With the introduction of Google+ and its asymmetric follow philosophy, some think Twitter may suffer some loss of users. The ability to follow anyone and have public/circle-based posts with threaded conversations makes the interactions more compelling without the Twitter’s 140 character restrictions. My view is Google+ is best at content sharing, while Twitter still rules for content discovery. While Google+ has yet to develop a monetization plan, Twitter is firing on all cylinders. For more insight, check out this video featuring Twitter CEO Dick Costolo who remains clearly bullish on the platform.

It’s early days for social analytics, but ever since the term “viral” was coined, there have been many attempts to determine how and why content gets rapidly disseminated across the social sphere. While there probably isn’t a single formula that works for all, understanding social amplification is a bit of art and science. The NY Times’ R&D group has taken an analytical approach through Project Cascade, a beautiful visualization of how some of their content spreads over time, seeking patterns and trends. Breaking down large sets of data into multiple graphical views that change over time often beats trying to make sense of often multiple spreadsheets of data. While Project Cascade has been deemed an R&D effort, I see promise in other contexts.

Enough already!

When are we going to just drop the “Digital” and call them what they really are? It’s easy to think this is a minor point, but qualifying something as “digital” is old-school, traditional thinking. No wonder companies have such a hard time becoming digital. This is not a new topic by any stretch and it’s generally created by the incumbent as a way to distinguish the traditionally accepted way of doing things with potentially new and disruptive methods. It’s a subtle change, but an important one because in some ways, de-legitimizes the new way of doing things and forces the new to prove its worth. Fair enough.In the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” we learned how disruptive innovation often starts off as an low-performance substitute for the incumbent technology. No one believes in it initially, but then after a few key iterations, it takes off and takes over as the dominant technology.

This theory has played out over and over again in nearly every industry from steel mills (b-school case studies galore) to telecom to photography. It is only a matter of time before we see this happening to digital and social marketing. As the tools to connect brands to customers and to other customers get better, more reliable and trustworthy, the more we will see a shift away from traditional means. If we apply social marketing to the graph above, I would say we’re still at the beginning part of the trajectory.

Those who are in traditional industries, like TV, need to adapt rapidly and learn to use the new technology to become relevant to their audiences. Take new Late Night talk show host, Jimmy Fallon. As an avid tech guy, he has made use of Twitter to generate a following of nearly 300,000 people whom he can directly engage with. He invited Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky on and Digg founder Kevin Rose. (The guy is clearly in touch with the digerati.) He asked his Twitter followers for questions to ask Cameron Diaz. He has even used it to help generate enthusiasm for his show, but even members of his audience. The other day, he picked a random guest — Bryan Brinkman –  and asked his Twitter followers to follow Bryan on Twitter. Within a day, he went about 30 to over 20,000 followers. This is how to use social tools to connect with your customers. Those who get it have already hit the ground running and are ahead of the curve and are betting their futures on digital.

So, what does this mean for businesses? Even though it’s been over a dozen years since the web started taking off, it confounds me that web and digital marketing accounts for a small percentage of overall marketing budgets. At some large Fortune 500 companies, I’ve seen them allocate less than 10% of their budget on digital; the cost of creating and running a commercial can often buy them an entire years’ worth of digital marketing effort. Despite this, I’m not particularly concerned because it’s still early days and digital and social marketing will eventually take over as the dominant and become the incumbent way of marketing. At that point, they will simply be referred to as “marketing.” Period. That is, until another technology comes around to once again, disrupt the value chain and take over as the legitimate incumbent. You can bet that the smart money is already on it.

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

Since the outset, there has been furious debate as to whether Twitter can become a sustainable business. How could a company run for over 2 years without any revenue or a sustainable business model? It defied the business strategist side of me, especially when they they turned down a $500MM offer from Facebook. There was even a “Twitter business model contest” to see who could come up with one. Part of the challenge comes from the fact that Twitter has evolved from a single-purpose status bar into a very efficient and direct 1:1  or 1:many communication platform. Increasingly, it’s how I find things out before it hits the news (anyone remember Flight 1549 that crashed in the Hudson? It was reported by Twitterers on the scene within minutes and a full 15 minutes before any major news organization).In the nearly 3 years since its inception, the service has had its ups and downs — with serious downtime that comes with rapid expansion. Despite the growing pains, users put up with it because it was so addictively satisfying and to some, it represented the bleeding edge of social interaction.

Recently Twitter closed a $35MM series C round of funding which tells me there are indeed people who think there’s a viable revenue model in the works. As we saw with the CNN + Facebook status integration for Obama’s inauguration, there are opportunities for Twitter to do the same — or better — by integrating into other real-time events. Think about it: Twitter attracts super social people who want to share and what better way for brands to connect than via people who will spread the message because they want to? For them, it is less about the brand and more about the social interaction that they would normally do on their own. The question now is, how can Twitter monetize these activities without alienating its users (ahem, Facebook)?