Twitter Fuels iPad’s Big Buzz, but Sentiment Generally Neutral

Two More Publishers Talk About Blocking Google

Razorfish’s FEED Study: Brands Are the New Celebrity

Interesting or entertaining” content was the No. 1 reason to follow a brand for 23% of the 1,000 consumers surveyed. And a recent report from Penn State found that 20% of all Tweets mention specific brands or products (Today, for example, “Google Wave” and “Modern Warfare 2″ are trending topics on Twitter).

The most important take-home from the Razorfish study is that interactions with a brand matter consumers. Of those surveyed, 65% said an online experience with a brand has changed their opinion of that brand, and 97% said that experience influenced whether or not they would purchase an item or service. Those who engage with a brand digitally aren’t just more likely to purchase that brand, they’re more likely to recommend it to their friends.

Most companies are worried that their consumers’ ability to communicate with peers and read user reviews online is crippling the effect of advertising. But Razorfish found that technology isn’t killing advertising–it’s helping it to evolve. Some 69% of consumers provided feedback to a company through social media channels, the company’s Web site, or review sites. These channels are creating two-way communication between brands and their customers.

Think of how you relate to brands today. We’re certainly not the consumers of 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Now we can follow Zappos on Twitter along with 1.5 million others, or be one of Starbucks’ four million Venti Vanilla Bean Frappuccino Blended Creme drinking friends on Facebook..

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Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.