Following up on my previous post A New Local Business Model for Twitter, I extend the idea of Twitter potentially employing a new hashtag for geographies to other categories.
To recap the geographical strategy:
1) Twitter first creates a series of geographical Twitter accounts with a new Twitter name coding system that uses, say *, instead of @. For example, *Berkeley_CA or *Boston_MA. Start with metro areas and expand into smaller cities: *Waltham_MA and neighborhoods: *BackBay_Boston.
2) Each *Twitter account curates the best Twitter feeds within the geography, and is automatically set to retweet local feeds with the type of local information that communities want to see: News, Things to Do, and Deals. Curation is best done manually on-the-ground by a local; this person could be recruited as a volunteer who wants to serve their community in the same way About.com populated their experts. The *Twitter feed would look something like this:
3) The third step is the key departure to Twitter's general strategy - building a Twitter based application (note Evan Williams doesn't mention anything like this in his October "What's next for Twitter" interview). Twitter should build hyperlocal websites similar to Patch.com for each *Geography, and create an automated overlay similar to http://paper.li/breakingsfnews/community-news or FlipBoard:
4) The final ingredient is monetization. Just like Patch, Twitter can now build a national network of hyperlocal websites without the HR expense of hiring editors. They can now leverage their local media presence to deliver Deals and coupon based advertising. By using deal syndication networks, Twitter won't even need to hire a massive local sales force.
A new Twitter business branding model
Now extend this hashtag concept to business. One of the commenters on the mirror article on Social Media Today, Timo Platt states:
To truly differentiate its capabilities in the Local market, Twitter must offer new communications capabilities to reach targeted audiences, and to expand Twitter's leadership in the micro-blogging B2B space to the broader C2C and P2P sectors, which marketers covet.
New messaging capabilities would thus help Twitter extend its user base and offer a more attractive audience to marketers. When coupled with messaging that enables brands to engage in continuous conversations with consumers via targeted messaging that is tightly integrated with their diverse and varying on-the-go daily lifestyles and activities, Twitter would gain a competitive advantage vs. Facebook, FourSquare, Groupon, Where, Yelp, etc.
What Timo is proposing for b2b, retail and other business focused Twitter agendas can potentially be collated within a second hashtag, namely $, as in $walmart or $goldenstatewarriors or $cisco (note, Twitter will need to extend their character limits for both businesses and geographies). The revenue opportunity here is obvious, collect recurring fees for the subscription of $ hashtags.
What's the difference between @ and $ for a business? Twitter can provide new features (all of course for additional fees) including:
1) Enterprise privacy - only qualified vendors can follow $walmart or $cisco. This could be a simpler enterprise solution to Yammer.
2) Loyalty programs and coupon distribution. Registered followers of $officedepot can redeem coupons or check out using a QR code off their mobile Twitter feed.
3) Leverage Twitter lists to curate $business feeds into directories. For example, The geographical hashtag *SOMA_San Francisco can develop lists of $businesses by category: companies, restaurants, things to do, etc. To make it easy $businesses would be able to include themselves on these kinds of lists (included in the fee arrangement) via an online self service page. Granular local curation is powerful, CRM systems can be overlaid across curated data.
There's more
Twitter can continue to create categorical extensions with hashtags. For example, Twitter might develop a Quora.com alternative of their Q&A framework by having the Twitter community ask questions to Twitter created feeds that mirror Quora topics like ?obama, ?socialmedia, ?Twitter, ?Twitter(company), ?dailydeals, all preceded by the "?".
Now Twitter can develop a comprehensive hashtag strategy:
* = geographies, places
$ = business
? = topics where Twitterers can ask questions along the same lines as Quora
It would be best to limit the number of hashtags that Twitter employs simply due to confusion, but the hashtags for the three categories above are intuitive.