Disqus - Latest Comments for BobWarfield

Re: Learning Social Business From a Greasy Auto Mechanic

BobWarfield — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:49:35 -0000

The respect works in two ways.

First, being successful with Social Media is all about authenticity, honesty, and transparency when dealing with others. That's respect.

Second, when you show someone that respect via Social Media, others can see it. That's leverage.

It's a powerful combination.

Best,

Bob Warfield
Helpstream CEO

Re: Dell makes 0.0025% of its revenues from Twitter

BobWarfield — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:47:42 -0000

If you're going to slam them on the statistics, be careful how you turn that statistical Rubic's cube to support your own arguments, Prem.

There are a lot of ways to look at generating $3M from Twitter, but only a very few firm conclusions can be drawn from this little bit of data.

For example, we can conclude that Twitter isn't paying Dell's bills, only 0.0025% of them.

But we can't conclude that to pay the bills using Twitter requires 40,000 people just because one person is involved with this particular project. Why? Because the one person isn't manually Tweeting, they're driving automation (based on Radian6 as I understand it). That means they have the leverage to apply this more broadly if they come up with the ideas to do so.

At best what we have is a single advertising campaign that has produced $3M of incremental revenue.

Is that a good or bad campaign?

Well the way to look at that is not by headcount ratios, because as I said, it's a campaign that can be automated and leveraged. Rather, it should be looked at as cost ratios. How many dollars of cost to return how many dollars of revenue?

Dell's ratio there for the most recent quarter was that $1 of cost returns $6.76 of revenue. That's a pretty lucrative money machine, eh? So here we have essentially one person's compensation using some Twitter infrastructure built on Radian6 that they already had for other purposes generating $3M in revenue. How much can we afford to pay that person before we're dragging down the corporate ratios?

Looks like about $443K. What do you want to guess is the likelihood this person is making that much? Yep, me neither. So this is likely one of the more efficient campaigns they're running. What do you suppose is the likelihood they would like more like this one and will keep experimenting?

It's gotta be pretty good.

Cheers,

BW

Twitter may or may not (I'm in the very likely NOT category, LOL) be able to deliver some substantial portion of Dell revenue, but as a relatively cheap incremental ad campaign, it looks to me like it performs well.

Re: Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media

BobWarfield — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:30:15 -0000

Conventional media's value add was distribution (though they claim it was content). The web took that away. Curation is a reasonable new value add that works in the new media world.

More on my blog:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/what...

Cheers,

BW

Re: Amazon: Building the cloud

BobWarfield — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:01:39 -0000

"Amazon has gone ahead and done it."

I too much prefer this approach to all the hype that has surrounded Google and some others on their platforms. This is but one shot fired, but it is an important one. There's a lot more to come:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/to-r...