Seattle has hundreds of great business and organizations active in social media. With Seattle Social Central, we’ve been tracking many of these great local organizations on Twitter. We took a closer look at 10 businesses and organizations that have caught our attention. They come from a range of categories, from non-profits to travel to retail. All of these Seattle organizations are having success using Twitter to connect with the community. Check them out!

Cupcake Royale (@CupcakeRoyale). The delicious local cupcake bakery has fun with their Twitter presence. Their snappy copy and laid back personal approach caught our attention. Lately they’ve been promoting the “Deathcake Royale” with giveaways – you can even “Blow Somebody The Kiss of Deathcake” via Twitter.

Hotel Max (@Hotel_Max). The boutique downtown hotel is a fixture in the local social media scene. Their account has tons of personality, great events, contests, and a special Twitter room rate. As evidence by the number of @replies and RTs sent per week, Hotel Max is one of the most engaged local businesses we’ve found. Given their large following and great community, I would guess that their efforts are leading to material benefits for the bottom line.

King 5 News (@KING5Seattle). An excellent source for local news and events. While many news outlets just push an RSS feed to Twitter, King 5 has real people behind the account. In addition to local news coverage, King 5 has created several Twitter lists to help find other relevant people and news sources.

Seattle University (@SeattleU). Twitter appears to be taking hold in the education space. Seattle U has a very active approach providing information about all things in the Seattle U community – sports, class info, new, events, etc. They are actively answering questions and engaging with their community on Twitter.

Avelle (@Avelle). Seattle-based start-up Avelle (formerly Bag Borrow and Steal) offers specials, contests, and information for their community. Avelle is a good case study for effectively scaling Twitter beyond one account. The primary account is managed by their EVP of Merchandising, their CEO and VP of Creative tweet, and they have several content specific accounts.

Swedish Medical Center (@Swedish). Swedish helps us navigate the noise in the healthcare space with useful information and news. They engage their audience when appropriate and help create awareness for other relevant non-profit organizations.

West Seattle Blog (@westseattleblog). Hyper Local FTW! The West Seattle Blog is provides a TON of useful, targeted neighborhood information (nearly 50,000 tweets in total).

The ACT theatre (@ACTTheater). If you’re interested in theater, the ACT is worth checking out. They provide information about events at the ACT and around Seattle. Like many of the others we’re highlighting, they have a very personal, conversational approach.

Brooks Sports (@brooksrunning). Brooks is a Seattle-base business with an national audience. Brooks offer specials and product information, but the bulk of their activity is connecting with runners and customers. They have started scaling their Twitter presence with multiple accounts.

Jolkona Foundation (@Jolkona). The Jolkona foundation is Seattle-based not profit organization. Of the companies mentioned, they are the newest to Twitter, but appear to be off to a great start. They recently raised over $2,000 in partnership with the Social Media Club of Seattle at the January event.

**Data from 20 Decibels Twitter Analytics tool and the Seattle Social Central Index.

-->

I'm on a redeye to NYC, supposed to be working on a presentation i'm giving in a few hours... but fuck it, i can't get this outta my head, so here we go.

(note: extremely raw, uneven, long, 1st draft publish & shoot; will revise l8r) 

ASSERTION #1: The default startup business model from 2000-2009 was based on growth (aka acquisition) and CPM- or CPC-advertising 

Over the past 10 years, we have seen a massive shift in advertising from CPM to CPC-based advertising.  This basically started happening when the 2000-2001 dotcom implosion blew the market cap of Yahoo to smithereens, and display advertising went into the shitter.  Altho CPM subsequently recovered, Google's IPO and the gradual emergence of CPC as a higher-quality advertising medium has been the dominant story of the first half of the last decade.  There's still a lot of page views and CPM advertising out there -- and YouTube & Facebook are making sure that doesn't change -- but as we VCs like to say:
    "at the end of the day, Yahoo is now Google's bitch".

Let me say that again with emphasis so you don't miss it. 

Google's ABSOLUTE FRIGGIN' SEARCH DOMINANCE has made CPC advertising the defacto monetization standard for the web.

Google is now making a ridiculous amount of samoleons: $2.5B free cash flow last qtr, or roughly $10B a year (a billion here, a biilion there, pretty soon that's cash-money, G...) -- and appears likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.  Although Microsoft, Apple, Ebay, & Amazon are all minting money too there's no question Google is an unassailable Internet JUGGERNAUT, at least in Search.

But what has all this Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness done to the internet & startup ecosystem?

It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI. 

So crappy in fact, we should be ashamed to call ourselves entrepreneurs & venture "capitalists". Why, Schumpeter is probably rolling over in his grave at how little Creative Destruction we have rained down upon crotchety incumbents.  It's a goddamn travesty that some aspiring startup or greedy hedge fund hasn't pummelled Yahoo and eBay into a hostile takeover by now, and Microsoft has made itself almost irrelevant in the consumer internet space -- helloooo Mr. Ballmer? please tell me how you own hundreds of millions of users and more than half the browser market and you HAVE NO VISIBLE 3rd-party distribution or monetization strategy? -- Srsly, we have monkeys driving some of the biggest trains on the Internet at the moment.  

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Fucking Way.

And while there's been something of a Startup Renaissance going on since around 2004, all these little web 2.0 wannabees have spent an inordinate amount of our attention on ad-driven business models resulting in a big steaming 2-Founders-1-Cup of FAIL.  Everyone seems to have assumed that since Yahoo and Google were giants in internet advertising, therefore all internet startups should be using some form of CPM or CPC ad-monetization.

THIS IS A VERY LARGE LEMMING-LIKE ERROR IN LOGIC THAT MUST BE CORRECTED IMMEDIATELY. 

We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models.  There have been a few interesting examples of startups acquired in the 00's for large amounts due to amazing growth (eGroups, MySpace, Skype, YouTube) or advertising potential (aQuantive, DoubleClick, AdMob, RightMedia).  However, mostly the decade has been an uninterrupted string of uninspiring business models and small-time acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups filled with rainbows & unicorns, rather than those based on simple, transactional revenue models.

ATTENTION u ASSHATs on Sand Hill Road & u HIPPY-DIPPY Startups in SOMA -- This Shit Stops NOW.

[fast forward to Twenty-Ten & the Soul of a New Machine: Subscriptions.]

ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods).

Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

Yes there is a role for Freemium, but unless you missed the TPS report the FREE part is only a loss-leader for the MEE-YUM part -- it's a test-drive before you buy something. If your users are just kicking the tires then you need to kick them to the curb eventually (unless of course they are your viral bee-yotches, in which case it's ok to have a few invitation whores as freeriders).

Free is not Forever, unless you never want to be in control of your own fate.

Gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be the simplest one -- that is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods, and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage.

Let me say that one more time so you don't miss it.

Get Dem Bitches to *PAY* You, G.

Ok, so there's only one problem with this.  It's called the Penny Gap.

Surprise, surprise... most people don't like to pay you squat unless they have no other choice.  And aside from the user's disinclination to pull out their wallet, there's also the problem of wallet friction itself -- payment conversion is shitty for many reasons other than just price.  Mainly it's because we can't remember our password.  I'll repeat that about a million times in this post so you don't forget.

WE. CAN'T. REMEMBER. PASSWORDS.

This is incredibly important, and i'll explain why in just a little bit... but now, let's talk a brief walk down Memory Lane past my old workplace, PayPal.

Password Friction: Where's the Login K-Y Jelly?

Here's one of the not-so-flattering secrets of the PayPal Mafia you've probably never heard: The far-and-away #1 customer service problem -- and cost -- at PayPal was something called "forgotten password recovery".  That's a nice way to say that people can't remember their fucking password. 

It's the biggest goddamn problem on the Internet, but at PayPal we made it even worse by tying a payment instrument to the process, and then locking out the payment instrument if they couldn't remember their password. What a Brilliant idea!  Let's see.... why don't we fuck over all of our n00b, first-use customers by forcing them to create an account they have no significant motivation to maintain yet, and then hope they don't give us a fake email address or fail to remember that password the next time they drop by... which might be 1, 3 or 6 months later.  Bingo, way to create the biggest HateStorm in Internet History: make it super simple for people to make their payment method unusable by simply forgetting their password.  Oh and i forgot to tell you we occasionally froze their account so they couldn't get access to their money.  That was a real winner too.

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service.  And i'm guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

Look, no online service is perfect and there are often good reasons why account recovery shouldn't be too easy -- sometimes it's not YOU who wants to get access.  But Password Friction at PayPal led to an unfortunate series of events which caused some signicant percentage of our users to HATE us with a PASSION that is usually reserved for politicians and lawyers.  Since i was often on the front-lines running our PayPal Developer Network, i got to hear first-hand from Merchants and Developers about how this password friction caused problems with payment, and with user frustration.  I got to know the folks in customer service pretty well, and i used to do my best to resolve some of our users pain.

So why am i bringing up all this bullshit now?

Well because as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, i want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don't forget their passwords.  If they forget their password, and/or can't recover it, then guess what MoFo -- YOU DON'T GET PAID.

Which means you don't get Laid, you don't get Acquired, and you sure as friggin' hell don't get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords.  Basically, it's this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

That's it, you say? 

Yeah, that's it Sherlock.  Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product.  If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password.

Now think about that for a second...what services have users login a lot?
1) Social Networks
2) Email & IM
3) Games, Music, & Entertainment sites

Which leads me to my 3rd & final observation.

ASSERTION #3: In 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be Facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes.

Now i'm not suggesting PayPal and Amazon are going to disappear overnight -- both probably have hundreds of millions of users (well, at least double-digit million *active* users anyway).  And in fact, they will likely still have dominant positions in the market.  But i will say this: if they rely *purely* on purchase behavior, they are fighting a losing battle against other services with more frequent usage, whose users will be more likely to remember their passwords.  Like a Darwinian evolutionary experiment, only the fittest passwords survive -- and in this case, the fittest passwords will be the ones used most often.  That is, the ones we use for core services like email, IM, games, music, videos.  And guess what?  Most of those services happen on social networks like Facebook, which currently has over 400M users and is growing like crazy internationally.

Well at this point i hope you've pieced it all together.  The key to success -- one might even say DOMINANCE -- in payment systems is to begin with the foundation of frequent-use products, so that users won't forget their passwords.  Whether intentional or not, Facebook has played this game to perfection.  Not too far behind is Apple with iTunes, iPhone, and other related frequent-use media & entertainment products, and an App Store that people use regularly.  And even Google has a shot here, with both Gmail and YouTube as two very large, frequent-use products, along with the upcoming Android platform.  Twitter is probably a dark-horse here, but if user #'s continue to improve they could also have a shot. And i'd also keep an eye on Skype too, which still has a lot of frequent users and value.

Bringing up the rear pathetically here are Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.  All 3 of these services have hundreds of millions of users (via email & IM alone, not to mention other services), and yet they haven't figured it out.  Yahoo had previously developed a payment product called PayDirect, but shut it down in 2004.  FAIL.  Microsoft had the right vision with HailStorm, but their UX was absolutely friggin' terrible (see Password Friction again), and they didn't stick with it.  AOL similarly has been shedding users for a decade, and never realized how valuable their original email user base could be.  It's unbelievable to me none of these Internet Giants has figured out what is going on.  They have neither acquired nor merged in a payment service (Amazon, eBay) nor have they acquired a large social network.  Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system, or acquires eBay (for PayPal), Amazon, or Facebook i just don't see them climbing back into the ring.  All of those deals would be very difficult and unlikely, even for MSFT.

So that's it folks, i'm spent.  This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is.  Sorry for all the swearing and uneven pace, but hopefully some of you will take away something useful.