Tweet charts allows you to generate a report of custom data for anything you can search Twitter for: hashtags, words, phrases, usernames or URLs. Enter your query in the box above labeled "search query" and check it out.

Using Twitter: A Really Simple Daily Checklist

Interesting. I'm checking out ... to be able to see when my followers are online. -

Discover hashtags for all the healthcare conferences! We hope this tool will help to capture and share the essence of these healthcare conferences on a global perspective.

Reminder: Cigarettes Kill via Wikipedia

On Friday, Pfizer announced that its new gene-targeted lung cancer drug, Xalkori, will cost $9,600 per patient per month, meaning it could cost $80,000 or more for the average patient. But Xalkori is only effective in about 5% of patients whose tumors have a mutation in a gene called ALK. As biotech executive Gautam Kollu noted on Twitter, the real cost of the drug is $9,600 plus 25 ALK tests, because that’s how many patients will need to be screened for one to actually get Xalkori (which up until now was known by the generic name crizotinib.)

Abbott Laboratories makes the ALK test through its Vysis unit, and I asked a spokesman how much it would cost. Like the test for Roche’s Herceptin, a type of test called a FISH test is used. The spokesman said:

An ALK test, including the pathology service, will be approximately $1,500 (a one time cost). The price we charge for the test kit itself is less than $250, which is similar to other FISH tests.

It’s not clear to me whether or not all of that $1,500 represents costs that would not have previously been paid for these lung cancer patients (I’ve asked Pfizer and Abbott) but that could mean that for every person who gets Xalkori, the system will pay another $30,000 on top of the cost of the drug. (Update: Most of the cost is for pathology services, and multiple tests could be combined in that panel. See below.)

Given those costs, it’s easy to see how DNA sequencing in cancer might have a market in the future. That’s one of the big potential markets for companies like Illumina, Complete Genomics, and Life Technologies, which are sequencing whole human genomes at a cost of $5,000 or less. Remember, though, those technologies could carry extra pathology costs, too.

Update: Further comment from Abbott:

Labs charge differently for their services — this is a ballpark estimate.  Also, if the ALK test is run as part of a panel of others tests, the lab’s service fee would likely be cheaper. The cost of the Abbott Vysis ALK test is less than $250 per patient, which is similar to other types of FISH tests.  The $1,500 includes the approximate list price for a laboratory’s pathology services. Rates may be different for individual laboratories based on negotiated contracts. The ALK test is likely to be done in conjunction with other pathology testing that is currently standard for non-small-cell lung cancer. Thus, the cost of the test adds only incremental cost to pathology.

It’s also important to note that when medicines like crizotinib are prescribed based on more specific diagnoses and proven effectiveness in targeted patient groups, fewer people will be given drugs that may not help them, avoiding  unnecessary expense and possible side effects.  End-stage cancer patients are known to consume lots of services. By being able to effectively treat patients with the ALK rearrangement, you are improving outcomes and costs of care as you are able to treat them.  This will, in fact, save money for our health care system.

During the last two weeks of my digital marketing internship I was tasked with the daunting goal of placing a value on different types of digital content. What is the value of a tweet? A blog post? A video? A Facebook status update?

Try doing a simple search and you’ll quickly see that everybody has their own opinions but nobody has a concrete answer. Calculating ROI (return on investment) or NPV (net present value) of social media content? Impossible, some say.

Moreover, a universal value simply can’t exist – the value that Dell places on its Twitter activity (accounting for $3 million in sales from 2007-2009) would wildly vary from the value I place on my personal Twitter activity, for example.

So how can you value digital content? Should we be trying to place a monetary value on content that largely has qualitative outputs? If we don’t, how can we truly price our services?

We all know that having a presence in a network where you can listen to your prospective customers and engage with current customers is worthwhile. Building name brand recognition, generating trust, and securing loyalty are all unmeasurable but imperative goals.

The problem arises when determining ROI of an investment in one of these channels – is it worthwhile, for example, to invest 300 hours a year maintaining a presence on Twitter if that 300 hours could be better spent turning prospects into customers on Facebook? Should I get a part-time job paying an hourly rate instead of spending that time blogging with hardly any tangible return? (I say tangible because again there are countless intangible returns like invaluable relationships with readers, etc).

After spending countless hours debating this issue with myself and others, I’ve come to the realization that new metrics and benchmarks must be put into place if we want to appropriately quantify value of digital content. Time spent on production isn’t sufficient, and the traditional marketing metrics such as CPM (cost per thousand impressions), PPC (price per click) and CPA (cost per action) simply won’t work for social media and multimedia content. Here’s why:

Example: Valuing a tweet
You cannot state that it takes roughly one minute to tweet and one minute equates to 50 cents of opportunity cost (the value of my time tweeting, which prevents me from using that time to do something else), thus 50 cents is the intrinsic value of a tweet.

Why is this wrong? Think about it this way: One tweet valued at 50 cents has no link and garners no RTs, thus quickly getting buried in the abyss of tweets. Another tweet valued at 50 cents has a link and a catchy lead attracting a solid number of RTs and clicks, thus extending its shelf-life. Some of the clicks turn into email subscriptions, or even potentially sales revenue. Obviously in this case you cannot say that the two tweets have the same value.

Display advertising has clear-cut calculations for quantifying a value for impressions and clicks. Try replicating CPM and PPC calculations for tweets like I did and you’ll likely stop with a massive headache. Here’s why:

To calculate CPM on Twitter, you have to determine what percentage of your followers likely saw one of your tweets. Four percent? Six? Eight? Ten? Nobody knows! (For validation, I asked a Twitter salesperson during a sales pitch to test out their advertising program and she admitted that there is no way to currently determine an accurate percentage). This percentage will change depending on what time of day you tweet, what day of the week, and time of the year. Moreover, if you hardly ever tweet the chance of one tweet being seen is much less than if you tweet every five minutes. As users get more savvy parsing tweets effectively (via services like TweetDeck or the list functions in Twitter) your chance of them viewing your tweet will increase or decrease, depending on whether you were one of the lucky chosen ones (which, to make things even muddier, you won’t know!).

Say we estimate four percent of your followers see a tweet and you have 5,000 followers. Thus, we’re estimating you have 200 impressions. Again using the incorrect-but-all-we-have-for-now 50 cent “cost” of a tweet, your CPM would be $2.50. (.50 / (200/1000))

What does this really tell you, though? You can’t compare it alongside an average CPM rate for a banner ad to compare effectiveness. First, two of the three inputs are extremely rough estimates. As they say, analysis is only as good as the data on which it is based. Second, I would argue that an impression of a clearly displayed ad is different than an impression of a tweet simply because users have learned to largely ignore advertisements, whereas a tweet isn’t immediately flagged in a viewer’s head as an ad to ignore.

To add to the problem, when you try to calculate CPC you think it’d be easy to aggregate number of clicks from a link thanks to services like bitly or cligs. However, Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” blog recently reported that less than 25% of all links on Twitter in the past six months correctly credit Twitter as the referral source. For instance, if users interact with the links outside of a traditional web browser (such as on a mobile phone) it is marked as a direct source rather than coming from Twitter. Moreover, if users click on a Twitter link that is embedded into someone’s LinkedIn profile, the click is credited to LinkedIn, not Twitter. Hopefully you can quickly see why this is a problem.

So if we can’t determine an accurate number of impressions or number of clicks to potential lead gen or conversion opportunities, how can we accurately trace revenue back to its correct source?

Why this matters
The 2007 rationale “you should do it because everyone else is” simply won’t work anymore to convince your boss, client, or customer why you should invest time and effort into a particular network or piece of digital content. These statements won’t get very far: “We should do a video because it feels like we should” or “Let’s launch a Facebook fan page because all of our competitors are doing it.”

Should we be trying to place a monetary amount on a single unit of content? Obviously a piece of content can vary drastically; the value of one video will unlikely be the same as one tweet, for example. But, we all need to begin thinking about the inherent value in what we provide to our company or to our customers so that we can place tangible goals and determine success based on them.

Thus, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how your team is tackling this issue, or how you as a freelancer are competitively pricing your digital services. I added a number of different links I came across as I was researching this topic. If there are others not listed below, please include them in the comments!

Additional resources on the topic
The Maturation of Social Media ROI

In Social Media, Your Return Represents Your Investment

The ROI of the Tweet

Tools To Measure and Impact Social Media ROI

‘Harden’ Your Social Media Marketing ROI

What is the NPV of Social Media?

How to Calculate the Net Present Value of Social Commerce

Social Media ROI

Social Media ROI: ROI Doesn’t Stand for Return on Ignorance (Book Forward)
Other posts that might interest you:

Seven interactive tools to strengthen your next multimedia package
Digital guru Jose Luis Orihuela recommends 25 “media thinkers” to follow
Facebook product manager Bubba Murarka on designing for the social Web

Kent sez, “Enter your Twitter handle and watch as your tiny online avatar turns into large-scale generative art. Results can look like batik, pastel, or tie-dye, depending on the original.”

We’re calling the Twitter API from Yahoo! Query Language, receiving an image URL for your avatar, converting it to a data:uri, and returning its base64-encoded value as JSON with a callback.

Then we create an image on the client, load it with the data YQL gave us, and stretch it to fit our (comparatively very large) canvas tag.

Since we’ve created the image locally, the usual canvas security restrictions don’t apply and we’re free to sample pixels. We do this, collecting color values and positions, and then we start drawing circles with random sizes and tiny random offsets from where each color sample was taken.

Avatar Portraits .:. kentbrewster.com

(Thanks, Kent!)

#TfN

I have collected some social media case studies that will give you practical ideas. You will see what has worked for others and find ways to adapt these practices to your own social media marketing.

Case Study: Restaurant Chain Builds Loyalty With Check-In Discounts
Scott Wise is the president a


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Let’s start with a finding that does both, and is a topic of little previous research, to my knowledge. When readers leave a news website, there are several main destinations: The top one is subdomains or related sites, for example exiting CNN.com for money.cnn.com. Second are sharing sites, both directly to places like Facebook and via widgets (like “add this”) on news sites. Third is Google — not Google search results or Google news but Google.com or specific Google tools like maps.

Corporate Social Media Reading List

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Allows you to pipe your bash input to twitter or identi.ca in an easy and fast manner to annoy the whole world.

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Journalists on Twitter - Breaking News, Politics, Opinion and more - Muck Rack

Shows where on a timeline an individual users' tweets typically fall.

Terraminds micro is a search application for Twitter messages and users.