(Fast Company) -- Twitter
For
ballooning into a global phenomenon that, finally, has a business
model. In 2009, Twitter boasted some 20 million users. Today? More than
200 million.
During that period of hockey stick-like growth,
Twitter unveiled a sleek redesigned interface, played an integral role
in recent revolutions in the Middle East, and introduced Promoted Tweets
and Trends, a stream of tweet-size ads that reportedly cost major
companies at least $100,000 to purchase.
For
launching the most radical upgrade to search in years with Google
Instant--and still boasting a 98 percent adoption rate. With some 2
million searches per second and 3 billion per day, Google can't alter a
pixel in its logo without the world knowing.
Yet that didn't
stop the Internet giant from unveiling Google Instant, a
results-as-you-type search engine that has helped users save an average
of 4 to 5 seconds on each query.
For
turning what most social media companies can't: a ($400 million)
profit. In January, social gaming company Zynga introduced CityVille,
the follow-up to their blockbuster (not to mention addictive) FarmVille
game. A little over a month later, CityVille already boasted more than
100 million users, making it the most popular app on Facebook.
No wonder Zynga, which was recently valued at $7 billion to $9 billion, is worth more than Electronic Arts.
For
boldly cannibalizing its own DVD-by-mail business. To defend against
growing competition from Hulu and Amazon (Blockbuster, who?), Netflix
launched streaming-only services in the U.S. and Canada -- both of which
became instant hits.
So in recent earnings reports, Netflix CEO
Reed Hastings hasn't highlighted the company's monstrous $2.2 billion
2010 revenues (up 29 percent year-over-year), or the huge uptick in
members to some 20 million subscribers (more than Stars and Showtime).
Rather, he brought out the most astounding figure of all: nearly 70
percent of subscribers now stream content online, up from 41 percent
last year.
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fending off copycats, goosing growth, and making check-ins a must-use
marketing tool for major brands. Astronaut Douglas Wheelock earned the
NASA Explorer Badge when he checked in while orbiting the Earth -- a
story that reflect Foursquare's meteoric rise. The company now boasts
7.5 million users, well more than double its total in September 2010.
Most
significantly, the company has steamed ahead in the face of growing
competition -- from Gowalla, Google Latitude, Loopt, and especially
Facebook Places. It launched a brand new version of the service in
March, unveiled an innovative merchant platform that has brands reeling,
and boasted some half-billion check-ins in the last year alone.
For
turning stray thoughts into big business. The New York-based
Twitter-that's-not-limited-to-140-characters micro-blogging service is
drawing around 30,000 new members each day -- and more impressively,
around 4 billion page views per month. In November, it scored between
$25 million and $30 million from investors, bringing its total past $40
million.
For
developing a revolutionary way to monitor and measure Twitter chatter.
Crimson Hexagon began at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social
Science but has flourished into the prime analytics tool for HP,
Microsoft, and CNN, which use the tech to gauge public perception.
The
company uses a "statistical human-assisted approach" to monitor the
Web, tracking and learning the specifics of what people are saying in
social media in real-time -- beyond the positive-or-negative analysis of
keyword and semantic searches -- and with as much as 97 percent
accuracy.
For
creating the CNBC of the digital age. On this site, live streams are
pulled from Facebook and Twitter; recently acquired service Abnormal
Returns culls the best financial news stories from the Internet; weekly
Webinars and video market recaps are offered; and StockTwits.tv features
original programming around the clock. In other words, StockTwits has
become an indispensible real-time financial tool for the social media
age -- not to mention that it boasts more than 300,000 monthly
unique
hits.
For
reinvigorating search market competition with Bing, the only formidable
Google challenger left. Thanks to strategic partnerships with Kayak,
Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook, Bing has begun nipping away at Google's
market share--and kept its Mountain View-based foe from becoming a
monopoly. Earlier this month, Bing became the second most-popular search
engine worldwide.
For
harnessing the power of social media to keep Conan relevant long after
he was yanked off the air. Even after his unfortunate departure from
NBC, Conan O'Brien kept his brand red-hot (er, orange-hot?) thanks to a
squad of 8 full-time Team Coco Digital staffers running his social media
like pros.
Cases in point: the millions of views on YouTube,
hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, and millions of followers on
Twitter. To hype his TBS show's November debut, Conan's team also
started a 24-hour live webcast of the production, built fan pages on
Flickr and Tumblr -- and launched a bright orange Conan blimp, which
spotters could check into on Foursquare.
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