Adnerds

In this web2.0 world, there are a few hot companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook are the most important. They are all leading innovation and the path to a more social web. We are big fans of them and we’ll explain why they earn your admiration as well. Next to admiring them, we love reading books about them. You can expect us to have an overview of Jeff Jarvis‘ ‘What Would Google Do’ soon.

But what can you as a marketeer, a business person, a company learn from them?

Twitter showed us the importance of persistence, listening and realtime. Facebook thought us how important sharing and connecting is. And Google outlines how focus and added value are of incredible importance.

• persistence: despite many negative outlets about its downtime and people ready to switch to an alternative, Twitter kept working on improving its product, its infrastructure, coding etc. They never gave up and are growing today at an enormous pace (over 700% last year!). The showed how a good idea beats negativism in the end… as long as you are willing to keep defending your idea.
• listening: they listened carefully to what their users where saying. The improved the service and keep doing so by converting suggestions by users in ideas. They hear what people want and build it or buy the solution and integrate it, like they did with Summize (now Twitter Search).
• realtime: in contrast with Google, Twitter is live. And search results are always up to date. A new entry is immediately shown making Twitter a threat for Google as Chris O’Brien described last week. People want everything now. And that is exactly what Twitter delivers them. And that expectance holds for you as well.
• sharing: Facebook is all about social activities: sharing stuff with friends. People love sharing. And as many sources describe: consumers tend to believe input from an unknown peer over that of a company. Tapping into Facebook’s newsfeed system to getting your message out by means of normal users is a big plus.
• connecting: Facebook users have an average of 120 friends and that’s what makes it important to them: Facebook helps them connect with friends and people they know. Sharing what a users’ friends are doing or having a user compare himself with his friends, is often a key factor in your website’s success.
• focus: Google is more than search and then again, it isn’t. Every merger (like YouTube or Writely) or any product developed (like maps or Docs) are all aimed to make Google the biggest and best search engine. YouTube hasn’t changed all that much since it was bought by Google, yet the integration of youtube results in Google give Google a clear advantage over Yahoo or Microsoft’s Live Search. Same goes for Google Maps that has a searchable directory of many hundreds of thousands of entries to stores, restaurants, companies, points of interest and so on. Having a clear focus on search is what makes Google the best in its field.
• added value: there is no doubt that everything google does has a clear added value. Google doesn’t care about its results, it cares about a user finding what he wants. And that is the biggest added value you can give a customer. It is not about your company or your brand, it is about your consumer and what he wants. And if you can be part in it, than do so.

Feel free to add why you admire them – or don’t. Or tell us what other aspects make them great and a good example for each of us.