There was lots going on this week so lots of inspiration for blog posts. Here’s a recap of my writing:
- Why Some People Should be Twitter-Free
- Don’t Abandon Your Blog for Tumblr
- What Does 10,000 Tweets Mean?
- HootSuite: Canada’s Biggest Web Success Story?
- Why Wasn’t BackType Funded in Canada?
For those of us who work in the Canadian social media and startup circles, there was some celebrating earlier this week when BackType announced it had been sold to Twitter.
Lots of credits goes to founders Christopher Golda and Mike Montano, who have made BackType one of the leading services to track and analyze social media activity.
Without raining on the BackType parade, a question that begs to be asked is whether BackType should have been funded in Canada as opposed to the U.S.
To provide some background, Golda and Montano were electrical engineering graduates from the University of Toronto, who showed their entrepreneurial chops by starting a service called iPartee. While the business didn’t succeed, Golda and Montano proceeded to start BackType in 2008 as a way to search for blog comments.
To jump-start the business, they applied and were accepted into Paul Graham’s YCombinator startup program in Silicon Valley, which coughed up $15,000 for a 6% in BackType. This let Golda and Montano create a prototype they could pitch to investors. Over the next three years, BackType raised $1.3-million and expanded into Twitter search.
In hindsight, BackType is a big fish that got away from Canadian investors. I would hazard to guess that in 2008 getting seed capital from Canadian investors was a remote possibility for Golda and Montano, which is likely one of the reasons they applied for the YCombinator program.
The question is whether BackType would get funded today in Canada. It appears the seed and startup investment landscape has changed with the emergence of new funds such as Real Ventures. Meanwhile, there has been a growing number of startup acquisitions, which should bolster the confidence of investors and entrepreneurs.
Do Canadian investors now have the ability and willingness to finance smart entrepreneurs with ideas? Or do Canadian investors still need to see traction such as a finished product, customers or revenue?
For more on the BackType story, check out this TechVibes story.
You know what’s strange about Hootsuite’s success? It’s how muted the enthusiasm has been in Canada.
Sure, a lot of people recognize that Hootsuite is a leading service to use Twitter and other social media services but it’s not like people are falling over themselves to thrust the Vancouver-based company into the spotlight.
Maybe that will change after Hootsuite said earlier this week that it now has two million users, many of them people happy to pay a monthly subscription fee. Even more impressive is the number of Hootsuite users has doubled in the past few months.
Hootsuite’s modest profile – and I know some people will push back against this description – may have to do with the fact it hasn’t loudly blown its own horn. Instead, the company has steadily continued to move forward by adding new features and, of course, introducing a freemium business model that has been embraced by many users.
Hootsuite also “suffers” from the fact it has a group of low-key investors as opposed to high-profile VCs looking to show how savvy they were in their startup financing activities.
In a way, it is refreshing to see a company enjoying so much success seem to take it all in stride. I’m sure the company could be a lot more aggressive and self-promotional but that doesn’t appear to be its style.
For more on Hootsuite’s success, check out The Next Web.
I’m not sure how this ranks in terms of an “accomplishment” but I recently posted my 10,000th tweet on Twitter.
That works out to about eight tweets/day. If a tweet takes a minute to create, I’ve spent 160 hours creating content. Either that’s been a good investment in terms of personal branding and providing value to the community, or it’s been a lot of productive time wasted.
Given I’m so vested in social media as part of what I do for a living, I can only see 10,000 tweets as a solid investment. A necessary evil in offering social media consulting service is you have to walk the walk in addition to talking the talk. It is difficult to suggest a client commit themselves to Twitter if you’re not already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I do have to admit that cracking the 10,000 tweet barrier also provided more food for thought about the amount of time spent on social media. One of the key issues I’m trying to attack is how to become more focused and productive. For all the benefits of social media, it’s also a time and focus killer.
In many ways, social media is double-edged sword for me. I see it as valuable but, like many people, grapple with how and when to use it.
There’s an awful lot of excitement these days about Tumblr, which is now attracting 400 million pageviews/day and 8.4 billion pageviews/month. The buzz around Tumblr has been cranked up by people such as Steve Rubel, who recently decided to abandon his blogs to embrace Tumblr, calling it the “next great social network”.
But here’s the thing: Tumblr may be described as a micro-blog or a quasi-blog but it’s not a blog and, as a result, it shouldn’t been seen as a replacement for a blog.
Instead, Tumblr is a wonderful and valuable complement to a blog because it offers another way to publish and share content using a platform that is user-friendly and, of course, increasingly popular.
In my case, I’m using Tumblr to share content that isn’t quite right or not a good fit for my blog but, nevertheless, has some value or strikes me as interesting. As a result, it’s a place where I publish photos (a recent one featured a new Krispy Kreme Doughut Cafe), info-graphics about social media and the Web, and stuff on the Web I find interesting such as cool sign-up forms. I guess in a sense it’s a personal/professional life-stream platform.
Unlike Rubel, there is no way I would abandon my blog to exclusively use Tumblr. Here’s why:
1. When you use Tumblr, the content is posted on their platform so you don’t have complete control. On the other hand, a blog is personal or corporate asset that you can control, move, etc.
2. While Tumblr does provide a fair degree of flexibility, it doesn’t have the developer or design ecosystem that WordPress offers.
3. A blog can be tightly integrated into a Web site, providing a lot of SEO goodness that a standalone platform such as Tumblr.com can’t offer.
For thoughts on Tumblr vs. a blog, check out this post from Spin Sucks.
Just because Twitter has more than 200 million users doesn’t mean it’s a tool for everyone.
In fact, there are some people who just shouldn’t use Twitter because it gets them in hot water more than it helps them build a personal brand, promote a business, or provide valuable or interesting content.
A case in point is Toronto councillor John Parker, who seems to think Twitter is a platform to opine about “hot chicks”. Not that there is anything wrong with hot chicks or using Twitter to talk about hot chicks but not when you’re an elected official with a high profile.
Parker’s stumbles and bumbles on Twitter may be light-hearted but it clearly shows he has no clue about the inappropriateness of “hot chicks” tweets or the downside of Twitter given what gets said on Twitter goes way beyond Twitter.
Parker joins a long list of politicians, athletes and celebrities who should be told “Sorry, no Twitter for you”. It’s like giving the car keys to a teenager who proceeds to drive recklessly. At some point, you have to ask for the keys back.
The problem with Twitter it requires little or no thought to tweet. It plays right into our multi-tasking, impulse-purchase world. You think or do something, you instantly tweet it – damn the consequences, implications or fallout.
It explains why most tweets are value-less, inane or digital flotsam that would be left untweeted. I suggest there be a tweet-meter that measures the goofiness of tweets. If tweets fall before a certain level, you’re on probation. If the bad behaviour contents, you’re banned from Twitter.
Some people should stay away or walk away from Twitter to save themselves and protect the rest of us from their digital noise.
