Mobile payments: the money is stuck in my phone

I worked with a fellow who balked at creating a gmail account because he didn't want too many passwords out there (here's the post).

"It puts my bank account in danger," he explained.

My guess is, he still uses his cell to make phone calls.

My other guess is that the rest of us use our cell phones to check our gmail, listen to music, google the earth, check on our blogs, our twitter, our foursquare, our LinkedIn, our fitness plan, our stock prices, jot notes to ourselves, and record a voice message.

I shudder to think what my former co-worker will do when he discovers he will be making payments via his mobile phone.

According to a post on the Reflections of a Newsosaur, phones will replace currency and credit cards.

"It’s not a matter of if, but when," says Alan D. Mutter.

"The check's on the phone," we'll promise creditors.

During their follow up contact we'll swear, "We got disconnected before I could complete the transaction!"

If you lose your phone, as I did recently, and thank you Stephen King for it's safe return, you'll be making payments with what? Cash? The importance of the receipt will rise and bury us in unneeded slips of paper. We'll have to prove we paid that bill in cash with another piece of paper. Or, a scan of a piece of paper.

We will no longer have credit reports, we'll have phone numbers that denote our status of good payers. It will morph to our 'phone-it-in' score. A good score will make our KLOUT rise along with our perks of unnecessary offers.

We'll be drowning in credit-connectness, personal QR codes based on our ability to pay, finance, float or dodge. Our phones will act as personal transponders that open doors, gates and bridges.

Waving our phone at someone will be an honor of respect and will probably leech a few dollars out if we shake it too hard.

Google will be our new bank.

And you thought gmail would always be free.

How many times should you tweet a blog post?

Twitter is a revolving door of social experiments

One of the things that blogging daily has created is a heightened interest in analytics. I have a couple of different measures on the blog, so I can get a good feel for what is happening with the 360 Convos audience. I've also done a little experimenting to see what combination, for instance of tweets, seems to work best in announcing a new post and building an audience.

Mark Suster wrote about how many times the experts were tweeting after he sat on a panel with Guy Kawasaki. His post, Both Sides of the Table, reports that Kawasaki tweets a blog post four times.

Up until a few months ago, I'd been tweeting a link twice—as soon as I post, and then letting the automatic feed release it a second time.

More recently, I began to notice that I personally didn't pay attention to others who tweeted only once and disappeared. As I flipped through my stream it wasn't enough to make me pause. I did, however, notice when the same avatar showed up in my stream in a clump, meaning the person was tweeting several things in a row.

Currently, I follow about 1000 people on Twitter and have that and about a third more following me as @TheClassicCarol. My experience shows that tweeting a blog post just once has a low affect on drawing a reading audience.

Not everyone sees every tweet. Not everyone is on Twitter all the time, therefore you need to send info out at different times during the day.

That's more anecdotal than research, but it gave me a place to start, and I began tweeting in groups of three. Not always the same blogpost, but three things from the blog.

Was this smart? Let's look at what 9,000 other bloggers are doing.

Problogger has been running a poll since May 19, 2010. Their results from over 9,000 respondents show:

26% never tweet their blog post
33% tweet their blog post once
40% tweet their blog post two times or more times

Of the 40%, the highest portion of that comes from those who tweet a blog post five or more times. That puts them in the Kawasaki category.

The 360 Convos experience shows that three will generate a higher response to the blog than a one-time shot. It has created more conversation and retweets from followers which has had a positive effect on my KLOUT score. I noticed an increase of over 10 points.

Has the multiple tweets annoyed the audience? I've seen no visible difference in the unfollow rate. The outcome I do see follows a standard principal in marketing, you need to send the message out more than once, or as I like to say, "one ad does not a campaign make."

When has a tweet series produced a measurable outcome for you?