Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: twitter

  • Valuing Twitter

    Valuing Twitter

    Now microblogging service Twitter has released documents ahead of a stock market float, it’s possible to start looking at the viability and stock market valuation of the company.

    When Facebook’s float was first mooted in early 2011, we looked at how the social media service stacked up against Google a decade earlier. The question was ‘is Facebook worth $50 billion?’

    The stockmarket answer was resounding ‘yes’ despite an initial fall that saw investors face a 50% loss in the early days of Facebook being a public company. Today the stock has a market valuation of $122 billion, with an eye popping price/earnings ratio of 122.

    So how does Twitter stack up at the valuations being discussed? Quite well it appears when we put it against Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

    Company Google Facebook LinkedIn Twitter
    Market Cap 288 123 27 13
    P/E 25 288 901 29

    For Twitter, the real challenge is making money from the service and their latest idea is marketing the service as an essential companion to watching TV.

    The discussion over how Twitter makes money exposes another problem for the service in it has no obvious revenue stream which makes comparing the platform to Facebook or LinkedIn rather problematic.

    Facebook has advertising while LinkedIn has premium subscriber services both of which are problematic.

    Not having an obvious revenue model may not turn out to be a problem – as LinkedIn’s P/E shows – and Twitter’s founders are probably more likely than anyway to be the digital media industry’s David Sarnoff.

    It may be Twitter makes its money from giving advertisers, marketers and others access to the massive stores of data the company is accumulating.

    Whatever way it turns out, Twitter’s going to be the hot IPO news for the tech industry for the rest of the year. At current prices, the investors will be lining up to buy the stock.

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  • Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

    Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

    “I’m not a very public person,” twenty-two year old Walter Woodman tells the New Yorker in How A Relationship Dies on Facebook.

    One of the assumptions of the social media industry is that digital natives, those born after 1990, have little if any expectations of privacy. The New Yorker story challenges that idea.

    Much of the New Yorker’s background is taken from the Pew Centre’s May 2013 report Teens, Social Media and Privacy which interviewed 802 US teens and their parents to identify young adults’ attitudes towards privacy.

    As the Pew Centre’s Mary Madden wrote in a follow up post to that report, US teenagers aren’t about to about to abandon Facebook yet but they are concerned about privacy and the work involved in managing an online persona.

    While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much.

    This suggests a far more mature, and complex, understanding of privacy by teenagers than many of the social media boosters assumed when declaring that privacy is irrelevant in the Facebook era.

    Like their parents, teenagers and young adults know there are consequences for sharing too much online which challenges the social media platforms that have built their businesses around users spilling everything about themselves into the big data pot.

    It turns out digital natives are just as conscious of the risks as their parents, although how they handle it may manifest in different ways, and the assumptions of many social media businesses aren’t quite as robust as they appeared not so long ago.

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  • I don’t get it

    I don’t get it

    “I don’t get Twitter or Facebook” says the talkback radio caller, “why would you want to tell the world what you’re having for dinner?”

    Once upon a time people didn’t get the motor car. There were many good reasons not to – compared to a horse a steam or petrol driven vehicle was expensive, unreliable and restricted in where it could go.

    The motor car ended up defining the 20th Century.

    Those who didn’t get it – like the stage coach lines and later the railway companies – eventually faded into irrelevance.

    Something we should remember though is that many of the entrepreneurs in the early days of the motor car who did “get it” went broke. As did those in earlier times building railways and canals.

    “Getting it” is one thing, but it doesn’t guarantee it will make you rich or guarantee your business’ survival.

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  • ABC Nightlife: Going Viral

    ABC Nightlife: Going Viral

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss technology, change and the online world on Thursday, March 22 from 10pm on ABC Local Radio.

    A podcast of the program can be downloaded from the ABC Nightlife page.

    Do you know who Kony is?  You probably know at least something about this Ugandan warlord thanks to a video about him that recently ‘went viral’.

    Tony and Paul will look at how and why videos go viral on the net – how does it start, and why do some capture the world’s attention when most don’t?

    Some of the questions we’ll look at include;

    • What is “going viral”?
    • How do videos go viral on the Internet?
    • Are these viral videos just marketing stunts?
    • Is it just videos that go viral on the internet?
    • Who sends these around the web?
    • How is the Stop Kony campaign different?
    • Is there a downside to going viral?

    An excellent presentation on what makes a video go viral on the internet from YouTube’s Kevin Allocca describes some of the factors involved.

    We’ll also be covering a number of other topics including;

    On the topic of Online Scams, reader James Voster recommends the Victorian government’s Consumer Affairs Page.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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  • Is Twitter’s censorship a good thing?

    Is Twitter’s censorship a good thing?

    Since Twitter announced they were going to start blocking messages on a country by country basis if required by the laws of that land they have received a lot of criticism.

    Most of this criticism of Twitter revolves around the belief that every message should only edited or deleted by the person who posted the tweet.

    Anything else a breach of free speech and a threat to the underlying principles of the internet.

    That utopian view of the Internet doesn’t translate into real life; the online world is as subject to laws as any other part of life and social media companies have to comply with the same laws as newspaper organisations or fast food chains.

    Regardless of what you think of those laws – and in many countries they certainly are unreasonable and oppressive – they do matter.

    Were Twitter not to comply then the entire service would be at least blocked in those countries and, should an action be enforced in a US court, then the tweet removed anyway for every user around the world.

    By introducing country specific blocking, the service can let the rest of the world see a tweet that would otherwise be lost and in countries with restrictive or authoritarian laws, local people can still use the service.

    A particularly clever way of dealing with removal requests is to note that the specific message has been blocked in a country. This adds a level of transparency and accountability to the actions of courts and governments that want to close the service.

    We can see that being particularly effective in jurisdictions like the UK where British judges have been quick to apply “superinjunctions” preventing the merest mention of something by anybody.

    Should Britain’s overeager judges start demanding Twitter block tweets, those in the UK will quickly realise something is amiss. The effect will probably be to increase the interest in the blocked tweets that can be seen anywhere around the world.

    Despite the utopian view that transparency and openess will solve the world’s problems, we don’t live in that world right now and people can – rightly or wrongly – ask that false, defamatory and damaging posts on the Internet can be removed.

    Interestingly Google this morning announced they will be introducing a similar system to deal with country specific problems on their blogger platform.

    Twitter’s handled this in the best way possible, in many ways this could be a step forward for social media and the Internet in general.

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