Twitter Kills The #Dick...

Yes, it’s happened. Three days after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey comes back in to head product, the dreaded #Dickbar , or the Quickbar that inserted trending topics and promoted ads into your tweet-stream on the iPhone, is dead. Business Insider  reported that the Dickbar was a mistake in the first place, having been developed by a junior product manager with no senior oversight. And this would make sense, considering Twitter backtracked after its launch, taking the step to pin it to the top of the app weeks ago and today deciding to do away with it altogether. From the Twitter blog: “Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.” While this move calls into question Twitter’s grasp on it overall monetization strategy (is it ads over user experience or user experience over ads?), for now users interested in shaking off their #Dickbars can download the new ad-free app from the App Store. In case anyone misses it, you can replicate the experience here .

OneRiot Rolls Out Socia...

As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. Today, the startup is launching a social targeting service for mobile ads, that the company claims offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps. By way of history, OneRiot first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. OneRiot also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise. Currently, OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs says the company is seeing 2 billion impressions per month across its network (for context, Google’s AdMob sees 2 billion impressions per day). With the new social targeting service, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e.Twitter). The company says that this data is derived from users that heavily engage with content on their mobile device that is relevant to their current social activity, including status updates, tweets, photos, advertising and more. The company recently implemented the service during the Super Bowl for car manufacturer Chevy. OneRiot targeted Chevy’s campaign to male US sports fans and car enthusiasts who were talking about “football” across a network of mobile Twitter apps (these include UberTwitter, Echofon, TweetCaster and others) during the game. When the audience checked their app, they saw the ad for Chevy, which prompted viewers to check out Chevy’s Super Bowl video on YouTube. OneRiot contends that its mobile targeting is more specific and granular than competitors in the social advertising space, such as 140Proof. Of course, I’m sure Twitter itself can provide the best targeted advertising to consumers. While social targeting is useful for advertisers, it’s important to evaluate click-through rates of the ads to determine how the mobile formats are performing. Peggs says CTRs are consistently above 1 percent for mobile ads. OneRiot declined to give us any further information on the company’s overall revenue and performance. CrunchBase Information OneRiot Information provided by CrunchBase

Salesforce Mimics Twitt...

For Salesforce, Chatter is the company’s major foray into the social enterprise and a way to capitalize on the “Facebook for the Enterprise” market. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced in November of 2009, was launched into public beta in June 2010 after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform’s first three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 20,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce’s client base using the platform. And most recently Salesforce debuted a new version and made the application free for users , with premium features as an optional add-on. Today, Salesforce is adding a number of new features, including Trending Topics on the network, and the ability to ‘Like’ actions, post a hashtag and send @replies to contacts in status updates. Sound, familiar you say? Clearly Salesforce drew inspiration from both Twitter and Facebook for the new features. Ironic considering that Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff was quick to denounce Chatter as a social network when the platform first launched in 2009. Of course, as Facebook has grown into an empire with 600 million users, its usability and collaborative features have major potential in the enterprise world. And Twitter has given users a new and novel way to interact with each other on the realtime web. As Twitter and Facebook become popular worldwide, it makes sense to translate the same experience a consumer has in their social environment to their professional lives. So, it makes sense for Chatter to add these features as a way to make the platform more social and easier to use. In addition to adding these features to Chatter, Salesforce is also opening Chatter up to the public with the launch of Chatter.com (which will debut on Jan 31.). Chatter.com will be a completely self-service, free version of Chatter. The main difference between the existing version and Chatter.com is that Chatter sits inside the Salesforce ecosystem and is meant for existing Salesforce CRM, Force.com and Service Cloud users. Chatter.com can be used by any business, organization or company for free. Sean Whiteley, SVP at Salesforce says that all the new features on Chatter have also been added to Chatter.com, includes likes, @replies, trending topics, hashtags and more. The two iterations of the social network are essentially the same. We also hear that Salesforce will soon be launching an Android app for Chatter as well. Whiteley also tells us that Salesforce will be airing two Superbowl ads to publicize Chatter, both of which have been co-produced by and featuring the tech world’s newest celebrity golden boy Will.i.am. CrunchBase Information Salesforce Information provided by CrunchBase

Twitter Boosts Profile ...

clickz Ad unit moves to the top of the site's trending topics list.

Pharma Marketers Scared...

clickz For heavily regulated pharma ads, Google says low CTR is a good thing.