Twitter is an interesting beast. If you are reading this and you are new to twitter, here is a video on what it’s all about:
Many people when they first learn about it, think it’s all a bit strange. Some time ago, I found this great visual which quite aptly describes the twitter life cycle which I’ve now seen played out with many people.
According to a hitwise report published in September 2008, twitter usage in Australia is up 518%. @silkcharm (Laurel Papworth) had an interesting post where she and a number of others critically analysed these stats with the view that they were perhaps conservative. I am still trying to figure out the best way to measure the volume of Australian activity on twitter so anyone out there with better stats, please share…
In Chris Simons recent post on the brain, he referred to it as “possibly the next biggest gimmick”
However you look at it, in the digital marketing space, twitter has really shaken things up. There are hundreds of applications built of the Twitter API which enable the service to be viewed, used, tracked and analysed in numerous interesting ways. New ones seem to pop up everyday.
At a global level, the influence of twitter has made the headlines a few times recently first in the Obama campaign and then with the reporting around #mumbai.
But what is the relevance of this for business and marketing. More specifically, what is the reach and application of this platform in Australia?
@silkcharm also launched a great site a little while ago called ”the Twitter agency” where many of Australia’s Twitterati, discuss best practices, share their learning’s and observations and knowledge for anyone to review. Shifted pixels posted a list of the top 50 influencers on Twitter. There are a lot of machinations around how people are ranked and who is important but if you want to get in the game, these are definitely some interesting people to follow locally.
Many of our prominent politicians are now participating, with varying degrees of success. According to the Sydney Morning Herald “So many people were signing up to follow Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s short text message updates on Twitter last night that his new page on the social networking site crashed”. Perhaps more interesting in this is the proliferation of fake politicians, some of whom are very amusing.
From a business perspective, the recent developments of @bigpond on twitter certainly drove some interesting debate and is starting to yield some positive results as documented by my business partner Phil Smith
Twitter may be a fad, or perhaps the first evolution of a potentially far more powerful phenomenon than instant messenger and blogging but there is no doubt it warrants business attention. We certainly want to incorporate it into the ad:tech program.
The question I would ask however is where to pitch such a broad topic at a forum like ad:tech. Should we spend our time educating those who don’t get it yet or should we focus on how to get the most out of it from a business perspective….
Thoughts please!
Twitter is definitely a phenomenon – interesting to see recent closure of Pownce (which arguably had better features than Twitter). Also Twitter has scale now, it’s going mainstream with non-geeks proliferating. Resistance is futile, you are very likely to be assimilated ;)
My 2 cents:
Microblogging is here to stay, and it will grow …massively in the next 2 years. What SMS did for the mobile phone, Microblogging will do for the web.
For me it’s a question of who reaches critical mass in this field. Twitter is king for the moment but has some maturing to do or it risks being outsmarted. Usability is still poor when using Twitter through their web client which leaves them a little vulnerable. Apps such as Tweetdeck do a much better job implementing the benefits of Micro-blogging.
Whilst we’re waiting for this to pan out it will be interesting to see what Google does with Jaiku… or whether Facebook looks to make a concerted challenge in the Micro-blogging space to rival Twitter.
From a business perspective I think Twitter is a phenomenon.
It’s been a great tool to profile the value of social media within Telstra. Why? Because Twitter has provided BigPond an opportunity to engage in valued exchanges with customers (as highlighted in Phil Smith’s blog).
I recently blogged about corporate value in social media and discuss our Tweeter experience in greater detail: http://tinyurl.com/6e964g
Cheers,
Mike Hickinbotham
Telstra Blogger – The Scrum
I agree that micro-blogging is a phenomenon rather than a fad.
The leader in this field for over a year has been Twitter, almost in spite of itself. Historically it’s had hideous performance issues as a result of its rapid scaling. As Kate points out, these are largely a thing of the past.
For mine, Twitter has or is very close to the critical mass to which Iain refers. It has a large user base, which has become more mainstream from its geeky origins.
Twitter does NOT have the most nor does it have the best features; the now recently renounced Pownce had better, as do Plurk and several others.
I disagree that Twitter’s UX leaves it vulnerable. I’m not saying that it has a good web UI – it’s not – there are many 3rd party clients that play this part.
As I see it, the role that Twitter is filling is deeper, at a platform level. It is becoming an essential part of the ecosystem. I dare say that is one of the reasons why FaceBook recently offered “$500m” of stock for Twitter.
As for where to discuss microblogging or Twitter within Ad:Tech, I’d suggest that you make it a round table debate or a series of case studies rather than a Twitter101 session. The latter can be downloaded in an instant and won’t generate as much discussion.
Just the somewhat biased view of someone who has generated a 6 figure profit through Twitter…
@eskimo_sparky
@happener
A good gimmick can last a lifetime. Remembering of course that any great trick that attracts such attention often ends up fulfilling a useful business purpose. From all your comments, that could seem the case. I’m wondering now, whether ‘loopt’ is important in this equation? I must say that I don’t personally ‘get off’ on syncing, or the patience you sometimes need to get all your apps in sync:-) How much of any useful business purpose depends on sync this with that, (like Loopt,Twitter and Facebook) and then add another app and then another? I sometimes wonder if it will infact be never-ending, (and/or will business adapt to so much maintenance of adding new apps daily)? And the reason I have so many questions is because this blog has presented such an exciting learning curve..
I’m not sure it’s either, right now it’s still extremely niche no matter how you cut the data … I use twitter and think it’s a reasonably good comms/expression tool, the only thing about Twitter that gets me is its users are so self important and self referencing. I swear half of the discussions on twitter are ABOUT twitter.
Maturity of Twitter is evident with increasing related apps (integration into FB etc) and development of related microblogging tools such as Yammer.
Twitter will increasingly become part of a swag of digital tools used by pr and marketing companies for both listening to customer feedback but also the dispersal of marketing messages.
It is also a great addition to the swag of Enterpise 2.0 tools and is increasingly being integrated into organisational km suites.
On a personal level, I see a lot of fellow social media colleagues spending more time on Twitter than on Facebook – it is gathering speed.
Cheers
I agree with the sentiments above. Twitter or more generally the concept of microblogging is here to stay. We are living in a world where people do want constant updates, increasingly connected and have access to the internet on their phones.
Twitter is great for news updates, trends, technical updates and crowdsourcing. A lot of major events now are causing massive spikes in Twitter, and they believe lately (Obama inauguration + Hudson plane crash), two major newsworthy events caused it to overtake Digg – if you believe in Hitwise.
It will be interesting to see the many Twitter support tools and spinoffs develop. Things like Brightkit and Yammer are geared more towards enterprises and will eventually monetise microblogging.
In terms of topic @ ad:tech, it would be safe to assume that everyone there would know what it is. People would be more interested in its business application, where it is headed, how to get the most use of it, how it fits in with broader digital strategy (especially with blogs), and what type of organisations are best setup to use it. Twitter is not for everyone, and on the client side, you need to have a dedicated team for it.
(disclosure – we use Yammer @ work and it rocks!!)
It goes well beyond Twitter. Barack Obama or Mr President as I now address him, wants to keep his Blackberry on to access public messaging. As idealistic as that might sound, that’s the crux of business messaging and interactivity before and well after Twitter. We’ve already had so many lessons and there have already been some amazing and immersive results. But there’s still people using old world media planning and PPC methodologies to suggest they can convert new markets to generously advocate, tag, blog frankly and fearlessly and spend heaps of time and engagement with video. I read some interesting stuff on Ad Tech Asia about some of the new niche networks, but I think immersive video and animation is becoming increasingly intrinsic on and off the phone and across various clouds. I also read some interesting Mike Walsh and Brad Howarth stuff about clouds, storage, scale and all those kind of things. But the crux is re-learning the public voice of branding. And if you want these publics involved in some of your great communications, sort out the joke that calls itself Australia Broadband and fair wireless caps for large populations. If some Telstra 20 years experience exec tells me his household pipes are mass representative, that is, ladies and gents, a joke. There’s also been a lot of interesting stuff written about scale. Well, this is now a different kind of scale and the right balance could be the tipping point. The kind of audiences that used to be glued to a thing called TV are getting stuck on the need to have wide range and highly cost efficient access to gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of data….I repeat, we all of us need to re-learn the public voice of branding and we all need more and more accessibility to messages and messaging, including video, on a grand scale.