TechnoCloud

Enjoy Fake Steve Blog’s wonderfully cynical take on this here. Certainly Google and many others would beg to differ…

An article summary caught my eye in the BBC Technology feed this morning: “Thousands of pieces of rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags…”

A click on the piece revealed it was actually about tracking household rubbish. Call me cynical, but surely that summary could equally be applied to most of Twitter?

Don’t get me wrong, I do see value in Twitter as a tool, but struggle to use it on anything like a regular basis due to the constant noise even a small number of followers generates.

There are endless debates in the industry about how to measure social media ROI and indeed even if you can or should. However, these almost exclusively focus on off-site activity on social networks, e.g. what benefits are there from a Facebook page or a Twitter profile.

What is missing are credible statistics that cover on-site social media functionality.

There are a multitude of white label social networks all promising to add varying degrees of social media functionality to your site from simple commenting, all the way to building a quasi social network around your site’s content. The problem is that case studies on the effectiveness of these types of functionality are very thin on the ground.

Specifically, what impact on traffic, site loyalty, ad returns is there by adding the likes of a forum, commenting, profiles, reviews, rating…?

There is the difficult question of how you separate the rating or comment from the post itself. However, you can track before/after introductions of functionality; likewise, you can track the activity on a forum as a separate section of the site. So where are the case studies?

I’ve seen a range of client testimonials from white label social networks, but these by their nature are cherry-picked examples to showcase a service. What we need are credible case studies from sites themselves and from media measurement firms to really demonstrate the case for social media ROI, something that would benefit the industry as a whole in terms of take up of these services.

If these case studies are already out there, great, link to them in the comments. If not, it’s time to start creating them.

Spotify’s music streaming service is trialling its first audiobook, appropriately enough Chris Anderson’s much hyped ‘Free: the future of a radical price’. This is available to users in the UK only.

Spotify remain coy over whether this will become a business for them, but hint that a successful trial may lead to further additions to the catalogue: “This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue. We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…”

While Chris Anderson’s Free is by its subject matter an obvious candidate for ad-supported streaming, it will be interesting to see whether other publishers follow his lead. It does open up the question of whether Spotify will expand into other media, extending to podcasts or even video.

Like death and taxes, spam will always find a way.

And so it seems for Twitter whose problem with spam has grown in line with its popularity. On what is essentially an open communications platform, it is inevitable that the worst as well as the best facets of communication would find their place.

These take several forms, including:

1. Simple posting of spam links
2. Hacking of Twitter accounts to post said links
3. Fake profiles with official sounding names (e.g. Walmart offers) or even blatantly suggestive ones
4. Mass follows in the hope that others will reciprocate. Return to 1.

The last deserves its own paragraph for its sheer cheek. You receive a follow from a seemingly random and very attractive stranger; that profile includes a few pictures of demonstrate said attractiveness; the profile states oh so innocently how that person is in a new town and looking for friends; they invite you to chat via what looks like a standard Yahoo (or other) embedded chat client; you enter your credentials; your password is stolen. Nice (and no, this is not from personal experience).

There are of course many other methods, but this post is not meant to be a spammers checklist.

You can block profiles and followers, although as the requests mount up it becomes an annoyance, and there’s even Twitter’s own spam profile to help you along and report spammers. Even then, the individual Tweets would still appear in the increasingly popular search results and, as with email spam, automation will add to the increasing unwelcome noise.

Twitter may or not be a new form of communication, but one constant annoyance of internet communication is not going away any time soon - Twitter spam is here to stay.

Further to the news that Spotify will be offering downloads through 7Digital, details of a new all-you-can-listen subscription download model are emerging.

According to Revolution magazine, Spotify will be offering users unlimited downloads for £9.99 a month, the price it currently charges for the ad-free version of the service.

In a threat to the dominant player iTunes, there are also plans to extend this download service to mobile, allowing users to listen to tracks and playlists. There are as yet no details of any DRM that may be involved to limit use of the downloads to active subscribers of the proposed service.

The UK already has Nokia’s Comes with Music service which provides unlimited music downloads for 12 or 18 months, all included in the cost of the handset. However, reports in the media suggest this offer has failed to gain real traction yet with only 23,000 reported subscribers by April from its launch last year.

Spotify looks set to press ahead with its mix of models, from ad-supported, to ad-free subscriptions, to individual downloads and now this model of downloads subscription to find the best mix to monetise its service. Mobile and computer subscriptions will be a significant and welcome addition.

Update: Paid Content are claiming that Spotify won’t be offering this service with a quote from an unnamed Spotify figure denying Revolution’s story: “something we could never support or achieve. It’s just not sustainable and our focus is on access, not ownership, as we’ve always said”. So, who’s right? It’s too early to say for as yet unreleased service, but certainly the optimum balance of subscriptions and mobile remain on the agenda for Spotify.

Spotify’s new UK MD, Paul Brown, was interviewed just a day into the job by Paid Content UK. Whether a brave or foolish thing to do on your first day, he did have some interesting things to say about the service.

While careful not to reveal numbers, he strongly hinted that the much rumoured Spotify iPhone application would be a premium service as a way to drive paid subscribers in conjunction with access to rare archive material.

“Portability is something we’re looking at - if you get a great execution on a range of portable devices, I think there will be a proportion of the population that will pay for that.”

Given the ease of the payment model of the App Store, many Spotify users would be willing to pay a reasonable price for a premium app in order to stream music on-demand, particularly if they can access their playlists and stream albums.

This would be an improvement over the one-song-at-a-time YouTube application whose catalogue is currently limited by disputes with the music industry or the limited Last.fm artist radio service on their iPhone app.

This blog has been keeping a close eye on Spotify’s attempts to go mobile, but the desktop client is also progressing with news that Spotify have signed a deal with 7Digital to sell MP3 downloads.

The Spotify service is already monetised through advertising, a premium ad-free service for £9.99 a month and limited affiliate deals with Amazon and iTunes on a small portion of the catalogue. More integrated downloads are a natural next step and while the initial user journey involves checking out at 7Digital’s store, they hope to enable transactions within the Spotify client itself.

This will launch initially in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain with plans to roll out to Norway, Sweden and Finland.

The question is will the Spotify userbase embrace downloads, with suggestions that take-up for the ad-free service has been limited?

It certainly makes sense to cover their bases in terms of revenue models and in the absense of the mobile service, this will provide a way for users to take their new favourite tracks and soon albums and playlists with them on their portable media players, particularly if the 7Digital pricing stays competitive with the dominant player iTunes.

Indeed if and when the mobile service is launched, how might this affect the amount of potential downloads, where many may prefer ads on streamed tracks to paid downloads? However, there are significant technical barriers to overcome on any streamed service in terms of bandwidth and of course, for those commuters among us, underground travel.

This story has a way to run yet.

As regular readers will know I’ve been running an ad trial on the site to learn more about ad placement with a view to sharing the knowledge on here and with colleagues.

Having completed a short test of Google Adsense Link Units vs Ad Units, I’m going to follow up with one of the questions I raised about unit type over positioning.

As a result, there are two ad units between the post and the comments to see if the higher click through rates of the link units in that position would result in higher overall revenue using ad units.

I’ll admit that these two ads are more obtrusive than I would like, so I’ll look to change them once I’ve gathered enough data to share.

If you have your own experiences to share, please do so in the comments.

As part of the ad trial I’ve been running on the blog, I said I’d keep readers in touch with progress as thanks for putting up with the ads on a previously ad-free blog.

In part two of the trial, I experimented with adding Adsense Link Units, between the article and the comments on individual posts.

It’s been about five weeks now and I have sufficient data to make a judgement for this blog at least.

The Link Units on the page have been clicked on nearly twice as much, but they have got a much lower CPM (virtually nothing, but statistically 25 times less), no doubt the requirement for the second revenue-generating click on reacing the Google search engine results page playing its part.

This does raise the question about trialing Ad Units in that space to see the relative click-through rates, although I’ll hold off for a while as Technocloud is not a revenue generating exercise.

Needless to say I’m removing the Link Units to declutter the site, but would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences.