorldWide Developers Conference 2010, Steve Jobs kept one of the most interesting of the system’s upgrades until point seven. But the launch of iAds, the iPhone’s new advertising platform, may well be its most influential feature. While multitasking and folders will all be very useful, the incorporation of a native advertising program designed specifically with iPhone apps in mind could well have a huge effect on the 200,000-plus apps already in the App Store, and the thousands of others still to come.

The ads, demonstrated through the use of samples created for Nike, Target and Toy Story 3, aim to bridge the gap between the interactivity of digital ads and the emotional engagement of television advertising, Jobs explained. Initially, they look similar to ads currently distributed by Google’s AdMob service, appearing as a small banner at the bottom of the screen. When users click that banner though, they’re given a whole different experience. They’re no longer whipped out of the app as they would be when clicking on a Google ad. Instead, the app is frozen and the user is taken into what looks like a new app that may contain a number of different features, from mini-games and animated timelines to videos and wallpaper downloads. The features may be as inviting and enjoyable as the app itself, providing a reward for a user who clicks on them. And with the original app frozen rather than closed, there’s no penalty for clicking, pleasing the advertiser.

Apple’s Takes a Bite from Both Ends

But it’s in the benefits for the developer that things start to get really interesting. According to Advertising Age, an industry magazine, AdMobs currently charges between $10 and $15 on a CPM basis. Advertisers who want to buy CPC campaigns can expect to pay 15-30 cents a click. iAds however is expected to charge $10 CPM and $2 for a click, passing 60 percent of the revenue to the app developer.

That’s a big leap in the price of mobile advertising (and in practice, advertisers looking to catch the first wave of ads will have to pay even more: with the iAds Developer Kit still to be released, ads can only be developed by Apple, a service for which the company is charging $50,000 -$100,000 for advertisers spending less than $1 million.) But it’s also a big leap in revenues for app developers.

One of the first challenges developers faced when the App Store opened was whether they should give their programs away for free and live off the advertising or charge the buck or two that seemed to be the standard rate for the iPhone. It was a puzzle that was solved pretty quickly: AdMob and other mobile advertising systems just couldn’t generate enough revenue for developers to make it worthwhile to give their products away for nothing. It always made financial sense to charge something — even just 99 cents — than to look to the ads to make cash.

If iAds can make free pay more than 99 cents, then the effect on the App Store, on mobile advertising and even on mobile computing would be enormous. For one, there will be a lot more free programs available. According to Greg Yardley of PinchMedia, a firm that supplies analytics software for iPhone apps, free apps are downloaded on average 7.5 times more frequently than paid apps, although they’re also used less.

But not only would more apps become free, those apps would also need to change to maximize revenues.

Free but Slow

Apple has estimated that the average iPhone user spends about half an hour every day inside apps. Steve Jobs has talked about showing one ad every three minutes, exposing iPhone users to an average of ten ads a day.  The more time a developer can keep a user on his or her app, and the longer they can make that app last before it’s removed to make way for something better, the more ads they can show and the more they can earn on both a CPM and a CPC basis.

Some apps are going to find that easier to do than others. Although all apps now pause when a user clicks an ad, users will still be more likely to click when their eyes are free to wander to the bottom of the screen, something that happens more often while playing strategy games without a timer than action-packed first-person shooters. Similarly, users are more likely to keep the game on their iPhone and return to it — even once the game has been completed — if the developer continues to release regular updates that extend its life.

Three immediate results of a functional iAds system then may be an increase in free apps, an emphasis on apps that exercise brains rather than the speed of fingers, and a greater reliability on frequent updates — all good news for dedicated Sudoku fans looking for a regular free fix.

But developers will also want to extend each play session in order to have time to show more ads. That may mean longer cut scenes between levels or more time in which little happens, moving characters from one place to another. The games may be freer and longer, but they may also turn out to be less exciting.

All of this though depends on iAds living up to its promise. In practice, it may not. Greg Yardley says that he used to be a fan of the potential of advertising on iPhone apps until he crunched a few figures and found that apps needed to show a CPM of around $8.75 in order to be successful. That’s a much smaller amount than the $30 CPM that advertisers can expect to pay for an iAds campaign (according to Advertising Age’s) figures, but much higher than the current 50 cents-$2 CPM that developers have seen from AdMob. iAds then could have a radical effect on the nature of mobile phone apps, creating apps optimized for advertising or  it might just make a few bucks from lite versions of paid apps — which could be why it was only point number seven in Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Photography: suesviews

It might be hard to believe now but when Facebook began, the settings were so restrictive that unless you were a university student you couldn’t even join the site. You could see the names of the elite who could join the site. You might be able to look at their avatars if they’d posted them, but even for other members, almost everything else was kept private. Private was the default setting. Members of the network could see where friends were studying, where they’d worked and what they liked to do, but everyone else was locked out.

Those were the days.

As Facebook has grown so has its troubles with privacy issues. The site now has over 400 million active users, a community that’s about a third larger than the population of the United States. Those people interact with more 25 billion pieces of content, from Web links and news stories to notes and photo albums. They post status updates that keep friends and family informed about what they’re doing, upload pictures and videos that reveal private aspects of their lives, and they use over half a million Facebook apps that often draw on the information they’ve posted.

Fundamental Privacy Mistakes

It’s a huge amount of material that’s both essential to Facebook’s value to advertisers and a giant headache to Mark Zuckerberg, its 26-year-old CEO. You can almost forgive him for making the mistake of offering privacy settings that assumed users wanted everything open but which were also too complex to be changed easily.

Almost, but not quite. Facebook’s mistakes were fundamental, an example of what to do to get privacy completely wrong. The only consolation that Steve Zuckerberg can draw from his failure is that Google made exactly the same mistakes when it launched Buzz. The search company attempted to start with critical mass by attaching itself to users’ Gmail accounts, exposing the email addresses of account holder’s contacts in the process.

Facebook, at least, didn’t do that kind of damage but both companies made the same error. They both assumed that because no one ever reads the privacy policies at the bottom of Web pages, no one ever looks at the EULAs on downloaded programs before they agree to them, and few people in practice ever say anything that could land them in serious trouble with a third party app developer, no one would mind if the default setting was maximum exposure. After all whoever was accessing the information — whether it was an old friend, a new retailer or an exciting app — was only acting in a way that would benefit the user. Privacy is a flexible thing these days and besides, those people who really are paranoid fussy cautious about what happens with their private information could always head to the settings page and change them.

On Facebook that meant playing with a host of different “granular” settings relating to a range of the site’s different functions. For Buzz it looked like it meant clicking a link to turn the system off, but it turned out that just meant you couldn’t see it. To get rid of Buzz altogether, users initially had to leap through one digital hoop after another, hoops they weren’t even aware existed.

Ask First, Share Later

The problem with those mistakes wasn’t that they actually revealed vast amounts of personal data that individuals needed to keep private (although a few unlucky individuals were affected). It made the public aware that they had personal information, and worse, that big companies were interested in it. Website users don’t read privacy policies because they don’t care about their privacy; they just don’t believe that their private concerns are of any interest to anyone else. Until a company comes along and helps itself to their personal data.

So what can companies hoping to amass vast amounts of user data learn from the mistakes of other corporate giants? How can they balance their need to please advertisers and app developers with the concerns of their members?

The simplest strategy is to ask first.

Email marketers aren’t fond of double-opt in requirements because it means they can’t be accused of spamming. They like them because so few people object when they’re asked. For much personal data the response is likely to be similar although much depends on the kind of information being requested (anonymous demographic is unlikely to raise many objections; private purchases might do.) It’s when companies take information without asking that users object and become suspicious.

It’s also important to make the privacy settings simple. As Mark Zuckerberg himself put it in his blog:

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

But the most important thing you can do with privacy is to understand users’ concerns. When Google changed the way it offered Buzz, it went a long way towards showing that it understood those concerns. Leaving it in Gmail however, a place that users think of as a personal space, suggested that the company still isn’t standing with its users. Similarly, Facebook’s simpler privacy settings hand more control to its users, but its recommendation

that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends.

also suggests that it’s still not quite getting it. Many users would consider status updates to be as personal as their pictures.

Facebook got privacy right the first time when it assumed that users wanted to talk only with their friends. The way its mishandled privacy may well end up prompting users to choose to bring those old days back.

Photography: askpang

If there was a prize available for dedication to the job and the ability to do it in the most trying of conditions then Lee Unkrich would surely have won it. Earlier this year, the Pixar director pasted a photo of himself on Twitter editing Toy Story 3 while sitting on a flight at 36,000 feet. Of course, he cheated. Judging by the snazzy seat back, it looks like Lee wasn’t typing with his knees behind his ears in Cattle Class. He also broke the rules. Not the rules that prevent you from grabbing your bag as the plane touches down and standing by the exit or spending the entire flight in the bathroom, a private cabin where there’s room to stretch your legs, but just about all of the unspoken rules that dictate the right and wrong ways to work on a plane.

The rules are new. They’ve only developed over the last few years as long haul flights have added electricity sockets that make it possible to work without keeping an eye on a computer’s battery level and as some have added Internet access. Now that it’s possible to take an entire office with you in your carry-on baggage and plug it into a plane’s infrastructure, today’s digital, high-flying nomads need to know what they can and can’t do when they’re working in the clouds.

The first thing you can’t do is expect privacy. Take your laptop to a café and you can try to pick a seat with the back to the wall so that nobody is reading over your shoulder. You can certainly expect a table of your own so that no one is sharing your eye-space. Mostly though, you can rely on the fact that the other café customers are too busy with their own lives to show more than a passing interest in yours.

On a plane, passengers have no lives. Their entertainment choices are limited by whatever happens to be on the screen in front of them and their diversions are restricted to the media material they’ve brought with them. With hours to kill, it doesn’t matter whether your job involves creating a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or counting dots on a screen, it’s going to look more interesting than the back of the next seat.

What Happens on the Plane, Stays on the Plane

That limits the kind of work you can do. Putting on the screen anything even remotely confidential is out of bounds — such as a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or the unedited rushes of a brand-new Disney movie. And you can’t write anything about your fellow travelers either. Lee Unkrich went on to tweet that how his neighbor showed little interest in what he was doing, a hint that she was missing a giant opportunity. That was probably just as well. She might have been less than happy to see herself being discussed with tens of thousands of people thousands of miles away. It’s not a good idea to irritate someone you’re stuck next to for seven hours.

If the first rule of working on a plane then is not to work on anything confidential, the second is that what other people are doing on the plane stays on the plane — especially if they’re doing it in the next seat.

The third rule is not to bother anyone, another rule that restricts the kind of work you can do. Making a fitness video using your computer’s web cam is obviously out but so is anything that involves lots of speaker noise, shouts of frustration or pacing around. In fact, if you know you’re going to be working on the plane, it’s not a rule but it is a good idea to book a window seat. Your own ability to take microbreaks will be limited but you won’t be forcing other people to ask you to remove your headphones and lift your computer every time they need to stroll the aisle. That would bother them too. Some working travelers have even been known to take their own thermos flasks of coffee, a choice that means they don’t have to take frequent trips to the galley to load up on fresh beans — an essential lubricant for some when it comes to keeping their main work-muscle greased. (On the other hand, if that coffee means lots of running to the bathroom, then it’s probably best to work without it).

Don’t Do It Unless You Have To

The second most important rule though is to choose the right kind of work for you to do on the plane.

No one, not even the most Donald Trump of bosses, expects an employee to put in the hours while wedged into an Economy Class seat. A flight then is one time when you don’t have to work if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to feel guilty about your choice. You are free to relax with a DVD and to use the seat’s electricity socket to play computer games for seven hours if that makes the journey less painful. If you do think about work, choose something important, that isn’t more irritating than waiting for the flight to end and that needs to be done right away. Adding the final touches to a talk or presentation, for example, makes a good choice. That’s information that’s going to be shared anyway, so it’s unlikely to break any confidentiality rules. It’s likely to be something you’ll need shortly after you arrive so it’s suitably urgent. And it’s not something that requires a huge amount of focus and brain power so it shouldn’t hurt too much. A bit of light-hearted blogging should also work but reading and research make for some of the best uses of flying time.

But the most important rule to follow when working on a plane is not to do it unless you really have to — and unless you don’t mind the rest of the plane thinking that you’re a workaholic who’s too disorganized to take a few hours off. When other passengers see someone working on a plane, as a rule, that’s what they think.

It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Thirty-two countries, billions of dollars, a television audience that stretches from South Africa to North Korea, and 90 minutes of 22 men kicking a ball in a sport that Americans tend to dismiss as a girls’ game. The FIFA World Cup, an event that takes place once every four years and captures the imagination of (almost) the entire globe, is now under way in Africa for the first time. Like any event with an audience that runs into the hundreds of millions, it’s also a huge business. According to accountancy firm Grant Thorton, the games could add as much as 0.5 percent to host nation South Africa’s GDP this year, an injection of some $12.4 billion. Much of that will have come from the effects of tourism. About 373,000 foreigners are expected to visit the country during the month-long sporting jamboree, spending about $4,000 each. Most of the money though will have come from government coffers to pay for new stadiums, renovated roads and security. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be not the country, but FIFA itself. The organization’s profits from the last World Cup, held in Germany, were a cool $1.8 billion.

But the international sporting body isn’t the only one making money out of the World Cup. Sellers of vuvuzelas, the plastic trumpets that sound like angry bees and infuriate commentators, and which South Africans insist are traditional musical instruments, are clearly doing well. Earplugs that promise to block the sound are reported to be selling equally fast. Pubs and bars with big screens and expensive beer will do fine too, despite Fifa’s attempts to stop them. Makers of novelty items will struggle a little but websites that discuss the World Cup, optimize their AdSense units or offer decent affiliate products can expect to earn a little income too. Anyone can do that, although they’ll struggle to do well on search rankings when FIFA itself, big broadcasters and media giants are dominating the rankings.

The World Cup on Social Media

The best hope to make some money out of the World Cup then (other than scalping tickets) looks like social media. While Facebook and Twitter might not have done much to influence the UK election (depending on who you ask and how you measure the results), this World Cup does seem to have taken social media to its heart.

The biggest World Cup social media success has been Nike’s “Write The Future” ad. At three minutes, the full length version is too long to be played on television but on YouTube, it’s been viewed more than 15 million times. To reach that sort of audience during a television show would have involved a deep dip into the advertising budget, and even then the company would be lucky to get more than 30 seconds. Nike has managed to persuade an enormous audience to choose to watch an ad that’s three minutes long without having to spend a dime on placement.

It did however have to spend a lot of money on star sponsorships as well on the film itself, which is creative and as professionally-made as you might expect from a multinational footwear giant.

Outside the Xbox

YouTube isn’t the only social media tool that companies are using to spread their name during the World Cup though. Electronic Arts famously launched a soccer management game produced by Playfish, the social media game company it bought at the end of last year. The game, which can only be played across Facebook, may generate a small amount of cash but the real World Cup money for the video game company will come from its console games. 2010 FIFA World Cup sells for around $60 and moved more than 1.7 million copies in Europe in its first week alone, making it the most successful launch ever for a sports simulation.  If you’re really looking to make money out of the World Cup, the best approach it seems is to get yourself an official license.

But it can also pay to be think outside the Xbox. Korean company Hyundai has taken a broad approach to World Cup marketing. Describing its marketing activities during the event, the carmaker relegates television advertising almost to the bottom of the list. Perimeter boards are at the top, suggesting a high spend, but much of the focus is on the fans and on activities in which they have to play an active part. “Fan fests” consisting of screens and events around the world will put the brand in front of large audiences, a “fan of the match” will help to whip up enthusiasm, and an online program makes the interaction online too. The aim, the company says, is to “improve the quality of the interactive experience with the brand.”

The broad coverage is not without its risks however. After British broadcaster ITV cut away from England’s opening game in the fourth minute of the match to show a Hyundai ad, viewers were returned to the game to see captain Steven Gerrard celebrating the team’s only goal. ITV took the brunt of the blame for that faux pas but forcing fans to look at you instead of a goal is not going to lead your market to cheer your name.

So if earning from the World Cup has been dominated by companies with the biggest marketing budgets, is there anything left for small firms with deep enthusiasm but shallow pockets? Websites that already have plenty of traffic can certainly match their content to the event. Travel firm Bootsnall, for example, launched the WorldCupBlog, a site that’s managed to reach the first page of search results on Google for the keyword phrase “world cup” and is filled with affiliate ads, banners, and of course, ticket offers. Other sites will have to be a little more subtle with the odd promotion. Nor is it worth working investing too much in World Cup revenues. Unless you can repeat the formula for the Olympics in two years’ time, you’ll only have a month to cash in on your effort. If you’re Fifa, Hyundai, a pub with a big screen TV, or a stall-holder with a pile of plastic trumpets your best bet for making decent money from the World might well be Spain at 9/2.

Last summer, Alex Brownstein decided to advance his career. He had a job as a copywriter at ad firm Publicis, but he really wanted to work at “a really creative shop for really creative [creative directors].” Rather than follow the usual route of updating his resume, sending it to the human resources departments of other ad firms and hoping that they had an opening, Alex took a route that gave him direct access to the people he most wanted to speak to.

In a move that also showed off his creativity, Alex identified the creative directors he wanted to work for and bought AdWords ads for their names. When the creative directors Googled themselves, the top result was an ad that said: “Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too.” The ad linked to his website, alecbrownstein.com.

Brownstein targeted a total of five creative directors, received interviews from four and job offers from two. He now works as a senior copywriter for Ian Reichenthal at Young & Rubicam’s office. The entire search cost a total of $6. Had he mailed in his resume, he would probably have spent more on postage.

Caught in the Act of Googling Themselves

Brownstein’s approach had several advantages. He was able to put his name and his skills directly in front of the people he most wanted to target. By addressing those people by name, he showed that he knew the industry and was familiar with their work. By using an original strategy, he demonstrated the very creativity that he was selling. And by intruding at a time when the creative directors were Googling themselves, he was also showing that he understood human behavior and how to use it for effect — an important feature for an advertising copywriter.

As a model for other career-minded types to copy though, it has its challenges. Not everyone knows the names of the people who are most likely to employ them, and not all industries are as public with the identities of their key personnel as the advertising industry is. Nor are those personnel likely to Google themselves as often as advertising people might. Brownstein got the idea for the approach after Googling himself, something he told Mashable that he does with “embarrassing” frequency. Marketing manager Karl Sakas estimates that it took Brownstein about six months to land his job. Hopefuls seeking employment in industries staffed with more modest types might have to wait even longer.

But it worked, it cost little and for jobseekers looking for specific positions but who aren’t desperate for immediate change, there’s no reason it won’t work again.

Who Wants to Work for Microsoft?

Google isn’t the only place that creative jobseekers have been advertising their skills though. Even before Brownstein was interrupting the private browsing moments of some of New York’s top ad people, a man called “Eric” was promoting himself on Facebook. He took out an ad that included his picture, a headline that stated “I want to be at [company]”, and text that read “Hi, My name is Eric and my dream is to work for [company]. I’m an MBA/MFA with a strong media background. Can you help me? Please click!” The companies he targeted were Microsoft, YouTube, Netflix, Apple and IDEO.

Despite the difficulty of believing that anyone actually dreams of working for Microsoft, Eric did receive plenty of offers of help from Redmond employees offering LinkedIn connections, the addresses of recruiters, and the job descriptions of specific roles in their division to apply for.

Eric chose Facebook, he says, “because it was unconventional, cheap, highly targeted and offered solid performance metrics.” He was able to limit the ads so that they were seen by people employed at the companies he was targeting, and the keywording would have made sure that a manager at Microsoft didn’t see that he was also dreaming of working for YouTube. The whole process took about half an hour, cost less than $50 and resulted in more than 50,000 impressions and more than 500 clicks. It’s not clear though whether the leads produced a job offer.

This is a very different approach to that used by Alex Brownstein. Brownstein was hoping to land one of a number of specific positions that could only be offered by one of a number of specific individuals. Eric’s approach was broader. He was looking for “help” rather than a job, something that more people can provide, even though it won’t lead directly to the end goal.

The best approach of all then might be to combine the two: use Facebook ads to generate information about individual employers; then use that information to offer Google ads that put your online resume in front of them… eventually.

There is a third method that you can use though. When Web marketer Larry Dinsmore found himself out of work, he went for a scattergun approach that should put even Eric to shame. At one point, he simply opened the Yellow Pages, started at A and worked his way through the listings, emailing his resume to every business with a website. He even thought of printing a stack of resumes and handing them out like flyers. Fortunately, he had a better idea. He printed the words “Damn, I need a job!” on the front of a t-shirt, and placed a short cover letter on the back.

“Put something about yourself on your shirt and not only will they read it they will strain to see it,” he writes on his site damnineedajob.com. “They will position themselves for a better look. Stand in line at a fast food joint and at any given moment someone will be checking it out. I’m telling you people can’t help it.”

There’s no indication that Larry’s approach worked any better than Eric’s but the efficacy of turning yourself into a human billboard will depend on where you choose to stand. It’s the kind of strategy that’s more likely to work at a convention than in line at a fast food joint — unless your dream job is to flip burgers.

Whatever kind of job you’re looking for, creativity is going to be an important part of staying ahead of the pack. That applies to the way you search as much as the contents of your resumé.

Much has been said about Twitter’s ability to build brands, spread messages and create interaction. But Facebook’s business pages have been around much longer, are a lot more flexible and are part of a much larger platform too. Coca Cola’s tweets, made up of slightly creepy greetings to followers and public Coke drinkers, for example, are read by fewer than 30,000 people. The company’s Facebook page, which is filled with videos, active discussions, ad campaigns and all sorts of other goodies, has been liked by more than 5.7 million people.

Creating that kind of following though takes more than a well-known brand and about ten spoonfuls of sugar in every can. It also takes a smart use of the functions available to marketers looking to build their market with Facebook. Here are five brands that are getting it right:

Electronic Arts

One of the most valuable strengths of social media marketing is that companies aren’t just broadcasting their messages to their market. They’re letting their market talk about them among themselves. That’s something that EA Sports 2010 World Cup Edition uses to the full. The company, which is known for its computer sports simulations, was expected to bring out its new management game on consoles. Instead, it chose to use Facebook as a platform, providing a way for the site’s users to face off against each other.

Users can buy “packs” of players for about $1.50-$3 each but the revenue is unlikely to be the main reason that EA have opted for Facebook instead of Nintendo. Console games are more likely sell for around $50 each and points earned during the game can be used to pay for more team members. Rather than looking at cash for this simple game, the company is using Facebook’s horizontal networking — and its $300m purchase of app developer Playfish — to keep people talking about the company and maintain its awareness during the soccer World Cup.

The Facebook page for its main product is pretty effective too.

Dunkin Donuts

Electronic Arts’ new game is powered by a smart app, something that requires plenty of time and money to create. But businesses don’t need to go to that expense to create an effective Facebook presence. Dunkin Donuts doesn’t offer anything on its Facebook page that isn’t available to any other business wanting to make use of social media. Its wall though contains plenty of posts by keen fans, the admin staff have bothered to fill in the details on the info page — something not done by every business (we’re looking at you, Benetton) — and its events widget lists all sorts of local happenings that might interest customers.

Where Dunkin Donuts really excels though is in the steps it takes to reach out to its fans. Users are offered a “perk” for enrolling in the company’s app. Maurice, a talking coffee bean, offers a measure of fun. And most importantly, submitting a picture to the page’s wall puts users in the running to be chosen as a “fan of the week.” It’s a simple way to make customers feel that the Facebook page is about them, and not about the company.

Bushells Tea

A challenge for companies considering using social media to push their brands is the site’s demographic. Facebook started at a college and it still looks like a poor choice for firms looking to target markets whose members are middle-aged or older.

When Australian marketing firm Soap Creative was hired by multinational company Unilever to promote its local tea brand Bushells however, it chose to focus much of its digital strategy on Facebook. Without spending a dime on promotions, the page has quickly built up a following almost 20,000 at a rate of almost 1,000 new fans every month.

The company attempts to get around the reluctance of older Facebook users to engage actively on the site by promoting its presence as part of the conversation that comes with a cup of tea. According to Ross Raeburn, one of the people responsible for the campaign, Soap Creative has seen the self-moderation, community ownership and brand participation that they’ve come to expect from Facebook. The wall is active, the company is learning information about its customers missed by annual focus groups, and Bushells has succeeded in deepening the sense of brand loyalty held by its customers.

CM Photographics

Not all the most effective commercial pages on Facebook are pushing big brands or run  by professional marketers. Chris Meyer is a professional photographer who advises other photographers about the benefits of Facebook marketing. The site itself has used him as a case study for the rewards its ads can bring after a $600 spend generated over $40,000 in bookings. But it’s not just his paid ads that are bringing results. His studio’s business page also has  a surprisingly large following and an interactive wall filled with comments from customers and friends.

There are no secret tricks here. Chris Meyer doesn’t use an interactive app or even post videos. He just makes regular posts that are upbeat, human and which engage with his followers. It’s a strategy that might not work for companies so large that they struggle to present a human face, but for very small businesses, Chris Meyer’s friendly contact is a good model to follow.

Amnesty International

And finally, it’s also possible to make good use of Facebook’s pages without attempting to earn a dime. Amnesty International uses its Causes tab to publicize its fundraising efforts, the results of its recruiting, the level of its “karma” — a way of thanking supporters — and to list the causes it supports. Its YouTube plug-in makes sharing videos with friends as simple as sending an invitation and a Twitter feed helps to add instant news. Mostly though the page shows how Facebook can sometimes work as a broadcast system and the first step in a viral campaign. Amnesty adds the clips and offers its opinions on human rights issues, and its followers then share them with friends.

If there is a problem with Amnesty’s use of Facebook though, it’s the address. Facebook.com/amnestyinternational leads to the Belgian branch of the organization, a page which isn’t publicly available and which has posted little content. If you want to make the most of Facebook, it does pay to be open — and get your name right.

Facebook’s business pages then can be hugely valuable but the way they’re used does depend on the type of product or service you’re offering, the demographic of your market and the kinds of tools best used to engage and interact with them. There’s no one strategy that can bring results; only a number of tools, and a willingness to press some virtual flesh.

Image: zengame

Being first to market always bring advantages You get to set the standard, establish your brand, create demand, and associate your product with the market. When there are no competitors, you’ll have 100 percent of the market share and the loyalty of satisfied customers. And when competitors do arrive, they’ll have to battle hard to push you off the top. But being second has its advantages too. You get to build on the mistakes made by the pioneer and enjoy a market that’s already been told the benefits of the product. With the right planning, the creators of a “me-too” product can quickly find themselves overtaking a tired front runner and moving from second — and even last — to first.

Stealing that position though will mean some smart preparations and creating a product that doesn’t just copy what’s already out there but which improves on it, exploiting the weaknesses of the current market standard and filling gaps so that your product can compete.

The best way to do that is to offer better quality. When industrial designer James Dyson created a new model of vacuum cleaner, he was entering a market dominated by large companies and in which “hoover” had become a byword for the act of sucking up household dust. By redesigning the product so that suction rates improved by 45 percent, Dyson was able to offer a vacuum cleaner that went on to become the market leader by value in the United States and the fastest-selling cleaner manufactured in the UK. And he was able to do it even though his me-too product is about eight times more expensive than that of his competitors.

When you compete on quality — and offer a significant improvement over competitors — it can be possible not just to steal market share but to change the pricing of the market too.

Be Nicer to Customers

Unlike manufacturers, retailers don’t have the option of offering higher quality products: the items on their shelves will be the same as the items on their competitors’ shelves. But they can beat the pioneers by looking for flaws in their customer service, and filling the gap.

That’s what Zappos did after founder Tony Hsieh had reviewed Amazon’s online bookstore and copied the model to sell shoes and clothing. After making almost no sales in 1999, the company was grossing over $1 billion ten years later. That growth came as a result of a focus on customer service that included return shipping assistance, a 365-day return policy and a call center that was always open and always helpful. So effective was the attempt to help customers that Amazon, which had enjoyed a five-year head start, bought the company last year for $1.2 billion.

Competing on customer service works best for me-too retailers because service is their main product. When customers can buy the same items in a range of different stores, both online and on the high street, the choice of seller will come down to convenience, trust and ease. When your me-too product is identical to something that already exists, then just offering to treat the customer better can be enough to pull ahead — at least until your bigger competitor pulls you in.

Apple is Always Second

Improved customer service usually concerns the relationship between the seller and the buyer. But when you can improve the relationship between the product and the buyer, then a me-too product can really steal the market.

Apple is the master of this technique. The company is never the first to bring a product idea to the market. It wasn’t the first to create an MP3 player, nor the first to use a touch screen nor even first company to offer a tablet computer, which have been around since the early 1980s. It did however improve the quality of products that already existed, but no less importantly, it made them easier to use.

iPods took off when music lovers realized they no longer had to click a button multiple times to find the songs they needed; the clickwheel meant that they could just roll their finger. And the sliding pages and large screen on the iPhone finally made changing functions and surfing the Web — something that other phones had been offering for years — convenient and easy. Although Apple had come in for criticism when it announced it was entering a crowded mobile phone market, its focus on ergonomics and user interaction meant that it was quickly able to dominate the field with a product whose core functions — communications, picture-taking, music playing and Web surfing — were the same as those of established competitors.

Of course, much of Apple’s success is also down to hype and marketing, but that’s another important way for a new product to beat a similar competitor with a first mover advantage. Users of Tivo, for example, may take the company’s dominance in its market for granted but the development stage was characterized by stiff competition from Mountain View pioneer ReplayTV. While Replay picked up the praise from critics and users at tech shows across the country, Tivo’s more business savvy executives were busy showing their player to broadcasting companies, making deals, and assuring them that their advertising revenue wouldn’t be affected. As Replay struggled to sell its player to customers, Tivo already had deals in place with retailers and broadcasters.

According to one survey, me-too products that differentiate themselves with unique customer benefits and superior value enjoy on average, five times the success rate, four times the market share and four times the profitability of the competitors that lack that key ingredient.

Whether you’re planning to mark yourself out with a better quality product, a superior customer service, revolutionary usability or some smart marketing, there’s no reason that being second to market means that you can’t conquer that market. Creating a successful business always means doing better than your competitors. That’s always easier to do when you know what your competitors have been doing — and what they’ve been doing wrong.

With more than two billion videos served every day — almost double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined — standing out on YouTube so that your clips win attention, go viral and perhaps even graduate to a meme is never going to be easy. There are a few ingredients though that every YouTube clip needs to have if it’s to beat out the music videos and the lolcats to win views and build an audience.

The most important, of course, is interesting content. That might appear obvious but it’s actually rarer and more difficult to create than it sounds. More than 24 hours of video content is added to YouTube every minute, so information that’s entertaining enough to be worth watching and original enough that audiences haven’t seen it before is actually relatively rare. When it does appear on the site, it quickly snowballs, building up large numbers of views.

Like the secret ingredient of a Hollywood blockbuster, there’s no failsafe formula that makes up good video content. On some clips, it might be a free practical instruction (such as this video demonstrating how to draw a skull); on others, it might be an original use of graphics in post-production (such as in this clip by a professional director which has generated almost half a million views). The good news though is that the quality of content can override production values. Although many of the most popular channels on YouTube are run by professionals — such as Popstar Magazine’s channel, with its exclusive interviews with teenage heartthrobs — YouTube is famous for the home-made appearance of its videos. That means that Geriatric1927, an 82-year-old widower from England, has been able to build up more than 53,000 subscribers and an incredible total of almost 8.4 million views just by sitting in front of a camera and reminiscing about his past. There’s no fancy editing, no graphics and no attempt to bring in friends to shoot the breeze or play with props. It’s simply the ability of unusual information and good stories to attract an audience.

Everyone Loves the Underdog

Part of the appeal of Geriatric1927 is that he’s not supposed to win, any more than Susan Boyle was supposed to have a nice voice. YouTube’s homemade quality has made it the place where the underdog can make an appearance and win the mass support necessary to battle against the big boys. When the production looks enthusiastic rather than professional and the talent genuine rather than manufactured, audiences can feel that they can put one over on industry by pushing forward their own champion. When the champion succeeds, they get to feel that they spotted them first. Their champion’s success is their success too.

The biggest recent beneficiary of the desire of YouTube’s audiences to discover and promote a potential winner is Justin Bieber. After being discovered on the site by music marketer Scooter Braun, Bieber was brought to Atlanta, Georgia to record demo tapes. At that point, the music company would have traditionally taken over the promotion process. But Braun kept Bieber on YouTube, continuing to upload videos.

“I wanted to build him up more on YouTube first,” he told The New York Times. “We supplied more content. I said: ‘Justin, sing like there’s no one in the room. But let’s not use expensive cameras.’ We’ll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it’s theirs.”

That was a bit of smart marketing that combined the professional quality content of Bieber’s teen appeal with the underdog championing that’s unique to YouTube.

Show Don’t Tell

YouTube-manufactured Justin Biebers are relatively unusual, and not everyone can or wants to be a teenage sensation. For businesses, YouTube is more likely to be used as another way of distributing useful information that supplements the content on a blog. That content is often didactic. It teaches viewers something that they didn’t know previously, paying them for their attention with valuable knowledge.

When broadcasters do that on YouTube, the principle for success is the same as that in most storytelling: to show, not tell. TigerDirect, for example, is an electronics store which attempts to build a customer base by teaching audiences about the benefits and features of the products they sell. Its TigerDirectTV channel on YouTube contains a series of videos that discusses cameras, gadgets and computer equipment. Most of the clips are shot in a studio, with the presenter at a desk holding the item he’s discussing. But the channel isn’t afraid to get out of the room and take the camera to the great outdoors. In a clip discussing the difference between G and N wireless routers, for example, three presenters set up two routers on a long empty road and continued driving until the signal from each faded. The presenters could have said that G routers are good for 20 yards, N routers for much further but by demonstrating the difference physically, they created much better — and more memorable — content.

Although success on YouTube can come from an amateur appearance, professionalism can work too.

It would be great to say then that you can either go for shaky camera work and win the support of the underdog or bring in a crew and create a professional-looking show. As long as the content is interesting and entertaining enough, you’ll be a success. But it’s not that easy because there’s another element that’s vital for success on YouTube whatever your approach.

You have to do the marketing.

Put up a video on YouTube and you’re not going to get views unless people know you’re there. That means adding comments – intelligent, helpful comments – at the bottom of related clips. It means talking about the clip on your own website. And it means continuing to add new content on a regular basis so that you maintain your audience and don’t lose viewers just as your popularity starts to build. All of that takes time and effort — which is why it’s so much easier to film your cat getting stuck at the top of the curtains.

Microsoft’s announcement that the latest version of its productivity suite, Office 2010, will have an online component should have been a vote of confidence in the cloud. Currently in Beta, the newest version of Word will allow for co-authoring, and the ability to edit papers “and share ideas with others at the same time.” Users will also be able to “view the availability” of people who are working on the document with them, and “easily initiate a conversation without leaving Word.” No less eyecatching is the ability to access and share documents from “virtually anywhere” by posting them online and opening them in almost any computer or Windows phone using a Microsoft Word Web app or Word Mobile 2010. The suite should be a must-have for just about any modern freelancer working with clients scattered around the globe. In practice though, while Microsoft Office might remain an essential tool, the new version is unlikely to be helped by its new attachment to the cloud.

Microsoft’s move is intended to counter advances by Google, which increasingly sees itself as a competitor to Bill Gates’s firm. The search giant might not have its own PC-based operating system (yet) but both companies have mobile operating systems and Google’s free online office suite, Google Docs, is an indication that it sees the future in terms of Internet-based services rather than computer-based software.

Users Spend Five Minutes on Google Docs

A late 2009 survey by IDC, a research firm, suggests they might be onto something. While just under 20 percent of corporate respondents said that they currently use Google Docs, more than 27 percent expected to be using it “widely” in the following year. How widely they use it though may turn out to be crucial. An earlier survey by Compete found that Google Docs and its Excel-like service, Spreadsheets, had 4.4 million users in 2008. That’s only a fraction of the number of people using Microsoft Office, and a look at how those people are using the online service is even more worrying for Google. According to Compete, only 58 percent of those visitors actually used one of Google’s productivity services, with the remainder stalling at the home page. Worse, those that did use it only stopped by just three days each month — and then for only about five minutes a time.

By contrast, not only does just about everyone have Office on their PCs, they actually use it.

Where Google may be able to achieve some penetration is among a few tech-savvy companies looking to save money on multiple Office licenses. The need to protect those revenues is likely to have been what prompted Microsoft to put its services online in the first place, including a free lite version of Word.

But savings of thousands of dollars aren’t going to be available to freelancers. They might be able to put aside a few hundred bucks by swapping Microsoft for Google, or even OpenOffice, but when Office is their main professional tool, that’s not the place to start looking to make savings. It’s not that freelancers like paying $99 for a stripped down version of Office (or $399 for the full version). It’s that they don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount to pay for a standard professional tool that they’re going to be using every day. If it saves them the hassle of repeatedly explaining to a client why they can’t open the latest format of a Word document without losing all of the formatting then it’s worth the extra money. Nor is it just professional document-makers who are willing to lay out the cash for professional standard software. Paint.net is as free as Google Docs, and Photoshop has an online version, and yet Adobe has little trouble selling its main image suite for around $700.

Freelancers Want Their Work to Hand

One of the reasons for that preference for Microsoft Office over Google Docs is the very nature of cloud computing itself: the idea that everything is on the Internet and nothing needs to be stored on the hard drive. It’s a concept that’s heavy on efficiency and light on an understanding of the way that people actually use their computers. Companies like Google, with vast banks of servers, might be able to put their faith in storage rooms that they never see. Freelancers who have ongoing projects like to know that their work is no further away than their fingertips.

That’s especially true if they can access their work at any time. Cloud computing might be safer and offer all sorts of multi-access advantages that working with Microsoft and a hard drive can’t provide, but when your ability to access the documents a client is waiting for depends on the reliability of your Internet service provider, it’s no surprise that freelancers choose to safeguard their work themselves. Large businesses can have large back-ups and plenty of insurance; freelancers need to deliver the assets they’ve been creating if their business is going to have revenue. Google’s announcement in May that it was phasing out offline support for Google Docs would hardly have won the confidence of freelancers.

None of this though has stopped some aspects of freelance work doing well on the Web. Hunting for clients through services like Elance and RentaCoder make job searching easy, but apart from portfolios, these services store little on servers that belong to the freelancer. oDesk’s attempts to turn a virtual workplace into a real cubicle, complete with snooping boss and time-punching, show how little some companies understand about freelancers and their motivations.

If anything could shift a preference for personal responsibility towards trust in a cloud, it’s the rise of mobile devices. As tablets and smartphones become better at allowing document and spreadsheet editing, freelancers may find themselves looking to access their work not just in more than one place but also on more than one device. That’s the opportunity that Microsoft is hoping its new suite will benefit from. It’s more likely though that Google will be kept in its place, and freelancers will be doing a lot of wireless syncing.

Image: docpop

Twitter’s trending topics were meant to be its jewel in the crown, a way for anyone to see a snapshot of the zeitgeist, to understand which are the most important issues of the day, and to see breaking news topics as soon as they happen. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Unless Justin Bieber is the most important thing happening in the world right now and the three words to say after sex are what’s really on everyone’s tongue at the moment, then Twitter’s list of trending topics — highlighted on its website — have been a mighty fail. But even if trivia remains top of the trending topics, marketers can still pull some value out of the list — provided they know how to analyze the information they’re gathering and what to do with it once they get it.

Twitter at least appears to have recognized the failure of trending topics to produce usable information. Recently the site changed its trending algorithm to focus on “emerging trends” rather than the most popular subjects over a period of time. So far, the change has made little difference. Instead of Nick Jonas winning a spot in the trending topics list, “Jick Nonas” has made the popularity charts as fans look for ways around what they believe to be Twitter’s keyword blocking software. And hashtags like “#thatswhyyoursingle” are still dominating the list.

Listen to Real Conversations

The reason for the consistent failure is trending topics’ strength. Search sites have always marketed trending topics as an opportunity for marketers to overhear real conversations and understand the subjects that are actually moving people. These are topics that people want to discuss, not the subjects that media editors and producers think that people should discuss. But what people generally want to talk about on the Web are generally the same kind of subjects they talk about in college canteens, school playgrounds and around the watercooler: sex, sports, and rock and roll. That changes a little when a major news event, such as a natural disaster or an election, happens but the list soon reverts back to the usual combination of pop stars and cheesy phrases.

It’s tempting to believe that the failure is Twitter’s, that the site no longer has the kind of sophisticated audience that its initial 30-something, educated, slightly geeky demographics suggested. But trending topics aren’t limited to Twitter, and other sites are suffering from a similar failure to provide information that’s obviously useful to marketers. Google’s Trends should also be providing similarly useful data but like Twitter, its top lists are filled with searches for sports matches, television programs and celebrities.

One option for marketers and businesses then may be to ignore what’s on the list and simply aim to break into it. That’s always been part of the strategy of Twitter’s hashtag giveaways in which companies hand out a freebie at random to someone who wrote a tweet containing a particular hashtag. Twitter however was quick to spot this attempt at trend manipulation and appears to block hashtag giveaways from making the trending topic list. Giveaways have also become so common now that it’s harder than ever for a company to gain the kind of traction that would even qualify it for a trending topic. And there’s some evidence that the exposure generated by an appearance on a trending topic list doesn’t always translate into extra business.

A better option then may be to look beyond the top trending topics — which are likely to remain trivial and entertaining — and use the information to compare different businesses in the same field.

Google Compares Trends

Google differs from Twitter is in its ability to allow marketers to compare searches for their products to those of their competitors. A comparison of Blogger.com, WordPress.com and WordPress.org, for example, shows that the free WordPress blogs are more popular than the Google’s own offering. That might be interesting for bloggers wondering which software is more popular with other users, but it’s also an important piece of information for developers thinking about where to target their plugins. (A search by keyword, rather than by website, shows that interest in WordPress outgrew interest in Blogger back in late 2006 and has continued to outpace it ever since.)

Neither of those companies though are trending topics. Facebook’s privacy issues might push it onto the list briefly but in general, they aren’t likely to trend. One way then of using trending topics is to focus not on the most popular items that succeed in bubbling through the trivia but to mine search information, look deeper and make comparisons.

But perhaps the most important value of trending data doesn’t lie in an analysis of the information itself but rather in an understanding of what it reveals. The criticism of trending data isn’t an attack on the sites that produce it. It’s an expression of disappointment in the subjects that people find interesting enough to share in large numbers on social media sites and search engines. Companies might be disappointed to find that they’re not the main talking points among the general public, but they should hardly be surprised.

And yet, many of the items on the trending topics list are products. Justin Bieber is no less a product of the entertainment industry than Windows is a product of Microsoft. His record company have made him into a trending topic by making him trendy enough to build the kind of deep loyalty that other marketers can only envy — and which is just about unique to the music industry and its teenage fans. If trending topics reveal anything is that it’s not easy to create products that have mass popularity, and no list is going to provide a shortcut to instant success.

But the most important lesson is that a marketer’s goal shouldn’t be to join the conversation by attaching a product to a popular topic. It’s to be entertaining enough to change the conversation. When your competitors are sex and rock and roll, that’s not going to be easy either.

Photography: Josh.Liba

Moonfruit’s tenth anniversary promotion set the standard for Twitter-based marketing. The content management and hosting company promised to give away a Macbook Pro every day for ten days. To enter the competition, twitterers only had to include the hashtag #moonfruit in their tweet; the more they tweeted it, the greater their chances of winning. It was a giveaway that caused a Twitter stampede. At one point, helped by additional prizes for creative entries, tweets with moonfruit hashtags made up almost 3 percent of all the tweets being posted on the site. Overwhelmed by the popularity of the contest, Moonfruit called an early halt to the campaign, giving away the remaining Macbooks in a one-day bonanza. Since then, other companies have tried to copy the model. In particular, recognizing that prizes have to be desirable — and that everyone desires Apple products — the launch of the iPad looked like a golden opportunity, a chance for any company to gain instant exposure by giving away tablets and cashing in on Apple’s hype. Their failures have provided a textbook on what works on Twitter, what doesn’t and how the site is changing for businesses looking to use social media for marketing.

Choose Your Hashtags Carefully

Part of the problem was a poor use of hashtags. Software retailer Nothing But Software invited twitterers to simply include the hashtag #NBS in their tweets in order to stand a chance of winning. That hashtag though could have stood for anything. It was short enough to be added to any tweet, even one on unrelated topics, but not interesting enough to encourage readers to find out what it meant. It looked like a technical tag for people in the know rather than a fun theme that others would want to join. Had the tags reached the trending topics list, the company might have been able to cash in on some useful publicity. But it didn’t, and considering that even #moonfruit had mysteriously disappeared from the trending topics list, it was always unlikely to do so.

Hashtags might look like convenient ways for giveaway software to pull out winners but they’re also the main marketing message that users will be distributing, remembering and seeing. It needs to be a catchword that creates curiosity and looks fun, rather than a group of initials with no obvious meaning.

It wasn’t just careless hashtag choices that caused the iPad giveaways to fail though. They also lacked momentum. Giving away one giant prize every day for ten days meant that people whose tweets weren’t chosen on the first day felt that they were still in with a chance. Seeing someone else win each day showed that people were receiving their prizes — and that if those lucky winners could win, they could too. A lottery that can point to previous and current winners will always find it easier to continue attract players. It’s the near miss as much as the win that keeps gamblers coming back.

While a series of giveaways is always likely to be more expensive than a single offer of a solitary prize, however big, there are ways to keep a giveaway rolling without breaking the bank. Starting with small but valuable prizes such as iPod nanos or free consultations that lead up to the big prize can help to build interest and prove to followers that your timeline is serious about passing out the freebies. iPads aren’t cheap but handing out five over five days would have made for a $2,500 promotion. That’s an amount that shouldn’t take too long to earn back depending on the company .

Deliver What You Promise

Some of Moonfruit’s copycats didn’t learn from experience in the same way that Moonfruit did. The Internet company wasn’t the first to orchestrate a giveaway. It was preceded by Squarespace, a direct competitor, which had promised to give away thirty iPhones in thirty days. Like Moonfruit, they too reached the trending topics list but the handouts didn’t happen. Instead of receiving shiny new phones, winners were given less shiny gift cards — nice, but not the same thing and nowhere near as exciting. There’s a reason that people prefer gifts on their birthday rather than gift cards, even though the cards are more versatile. Specialist blog iPad Insider made an even worse error by promising to give away a 32GB iPad on April 2. By mid-May, there was still no sign of a happy winner. Promising to give away a product but not actually doing so might make for the cheapest way to attract attention but it’s also the quickest way to ensure that the company has no trust after the competition ends.

It’s unlikely though that iPad Insider intended to keep its iPad to itself. It’s more likely that the publishers looked at the number of new followers the promotion was providing, calculated how much they were paying for each and decided that they were too expensive. With little more than 1,600 followers altogether, the site could have been paying as much as 37.5 cents each if all the followers were new. Assuming the site had an advertising clickthrough rate of 3 percent, those new followers would need to click ads that paid $12.50 to make the promotion worthwhile. It probably looked cheaper for the site to sully its reputation among the relatively few people who noticed the promotion than wait for the ad revenue to pay for it.

That might suggest that expensive giveaways on Twitter should be restricted to companies with expensive enough products to recoup the expense. Moonfruit started its campaign with around 750 followers. The numbers rose to 47,000 followers before dropping back to just over 21,000 but its traffic increased by a factor of eight. With prices that range from $4.49 per month to $23.99 per month, it had a much higher chance of recouping the roughly $15,000-$20,000 the company would have spent on the promotion.

It would be tempting to say then that the rules have become clear — make the prizes desirable; make the hashtags interesting; create a series of giveaways rather than one big prize; ensure the cost of the promotion matches the value of returns — but it’s possible that giveaways have had their day on Twitter. When everyone is giving away an iPad, the opportunity doesn’t look special. And when users know that they can create a new timeline without followers and use it for hashtag promotion tweets without bothering anyone, the benefits to companies are minimal. The biggest loser of Twitter-based promotions may be Twitter-based promotions themselves.

You’d have thought that turning the world’s neatest smartphone into a million-dollar whoopee cushion would have been enough for iPhone developers. Not a bit of it. While some coders have been busy creating games that mimic air traffic control, recreating Microsoft Word on a tiny screen or turning an iPhone into a race track, others have been thinking up some of the most bizarre things it’s possible to do with a mobile phone.

Here are five of the strangest:

iLickit Licks the Competition

One of the things that has made the iPhone so special is the way that users interact with it. A touch screen combined with an accelerometer means that you can operate the device with just fingers and wrists. For Halihow, the makers of iLickit, however, that’s not enough. They think that iPhone users should show their appreciation for the iPhone’s flexibility by operating it with their tongues.

The game pulls up a picture of a food item which players must then lick away in the fastest time possible. Commenting on a review which suggested that playing might not be very sanitary, the company’s blog suggested wrapping it with kitchen foil or cleaning it with an alcoholic wipe. It certainly sounds like alcohol was an integral part of the development process.

iLickit is billed as “the first ever game on the iPhone… for your tongue.” It would be nice to think it’s the last but with 60,000 downloads in three days, we might not be so lucky.

Flychat’s Flies Make Very Small Carrier Pigeons

If iLickit has any admirable creative element it’s the way in which the developers have tried to come up with an unusual way of operating the iPhone. “Everyone uses their fingers,” they must have thought. “What else can they use?” If they had come up with a better answer, their creativity might have been a bit more laudable. FlyChat does something similar to create a text-based version of a social media service that’s a cross between Twitter and ChatRoulette. Type a message, tag or theme it, and attach it to a fly. The fly will then buzz off to someone else’s app, delivering the message to a complete stranger.

That’s two odd elements in one. On the one hand, why would anyone want to send a message to a complete stranger — or read one sent by a complete stranger? And why would they want to attach the message to a fly? What was wrong with carrier pigeons? Or how about dogs? Flies aren’t the cutest messengers in the world and they’re more likely to carry disease than something you’d want to interact with.

And yet millions of people do read messages written by strangers on Twitter every day and flies do get everywhere. Even it seems into your mobile phone.

Holy Cow, That’s a Strange Idea!

FlyChat might be odd but it has the distinction of being complex. The developers have had to come up with categories, think of a way to send the messages to other phones and display them. And someone had to come up with the fly idea too. Programmer Andrew Kaluzniacki doesn’t appear to have given himself too much of a headache thinking of features for his iPhone app. Holy Cow displays a picture of a cow. Touch the screen, and the cow moos. That’s it. No chickens, no goats, not even a picture of a field. You get one cow and one moo (although there are no limits to the number of times you can play that moo.)

It would be nice to say that a moo was the worst sound you can get out of your iPhone, but there are, of course, the fart apps. At least the cow only moos.

Quick, Go Pee!

Not all strange ideas are bad though. RunPee is odd, but it’s a very good idea. The free service, based on a website, lets cinemagoers search for the film they’re about to watch. The app then tells them the best time to  nip out for a quick break without missing anything important. They’re told the cue, advised on how long they’ve got and can even read a synopsis of what they missed when they get back. And if they keep on drinking their gallon-sized buckets of soda, they can keep looking at their phone to learn the time of the next missable boring bit.

The next time a silhouette of someone’s head pops up while you’re watching your downloaded movie then, you can thank RunPee.

Help Ruben and Lullaby Stay Together

Other strange ideas are less useful but they do at least have the distinction of being beautiful. Opertoon’s Ruben and Lullaby is a kind of love story with an ending defined by the player. A couple are having a fight. Shake the iPhone and you can make one of the partners angry, forcing a reaction from the other. Stroke the screen, and you can calm them down. The images are made up of some neatly drawn graphics, turning the app into a kind of interactive comic strip with music that matches the mood of the characters.

As ideas go, this one couldn’t have come much odder. It would have been easier to see how the same concept could have been applied to a battle between a superhero and a supervillain: shake to land a blow; stroke to build up strength. Instead, we get the kind of relationship trouble that video gamers are more likely to turn to their iPhone to avoid.

And yet, the app itself is beautiful enough to be a winner, and who knows, it might even help some poor lover save his relationship — when he gets bored, puts down his phone and shows his partner some attention.

The app store is filled with racing games, fart machines, platform games and measuring devices. Many of them look roughly the same. It takes creativity to come up with a new idea, and even if not all of those ideas are useful, even the strangest can be their own source of new inspiration. Just steer clear of the cows.

One of the downsides to freelancing is the loose connection between buyers and suppliers. Finding a good replacement is never easy but for clients, freelancers are much easier to fire than permanent employees who have contracts and might demand compensation. Once you’ve managed to persuade a client to pay you for your work, you want to hold onto them — and you want to avoid these giant client killers that will soon have you pitching for new gigs.

1. Promising What You Can’t Deliver

The usual advice given for success in business is to underpromise and overdeliver. And the usual discovery of business owners is that when you underpromise you don’t get to deliver anything.

The problem though is that when you promise more than you can do, you only get to deliver once, and clients aren’t too keen on handing over the cash.

It’s a mistake that’s just too easy to make. You look at the specs, assume that you can do most of the tasks and tell yourself that you’ll either learn the rest or charge enough to outsource those elements you can’t do to someone who can.

But when the problems start, they quickly mount. It’s hard to gauge how long it will take to learn something you don’t know how to do, so the first symptom of being out of your depth will be a delay. The second symptom, and the one that will really kill off the relationship, will be amateur quality on delivery: if anyone could learn how to do the task in minimal time and get it spot on with no experience, the client would have done it himself.

The easiest solution is not to bid on projects you know you can’t do but to regard each spec as describing the skills you should be learning if you’re to dominate your niche. The real difficulty comes though, when it’s established clients who are asking you to do something that falls outside your skill sets. Saying no to someone who relies on you weakens their dependence — they now have to find someone else. But it’s still a better bet than committing and failing.

2. Disappearing from View

The result of promising what you can’t deliver will be a sinking feeling that this project is never going to get done. At that point, the temptation is to hide. Emails from the client asking for updates are stored for later, then ignored and never answered. When they’re not sure about the best way to explain a delay, some freelancers prefer to say nothing, hoping that if they can complete the project properly eventually, they’ll be able to repair any damage caused in the meantime.

It rarely works that way, especially when the product comes in substandard. At that point any forgiveness or polite requests for change are likely to be replaced by anger at being kept out of the loop about the difficulties as they came up.

It’s easy to disappear when you’re freelancing for a client at a distance but it’s smart business to stay in touch even when  things are difficult.

3. Disloyalty to the Firm

When you’re an employee, passing your resumé to a competitor would be grounds for instant dismissal — or at least a quick search for a replacement and then instant dismissal. Freelancers  have a little more freedom than that. Clients assume that they’re working for others and possibly even for competitors, but they also assume confidentiality. Sometimes, they’ll even nail that trust down with a non-disclosure agreement. So while you should be free to work with another business in the same field, you’re not free to share the information  you learn working for other people — however much you think the client might love you for the gossip.

When a current client hears you’ve been talking behind their back, you can be sure it won’t be long before they’re giving you a kick in the rear.

That’s a problem because professional small talk can help to cement relationships between a client and a freelancer who rarely meet in person. One solution then is to share either old stories about related businesses or anecdotes about non-competitive fields. So a programmer working for two security companies might talk about the work he did as an in-house programmer before he went freelance and he could also discuss the work he does for a law firm on a very different kind of program. Those stories might still contain lessons that could benefit the client but if they’re not sharing any confidential information , they won’t cost you the trust of an established buyer.

4. Disturbing the Peace

Good clients always say that if you have any questions they’ll be happy to answer them. And good freelancers always know their stuff well enough to rarely do it.

This goes to the heart of the reason the client is hiring a freelancer in the first place: they want to offload the project onto someone else so that they can concentrate on doing something else. If you’re constantly sending them emails or calling them up to ask questions, you’re taking up time that they could have spent doing the work themselves.

That doesn’t mean you should never ask a client questions. It’s better to check than to get something wrong, and it’s better to stay in touch than to disappear. But it’s best of all to get all of the information you need right at the beginning of the project so that you can work on the project undisturbed —and without disturbing the client either.

Freelancing, by its nature, is a precarious way of making a living. You need multiple revenue streams and multiple clients. But most important of all, you need the skill, the talent and the reliability to hold onto the clients you’ve got.

On the other hand, freelancers might be easy to fire but they’re not very easy to replace and for the client there’s no guarantee that their next choice won’t bring out one of these giant client killers too.

Photography: Samikki

You can find them in every café that has a wireless connection. Hunched over their keyboards, today’s digital nomads have managed to turn every coffee bar into an office and every table with more than one chair into a meeting room. But while they might all be typing in similar places, café workers come in a  number of different flavors. Here are the seven types of café worker you can expect to find in your local latte bar:

1. The Networker

The Networker wants to be friends with everyone. He (or she) will see everyone else with a keyboard as a potential contact and every other café-worker as someone who can help them find a new client, a new partner — or even a proper job. So they’ll smile and be friendly, introduce themselves and chat — and do it all when you’re keenest to get down to work.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for an introduction or want to know what the Geek in the corner does, then the Networker is the person to know.

2. The Nomad

The Nomad is always on the move. She (or he) will turn up, drop their bag, open their laptop and disappear. The computer will sit on the table, humming away but they’ll be nowhere to be seen. After a few hours, they’ll return and either pack up their bag or have a swipe at the mousepad to bring the computer back to life before vanishing again.

It’s as though they expect the computer to do the work for them while they enjoy the day, which — if it were true — would mean that we’d have to call them “The Genius.”

If you’re really lucky, you might even come across the Indebted Nomad. A Nomad sub-species, these don’t just leave their computers on the desk, they also ask other people to watch them. You’re then left wondering whether you’re responsible if someone steals it while you’re getting a refill and find yourself feeling your sense of responsibility battle against your bladder.

3. The Hog

The Nomad takes up one spot on a table and one electricity socket but for the Hog, an entire café isn’t big enough. They’ll take a table for four, even when a table for two is available, plug every gadget ever made by Apple into all of the electricity sockets (before trailing the wire for their laptop halfway across the café), and regard other seats as coatstands, bag racks and additional desks. Most frequently found in Starbucks, where busy baristas are less likely to move them on, Hogs are famous for the dirty looks they give when you ask them very nicely if they wouldn’t mind terribly letting you plug your laptop into a socket before it dies.

The answer is usually, yes, they would mind. Their supercharged iPod Nano is more important.

4. The Socialite

For most café workers, their biggest friend is their laptop — and they don’t need anyone else. If they want conversation, there’s Twitter or, if they’re really desperate, they can ask the waiter for another drink. But when you’re serious about work, you want to keep the word stuff to a minimum.

The Socialite disagrees. For this brand of café dweller, watering holes are places not just to work but to meet, chat and sometimes to meet and chat about work. So while you’re trying to focus on your screen, at the next table four people are planning global corporate domination, sketching out their new development or watching a presentation.

They even have the cheek to give you dirty looks if you try to listen.

5. The Talker

Socialites chatting up a storm at the next table are annoying enough, whether they’re talking business or pleasure. Talkers though are far worse. These café citizens travel alone but are connected to the rest of the world through their mobile phones — which are almost permanently attached to their ears. As soon as a conversation ends and the phone hits the table, it immediately rings again, giving the rest of the café a chance to hear once again their very impressive Lady Gaga ringtone.

It’s not so much that the talk that can be so irritating to other café workers, it’s that they only provide half the conversation. Following a meeting organized by socialites can be interesting. You get to feel like you’re gatecrashing someone else’s board meeting. Trying to listen in on a conversation that only gives you one half of the chat however, is an exercise in frustration. And distraction.

6. The Moaner

One of the trickiest things about working in a café is finding the right café. Some places are filled with shoppers and tired children — you don’t want to try to work over the sound of gossip and screaming. Others are packed with students cramming for exams. They’re usually the worst kinds of Hogs, Talkers and Socialites. The key is to find a café that’s quiet enough to work, where you’ll be generally ignored, and which has enough power points for you not to have to fight someone for electricity.

Some café workers though ignore the search, pick the first café they see and try to change it — by complaining constantly. Moaners ask for the music to be turned down, the air conditioning turned up, the door left open, then closed. They’ll send back their coffee and say the croissant is too cold, ask the children at the next table to keep it down a bit and frighten the daylights out of the waiters. It makes for fun watching but not the best office mate.

7. The Geek

But the worst type of café worker by far is the Geek. Their fingers never leave the keyboard, their screen never flits back to the delights and temptations of the Internet. They’re focused on their work and they’re getting things done. Absolutely undistractable, they’re the superheroes of the café-working world — the people who come to a café and actually work.

Other types of café worker will try to console themselves by telling themselves that the Geek must be on a very tight deadline or that he doesn’t have any kind of home office — or even a home — but the fact, is the Geek is just the kind of focused, driven worker who achieves things, even when working alone in a café.

On the plus side, if they’re alone it’s probably because no one like geeks.

Twitter always had a strange business plan. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have had any business plan or development plan, let alone revenue model at all. The service was created after a brainstorming session when Odeo workers Biz Stone, Even Williams and Jack Dorsey found themselves lacking passion about the service they working on. The infrastructure was built in two weeks and used initially as an internal messaging system before exploding at the 2007 SxSW festival.

Throughout Twitter’s growth since then, the policy has always been to build and watch what happens. The initial idea might have been Jack Dorsey’s but the way the service works in practice has been the result of users reinventing it, figuring out strategies and deciding the sorts of messages that help to build their communities, gather followers, and — if they’re commercial users — push their brand. From hashtag chats, in which twitterers can discuss a topic in real time, to Twitter’s giant suite of third party add-ons, much of the way that Twitter is used has been created by twitterers themselves. When an idea has come from within Twitter and delivered from the top down, such as lists, users have often reacted by questioning its purpose — and ignoring it. Twitter might well be the first genuinely crowdsourced social media site.

That makes introducing a revenue model all the more difficult. Unlike add-ons that allow for multiple account management, hashtag chatting and keyword alerts, developers aren’t going to create a system that allows Twitter to make money. Biz Stone and Evan Williams have to do that themselves — and hope that users like it.

Twitter Handles 600 Million Search Queries a Day

The launch of ads in search results then, announced a couple of weeks ago, marks a difficult moment for the company as it tries to figure out how to make money from the 55 million tweets that pass through the system every day. Users may understand that Twitter needs to generate income but there’s no way of knowing how they’ll react to sponsored tweets appearing at the top of search results.

Twitter has done its best to increase the chances that users won’t find the ads intrusive. The messages have to be natural tweets that are part of Twitter’s ecosystem, they  have to show interaction if they’re to continue to appear, and they’re currently only being served by a handful of selected brands. Those limits may help Twitter’s community to accept the presence of ads on the site without finding them too commercial.

Most interesting though is the fact that the ads are currently only served in search results.

According to an announcement made at Chirp, the Twitter developers conference held in mid-April, Twitter’s search engine conducts some 600 million search queries every day. That’s a remarkable number that, if true, would place Twitter second only to Google as the Web’s most popular search engine. Yahoo, in third place, generates around 9.4 billion searches every month to Twitter’s 19 billion.

And yet, Twitter’s search engine is weak, difficult to use and not a natural place to find information on any topic. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand dug a little deeper and found that those search queries aren’t the same as the type generated on Google or Yahoo. Most, he discovered, took the form of automated alerts and widgets placed in Web pages whose API calls are recorded as search queries. The percentage of searches actually conducted by users through Twitter’s search engine — where the ads will show — is in the “low double-digits.”

Looking for Britney Spears on Twitter

And when people do search on Twitter, the kinds of searches they’re conducting aren’t the type that are most likely to attract advertisers. In April 2009, Hitwise found the most popular topic looked for on Twitter was entertainment, which made up 29 percent of the top 75 searches. It’s no surprise that “Starbucks” and “Virgin America,” two of the keyword phrases that now generate ads, showed no sign of making the top 75 that month (or apparently any month).

As Dallas Lawrence of Levick Strategic Communications argued on Mashable, companies looking to advance themselves through Twitter can’t rely on paid advertising as a useful shortcut. Sponsored search placement alone won’t be enough to give a company a platform; firms will  still need to invest in accumulating social capital through regular tweeting, communicating and chatting on Twitter if they’re going to spread their brand through social media. That’s especially true when the ads are only shown to that low percentage of users who happen to search on Twitter — and the even smaller percentage who happen to search for the company’s brand.

Clearly then, Twitter’s new advertising model is going to have a limited use as it stands. To make real money for Twitter — and to generate real exposure for advertisers — the sponsored placements are going to have to appear in timelines and not just in search results. It might be nice too if they then generated income for the twitterers and not just for Twitter and the development companies on whose products the ads will one day appear.

The most important lesson to take away from Twitter’s first foray into creating a meaningful revenue platform then isn’t what they’ve done — which is likely to change — but how they’ve done it. Like the system itself, Twitter has started small, tossing an idea out there to test the reaction and see what happens. If the ads generate interaction and if users don’t find them too obtrusive, they’ll be rolled out across the network and opened to other advertisers. By taking their time and giving an opportunity to Twitter’s users to pick up the ads and play with them, Twitter is increasing the chances that they’ll come out with a product that will work, rather than launching a system that will fail (as Facebook embarrassingly did with Beacon).

Twitter might have an unusual attitude towards a business model and a unique bottom-up approach to development but as a way of creating a growing business with a strong foundation, it’s a model that other companies might well want to copy.