The first, while admitting success for some brands like Dell, is decidedly negative:

Like Second Life, Twitter has become a wasteland for brands. Verizon, a company that spent more than $1 billion on advertising in 2009, has around 5,000 followers — about 0.3 percent the amount that Perez Hilton has. Coca-Cola has 15,000. Apple’s not even on Twitter. And some corporate Twitter accounts suffer from prolonged neglect. Delta Airlines’ Twitter page went from June 17 to Dec. 22 last year without a single update. Delta reps could not be reached for comment.

The second turns this on its head though and shows how upstart brands are lapping their bigger, yet slower competitors.

Witness a curious dichotomy of social media: While most brands are now tweeting as a way to reach consumers, the biggest ones with the most resources are often left in the dust by the indie brands with a fraction of their market share.

There are several theories behind this twist. To be effective, marketers say, tweets don’t just have to be brief, but cool and snarky as well — two traits that seldom come easy to a buttoned-up, publicly traded corporation. Another reason is that upstart brands are more readily associated with entrepreneurial personalities, who can in turn use Twitter to convey the mood and swagger of their brands better than a large PR department. Whatever the reasons, it’s the up-and-coming brands that seem to have squeezed the most marketing juice out of Twitter.

The example given here couldn’t be more clear. In the greeting card space two-year-old Somecards with all of its five employees has 1.7 million followers while ninety-nine-year-old Hallmark and its 14,000 employees barely has 2,000.

Whether Twitter stays/remains/becomes niche remains to be seen. What has been shown though is that some brands are succeeding while others slog along. Chalk it up in part to enthusiasm. As noted in the articles, Delta went some six months between Twitter posts last year before engaging in 2010.

Take a look at the advertised URL in the image above.

Financial institution Barclays is promoting its Facebook presence rather than its corporate Web site.

As Fluxis writes:

This is a clear sign of the move away from corporate web destinations in favor of the locations where consumers are spending most of their time. This is a big shift and one that must be quite a challenge for companies to get their heads around, but it reflects the new reality.

What do you think. If Barclays is moving away from a corporate Web destination, should you?

• Phase I: Trial – no process is used and social platforms are implemented first.
• Phase II: Transition – an informal process is used and performed randomly.
• Phase III: Strategic – a formal process is used and performed routinely.

In order to accomplish this he says we need to achieve the following:

• Objectives – Define objectives with target audiences and social metrics
• Actions – Create a social marketing strategy with a definitive plan of action
• Devices – Deploy social platforms based on audience, objectives and strategy

His article is here.

The article focuses on three key points:

• Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates
  

  This is a way of measuring conversion rates, which is the lifeblood of all applications. The term “conversion rate” refers to the total number of visitors who came to a site, compared to the number of visitors who did a desired action (such as creating an account or purchasing an item).

• Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do
  

  Pageview tracking is becoming less and less relevant for many web companies. Instead of the basic unit of measurement being the pageview, they are starting to track more directly relevant things, like the actions people are taking.

• Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?
  

  You can think of Visitor Retention as a measure of how “sticky” your site is. What we’re really measuring is the percentage of people who come back again and again.

Give it a read. The lessons are important for all organizations: large, small, for-profit, non-profit.