According to the study, which looked at 150,000 tweets, 11.1% of the brand-related tweets were information-providing while 18.1% were information-seeking. The latter of these two is especially useful to companies looking to understand what questions and concerns customers have about their products. However, the large majority of the tweets - 48.5% - were simply comments made in passing which mentioned the brand but whose primary focus was something else.

The remaining 22.3% of tweets were sentiment-related, meaning tweets in which a user was expressing an opinion about a brand, either negative or positive. What was surprising about this subset was that users were more likely to express positive tweets than they were to complain.

Why So Cheery, Twitter?

This seems odd, actually, given that the Internet has typically been a place for disgruntled consumers to rant and rave more so than it's been a place to praise what works. You can see this type of negative sentiment expressed everywhere from online forums to whiny blog posts about how such-and-such company "did me wrong!" In fact, the desire to express a negative opinion even seems to dominate feedback systems like blog comments, for example. Rarely does a writer receive comments like "great post" or "I totally agree" - rather, more comments resemble "you're wrong and here's why" or "how could you not mention X?"

That's why it's strange to hear that on Twitter, it's positive sentiment that reigns. What makes this platform different from the rest of the Internet as a whole? Are Twitter users simply happier people? Or has the data been skewed by marketing campaigns where Twitter users are encouraged to tweet nice things about the company in order to win a prize?

Perhaps it's because Twitter simply makes it easier to express yourself, allowing for a better balance between negative and positive sentiments. Typically, sharing your opinion on the web meant exerting a good deal of effort. Writing a blog post, recording a video, or leaving a blog comment are things that take time. For the most part, busy, information-overloaded web surfers aren't going to take that time unless something really gets them fired up. Twitter, on the other hand, is so quick and easy to use, you can post a missive of joy in only seconds. And the 140-character limit allows you a no-pressure way of doing so.

Weebiz seems to be going full speed. In just a few months, companies around the world have registered and started to use Weebiz' business center as an easy way to improve their business relationships and promote themselves and their products.

As promised, Weebiz has announced that first-class company accounts will be available this October. All scores from free accounts are being recorded and will be transferred to upgraded accounts.

Why offer this kind of prize?

First, it's a good way to say thank you to our members. Secondly, because Weebiz is a business community, throwing in a little competition certainly doesn't hurt.

According to CEO João Santos, "The €1 million challenge is our way to recognize the importance of our members. We want to recognize their importance to us and show them that Weebiz is all about them."

Santos invites all companies to register on Weebiz, fill out the application, and take the challenge.

Having an online presence today is far more than having a website. Social media is the order of the day, and everyone agrees that companies have to reach consumers through these innovative channels. What few people are talking about is how companies should be reaching each other using these same tools.

Some business fairs occur annually, some every other year, but none at the time of your choosing. Moreover, they are expensive and require complex PR and marketing to be minimally effective. Online directories, on the other hand, are usually free and work around the clock all year long. However, we are living not in the age of information but in the age of information overload. In directories, your company quickly gets lost, buried beneath a ton of competitors.

The ideal solution to drive business networking to the next level would have to be inexpensive and permanent, while allowing your company to stand out from the crowd, establish real connections, share industry and market information, promote your products and services, and discuss and execute business opportunities.

Of course, some may argue that companies can't really have "friends" in the traditional sense. So, why use the social networking concept for companies? Take Weebiz and ReadWriteWeb, for instance. Weebiz is one of ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, which means we have a relationship. So, while saying that we are friends may be an exaggeration, we are definitely connected in a relationship. These are the kinds of connections Weebiz leverages, along with many other kinds of business relationships, such as clients/suppliers and so on.

One other question that is asked is, Why would I need a network for companies if I already have a professional network. Well, for starters, people can change positions and move to other companies, and when they do, they take their networks with them. On Weebiz, the network, clients, partners, and suppliers remain with the company, independent of whoever manages the company's profile. A network nowadays is regarded as a valuable, even priceless, asset. The idea behind Weebiz is to put this asset in the hands of the organization as a whole, instead of an individual.

By connecting to clients, suppliers, and partners on Weebiz, companies indirectly connect to many other businesses and find many other potential relationships as well. The result is a vast network in which opportunity flows. Weebiz simply leverages your connections and brings the power of social networks to your business.

Visit us at www.weebiz.com or check out our lessons for business men in a public toilet and tell us what you think.

These are glorious days for networking. The social Web is richer and wider than ever before, and it offers a myriad of services and platforms to help us connect with each other, share our likes and dislikes, etc. Some people even say that too many such services exist, that many of them will plunge in dot-com bubble-like style.

We envisioned for Weebiz a real network of companies, in which relationships between different businesses were visible and working to their advantage. For example, if company A is a supplier of company B, and company B is a strategic partner of company C, then Weebiz could make it easy for company A to realize that it should do business with company C. This is obvious, and social networks for professionals, like LinkedIn and Xing, have proven this to be very useful for people.

So, how come no one thought it would be just as useful for organizations as well? We'd like to think we are a bunch of incredibly original thinkers, but the reason is probably that to make such a network make sense is hard. People use computers, surf the Web, register for accounts on social networks, and so on. Companies, on the other hand, don't. The people who make up an organization do all of these things, and sometimes they do it in the name of the company they work for (take the many brands on Twitter, for instance), but the truth is, treating an organization like a user can get awkward.

We had a solid idea of what we wanted to do: create a social network and fill it with companies instead of people. You may wonder why, but for us it was obvious. No new product makes sense unless it satisfies someone else's needs. So, what needs did we want Weebiz to satisfy? Plenty of them, actually.

First, there is the obvious advantage of connecting thousands of companies, in what experts call "network externalities." Basically, this happens when the value of a good or service increases with each new consumer or user. Most communities benefit from this effect, as does the telephone system. Secondly, a network that behaves intelligently, by identifying what is and is not relevant (through tags, semantic technology, etc.), can be incredibly valuable in a time of information overload. The auto-suggest systems we have grown accustomed to with services such as Amazon and YouTube apply just as well to the needs of businesses. After all, spam becomes the least of your troubles when you have to navigate tons of information to get what you want. Instead, relevancy becomes critical. This is what we are chasing after: connecting companies through their business relations and establishing a smart network in which companies can promote themselves and their products and services, as well as find information relevant to them.

Promoting and discovering business opportunities was, then, the central purpose of Weebiz, and so we decided to kick-start our business center. To do so, it was clear that we should be the ones to offer the very first business opportunity. In deciding exactly what to do, we fell back on one of our core values: shared success. So, we created a challenge to discover the most influential of pioneers on Weebiz: the company with the most business relationships, profile followers, views, etc. Obviously, our business opportunity had to be attractive to companies; a free cell phone probably wouldn't cut it. €1 million seemed like a fairly attractive incentive, so we went with it. The question then was, how in the world would we come up with that kind of money? Because our objective was to "share" some of our own success, we decided that only paid accounts could enter the challenge, and that the winner would be chosen only after we reached the milestone of 5000 paid accounts. This way, the challenge would pay for itself, and we would simply be giving back part of our revenue (most of it, really).

Many of the challenges we faced early on might seem simple, but they weren't. For example, if a person is needed to manage the profile of a given company, who should have an account, the person or the company? And if a person can have an account, should they also have a profile? Giving both a company and its employees accounts seemed like the simplest solution at first, but that would turn Weebiz into a mixed network of people and companies, which would draw us away from our goal. We ended up deciding that accounts should be personal, but that no one person could have a profile, only a log-in name. We also decided that more than one person could manage a company's profile (although only with paid accounts).

This dilemma led us to a much more consequential challenge: credibility and trust. When you connect with strangers on the other side of the world, making sure they are who they say they are is essential. It's even more important if the people are connecting for business purposes, because money will probably get involved sooner or later. Weebiz is not meant to be an intermediary for business transactions of any sort. It is designed as a platform and service to help companies promote themselves and find what they need. Still, not having a trustworthy community would be the end of us.

With the help of a partner, Weebiz easily authenticates companies with paid accounts. The problem, though, is with free ones. The only feasible solution was to make the domain of the email address submitted during registration the name of the company's profile, unless the company upgraded its account (and thus authenticated). With this solution, some companies may appear with slightly different profile names on Weebiz, but we can now at least guarantee that whoever uses an account owns (or is authorized to use) the domain in their company's profile name (unless they use an email provider we don't know about). This decision may put off some companies, but we are far more concerned with making Weebiz a community that businesses can trust.

Finally, we faced the question of which features exactly to include in the service. Some were obvious: business proposals, for example. Others, like CRM tools, were not. Many online services struggle with this question; ideas about what to include can come pouring in and create confusion and distract focus. Our conclusion was that Weebiz should be a platform. We decided that providing an API for others to work with not only would provide users with a variety of tools but would ensure we did not lose focus on our main mission, which is to be a network for companies. (Weebiz is still under development and currently in an open beta, so many features, like the API, are still unavailable).

Put your company on the social Web by visiting Weebiz today.

Yet they're hardly alone when it comes to big businesses that are missing out on leveraging this new mobile platform. Several companies that should have apps, don't. Why is that?

Listen Up: We Want Apps!

Today, there are numerous companies that could and should have iPhone applications or, at the very least, an iPhone-ready mobile web site, do not. Another that comes to mind immediately is My Coke Rewards. Coke Rewards are the points you can collect from the bottle caps and 12-packs of Coca-Cola beverages. You enter them in on the company's dedicated web site or via SMS in order to receive free prizes and discount coupons. Yet, there's no iPhone app for this. In fact, the entire site runs entirely in Flash, so there's no way to browse to the site using the iPhone at all. It's a terrible mobile experience from one of the world's biggest retailers.

Other companies missing the boat are those in the travel industry - companies like Priceline for example. Although Priceline operates a mobile site at www.priceline.mobi, there's no app available in the iTunes store. Imagine the missed opportunities! Who doesn't want to get a cheap flight or hotel? However, one of their competitors already has an app up-and-running: Travelocity. The Travelocity app offers several travel tools and a one-touch button for booking tickets. But where are the other big players in travel? Orbitz? Expedia? No apps from you?

While still on the subject of tickets, the giant ticket brokerage Ticketmaster is also sorely missing from iTunes. Instead, the lesser known Tickets Direct is getting all the iPhone owners' business as their app lets you search and purchase tickets for thousands or concerts, sports, and theater events.

Then there is Apple's partner, Starbucks. Given the integration between the two companies when it comes to music, it's hard to believe there isn't an iPhone app for ordering your latte by now. Although a lot of iPhone owners desperately want this, we do understand that building a system to handle mobile orders would take time. (Still, we hope this is something that they're working on.)

For that matter, we hope all the restaurant chains and pizza places are working on mobile ordering systems. Many chains have mobile web sites, but this isn't enough for us anymore. We want one-touch access from our homescreens. Especially for those restaurants who already provide curbside-to-go services. Why not have an app for this? It just makes sense.

Other businesses that should be leveraging the iTunes platform are the shipping companies like UPS and FedEx. There are several different mobile shipping trackers available now, but all are third-party applications. None come from the actual shipping companies themselves. Without their own apps, these companies are missing out on an opportunity to establish a brand presence on a platform that is increasingly being used in the workplace, thanks in part to the iPhone's ability to receive Microsoft Exchange email...not to mention the CEOs who are now demanding that I.T. support the device.

Also missing from the App Store are apps for major retailers. Where's our Best Buy app? Circuit City? What about our favorite clothing store? Grocery store? Car dealership? Although there are price comparisons apps aplenty and Amazon's app of course, several brick-and-mortar operations are still missing from the store. And while Jaguar's iPhone-only magazine launched in 2007 was clever, we want more. We want real apps.

Finally, why haven't local papers thought to use the iPhone platform to save their dying businesses? Most papers of any decent size already have developers on staff who work at maintaining the paper's web site - why not ask them to build an app instead? Some larger news organizations have already done this including AP News, USA Today, and the New York Times (Disclosure: RWW is syndicated by NYT). But where are the smaller, local news organizations? This could be how they could save themselves. Who wouldn't want to read the local paper on their iPhone? Add in mobile coupons and ads from local businesses to the app and you could breathe new life into the industry.

Who's Getting it Right

Surprisingly, some of the companies getting the iTunes experience right are the ones that don't immediately spring to mind when you think about companies needing an iPhone presence. For example, you may be surprised to find that retailers like Nike and Kraft have recently launched iTunes applications. Kraft's iFood Assistant helps customers create shopping lists and find the nearest grocery store, all while maximizing exposure for their product line through the 7,000 searchable recipes it contains.

Nike also recently launched an iPhone app to promote their sponsorship of Italian soccer. Called Nike Goal, the app is an extension of the Nikefootball.com web site.

Major retailer Target not only gets points for knowing to advertise within Pandora's mobile app, but they have their own iPhone application, too. The app is a gift finder app that lets you search for gifts by price and gender. Clearly, the app was launched just the for holiday shopping season as it came out in November, 2008. However, this app could be so much more that what it is today. We could use our iPhones to add items to our Target gift registries, collect mobile coupons, or check out the latest sales. So Target, you only get half credit for this one.

According to AdAge (link behind paywall), apps will be the new way to engage and advertise to your customers, but frankly, we're not seeing many big companies with apps just yet. We hope in 2009 we'll begin to see more. It's certainly time.

It may be all the rage, but are company-built social networks for customers to socialize in really smart?

Former RWW staff member Josh Catone found the WSJ story first over at his new gig and offers some good advice for companies seeking to avoid this terrible fate.

According to the study's author, the biggest problems are the following:

• Overpriced, shiny features.


• Insufficient and inexperienced community management. (See our massive post on community management earlier this week.)


• Bad metrics and criteria. Though Moran says most companies can talk the talk, saying they are looking for engagement and word of mouth, they end up measuring in page views. He says that's bad. It probably wouldn't be so bad if they were getting any page views.

Other Perspectives

The study was performed in conjunction with Beeline Labs and titled The Tribalization of Business. How bad do things really look? That depends on who you ask. Beeline's summary of findings don't sound so bad at all. A press release that appears to have originated from Deloitte looks a little more somber. The Wall St. Journal coverage focuses on absolute gloom and doom. The report itself? You'll have to request a copy and get in line, apparently. Look out, here comes the future!

Let's face it, though. Social networks where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around are a dumb idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat litter. We have written before about the never ending market for niche social networks and we're down with that. Hell, we like to read about countless niche social networks on the Ning Blog just for fun. If brand-centered social networks are failing, though, it's probably because they are brand heavy and stupid.

The matter could probably warrant more thoughtful discussion, but instead we'll leave you with this image, from Purina's Breeze for Cats. It's a "community" focused on cat litter. Ask yourself, is there hope for humanity?

Fake Smile photo by Lauren Photography