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With all the attention surrounding social media these days, online marketers may be assuming that Twitter, Facebook and the like are doing a complete job of relationship marketing for them. The reality is, however, that it’s easy to be lulled into complacency by social media and think that’s all you need to worry about.

Yes, it’s true, social media provides a convenient and immediate way to interact with prospects and customers, and it can become the core of a communications strategy. But not everyone engages with a company via social media. Using social media to the exclusion of anything else may put a marketer in danger of overlooking the basics of relationship marketing.

Even if you are a big believer in social media, you need to have an underlying lead cultivation strategy in place. You must have a process to take a sales lead that you receive through any channel from one logical step to another. You want to qualify that lead along the way so it eventually gets classified as a cool, warm or hot prospect.

A lead cultivation strategy relies on ongoing periodic contact. Ideally, contact should be “intelligent” and recognize the specific needs of the individual at a given point in time. This could be accomplished via social media, but it could also be through a combination of email, text messages, direct mail, or even phone calls, if appropriate. Assuming every prospect responds to a single universally-applied form of communication could be too limiting.

In e-commerce, it is even more important to cultivate a sale. Responding to an online inquiry is your first opportunity to demonstrate that you care about a prospect and want their business. You should handle an online inquiry in such way as to make sure a prospective customer wants to make a purchase with you and not a competitor.

When it comes to the transaction itself, the bane of an online marketer’s existence is cart abandonment. This is the point at which an online seller is most vulnerable, and industry statistics are not encouraging. Research conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 90 percent of e-commerce leads turn cold within just one hour. SeeWhy, a cart recovery specialist, says cart abandonment accounts for a loss of over $1 million daily for a company that sells $200 million of goods online each year.

Too many online sellers are missing out on an opportunity to convert a prospect who is on the verge of buying. A recent study conducted by digital marketing firm Silverpop found that 83 percent of online sellers wait five hours or more before sending the first cart recovery email. Over two-thirds of survey respondents send just one cart recovery email. Yet almost half of the survey respondents said their cart recovery emails resulted in a conversion rate of 11 percent or higher – nearly four times the conversion rate of their broadcast emails.

There are other times during the online sales cycle when contact is appropriate – acknowledging the purchase, asking for a positive product review, requesting a referral to a customer’s friends, suggesting a gift purchase, encouraging completion of a satisfaction survey, and so on. These types of contacts can reinforce a customer’s relationship with you and lead to increased revenue.

The bottom line: Social media is a wonderful way to keep in touch. But it should enhance, not replace, a comprehensive cultivation strategy. To be successful, online marketers need to complete the cycle.

The right timing can equal success. Since launching in 2007 the BlogWorld founders Rick Calvert and Dave Cynkin have leveraged their timing to capture lightning in a bottle providing a platform for bloggers to expand their craft, find new business opportunities and exchange ideas with their community. Recently BlogWorld made a set of major announcements moving the show away from its traditional base in Las Vegas and holding two shows in the same year on in New York (May 24-26th at the Javits Center) and one in Los Angeles (November 3rd-5th at the L.A. Convention Center).

I recently sat down with Rick Calvert, CEO and Co-Founder of BlogWorld & New Media Expo, to talk about the impetus behind the changes in location and what Rick sees as the convergence of media.

What brings BlogWorld to New York?

Since our first event in 2007 we’ve had numerous people ask us about having an East Coast version of BlogWorld. Even though we get lots of people traveling to the show from around the country and abroad there are exponentially more who just can’t afford the travel or the time to come out West. For two years now we have been looking at doing an East Coast show that serves as many people as possible and finally everything fell into place with the Book Expo America Co-location. The fact that Book Expo America sees as much value in this co-location as we do is definitely a sign that traditional and new media are converging.

You’ve recently announced the West Coast BlogWorld will be in LA. The Cohen Brothers’ film Barton Fink is a great example of what happens when a writer from New York comes to LA. When it comes to the convergence of media will the City of Angels every really accept the blogging community?

The short answer is they will accept it or they will be out of business. The truth is lots of individuals in those entertainment industries are already embracing new media and even leading in many ways. Every major film studio, TV network and record company has some kind of social media initiative. I think it’s important for the bloggers and new media content creators to remember that the traditional media industry can teach us just as much as we can teach them.  They have been monetizing content for a very long time.

For those who haven’t seen Barton Fink at the end of the interview there is a clip, featuring John Turturro and Tony Shalhoub, that perfectly captures what Hollywood studios think of writers. When you watch it try swapping out the word “writer” for the word “blogger”.

What trends do you see that herald the convergence of traditional and new media?

All major magazines and newspapers in the country have blogs now. Many of them have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts as well. Last year the folks at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) approached us and expressed interest in recruiting folks who were exclusively producing new media content to join the guild. The Grammys just held a couple of social media sessions at LA Live in the lead up to this year’s event. Previously, we’ve had Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, Jermaine Dupri, and other musicians speak to huge crowds at BlogWorld. There is no doubt the convergence is happening. The question is how fast is it happening and how much crossover will there be between the two.

Traditionally, bloggers and journalists have been at odds. Do you feel that bloggers and authors’ goals are more aligned?

Some bloggers and some journalists are definitely at odds. Some bloggers are journalists. Some journalists are bloggers. Some journalists try to use the term “blogger” as a pejorative and that really just exposes them as ignorant. New media is perfectly aligned with all forms of traditional media. It’s hard not to harp on this point but honestly, most of the world still doesn’t understand it. This includes most of the decision makers in traditional media. New media is just a collection of new distribution tools and platforms. New media also changes the dynamic from a one way broadcast into a two way conversation and that is a very hard concept for many people to grasp. Once they do, they fall in love with it.

Book publishing as we know it is changing. How do you think publishing will be transformed over the next couple of years?

There is no doubt that digital content is going to outsell printed content very soon; it just came out a month or so ago that Amazon was selling more digital books than printed editions. That doesn’t mean print media or book publishing is extinct. It will just be more selective and quite possibly more premium. Blogs also offer a great medium for aspiring authors. Wiley has been coming to BlogWorld for a couple of years now and in fact signed several new authors to book deals as a result of meetings at BlogWorld. Book Expo America is going to be a great opportunity for aspiring authors to meet publishers and for publishers to find some really great writers.

Do you plan to offer some sort of combined pass between BlogWorld and Book Expo?

Definitely. All BlogWorld attendees with a two day conference pass or full access pass can attend Book Expo America. All Book Expo America attendees can visit the BlogWorld tradeshow floor and upgrade to a BlogWorld conference pass if they like.

I’d like to thank Rick Calvert for taking the time for this interview. And now a clip from Barton Fink. Enjoy.

Social media is growing up real quick, and it looks like it’s time for it to put down the beer-bong, move out of the frat house and move into the cubicle. Basically, the party is over, and a lot of marketers will find that conversions are the only cure to their social media hangover.

Last week, eMarketer reported that in 2011, twice as many marketers will be concerned about the actual return on their social media spend. Basically, business are putting their foot down and forcing marketers to care less about how many fans/followers they garner, and more about how those fans/followers impacted their bottom line:

Site traffic, which was the top metric for social marketing success in 2010, will still be on top this year. But the No. 2 spot will change hands, as twice as many companies plan to pay attention to conversions. [...] Revenues will see a similar surge in interest. [Emphasis my own.]

So it looks like the days of evangelizing the conversation simply for the sake of conversation are done (or at least numbered). As the saying goes, “money talks.” So while it might be nice to have x-hundreds or x-thousands of consumers talking about or engaging with a brand, the final word is going to go to the bottom line — i.e. how many of those “mentions” converted into sales.

So how is this going to affect how social media is sold, measured, and evaluated? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but social will probably end up tied a lot closer to SEO.

Search, Social, and the Bottom Line

While Americans spend more than 6 times as much time with social than they do with search, search still has one clear advantage: intention.

Basically, search is better at leveraging purchasing intent because it is a keyword driven medium — i.e. results are served based on keyword queries that are typed into a search bar. What this means is that when a user searches for something, they are actively interested and already in a mindset where they might want to buy.

This makes search users much more qualified than social users.

Granted, social networks like Facebook do use keywords to serve up ads, but those keyword occurrences tell marketers nothing about user intent — such as the mood they are in at any given moment. Just because a keyword appears in my interests and throughout my social graph, that doesn’t mean that I’m interested in buying.

Indeed, social ads are so disruptive because people log onto social networks to socialize, not to buy. This is probably why Facebook’s 2010 ad revenues are estimated at a mere $1.86 billion, while Google posted $6.77 billion in revenue in Q1 2010 alone.

Social & SEO

So we can probably expect to see marketers evaluate their social campaigns in light of how search has set the pace in intentional targeting. But how exactly is that going to manifest at the tactical level?

Well, it’s unlikely that eyes will be on focused ads. Basically, paid search and social ads are (for reasons outlined above) too different to compare. Indeed, despite Facebook generating nearly 25 percent of all pageViews in the US, those ads get half the clicks of network banners, and an eighth of what Adwords ads get.

So that leave us with SEO: namely, how can marketers use social media to reach the same kind of intentional users they would with organic search?

As eMarketer reported just a couple months ago, many marketers already see social media as “an excellent driver of content visibility, [that helps] to keep content fresh and abundant, and also [increases] the number of inbound links a site receives.”

So if marketers are to focus more on the bottom line of social media, they may very well look at how social traffic and trends can boost their organic rankings. After all, why keep that “engagement” and “conversations” within the walls of a social network when you can push them back to your site where they can help raise your profile with users who already have the intent to buy?

Just the Beginning

While this might be the end of social media evangelism, it is by no means the end of social media. Indeed, social media’s youth might be over, but that means its career is just beginning.

In the short term, social is becoming a much more important factor in search rankings — a place where users are actively interested in products/services. In the longer term, social networks (like Facebook) will probably devise their own version of intentional targeting.

So as marketers look more and more at the bottom line of their social media efforts, these channels will become more mature and more refined. After all, such a change in focus in how its evaluated only means that its starting a new, more responsible era in its life where its able to deliver on the promise of its full potential.

Reports surfaced last week that Twitter was a possible acquisition target of either Facebook or Google.

While this may be an idle rumor, it represents a merger and acquisition market that’s heating up. Of course, there was the failed bid by Google to purchase Groupon, but the recent acquisition of The Huffington Post by AOL could be a harbinger of more acquisitions to come in the online world.

This latest rumor raises a few interesting questions:

1. Are we witnessing the emergence of a new Internet bubble?

Let’s face it, these days anything labeled “a bubble” is not a positive thing (think “the housing bubble”). But if you remember the breathless days of old when we witnessed an Internet bubble with valuations reaching the stratosphere, it would actually be an economic shot in the arm if it were to happen again. In the past, online businesses couldn’t be snapped up fast enough. The problem was they made hollow promises. This time, hopefully, it would be different and businesses would be solid enough to sustain themselves. It does appear that social media in particular has piqued the interest of investors, and it is no accident that Facebook and Groupon have both been considering IPOs. Google, meanwhile, has been kicking the tires of just about anything it can get its hands on. All of these elements could be positive signs of a new Internet bubble that will hopefully last a while before bursting.

2. Is this more evidence of an ultimate showdown between Facebook and Google?

Well sure. These giants keep dancing around each other as if they are the top two sumo wrestlers on the planet. While Facebook and Google have managed to coexist peacefully, there continues to be signs of increasing competition and one-upmanship (Facebook Places and Google Places being just one obvious overlap). Movements by both parties demonstrate the inevitability of a mega-clash that can’t be far away. A fight over a hot property like Twitter will simply exacerbate the situation.

3. Is Twitter ready to sell?

When money is flowing freely, anyone will sell for the right price. The remarkable thing about a potential Twitter sale, says the Wall Street Journal, is the company’s valuation: somewhere between $8 and $10 billion. Let me repeat that: between $8 and $10 BILLION. In December, Twitter’s valuation was below $4 billion. Even that was pretty spectacular, given the company had revenue of $45 million last year while it lost money, and expects revenue this year might reach $110 million. If Facebook or Google or someone else threw billions of dollars at Twitter, it would be tough not to sell.

4. What would a Twitter acquisition mean?

It would be nice to think an acquirer would leave Twitter alone, but acquisitions usually don’t work that way. On the positive side, an acquisition by Facebook would likely present a good fit, and integration of Twitter into Facebook would offer an unequalled social media offering. An acquisition by Google, more likely to occur because of Google’s rich cash reserve, would be challenging in terms of integration. What it would do, however, is give Google the jump start it needs to get serious about social media. Still, potential problems exist, as Matthew Ingram of GigaOm points out. Google’s acquisition history, writes Ingram, “isn’t likely to fill anyone with confidence about how Twitter might fare under the Google umbrella. …For every acquisition that has paid off, like YouTube or Keyhole (which became Google Earth), the company has made a whole series of purchases that have gone absolutely nowhere.”

Despite the old adage, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Twitter may not be a serious acquisition target because the price is just too high. And if it is a target, Twitter may rebuff a potential acquirer, much as Groupon rebuffed Google, casting an eye toward a future IPO instead.

Whatever happens, Twitter is riding higher than ever, as I suggested in my recent piece about Twitter’s considerable influence. Their advertising is gaining traction too; the company is selling out its “Promoted Trends” ad inventory every day, according to the Wall Street Journal. For now, Twitter seems to be doing just fine on its own, thank you. And I have to agree with Matthew Ingram when he says:

“Being bought by either Google or Facebook might bring a big payoff, and substantial financial and operational resources, but it would almost certainly dilute that focus [being a real-time communications network] – simply because it would be a small part of a much larger company – and that would be a shame just when the service is starting to show its real potential.”

It’s easy to hate advertising. It’s mostly unsolicited and it’s everywhere we go. So it’s no surprise that people really hate ads in social media and on mobile devices.

This week, eMarketer reported on a survey commissioned by AdAge and conducted by Ipsos Observer, and findings did not bode well for digital advertisers. Overall, users dislike website ads almost as much as they dislike ads on social networks, and they really dislike.

So why is it that some ads are more acceptable than others? Why are we more okay with ads in print and on television than in digital form. Well, the answer is probably part nature, part nurture, and part context.

Why We Hate Advertising

Our aversion to advertising has to do with free will. Essentially, unsolicited sales messages vie for a piece of our mind share. They intrude on our thought processes and try to govern what we think about, and to that extent, try to subvert our free will.

It’s the difference between sales clerk and a door-to-door peddler. I’m more likely to find an in-store salesman helpful than offensive because I chose to walk into the store, so I’m probably interested in making a purchase, and the sales clerk’s knowledge about in-stock products can help me make a better purchasing decision. The door-to-door salesman, however, is unwelcome because s/he was uninvited — they are intruding on my space and interrupting my day to peddle something I’m not actively interested in.

Why, When, and Where We Tolerate Ads

This, of course, begs the question: why were survey respondents so much more likely to tolerate print, television, and outdoor advertising than they were radio or various forms digital forms. Well, this is where nurture and context come into play.

For starters, in some cases, we grew up with advertising being bundled with the media. Most people cannot remember a time before print and television advertising. Advertising is an inherent part of each of these media experiences.

With digital channels, however, we can actually remember a time before ads. Not only do some of us remember a mostly ad-free net, but most of us remember when our favorite services were free of advertising — such as Facebook a few years ago and Twitter until recently. As a result, the expectations we have about of our web, email, and social media experiences are relatively altruistic compared to other media.

More importantly, each media has particular peculiarities that make it more or less compatible with advertising. And the less compatible it is, the more that ads disrupt the end user’s media experience.

Mobile: The problem with mobile advertising is the very reason why marketers get so excited about it: mobile phones are a very personal thing that we take with us everywhere we go and interact with us constantly. As much as mobile allows us to geo-target users with nearby offers every time they search or check-in somewhere, they go beyond mind share and intrude on users’ actual physical space. This means mobile ads are worse than an unsolicited door-to-door sales call. They’re like having that salesmen follow you around all day.

Social Media: As much social graph info is valuable for profiling a user and targeting them only with offers they might be interested in, social advertisers often overlook one critical aspect: we log onto social networks to socialize, not to buy. With social media, anything that disrupts the socializing experience only creates friction. For instance, Facebook ads perform only half as well as regular banner ads.

Email: Here we have a very personal, private space. Our inboxes are things that we guard very carefully. They’re where we have personal, one-on-one interactions with other people, and they are places where we store valuable secrets — like usernames and passwords to other online services. Of course, we don’t want to feel like there’s a salesman lurking in our inbox.

Websites: There are two space limitations to a web page. First, like print, there is the overall real estate on the page — i.e. what’s taken up by content, sidebars, navigation menus, and ads. Then, unlike print, there are the limitations imposed by our screen. We can only see so much of that limited real estate at a time, so ads intrude on our field of vision in a much more salient way. As much as we might be banner blind and not notice what the ad is for, we do notice that an ad was there, getting in the way of our content consumption.

Radio: What’s interesting about radio is that it’s a medium that, like print and TV, grew up with advertising, but we still find radio ads more unbearable than tolerable. This is because radio is a one-dimensional medium. There are no pictures or colors. There is only sound. So most radio advertising is a lot like some stranger on the street leaning in to your ear to tell you why you should buy something from them. Beside, most listeners tune in for music, and the ads are probably the biggest annoyance.

Credit: Pink Ponk

Print: There are two aspects of print advertising that make it more tolerable: First, it doesn’t disrupt the consumption of actual print content; you can always skip over ads, turn to the next page, or ignore them altogether. Second, in many lifestyle publications, they actually complement the content — e.g. I have friends who read fashion magazines more for the ads than anything else.

Television: Here we have a medium that’s been completely packaged around advertising, so the viewer’s overall experience is barely disrupted. First, original programming is written and edited around commercial breaks. Story lines tend to arc in a way so that we stay tuned to see what happens after the commercial break. This makes the commercials part and parcel of the excitement we experience through a show’s plot. Besides, even if we leave the room during the breaks, commercials are sufficiently louder than the programming that they might still manage to capture some of our mind share.

Out of Home: Outdoor advertising is bearable very much in the same way that print advertising there. It’s there, in our face, polluting the landscape, but it’s easy to ignore.

Marketing Beyond Advertising

Let’s face it, if every user/viewer/listener/reader had a choice, we’d live in an ad-free world. But ads exist because publishers and broadcasters need to pay their bills.

Besides, many of the media where ads are less than welcome are still their nascent stages. We can still remember when these channels were ad-free, but it won’t be long before those days are going to seem like a lifetime ago.

Mobile and social are still the media that they are, and ads are never really going to deliver the return that marketers need to justify their investment. Rather, mobile and social marketing are going to be driven by other tactics, such as content and opt-in notifications. Indeed, it’s the targeting options available through mobile and social that make these other marketing channels so promising.

Using social media as part of our business strategy requires us to change our expectation about tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Today I’ll focus on making social media serve a critical goal: generating leads and sales. To start; let’s try acting on your instincts more often.

You Already Have the Answers

What if social media is not a game changer? What if social media marketing was a potential game enhancer that you can figure out on your own, maybe even better than the experts? Even more radical, what if you already have the ability to stretch each social media budget dollar farther? Like IBM’s Mike Moran preaches in his book, you simply need to do it wrong quickly and be fearless learners, trusting and acting on your instincts.

Let’s start with a look at real estate. In the early 1990s, the web was posed to make realtors obsolete. Remember disintermediation? The middle man no longer fit in the middle. It was all coming to an end. Now, Trulia.com and Zillow.com are still around, but so are realtors.  As it turns out, data provided to home buyers isn’t terribly valuable by itself. People who can interpret that data are valuable.

In real estate, opinion and knowledge sharing on the web ( e.g., the wisdom of crowds) is helpful, but not always trusted or valued. Buyers and sellers still appreciate working with the knowledgeable, credentialed people of the industry, realtors. After all the hype and spin, trust and critical thinking matters more to people. Who’da thunk?

Think about it this way: realtors clearly have the social business know-how. Consider their historic expertise in facilitating conversations that lead to consumer trust. In this light, realtors simply need to learn how to best choose and apply an array of new digital marketing tools.

Jeff Turner of Zeek Interactive says it best:

“[Realtors] may have strong positions in numerous social media sites, but they have one or a small number of hubs around which all of their social media efforts revolve.”

Realtors are in the ideal power position for leveraging social media, perhaps more than any other business industry. Realtors aren’t blogging about blogging. They’re not tools of the shiny new tools. They’re social commerce experts.

In a true, non-tech social context, who better to apply marketing constructs within budding social media than realtors? They already have proven (effective) strategies that power the tactics. They have the social business skills needed to succeed.  In many ways, realtors should be schooling digital experts when it comes to creating more profits using social media technologies.

How is your business any different?

Ethical Bribes Work

What sells better: awareness or a quality experience?  Think about your own experience with brands, products, and services.

Consider the last time a vacation timeshare marketer offered you the ethical bribe of a free vacation. These marketers have used free vacations to lure the most likely prospects for years. Then they engage customers in real time, but they go far beyond simple engagement. They assess prospects one-on-one to understand where the customer is at in the purchase process and then set the hook with clever sales techniques.

With the web and social media, we have new opportunities, but not under revolutionary terms. Nearly everyone can replicate this model, not just supposed experts.  Why? Because we already have marketing expertise and NOT because everyone has access to social media!

We need to pick the best tools to earn customers’ participation. Jeff Turner reminds us that we don’t want to become tools of the tools in the process. After we’ve chosen our tools, it’s time to interact, and to deliver customer satisfaction though a qualitative experience. Ultimately we’re reaching beyond creating mere attention and awareness.

Never Forget the Fundamentals

Have the fundamental business rules changed because of social media? Or has the environment simply changed by speeding up and becoming more connected? Customers are hyper-connected, but the hype of social media spinsters hasn’t changed the fundamentals of business. The digital revolution is exciting and filled with opportunity. Capitalizing on it requires you to trust your instincts, to question your consultants, and to take bold action to improve digital marketing returns.

Here’s an idea. Suggest  to your marketing team that Twittering is just aimless chitchat without organizational design, purpose, or expected outcomes set  from the start. The same can be said for all social tactics. Empower your team to take action on the declaration based on these fundamentals. Trust your instincts, and act on them.

As Seth Godin is now saying with his new, Poke the Box movement:

“From the age of 5 we’re sort of trained not to poke.  We’re sort of trained not to push the envelope.  Because we’ve discovered that if we do that we might get punished…we might get pushed back…and the answer is to reassure yourself.  The answer is to feed yourself a steady diet of reassuring, inspirational, insightful, work—that maybe, just maybe, helps you find the guts to do the work you know you need to do.”

More often than not, business folks I meet already have the answers, they just need to be reassured and inspired into taking action. I’m hopeful that my new book will help smart people find the guts to take action.

Each day I see Paper.li tweets showing up in Twitter.  I see the NoAdTax one or the Todd Farmer Daily.  There is the Affiliate Summit Speakers Paper.li and a ton of others.  What I like about them is that I get to see what my friends are interested in and I have also discovered some new sites and bloggers via Paper.li.  What I also realized is that although Paper.li has become pretty popular, it is lacking one major thing: loyalty to the individual Papers.

Whenever I come across Papers on Paper.li, I see great content from smart people.  I also usually click on them to see what is going on.  What I have also seen is a lack of subscribers to the Papers.  I think the most I have seen is 10 subscribers.  The content is great, the delivery is great and you are easily able to share them with others.  What is missing is a clear way and a reminder to subscribe to that persons paper.

Things like a reminder, a light box or even just something that says “Have this paper delivered to your inbox daily” could help to increase subscriptions to people’s papers.  The Paper.li service is great and the idea is awesome, but what they seem to have overlooked is the engagement function. Which leads me to the other point of this article.  What have you overlooked that you could be doing better for your own sites and your customers?

We all know there has to be something better we can do with our sites.  If they were perfect we wouldn’t be here, we would be on vacation 24/7, doing charity work or having “me” time.  Have you ever sat back, looked at your sites and wondered if there was a way to get your visitors to want to interact with it more?  Is there a better way to get your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter?  Have you encouraged them to share your info, products or leave positive reviews of you elsewhere?

I think that sometimes we get caught up on all of the hype and buzz of what we should be doing that we forget the most simple thing, what can I do to make my visitors, customers and readers more happy.  How can I build up reader loyalty? How can I make my sales funnel better or shorter?  Is there a way I can get visitors to recommend my products or sites to their friends without distracting them into leaving the site or leaving the sales funnel?

Every once in a while it is important to take a step back and look at your site.  Think about what is not user friendly and what you can do to get people to want to come back and interact with it again and again.

Paper.li did an amazing job with getting their name out there and tons of people to want to use it.  The problem I see is that I have never had the urge to subscribe and I never see any major calls to action that ask me to.  It’s important to think about this to achieve long term success and repeat visits.  The content can be quality and it gathers itself daily, but if people leave Twitter because they get bored of it, then the distribution starts to die if no one has subscribed.  Paper.li may want to consider other ways to gather information and sources of copy as well, in case Twitter begins to die.  Until then I’ll still remember to visit people’s papers, but only when I am on Twitter and can see there is a new one in my stream.

Don’t look now, but Twitter is fast becoming influential in more ways than one. Liberal talk show personality Keith Olbermann abruptly announced on-air last Friday that he was leaving “Countdown,” his popular MSNBC program. On Monday night, instead of appearing on television, Olbermann tweeted during the time slot of his former show.

Olbermann wasn’t just pulling a PR stunt – he has close to 200,000 Twitter followers, about one-fifth of the audience for his show. In a recent blog Damon Kiesow of the Poynter Institute asks the intriguing question: “When pundits (or celebrities, reporters, or politicians) have personal audiences at that scale, what role does that leave for actual media companies?” Kiesow says when writer Howard Kurtz went to The Daily Beast from The Washington Post, it didn’t matter to Kiesow: “As a Twitter user, clicking a link to read his work at the Post is the same as clicking a link to read him at the Beast.”

Although it wasn’t obvious from President Obama’s Tuesday night State Of the Union Address, the president encouraged questions from Americans, some of which came in via Twitter (#askobama). The president, acknowledged to be pretty social media-savvy, must know that 8 percent of the U.S. population uses Twitter, according to the latest research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Twitter says, however, the number is even larger, claiming it has 61 million users in the U.S. of the 175 million users worldwide. Twitter adds around 370,000 accounts daily.

Famous users aside, there’s a financial side to Twitter’s considerable influence. Twitter is likely to earn revenues of $150 million this year, according to eMarketer, most of which is coming from the U.S. That’s more than triple the $45 million it earned last year, when Twitter first sold advertising. eMarketer projects revenue of $250 million by 2012, surpassing the troubled Myspace’s ad revenue. Twitter plans to get there through its Promoted Products suite (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends) and the launch of a self-service ad platform.

All of this positive activity contributes to the company’s valuation of $3.7 billion after it raised $200 million of venture capital at the end of last year. Sure, it’s a far cry from Facebook, but Twitter is a different animal and, at least for 200 million or so people, it has a value all its own.

Some data reported late last year suggested that Twitter had a long way to go to engage businesses, but let’s not forget that Facebook was in the same place before turning its attention to the needs of business. Business users are flocking to Facebook, whether it’s through Facebook pages pitching their companies and brands, or running ads on other pages, or Facebook Places or Facebook Deals.

Twitter is slowly showing that it too, can be viable for business use as a tool to disseminate news quickly, point to a promotion on Facebook, or serve as an entry point to a particular webpage.

As for using Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts, Twitter has yet to make a strong business case for them, but to keep its revenue growing, it will surely do so.

Twitter does, however, seem to fit the bill as a forum for instant communications that extends the influence of the influencers.

Don’t take my word for it… just ask Keith Olbermann and Barack Obama.