Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side of the equation. Reaching out to customers today also entails going where customers are and interacting with them where they are: social networks. In other words, you must interact with people your company does not already know because they haven’t already necessarily filled out a form on your site, chosen to get squeezed into giving their email address, or expressed that they “like” you.

Invite socializers to stretch their neck: Build up a base of followers. But you may not want to do this by blasting messages only about your company to people who didn’t especially care about you in the first place. Also send meaningful information showing that you care about them and that you are not simply company-centric. People do notice useful data and interesting messengers. Then, they feel like stretching their neck a little bit. Each time you send a message that includes a link (whether it leads to your company’s site or not), associate an ObjectiveMarketer landing page. Here is how it works:

• You write your message using ObjectiveMarketer;
• You choose the landing page you want to associate to your messages.

For example, at TWTRCON in San Francisco the other day, I sent this tweet:

When people clicked on it, here is what they could see: The page of the TWTRCON site I was referring to and a reminder of me, as the messenger, at the top of the page – the landing page- where my two latest posts are automatically displayed.

Think of the benefits for a company or a company division!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing page is:

• A frame of whatever size you like that accompanies the messages that you send.  You can create different types of frames depending on your campaigns.
• A stage where you can add information under any form: a link to your site, a video, a chat box, an image, coupons, a shopping cart, you name it!
• A Website on-demand on the fly. The department where you work may offer promotions at a faster pace than what the corporate Web development team can implement. So just tell your story through a dynamic landing page!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing pages present the capabilities of traditional lead capture pages and can be indifferently reference or transactional landing pages depending on how you decide to design those frames. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Just look at the wide set of features and designs offered by Marketing Hits, a Web Design, SEO, and Online Marketing company created by Brian Yanish, that also offers custom Objective Marketer landing pages: “MarketingHits custom landing pages are designed to leverage social media ROI by providing top of the page brand recognition and click-through,” Brian says. “In today’s fast-paced Twitter and Facebook world,” he adds, “brands need new ways to connect web content to their brand. Landing pages provide a unique opportunity to drive visitors to a company’s website sales or content pages – of course without violating the rights and the revenues of the site that is framed by that landing page.”

Marketing Hits has designed the landing pages of multiple companies.

Here, the agent tweets about a post from inman news.

When the user clicks on the link, he/she sees inman news but also has the opportunity to know more about the agency’s hot listings in the videos placed on the landing page.

It’s a win-win situation. A tweet brings traffic both on the site that is tweeted about and that of the messenger, who can increase his/her own traffic by 30%, and often much more.

Note: Traffic generated by an ObjectiveMarketer landing page is controlled by the user of ObjectiveMarketer, never by ObjectiveMarketer as a vendor – which makes OM’s landing pages completely different from the advertising banners implemented by technology vendors in exchange for free usage of their products. Disclosure: I am a board member of ObjectiveMarketer.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.

I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.

While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.

Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).

Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.

Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.

To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

(1) Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Mattersby Scott Rosenberg, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,by Shel Israel and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do busines by Erik Qualman are three books that I discussed in earlier posts. 

(2) http://www.ruderfinn.com/rfrelate/intent/intent-index.html

(3) More about ObjectiveMarketer. The product will be presented at BlogWorld on the Alltop booth (October 15-17, http://www.blogworldexpo.com)

“We invest in people…” is a phrase that entrepreneurs hear often from VCs and employees from corporations. What does it mean? Hard to know – or maybe, the actual content of the sentence depends on who is speaking.

OK, LinkedIn isn’t the whole spiel: For most people, you are your “background” and this “background” boils down to your résumé on LinkedIn. But a résumé is, by definition, limited: it is a summary. If Sergey Brin or Larry Page had sent a résumé to MSN, they would not have been asked to create the search engine of the future right away. Although they both had enrolled in the Stanford Ph.D. program, they were not “proven” yet. Who would have hired Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates in key positions? The history of these iconic figures reminds us that what most people call “background” is only the foreground, a few degrees and a work experience that jump out to hiring managers and most investors. The end result is what we know: multitudes with “relevant” degrees and tons of “great” recommendations populate companies — small or big – and more often than not, these perfect recruits can’t make much happen beside ensuring business as usual and maintaining the status quo.

We all know that a great employee (or great entrepreneur) is more than a résumé. It’s a human being with a real background, whether you understand the word “background” as the software that is not displayed but is silently operating in the head and the heart of that person, or as the overall implicit or explicit setting or scenery in which a person places himself/herself and the vibes he/she transmits. This part is the fuzzy aspect of interviews — for better or worse, for both the interviewees and the interviewers, no matter how streamlined the interview process in a company may be or how well the interviewee has prepared. But how can people convey who they really are? And how can people know more about you? This takes me to a poll that I recently offered mostly via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

What do you do if you are asked to bring up your Facebook page during an interview? After fumbling for a few minutes with the wording of my poll, here is what I finally offered: “A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page in an interview. What should she do: Agree; Refuse and see what he says; Ask why and then decide; Walk out of the interview?”

The idea of that poll came from a comment to a post by Renee Weisman, Keeping Your Online Identity Professional (http://www.womenco.com/benefits/articles/3608-keeping-your-online-identity-professional?page=1): “A friend just told me that at the interview, her hiring manager asked her to bring up her facebook page. He wanted to see the types of things she was posting as a way to judge whether she would fit in his organization!” 

Over 95% of the responses came through Twitter and the majority from the United States. After the first 100 votes, I noticed that percentages changed very little. Only a little under 12% of the respondents would immediately agree to bring up their Facebook page. I received multiple personal comments ranging from the right of having a privacy to the fact that our life is so much all over the Internet already that bringing up a Facebook doesn’t make that much of a difference. The poll was anonymous, but based on direct remarks, it is clear that people in their early twenties are the most open. One said: “Anyway, what 99% of people have on their Facebook is what 99% of the rest of the population also has. We have tons of pictures. It’s well known that other folks’ pictures are downright boring. So any hiring manager may be quickly bored as he/she goes through our galleries.” Another said. “My response would be ’sure.’ Can you bring your page too? You want to know whom you will hire, and I want to know more about who is hiring me and for whom I’ll work.”

The fact that over 50% say that they would “ask why and then decide” (they may end up agreeing for fear of losing a job opportunity in a tight job market), that over 25% would refuse and see what the hiring manager says, and that almost 8% would walk out of the interview is all the more striking as employers increasingly screen employees’ Facebook and MySpace pages: “Forty-five percent of employers reported in a recent CareerBuilder survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, a big jump from 22 percent last year. Another 11 percent plan to start using social networking sites for screening. More than 2,600 hiring managers participated in the survey, which was completed in June 2009.[1]“

My poll may not be “scientific, but if it is relevant, it’s clear that there could be a real discrepancy between the workforce’s state of mind and the companies’ hiring practices. If people feel forced to comply with corporate practices they do not like from the get-go, they might join companies only because they need a salary, not because they are sincerely motivated by the job – and strengthen a dangerous trend identified a few years ago showing that “less than half of Americans (47%) are satisfied with their jobs, according to a 2006 survey of 5,000 households (2006 survey of 5,000 households released by the Conference Board.[2] ” Economic recoveries are not simply a financial story: employees’ enthusiasm also counts.

Additional information in the CareerBuilder survey may add to people’s reluctance about bringing up their Facebook page: While ”Thirty-five percent of employers indicated that they did find information that caused them not to hire the candidate,” only “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.” So, screening Facebook and MySpace pages appears to be primarily a way to exclude people. While it’s obvious that an employer will not want to hire people whose Facecebook and MySpace profiles  display inappropriate pictures, drinking, drug use, or badmouthing a previous employer, personal profiles do not seem to have a huge positive influence.

The advice of many career specialists is to encourage people to maintain a squeaky clean “professional” identity. Great, but this raises other questions, such as:

- Should your Facebook profile be a copy of your Linkedin profile with just a very slight personal touch? What is a “professional” family picture? How do you tell your friends to always make sure that they only take “professional” pictures of you?

- What is “unprofessional” besides a few obvious no-nos? Could the word “unprofessional” become a tote bag for all the things that a hiring manager doesn’t like about a candidate – and may say more about a hiring manager’s potential blinkers, culture, personal tastes,or ideology than about the candidate himself/herself? 

A few people asked me why my question was gender specific (A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page). In the poll, I did not ask respondents to indicate if they were men or women (maybe I should have). My response was that it was a real case. So think of this for example: A hiring manager cannot ask a woman if she has children, but can see it on her Facebook and can apply a still very common prejudice that this woman may not be entirely dedicated to her work. While it has become harder to openly discriminate, is it getting easier to do so tacitly?

Social media give a voice to a lot of new people – that’s obvious. Being in the Silicon Valley, I would have responded “Yes” with no hesitation to my own poll. Looking at the results, I had to think of the fact that the virtual world may also become a reproduction of the real world – eventually strengthen its shortcomings, its prejudice, but this time, under cover.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The Art of Laconic Marketing: Weigh your Words before and when you say them: Social Media Marketing is not the simple addition of three words Marketing + Media + Social. Marketing and Media Marketing are the art of pushing messages to an audience. It’s a primarily a top-down approach. Social Media Marketing is a more complex game: You start from your message, sure, but real-time interaction does not simply require that you know “about” your “target,” but that you also listen to people (more precisely a collection of individuals) and improve your understanding of them immediately and, eventually, fine-tune the way you address them — and this, in real-time.

And you have 140 characters to do that! You can’t be “conversational” per se. You have to be concise – but not sloganish or buzzwordy, because you will turn off your followers. You have to be laconic like a Spartan, i.e. terse (sometimes witty) and provide an url. Now how can you prepare for message effectiveness and measure the exact impact and performance of your messages in real time, know what works, why, how, and how to optimally schedule your tweets? You need a completely new type of dashboard, an intelligent listening machine that guides your decisions — a control tower of sorts for your campaigns. The core value of ObjectiveMarketer is to provide guidance and analytics for your campaigns.

While Internet marketing focuses on getting visibility in general, effective social marketing focuses on message transportability and repeatability. The purpose is to scale a grassroots marketing approach, i.e. foster the storytellers that will feel like communicating your message to their friends/followers — retweet them — within their various neighborhoods, as well as to understand the actual efficiency of the levers. ObjectiveMarketer provides the statistics, the trends and comparisons across campaigns and channels, i.e. the social insight that enables campaign designers to assess the quality of their messages and the actual impact of their amplifiers. Subtle and thorough measurement is the only way to ensure wide reach.   

More about Amita: Amita is passionate about her product. For a good reason: I believe that there is no similar product today. She launched the private beta and her first users are thrilled. They also like this: she listens to their suggestions and understands what they say right away, because she is both a techie and a sharp marketing brain. As a result, when you suggest a feature, you can see that she is already cogitating on how to best implement it. She is a fast speaker and a fast thinker who grasps that, in marketing, “facts, not speculations and assumptions derived from trends or impressions, are key to success. I love marketing,” she adds. “In my career, I have often felt bad for marketing folks. They never seem to have the right tools to make informed decisions. They have lots of out-and-out marketing applications for brand awareness, promotional offers, and various other programs, but nothing that helps them before something has taken place. In the real-time and personalized engagement economy fostered by social media, they need a platform to pre-empt, strategize and execute — and the ability to gauge results.” 

Amita came to this country at the end of 2005 and worked as a product manager first at StrongMail Systems and then at H5 (http://www.h5.com). She loved every minute of it, demonstrated how skilled and efficient she was — eager as she was to show the high quality of her training in India. She got her Masters in Computer Sciences from the Engineering College in Raipur, which enabled her to work as an analyst at Computer Science Corporation and Seacom Solutions – and then, she went for her MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur (http://xlri.com). The more she learned at school or in companies, the more she wanted to become an entrepreneur. She is definitely jumping in with the right product at the right time. She works around the clock with her team here and in India. So, I couldn’t help asking if it was hard for her to juggle work and family, knowing that she has a six-month old daughter, Eisha: “Not in the least,” she responded with her bright trustworthy smile. “My baby is a breath of fresh air and my husband is very supportive.” Amita’s husband, Shekhar Yadav, who recently graduated with joint MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, works as Director Technology at StrongMail Systems.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of the matter is Twitter is still very new – and significantly enough, TWTRCON SF09 that took place on May 31, 2009, was the first conference focusing on Twitter as a business tool for marketing, customer service, PR, or to make money. Quite a few companies explained how they already use Twitter today. The conference was very well organized, very well attended and had great speakers and panelists. Here are some of the highlights for me (for a more complete survey, you may want to check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TWTRCON).

Operation Smile: Let’s start with a NPO. A great sign (albeit rare) is when a business conference starts with an inaugural party to help a humanitarian cause and provides updates on the money raised throughout the day. Presented as a live case study of a twitter-centric marketing initiative, Operation Smile launched a Twitter 140 Smiles with the goal of raising money to help fund 140 reconstructive surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities, including cleft lips and cleft palates. Check out http://www.140smiles.org and http://twitter.com/operationsmile! Twitter is not just an American thing! It helps change the life of people thousands miles away from the Silicon Valley.

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen). 

Great speakers: The main characteristic of the major individual speakers was their authentic spontaneity.  

Laura Fitton started with a pre-conference keynote, Twitter for Business 101. The first time I heard about Laura Fitton was when I read Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . In less than two years, she has become a real social media guru (although she views herself more as a “Twitter student” than an expert), and her company, Pistachio Consulting (http://pistachioconsulting.com) focuses on ways to connect businesses to new ideas and innovations using microsharing platforms. So, find the right followers, leverage this huge opportunity to connect to customers, and integrate Twitter into your operations – just as Salesforce is integrating Twitter. Her book Twitter For Dummies  (coauthored with Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston, to be published in July) will certainly convince even the most skeptical.

Twitlebrity is not the point. Efficiency is. Guy Kawasaki is a most famous twitterer, not for the sake of fame, but for business. His interview by Gina Smith was a great moment of humor and honesty. “I’m not on Twitter to make friends,” he acknowledged unambiguously, “but to promote Alltop.” View this as spam (but, you willingly subscribed!) but do not forget that Spam is a delicacy for Hawaiians. And what is perceived as ghostwriting by twittering lone-riders is teamwork potency in business. We knew that already: Kawasaki is no macho. His team: four women who have real names and are real people.

Shel Israel announced his future book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, to be published in September. His speech featured the stories of like-minded people, who assemble through Twitter, build personal global neighborhoods – in other words, a diverse Twitterville population, ranging from business folks to Janis Krums, who sent an image of the US Airways plane moments after it plunged landed on the Hudson River. “If the Pulitzer judges don’t consider an iPhone photo next year,” he comments, “I’ll eat my hat.”

The last individual speaker was Steve Rubel. He created a life chart using Mind Note, a mind mapping program, of where Twitter stands in the industry ecosystem and the directions the product might possibly take as a social OS that enables to a site to make social or a marketing OS. The diagram, inspired by Brian Solis’s Twitterverse, is now published at http://www.micropersuasion.com. Here below is a zoomable version of it:

Steve Rubel was definitely more exciting than the conversation with Anamitra Banerji, from the Twitter Product Management team, who rehashed that Twitter’s corporate motto is “We don’t know” for about 30 minutes. I truly wondered if I was watching the Silicon Valley aesthetization of cluelessness, a repeat of the “no-business model” snobbishness of the Internet bubble – only adapted to social media, or the elaborate staging of a revolution-to-come. Strange when there were a number of companies eager to discuss the viability of Twitter for their businesses.

Great panelists: The various representatives from large corporations were significantly more eloquent and enthusiastic about Twitter than the Twitter representative that appeared. What some of them do is already quite remarkable. Virgin America, Intuit, Phoenix Suns, PR Newswire, Boingo Wireless, Well Fargo, Comcast, Carl’s Jr,. Kogi BBQ, Dell Outlet, eBay, Cisco, and FutureWorks see Twitter as a platform: companies can strengthen their brand by engaging with their customers in real time, inform and support them better, create user communities, and generate more revenue. In doing so, each of them insisted on the necessity of defining clear strategies and measure actual results using different methodologies and various products (Radian6 was the most frequently mentioned), define rules of engagement and ways to personalize their brands, and eventually manage potential liabilities (while taking into account that the Twitter universe already has its own codes of conduct and is in many respects governed by its members — as is the case for most social tools). Even though many of these efforts are still at a fairly early stage, it is obvious to them that Twitter has the potential to drive real business, as was clear from the remarks of Stefanie Nelson at Dell, or Beth Mansfield, from Carl’s Jr. Beth has a real strategy on when is best time to tweet (the tweetspot), and she made a few people smile when she described herself as “a chubby 42-year-old wife and mother” interacting with her followers, “18-35 young hungry males.”

They are also all aware that “Twitter is dramatically changing the era of top-down management of corporate communications in real time,” as Brian Solis said at some point, and that if Twitter is a great environment to turn customers into evangelists, it also enables them to scream when they are unhappy — which turns out not to be such a big deal, as it enables marketing to better escalade problems and solve them faster. Forward-looking companies understand that the era of hidden dirty secrets is over, anyway. With platforms such as Twitter, customer-centricity is more than the one-to-one deal of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s a public commitment in a world that has morphed into a public tribunal: When a first class passenger on Virgin writes a tweet to say that he is hungry, you have to feed him!

Most of these companies are also looking at leveraging Twitter within a global social media perspective and working at the its integration with not only their Web sites using products such as Hootsuite, but their overall operations and IT environment. (We can only hope that Twitter will be able to hire the right folks to address their reliability and availability problems).

On the lighter business use side, “Your Brand is a Person,” I can’t help mentioning MC Hammer on the stage with Stefanie Michaels (http://www.adventuregirl.com). While agents try shield to shield entertainers and athletes and build their mystery persona, the life of celebrities is so exposed in the media and sometimes beyond recognition, that MC Hammer doesn’t see the risk he tales. “There was socializing before there was a platform,” MC Hammer said plainly; “embarrassing yourself on Twitter is not a new risk.”

Let’s Cut to the Chase: This was the title of the last topic of the day. The Twitter concept is here to last one way or the other. How big will Twitter is going to be? That’s everybody’s guess. I believe that Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/) could be quite right in assuming that the approach will turn into a universal protocol that will make it normal stuff. As far I am concerned, I tend to believe that the company’s somewhat complacent procrastination about defining its business model (even if it’s to find out the best practices nuggets, which is often absurd in a startup) may accelerate the commoditization of the concept. I hope this does not jeopardize the business prospects of the multiple — and often bootstrapped — companies that have created beautiful, interesting and useful products around Twitter. Here are some of the ones featured at the Conference: ObjectiveMarketer, PeopleBrowsr, UserVoice, ThumbFight, Jobaba.com, or Twitfunnel.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis ( http://twitter.com/mddelphis)