Social Networking and Saas Twitter Did Figure

¶ … Social Networking and SaaS

Twitter did figure out how to produce revenue & #8230; give people a reason to come to their site and charge revenue of advertisers for 'Promoted Trends.' What's new with what Tweeter is doing to create revenue and can it be a method of revenue creation your group's eCommerce company could use?

Common to many social networking sites, Twitter initially struggled to define what its business model would be over the long-term. Having to triangulate between privacy, security, personal preferences on the one hand and the need for continually providing an open architecture for developers while ensuring an excellent user experience challenged Twitter's senior management initially (Laudon, Traver, 2011). The initial efforts at creating an advertising platform failed as Twitter violated one of these three areas of their business model. Initial efforts at sponsored Tweets were at times done in a surreptitious and often shielded strategy, which made Twitter less trustworthy than Facebook. Facebook's lead of segmenting out users and attempting to sell advertising as well. This ultimately failed due to the lack of precision the Twitter platform had at the time. As Twitter experimented with these advertising models and approaches, they also began to impinge on the privacy of others as well, leading to continued protests from their user base. Exacerbating all of these factors was the continual churn Twitter was experiencing, with many of them leaving the service silently. These users left the service and allowed their accounts to stay on the site, dormant. It is estimated that nearly 30% of a given Twitter user's accounts are dormant. This also made the segmentation model that Twitter initially devised impractical.

After the fine-tuning of Tweets and the questionable ethical practice of allowing for paid tweets without necessarily telling other members this was going on with advertisers, Twitter settled in to a sponsored ranking advertising model that is working today. From an e-commerce business model standpoint, Twitter had finally found an approach to deliver value while also ensuring authenticity, transparency and trust. The Promoted Trends business model is accomplishing this well and is segmented on a geographic basis extremely well. Given Twitter's advances in analytics and business intelligence, this approach to segmenting their markets was achievable with a very high degree of accuracy. A recent example of this is their global campaign orchestrated with BMW for the launch of an entirely new line of vehicles (B & T. Weekly, 2012).

The unorganized and often conflicting business models of Twitter in the past are today galvanized around the analytics, business intelligence (BI) and depth of insight and expertise with Big Data or the use of exceptionally large, complex data sets. This continues to be a catalyst of future revenue growth for the company as well. Future additions to the Twitter business model include creating a reputation management and influencer series of applications comparable to Klout and applied to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and applications (Kolsky, 2012). Additional future additions to the business model include in-depth analysis of Twitter streams using advanced sentiment analysis and brand recognition analysis. Companies with expertise in advanced analytics are partnering with Twitter to capitalize on the massive data streams generated by the application, including Radian6 a division of Salesforce.com and Attensity among others (Barnes, Bohringer, 2011). The future profitability of Twitter is entirely predicated on how well they choose to manage their nascent analytics, BI and Big Data expertise, specifically in the area of ad targeting and sentiment analysis throughout specific markets (Morrissey, 2010). Over time Twitter will be able to create a real-time monitor of customer sentiment analysis for the most well-known and talked about brands globally. This will provide marketers and executives in these companies with immediate feedback on the performance of their specific marketing, promotion and selling initiative's.

Why would restaurants find SaaS (Software as a Service -- The Cloud) model very attractive for their purchasing/support services?

The many deployment and economic advantages of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) make it an ideal platform for small and medium businesses including restaurants to based their purchasing, supply chain and support services on. The core value of any successful e-commerce strategy is the ability to simplify a complex process while also creating a higher level of accuracy and efficiency within the process itself. Using a SaaS-based purchasing, procurement, supply chain and services series of applications in a restaurant will accomplish all bring greater accuracy and simplicity to these complex processes.

Another significant advantage of using SaaS-based applications for these tasks in a restaurant is ease of use relative to older, more complex applications that may be dependent on the Microsoft MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows operating environments. Having an application delivered entirely over the Internet where only a browser is needed on a smartphone, tablet PC or iPads, or any other device, is now possible for many restaurants and hospitality businesses due to the ubiquity of the Internet and its speed in many areas of the world.

The economics of SaaS applications however are the most compelling factors that are leading small and medium businesses to adopt them in en masse for every major strategy, from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to customer service. For the restaurant looking to automate their Purchasing and Support Services, SaaS-based applications free them up from having to purchase on-premise software to using only the modules they need online (Bentley, 2008). SaaS-based applications for Purchasing and Support Services can also be paid for out of operating expense budgets (OPEX) instead of their on-premise and often much more expensive counterparts having to be capital budgeted for (CAPEX) (Laudon, Traver, 2011). SaaS-based applications for Purchasing and Support Services will also be less expensive to deploy and keep under maintenance than on-premise software counterparts.