Get Satisfaction, Valuable Audience and TweetReach.com

Comment Highlights

Last week was a great week at Tippingpoint Labs. We had wonderful meetings and met some really neat people. We also had some great interactions at our website. We’re proud and impressed by the caliber of people interacting here. Thanks for making Tippingpoint’s blog so successful.

Here are a few of our highlights from the week:

Some props from Get Satisfaction

Early last week we released a comprehensive New Media Life Cycle Analysis about GetSatisfaction.com. We really enjoyed analyzing open, customer-centric customer service, and they noticed. Here’s what they had to say after the community manager read our report:

These Tippingpoing Labs people are incredibly awesome. Wrote a report about us. Free. PDF: http://bit.ly/bh1Wc
– Satisfaction (via Twitter)

We’re so glad they noticed (and read) our report.

His Audience Sucks

I wrote an article about measuring your audience’s value and determining where the most successful traffic comes from. Amelia, a frequent reader and commenter, wrote a great comment sharing some of her personal experiences with exactly this issue:

I have this problem with one of my customers. He wants to optimise for a very broad keyword that is not entirely relevant to his products but does bring a lot of traffic to his site. I suggested that we optimise for more relevant keywords and lo and behold he started to make more sales, even though his visitor numbers reduced. He isn’t happy about this. Some people are very hard to please …
– Amelia

By the way, Amelia’s company — Creare Communications – just released a great YouTube video called the SEO song.

The RSS Revolution

A couple of weeks ago Josh Cole wrote a great article about RSS and its ability to reach your audience on a regular basis. It’s still getting a lot of traffic. This week, one of the best comments echoed some of the issues some audiences may have if they are relying on RSS to reach the consumer audience.

Great article – now if I can just get my parents to join the RSS revolution!
– Dave from GoBackpacking.com

Dave’s right, popular adoption of RSS faces some real hurdles. If someone can just make RSS mainstream, maybe we’d get less spam.

What we’re reading

We use Posterous to keep track of what the entire Tippingpoint Labs team is consuming on the web. If you’d like to see everything, feel free to subscribe. Here are some of our picks from last week:

Microsites are Zombies — but iMediaConnection says they’re not

Philips razor micro site

Brett wrote a great article this week about the evolution of the microsite. Shortly after Brett posted this article, I got my daily e-mail from iMediaConnnection in which the subject line read: 10 mind-blowing microsites

No Pixie Dust — A Client’s Twitter Advice

Rob Sheard, the brand manager of one of our clients, Breville, wrote a great little article about how he views Twitter and its value in today’s marketing environment. Here’s a quick excerpt from his short post.

What is the secret to having great social buzz about your brand?  The same things that have always been important: An offering that exceeds the expectations of the consumer, A post purchase experience that makes them love your brand and want to do business with you again.

No magic pixie dust or secret Google spider enticing code, just nuts and bolts good business practices.

- Rob Sheard on Urbage.com

TweetReach The Numbers Behind Your Tweets

Someone in our office found this really neat tool that helps measure how far and wide your tweets travel. It’s called tweetreach.com and all you have to do is enter something unique from your tweet (a URL works great) and let the server do the work. Give it a shot.

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."