This month’s Online Community Expert Interview is with Ryan Holmes, CEO/Founder, Invoke – Creators of Memelabs, HootSuite, Claytorials, ow.ly. I met Ryan at this year’s SxSWi, and I was struck by how well he and his company understood both the business value of twitter, as well as the functional need of the business user.
As founder of Invoke, Ryan’s experience combines diverse management skills with solid industry and technical knowledge. Since 2000, Invoke has grown to a talented 26-person powerhouse focused on new media disciplines such as online advertising, viral campaigns and social application development. As CEO, Ryan has been active in all aspects of Invoke operations, focusing on strategy, business and product development and technical and social networking trends.
Ryan gained valuable experience in entrepreneurial and startup ventures, business management, and marketing as owner of a restaurant chain, a tourist adventure business, and online store with 3m+/year revenues.
Q: What are some of the most effective techniques you’ve seen Hootsuite users employ for engaging on Twitter?
A: I think that the more interesting usage has been around scheduling of tweets and RSS feed integration. We recently had someone tell us that they scheduled interesting content every 10 minutes for one week and went from 100 to 5000 followers in that week. I think that’s pretty amazing. The RSS feed integration is also powerful because it allows someone to easily add a bunch of content feeds around a specific interest niche. For example if your core area is technology, you can integrate a Digg, Engadget and TechCrunch feed into your Twitter account using Hootsuite.
Q: How do you think the Twitter ecosystem of content streams, API’s and third party services evolve?
A: Twitters dependence on API is pretty amazing. As a service, 70%+ of its messaging volume is sent via its API, so they are ultimately very incentivized in keeping their developers and third party applications happy. I have likened Twitters business to owning a communication channel similar to IM, or email where there are multiple clients (ex: Outlook, Thunderbird, Yahoo! Mail in the case of email). The risk of a non-distributed communication channel is that if Twitter goes down, then none of the applications really function well.
I think a general trend for the third party apps will be to build out as much functionality as possible within Twitter, and then look towards incorporation of other platforms.
Q: With the recent influx of mega celebrities with huge followings (think @aplusk and @oprah), is social media starting to look more like broadcast?
A: Twitter is a very simple system and because of this simplicity, it can be a subtly different tool to everyone who uses it. It can be a microphone (customer service/sales), telephone (one-one conversation), or a megaphone (broadcast).
Q: What are your plans for Hootsuite? Can you talk a bit about the business model?
A: Our plans for Hootsuite are to continue building the stickiest application for power and corporate twitter users. Our current version has great success with group workflow (editors and administrators), scheduling, multiple accounts, and analytics. Our upcoming release will focus on simplicity/flexibility of use, brand and keyword monitoring, increased analytics and sharing of streams. I think these are massively important improvements and we expect to see some big gains in usage.
Our focus with Hootsuite has been to build community over generating revenue to date. We have been doing that very well. We have a few excellent and unique ways of monetizing as we move ahead, but we will always have some level of free functionality.
Q: Since we are talking about Twitter, what did you have for lunch today?
A: Well, I just got up after attending an amazing wedding last night. I’ll tell you that I had a filet mignon there. It was completely overkill with two huge 1.5″ thick medallions. I felt sad that I couldn’t finish it. I twitpic’d it and it’s on my twitter stream @invoker for anyone who’s REALLY bored.
