Here is the text of the email received today, where the announcement regarding recent privacy changes and their new Tailored Suggestions are almost treated as a side note:

New things are always happening here at Twitter HQ. We’re growing at a rapid pace, and our commitment to simplicity, transparency, and reaching every person on the planet continues. We thought you might be interested in knowing about some of our most recent developments:

A new weekly email that delivers the most interesting news and items you might have missed from the people you’re connected to on Twitter. Now Twitter is in more languages than ever. Check for your preferred language and change your setting. Download the latest Twitter mobile apps at twitter.com/download. There’s more to Discover on Twitter.com – try out the new Discover tab.

In addition, we’ve made a number of updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Here are some of the main changes to our Privacy Policy, with links for more information:

We’ve provided more details about the information we collect and how we use it to deliver our services and to improve Twitter. One example: our new tailored suggestions feature, which is based on your recent visits to websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets, is an experiment that we’re beginning to roll out to some users in a number of countries. Learn more here. We’ve noted the many ways you can set your preferences to limit, modify or remove the information we collect. For example, we now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which stops the collection of information used for tailored suggestions.

There are a number of potential privacy problems with this new behavioural tracking and targeting by Twitter:

Privacy Problem 1 – Awareness

Most Twitter users would have assumed that Twitter only knew you visited any particular website if you actually interacted with the embedded Twitter button on that website. However, Twitter is gathering data about websites you visit, even if you don’t click on the Tweet button. This is significant since nearly every website today hosts integrated Twitter buttons or widgets. Now, Twitter admits it is gathering all that data about users’ web browsing on other websites and storing it against their personal profiles.

Your web  browsing history – “visits to a third-party website that includes a Twitter button or widget” -  is stored against your personal data (name, date of birth, location, email address) for 18 months. They will stop using the data to tailor content to you after a “maximum of ten days”.

Privacy Problem 2 – Usage

Initially Twitter suggests that it gathers the data in order to improve Twitter. One specific use they highlight is to suggest people you might want to follow who are frequently followed by other Twitter users that visit the same websites as you. There is little other information available about how they intend to use the information in future. It can of course be assumed that the information about your online behaviours will be very valuable for future targeted advertising or content suggestions.

Twitter do make clear that they will share your personal with other service providers who “perform functions and provide services to us in the United States and abroad”. So the usage of your data is not protected by the laws of a particular jurisdiction, but by the contracts that Twitter will have in place with company in various parts of the world. Let’s hope that those contracts are robust.

Privacy Problem 3 – Opting Out

Twitter asserts that they have “noted the many ways you can set your preferences to limit, modify or remove the information we collect”. However there is no opt-in to the service and even though many users have already received individual notification that the service is now live, they are not presented with an option to opt-out. It is unclear if individual users will be notified once this feature has actually been enabled for them.

Twitter makes heavy reference to the ”Do Not Track” standardized Internet privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. However, this is a blanket browser setting that does not make it possible to specifically instruct Twitter to not collect data about the other websites you visit. Furthermore, this facility is not available on all web browsers, so some users will not be easily able to stop Twitter or any other website from gathering browsing behaviour data today.

Sunrise, where Europe meets Africa

Company Transformation

I work in a company that has been one of the most successful in the online poker market over the past five years. PokerStrategy.com is not a poker operator, but an affiliate poker education community that provides unique value to both individual players and operators.  My role as Head of Operations is to help ensure we deliver the highest quality content and services across our nineteen language markets.

The company is going through significant transformation as it focuses on its core competency of building high value e-learning communities across different sectors. In order to achieve this successfully we need to systematise an often very individual and subtle approach to building international communities centred around in-depth knowledge sharing and teaching.

Company learning should always be iterative; constantly analysing and discerning which activities are having impact and which not. This is particularly important in a rapidly growing organisation; where the risk of low-impact practices becoming institutionalised is relatively high. In growth mode where decisions are taken at great speed, there is often little time to review the success of each decision taken.

Once in a while in each company a step-change comes. This week I spent some time learning to trade forex, as we put the finishing touches to our new vertical that will be launched on a brand new technology platform. Exciting times ahead.

Affiliate Marketing

A successful affiliate with a strong customer proposition can be a powerful force in any market. When I worked in the insurance sector I witnessed affiliates having a cannibalistic effect on the market. Incentivised only on acquisition, comparison websites market themselves as providing independent advice to customers, continually poach their users from one partner to another.

Getting familiar with the natives

In the end, under the guise of independence, the affiliate only incentivised on acquisition, is most interested in creating market churn in order to drive their revenues. This churn drives revenues out of the market with the effect of reducing the quality available to customers. So customers pay less, but in the end the overall quality of the product offering available is much less.

Within the gaming sector, a sophisticated lifetime revenue-share affiliate structure has emerged. In this approach the affiliate partner is less incentivised to poach since they are rewarded on long-term customer value. Where the affiliate is not incentivised directly to create churn, you can expect that they will provide more balanced information to consumers with a resulting more stable market.

Under such an approach, affiliates can play an important role in helping to retain or even reactivate dormant customers. Affiliates will create their own relationship with customers, but with the right commercial terms and a great product offering, you can leverage that relationship to your ends.

Family Adventure

A large part of this move to the Pillars of Hercules has been the opportunity for our little family to experience a new world. Gibraltar itself is a rather large geographic curiosity with an even more curious history. Part British, but with a strong mix of Spanish, Moorish and Jewish influences it is now one of the centres of online gaming in Europe –  with a resulting large ex-pat population.

Winter football under the shadow of The Rock

The kids go to local schools where the curriculum is the same as in the UK – vaguely similar to the Irish one. Amidst the normality of daily life, we remember that we live in a place by the sea where the sun shines every day. With Spain at our doorstep and north Africa a short boat-ride away, each weekend or day off can bring a different adventure or simply another lazy afternoon by the pool.

First a little background. Five years ago a professional poker player and a chess master got together to think about the best ways to teach others how to improve their respective games. Both had been embedded in their games communities thanks in particular to the rapidly evolving social web. They quickly realised that for them the most effective learning was achieved through purposeful coversations with other players in their networks.

Dominik Kofert (centre) co-founder of PokerStrategy.com accepting the iGaming Affiliate of the Year Award 2010

Out of those conversations PokerStrategy.com was born, with the vision of creating an online community focused on helping people improve their poker skills. Today the community consists of 5 million players across 19 different language communities in countless countries around the world. The company employs nearly 300 full-time people in Gibraltar and Germany together with hundreds more freelancers spread far and wide. PokerStrategy.com asked me to come on board to assist with their continued growth in both existing and new territories and in new verticals – a new e-learning community focused on trading will be launched soon.

So, what has PokerStrategy.com done to grow such large e-learning communities? Here are some of the key ingredients I’ve observed:

1. Passion

Many larger companies take this for granted. When you are small you live on it. When you are building a community you cannot do without it. The founders of this community and every one of the first 50+ employees was passionate about poker. They liked to play it, talk about it and meet with others who shared their passion. Think about it. Have you ever been a member of a club that was filled with people who were not passionate about the thing that club was about? Of course not. Online communities are the same. The members of a community need to see that those ‘in charge’ are as passionate about the topic as they are.

Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to demonstrate that passion to millions of people around the globe. The one thing that your competitors cannot replicate is YOU.

2. Participation

Dominik Kofert (aka Korn) is one of those original founders of the first PokerStrategy.com community. Today he runs a multi-million dollar company and yet every day he posts and interacts with other members of the community. Why does he do that? Well he firmly believes that his and every other paid employee’s participation in the community has been central to its continued growth. A community is an organic ecosystem that is fed 100% by the contributions of each member. The sum is greater than the individual parts. But every individual contribution, no matter how small, supports the overall health of the community. The participation of paid employees is central in demonstrating continued commitment towards the community and is noticed and appreciated.

Furthermore, when growing communities, your own proximity to the community is critical in helping to quickly identify potential difficulties or opportunities to improve how things operate. Your ‘customers’ are telling you every day what they think and if they feel they are not being listened to, they will go elsewhere.

3. Locally Global

No matter what we may think, most people think locally. We are most interested in what is happening in our locality, our region or our country. PokerStrategy.com figured this from early on. Starting from within the heart of Europe this type of thinking came naturally to the founders. While the English-speaking community remains a catch-all for poker players from around the world, among the most successful communities have been those with strong leadership and support structures within local territories.

Today PokerStrategy.com is run from a global HQ in Gibraltar. Here, 19 small teams consisting of native speakers are dedicated to supporting each different language community. They both observe and participate in the communities so that they can identify new strategies for improving the experience for members in their local community. Each community has its unique characteristics and it would be foolish to think that you could bring one template to the world and expect it to work universally.

4. Less is More

Many Internet start-ups make the mistake of continually adding new features to their product offering, often in the hope that the new functionality will compensate for the under-performing existing functionality. Every man-day you invest in new features is time you lose on polishing what you already have, making 120% sure that is works for your customers. In the age of social media, mobile apps and widgets I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at PokerStrategy.com to see that they had stuck to the knitting. To be fair, there is much more that the team would like to do in terms of features and functionality, but they have spent the vast majority of their efforts on ensuring that the core functions within their community work extremely well.

The trick is to realise early on what is the cement that binds your community. PokerStrategy.com focused on continuously improving and optimising this aspect of what they do.  If the core isn’t working, don’t hope that the fancy stuff will mask over the real problems.

5. Add Value

Every community must have a purpose. People participate in a community because they get something out of it. Education is a great way to add value and is one of the central activities in many communities or clubs that people participate in. From the start, the PokerStrategy.com community has had learning at its heart. Members keep returning since their active participation results in the improvement in their game play.

A community-based learning environment is different to a traditional college or open-university approach where all the expertise is centralised in a few lecturers. In a community approach the expertise is decentralised and therefore teaching is democratised. I can learn as much from someone who is just a little better than me as from someone who is a full-time pro. In fact, in real life most of my learning comes as a result of my interactions with people who know just a little bit more than I do. They are often in a better position to empathise with my current learning hurdles. Furthermore, learning in community is reciprocal as teachers too learn from the self-reflection required to become a good teacher. Thus many coaches in the PokerStrategy.com community are motivated to work for free since they are benefiting from the intrinsic rewards of teaching.

I see six (not four) pillars to the social influence dynamic that are worth being conscious of as you plan your social strategy:

Friends, family members and co-workers typically have the most immediate impact on our purchase decisions on a daily basis. Consumers are connected to many of their personal networks online  and the new movement in social commerce sees brands enabling individuals tap into the experiences and recommendations of friends in order to drive sales.

We also tend to rely on the recommendations of people with whom we share an interest (in social media, sport, music etc). Thanks again to social tools we can now easily connect with people that we have never met but with whom we enjoy interacting, because they are passionate about the same things that we are.

Since the web offers unprecedented choice, consumers regularly find themselves presented with choices that no one in their personal or social networks has the previous experience to help them with. The anonymous ratings and reviews left by other customers are increasingly valuable in this world of seemingly endless options.

Friends, people with shared interests and other customers may not always have the deep knowledge of a product or service that is adequate to help us make up our mind. Consumers tend to trust the views of independent experts especially on complex purchases or where a high degree of commitment is involved.

Let’s not forget about the impact of celebrities on consumer decision-making. Celebrities, in all walks of life, represent aspirations that have been fulfilled. We naturally like to identify with people who represent success in whatever spheres are important to us. Celebrities have never been so accessible and indeed many now see social media engagement as central in supporting their fan bases.

Finally, since individual employees of organisations often hold greater sway amongst consumers than the corporate advertising or communications activities of brands, they are a greatly untapped resource. Google recently demonstrated that this realisation when it announced that it has given a social media mandate to every single employee.

Influence is complex. Each purchase or engagement decision will rely on a different mix of social and other influencing factors. One thing is certain; as the fabric of society changes thanks to ever-evolving communications capabilities, sales and marketing people would be foolhardy to ignore the dynamics of social influence.

• Well-defined (easy to describe)
• Fresh (new / different)
• Accessible (easy to do or replicate)
• Immersive (engages multiple senses)
• Significant (is a big deal)
• Transformative (changes the way you think / feel)

Drori talks about how tired brands often use the medium of advertising to convey the compelling experiences that people have with their products and services. Take this recent EuroDisney TV ad, and see how the focus has been shifted from the facilities in the theme park (which everyone knows about) to the moment the kids actually hear their parents have booked the trip;

The moment when parents reveal a planned family trip to EuroDisney is always a compelling experience for everyone in the family, even more so because of the manner the parents undertake  the ‘reveal’ in the scenario depicted. EuroDisney is inviting parents to create their own compelling experiences for themselves and their kids around their product. Compelling experiences such as this have a high degree of memorability and talkability. These are the real fuel for your communications objectives.

Too often brands spend valuable communication budgets harping on about how great they are. Wouldn’t it be far more impactful to share the compelling experiences that customers are having thanks to your company’s product or service offering? Michael Schrage, who lectures about digital business over at MIT, writes today on HBR that when running a company event:

Customers — not your company’s products and service innovations — should be at the center of customer events. Make their engagement — not your messaging — the core of your event planning.

This applies equally to all engagements that you have with your customers.

When people ask me if Facebook or Twitter are here to stay or whether they are greatly over-hyped, I tend to advice that these social networks are just the tools that people are currently using to do what they like or want to do. Facebook, for example, is great because it makes it incredibly easy to keep in touch and to share photos and videos with friends. LinkedIn is great, because it helps busy professionals connect with peers in other companies and in related sectors. Twitter is handy for finding out what’s happening locally and around the world, in real-time.

The place to start for anyone getting started with social media is not with the tools themselves, but with what it is that you like or want to be able to do. I know lots of people who’ve signed up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc etc and just as quickly cease using them. Why? Because these particular social networks don’t serve a purpose for them in their lives.

Many business leaders feel compelled to have a social media strategy, without really understanding why it could work for their business. This quote from Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook is worth reading several times:

It’s problematic that many businesses focus on existing and emerging technology, and not on social behavior. Thinking about platform integration first, like Twitter or Facebook, or technologies first, like what could be enabled by “mobile location” or “real-time updates,” is the wrong place to start. Often, businesses need to step back and consider what will motivate people to use what they are developing, above and beyond what exists today.

Something that I’ve been saying for a while is that human behavior changes slowly, much slower than technology. By focusing on human behavior, not only are you much more likely to create something that people value and use, but you’re more likely to protect yourself from sudden changes in technology.

Understand who your customers are. Understand what they are trying to achieve. Understand their motivations and behaviours. Understand their frustrations. Understand how they currently interact with technologies. Do all of this first, before you start to think about your social media strategy.

When you do that you will probably start to see a fundamental shift taking place throughout the developed world is that the Internet is helping us become more social. When I talk to friends about some of the work I do helping to build ‘community’ online; they tell me it sounds like organising a local parish event. Well it is a bit like that; the world has just got that small.

Building community is not the same as building a social network. Think of social networks as the mechanisms that enable people to connect remotely. Think of communities as people gathering together, sharing and conversing around common interests. Telecoms operators are concerned about becoming dumb pipes, where the real money is made on the content that is transmitted by others through their networks. Social networks are the dumb pipes of communities. Seriously, no one bar the techies really cares how Facebook or Twitter works. We care about the relationships that we have with others with whom we like to share things and chat about stuff that interests us both – which these networks facilitate of course. But the richness is in those communities, not in the technology.

Ask yourself if you really want to try to create the next big social network or whether you want to foster a community around something that lots of people are passionate about. If it is the latter, focus your energies on understanding human behaviour and then harnessing all of the social network technologies to support those human behaviours as you grow your amazing community.

Your customer is the best source of new ideas. You need to implement a strong process that revolves around continuously asking customers “What more can we do for you?”

- Terry Clune, Taxback.com

Apply this test to your enterprise. Are you making life better for people? Making something really easy and very low-cost.

Do you deserve to exist because you have a sustainable difference that adds value to customers? Know your competitors and understand why, from the start, customers choose you rather than them.

Scale and speed are the two most important things that matter. Faster, better and cheaper are the most important things online.  You can never move fast enough online. It may not be perfect, but get it out there and start transactions.

Having a high margin (94% in Stockbyte) in particular with intellectual property is a money-making machine you can scale and can facilitate lots of mistakes.

Take the easy money. Don’t be afraid of whitelabel partnerships that give you access to instant scale and give you revenues fast.

- Jerry Kennelly – Stockbyte, Tweak.com

Networks take time. For funding for example it can take many months to establish relationships that will deliver. It is therefore critical to start early and make and grow connections.

- Kingsley Aitkins, Ireland Fund & Networking Matters

Are we in a technology bubble? People are worried that we are in another 1999. However the companies today actually make money. Groupon – run rate is well over €2b. Zynga – who would buy virtual cows, peas and carrots? But they do. Facebook is a cashflow positive company.

What is the big mobile trend? 2011 is the year of mobile photo sharing. Instagram – a mobile photo-sharing account.

Where is the next Silicon Valley? LA, NY, London, Israel, Dublin? Silicon Valley has unique circumstances. Don’t create a copy of Silicon Valley, but create your own innovation hub.

Why is Quora so hyped? Wants to become the Wikipedia of Q&A. Why will people not stop talking about it? Its founder is the former CTO of Facebook. It strokes the ego – people want to be heard and recognised for their expertise. You can hear leaders talk about their companies. Its number two user is Robert Scoble.

What is the future of social media? Compare it to email, the telegraph and the telephone? It is just a new form of communication. A faster form of communication. There has never been a tool that sends as much information to more people in a shorter space of time. It is a tool.

What is the next big thing? I don’t have any goddamned idea. Don’t start a startup because it is the next big thing. Start a startup because it will make people’s lives easier.

Is anyone making money from social commerce? Check out Sociablelabs and Socialfeet. It is so early yet that the bounds have not been set.

Do not think of social media as the shiny tools. Think of it as communication. Conversations and connections with people. Improving people’s lives is what is really important.

- Ben Parr, Mashable

On brand? Do something better, cheaper, faster. We are in entertainment. Financial risk-based entertainment. It matters more if you have money on it. There is something universally appealing to taking risk. There is something universal to enjoy the buzz. We try to do that better everyday. The brand will follow.

- Breon Corcoran, PaddyPower.com

Just look at the relative strength of the ‘marketplace‘ category which is comprised of websites that facilitate individuals buying and selling to each other:

We’ve been talking quite a bit about the advent of social commerce as a relatively  new phenomenon. However the inherently social marketplace websites such as eBay, Gumtree, DoneDeal and Daft have all been around for quite a while. In reality the web has always been particularly good at facilitating commercial transactions amongst and between individuals.

We are indeed starting to see a new dimension in social commerce. The strongest trend in this market is clearly seen by the impact that the ‘group deals‘ category is having within a relatively short period (see the chart above). In large part due to the impact of just two websites – Groupon’s Citydeal and LivingSocial - both of which were relatively unknown in Ireland just twelve months ago. These websites’ ability to tap into consumers’ social tapestry (both functionally and psychologically) is surely at the heart of their ever-accelerating growth.

1. Smartphones will be the new credit card

A new era of smartphones and tablets was ushered in at Mobile World Congress 2011

2. Consumers will grant access to more personal data

3. Location-based marketing will grow

4. Online and offline shopping will seamlessly merge

5. Mobile transactions will grow

6. Consumers will pay for more mobile services

7. Mobile will be the battle ground for loyalty

Forget dumb loyalty cards. Smart mobile apps can access customer account data in real-time. With the power of a two-way data stream at the point of purchase, imagine how retailers could start to really cement customer relationships. Imagine walking into your favourite coffee shop to have your preferred blend already prepared and waiting for you at the counter, because with one click you told them you were on your way. Or you walk into their branch in another city and they greet you by name thanks to the NFC integrated with their loyalty app.  Then simply wave your smartphone in front of a scanner and your loyalty points are updated and payment is processed automatically. Now that is a service proposition likely to WOW customers.

Many of these impacts are already being experienced by customers around the globe. It will not be long before we start to experience more of them here too. If you are interested in participating in a discussion about mobile commerce, come along to our next e-Commerce Innovation Forum which will be held sometime in early March. Join the LinkedIn group here to be kept in the loop.

Community Dynamics

A community is a group of individuals gathering together with purpose. Let’s pretend for a moment I want to get good at playing poker (I am developing an interest – did you know that Facebook is now the biggest poker room in the world thanks to Zynga?).

A community approach to learning poker sees me engage with others to see if we can help each other learn. I recently signed up on PokerStrategy.com, an online poker school/community with 4m members. The reason I take this route is because I assume that is is a better approach than alternative scenarios 1, 2 or 3 (refer to the numbers in the chart above).

In alternative scenario 1, I might set out to learn poker on my own. I’ll probably do okay, but I’ll find it hard to motivate myself and I’ll be unsure if I’m on the right track. I’ll also miss the opportunity to bounce ideas off other people or to learn from their mistakes.

In alternative scenario 2, I’m gathering with others; chatting about random stuff that interests us, but if we’re not focused on talking about how to get better at poker this engagement will not support my ultimate purpose of learning how to win at the poker tables. I’ll probably not stick here for very long.

In alternative scenario 3, I can see that others are working together to learn how to play poker. Perhaps I don’t want to get involved, because after all these guys are my competition and I don’t want to give them my tips. Problem is, they’re all getting better quicker than I am. By not participating I lose out.

The sweet spot is the intersection of me and others working together towards a shared purpose. This is where we all win. Now in this scenario I have to actively participate in order to derive benefit. Communities don’t like lurkers and they don’t work for lurkers anyway; because it is in the interactions that you benefit. Basically you have to give a little in order to get something out.

To build a strong community that lasts, community managers need to focus on engendering greater levels of participation and shared ownership of the community. The more individuals that invest greater amounts of their time into quality interactions, the stronger the community.

So the key things to think about when you want to grow a community are:

1. Ensure that your community facilitates a purpose that enough people care about to want to join.
2. Facilitate your community members’ purpose in every way that you can, flexing to their changing needs over time. Communities fail because they serve the creator’s original purpose and not the members’.
3. Support and encourage greater participation in the community by all individual members. You’ll need different strategies to sustain participation by newbies as opposed to more senior members.
4. Divest ownership to the community so that it can organically scale. You won’t be able to automate all of the management tasks of your community. In particular delegate to the leaders that will start to emerge – these are the people who are most passionate about the community.
5. Protect the individuals in the community from harm (bullying, flaming, personal attacks) through tight moderation. In doing this you will protect the overall community and ensure that it is a positive place for everyone to be.
6. Celebrate the achievements of the individuals in the community and of the overall community. Afterall, communities are made up of people who generally enjoy social recognition and like to have fun.

We like to be part of something bigger. Communities give us that opportunity. Plus they help us to achieve our goals, whatever they may be.

What have I missed?