Why You Should Get Excited About Twitter
Posted June 26th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli
After months dismissing Twitter as a fad, I jumped in earlier this year and quickly discovered a whole new social media community… and a new perspective on the business impact of social media in the future. Twitter may be the purest form of social media and the change in web behavior that Twitter represents may be may become one of the most exciting opportunities for marketers on the web.
Social media is all about candid conversations and developing relationships. Blogs started it all by giving people a new voice, but that voice is still largely a one-way conversation. Most posts don’t have many comments, especially when you eliminate all the simple “great post” or “thanks for mentioning me/my company” entries. Sure you’ll see a few high profile blogs with hundreds of posts debating the issues and building on the points of the blog, but once you get beyond Technorati’s top 100 that level of interaction is rare.
Forums and discussion boards are a step up and many communities have deep and insightful conversations on very niche topics. The problem is you often have to look pretty hard to find these groups and you often see many people shouting at each other hiding behind anonymous usernames.
Twitter is different. The culture of Twitter is very open and personal. People are identified by their real names and their picture appears next to their name whenever they participate. A click on your name brings you to a profile page with a history of your tweets and links to your blog or website. Conversation occurs is real-time so whatever is on people’s minds at home and at work is represented here, as it happens. As you can imagine, that includes many discussions about brands and product experiences.
There is certainly a lot of noise here, but that is what monitoring tools like Radian6 and specialty search engines like Summize are for. As with any type of social media, the sheer volume of conversations requires that you use smart tools to organize the data and apply metrics to understand the trends.
Companies are involved now. For example, Comcast has been widely praised for the way they are using Twitter. Service reps are monitoring tweets about the brand and reaching out personally to get their service problems solved. Customers love to see that their voice matters and companies are taking them seriously.
The funny thing is that the opportunity here isn’t necessarily about Twitter. Twitter itself may not even be a big part of this trend in the future – unless they get bought. Twitter is a private, understaffed organization struggling to find a way to make money…and they have a lot of shortcomings. I see the “fail whale” more than I see my kids in a typical day. What’s important here is that Twitter is a great innovation that started a new type of consumer behavior.
Thanks to Twitter, people are now comfortable making frequent posts about what they are doing and what they are thinking throughout the day. Aggregators like Friendfeed make this even more interesting. They collect your “tweets” and then add many of your other online activities - like shared news items from your RSS reader, Facebook updates, and product reviews submitted - and make them all available in a single “lifestream” that is published online.
Not only does this lifestream change the way people present themselves online, it encourages them to share more. Google talked about this at the Supernova conference recently. They say people have been reluctant to share a lot of their lives because they don’t want to feel like they are interrupting and spamming their friends. In this new lifestreaming environment, sharing is encouraged since friends can subscribe to your news feed and view your pictures, stories, product reviews and commentary when they want to see them. People are now motivated to share more of their life as they grow their network and shape their online image.
As the information in these profiles become richer it becomes even easier to get advice and recommendations on purchase decisions from your extended online social network. This pushes the influence of corporate marketing and advertising messages even further away from the consumer.
But this is where social media marketing gets interesting. Lifestreaming facilitates the power of consumer-to-consumer influence making it even more important for companies to be actively involved in social media. These profiles are a new window into the lives of the advocates and critics surrounding your brand. You can learn a lot more about what they like or dislike and track the impact of their influence all across the web so you can engage with them on a more personal level and participate in their lifestream.
I use Twitter to communicate and share interesting interactive and social media news and issues. If you find that interesting, follow me here.
