Webware

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes."

That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it's representing your company, that is.

The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new--and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it's still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. "Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements," the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.

Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it's getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.

During New York's inaugural "Social Media Week" festivities earlier this month, media-industry research firm Abrams Research (that's "Abrams" as in MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for the news junkies out there) conducted a survey about the perception of various social-media services within the industry. The results weren't too surprising: 30 percent of respondents would pay for Facebook (keep in mind that these respondents are people already active in the social-media world). They encourage businesses to think seriously about Twitter for marketing. Etc.

That's all good and fine. But what we really found hilarious was the extra-credit question, which asked respondents to pair up one suffering print-media brand with a social-networking service for the ultimate media mashup. (Or, as the survey called it, a "shotgun wedding.") The best suggestion would receive a $500 charity donation in the winner's name.

The winner, according to the research firm's release, was MIT business school student Amanda Peyton, who put up a relatively straightforward pairing of Reader's Digest and social-news site Digg.

"Take Reader's Digest, add Digg, get AARP to sponsor," Peyton's suggestion read. "Create Digg-type ranking system within RD website. Call it 'Seniors Speak: Content Ranked By Seniors, For Seniors.' Baby Boomers are getting older and 50+ community is tech-savvy and loves targeted products. Digg gets an entirely new demographic. Site can start with only RD content and then expand."

One of the runners-up, Samantha Duenas, devised a way to bring fashion tome Vogue into the digital age while bringing a whiff of exclusivity to the News Corp.-owned MySpace. "(Old Media) is going broke, MySpace is falling off a steep cliff into uncool. Vogue should make all of their world issues digitally accessible through MySpace for an annual subscription fee," Duenas wrote. "Models, photographers, stylists would have MySpace profiles with exclusive photos and media only accessible to subscribers. Usage of photos/media on blogs would tag back to MySpace."

That's interesting. Some of the non-winners, however, were just plain funny.

"High Times magazine and Twitter," one respondent said. "It will give a whole new dimension to the term 'tweetup.'"

"AARP magazine with Facebook," another suggested, "since all of our moms are on Facebook now anyway."

There were also some blatantly obvious ones: "Hustler and AdultFriendFinder. Talk about a match made in heaven." Along similar lines, "Playboy and Facebook. Just because I'd love to see a 'Poke a Playmate!' promotion." Abrams Research said it also received a suggested match of the New York Times and naughty video hub YouPorn, but that no explanation was provided. Figures.

Another one of the entries was an elaborate epic poem about magazine giant Conde Nast, penned by blogger Katie Baker. It didn't win, but her valiant rhyming efforts were recognized.

Scout Labs, an interesting variation on market-research services, comes out of beta on Wednesday. Briefly, you feed it your brand name and some key words, and it scours the Web--blog posts and Twitter items, mostly--to see what people are saying about your product or company.

The competitive advantage: Compared with other market research tools, it's cheap: $250 a month for the standard package.

Scout Labs CEO Jennifer Zeszut said typical online market-research services, like Neilsen's BuzzMetrics, Visible Technologies TruCast, Cymfony, and Collective Intellect, cost more because they require manual intervention. Each report or dashboard is a custom job.

Scout Labs, by contrast, is automated, down to its core technological deliverable, which is not just collating online opinion about your product, but gauging its sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral.

Zeszut said that Scout Labs will get sentiment right (which is defined as in agreement with a human customer) about 72 percent of the time. That sounds pretty loose, but she said that if you ask three people to gauge the sentiments of articles about a product, they'll only be in agreement with each other 82 percent of the time.

Plus, you can correct Scout Labs' ratings when you see an error, and it will learn from it.

Scout Labs will show you how much of the blogosphere cares about you, compared with your competitors.

(Credit: Scout Labs)

The demo I saw featured some cool data displays, like a graph showing how "share of voice" for a product compared with its competitors over time, and one showing the positive/negative perception changing over time. The standard dashboard view shows how your keywords are faring day-to-day. For example, if you worked at Comcast and had "Comcast sucks" as a keyword phrase, you'd see how you were doing each day on the dissatisfied customer front. (A primary goal for a market research product is to help companies stay ahead of angry customers, so that would be a good thing to track.)

In addition to its cool tools for gathering and presenting information about how your business is being perceived, Scout Labs also helps you act on the news. For example, you can create a discussion thread around a blog post, Twitter item, or YouTube video, and automatically e-mail an alert about it out to your team. You can also tag items to collect them in batches for further study.

Scout is not priced by user, but by the number of keywords you can search for in an account. There are the budget plan at $99 a month (for five terms), the standard plan at $249 a month (25 terms), and additional plans for public relations and marketing agencies that let users set up "workspaces" for different clients and mete out access to those workspaces to their customers.

The dashboard shows you how well you're doing on the Web each day. It tracks blogs, Twitter, and video-sharing services.

(Credit: Scout Labs)

Scout looks like a smart progression in the market of real-time sentiment analytics. I haven't tried it over time myself, so I can't comment on how effective and accurate it is. But conceptually it's reminiscent to me of Google Analytics, which democratized Web measurement. Scout isn't free unfortunately, but its pricing undercuts traditional services dramatically. And for the engaged marketer, it will likely offer a lot of useful information. Product marketers who want to cast their lot with standard consultants may still find the old model more comfortable, though.

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in two rounds from Minor Ventures, run by Halsey Minor, who was one of CNET Networks' founders.

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

Marketers ought to be aware that some consumers are suspicious about the phenomenon known as "behavioral targeting," a new report from eMarketer says.

Called "Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issue," the report released Friday explores the digital ad strategy, which collects consumer information and uses it to serve up ads that they may find interesting or relevant. This has been the basis for high-profile programs like Facebook's Social Ads and MySpace's HyperTargeting, as well as Google's extraordinarily successful AdSense. (That's why you'll see ads for vacation homes in Gmail after you've been e-mailing back and forth with your friends about wanting a weekend getaway.)

The takeaway point from the report: "Consumers want ads that are relevant to their needs, but they have mixed feelings about how that relevancy should be determined."

eMarketer cited a TrustE study which found that 70.5 percent of Internet users polled seemed to be decently aware that their browsing activity could be tracked by third parties for advertising. But only about 23 percent of them said that they were OK with having their behavior monitored, even if they were assured that the data would not be shared and no personal information would be divulged.

Targeted advertising is an extremely sensitive subject, with privacy advocates on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum voicing concerns. Internet service providers have been criticized for behavioral-targeting campaigns, questions of legality continue to arise, and top executives at tech companies have been brought into the debate.

The study suggested that advertisers should ensure that consumers are educated on the fine print of behavioral targeting, and that they're offered an opt-in choice. "One way to ensure that consumers welcome rather than reject behaviorally targeted ads is to ask them to give their consent to receive them," a release about the report wrote. "Tell them about the real benefits of saying yes, including more-relevant advertising." That's what the Internet Advertising Bureau has recommended, too.

But perhaps a more serious issue for the ad industry is accuracy. The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.