Do you Twitter? Chances are that if you are a young, tech savvy, mid-20′s employed American citizen you do, but assuming you do what do you use it for? To many twitter is nothing more than an egotistical cloud for us presumptuous enough to believe people would want to be constantly bombarded with 140 character updates of our mundane lives (see video below), but they are wrong.
Twitter is a real-time stream of conscious for our society; an immense database of comments, thoughts and expletives that make up our collective social musings. When news breaks, twitter explodes. For example, when a man saw a plane crash land in the Hudson river the first thing he did was not call 911, he tweeted instantly alerting not just one person of the incident but hundreds. It is this instantaneous ability to alert thousands to current events, long before the traditional news media could respond that makes me believe Twitter, or at least its pioneering vision, will be around for a lot longer than many other trendy .com trends.
This instantaneous connectivity has implications far beyond news and offers businesses whole new way to interact instantly with their customers be it through promotions such as daily specials or instant customer service response times. Recognizing this ability to stay in constant contact with customers, companies are flocking to hire social media marketing specialist that have experience with twitter. For example, the famous Hollywood theatre the Roxy was one of the first businesses to see the business opportunity of twitter, @theroxy and launched its first account in May 2007. Since that time, the Roxy has gained a huge following of 35,000+ twitter followers and has been able to leverage this online activity to rejuvenate one of Hollywood’s most famous hangouts. Nic Adler, the manager of the Roxy, recently spoke about this experience and how it has transformed his business and those around him with Dick Gordon of WUNC’s national talk show The Story. If you have not heard this, it is definitely worth the listen; Nic Adler on The Story (WUNC)
Nic was at the forefront of the business side of twitter, but since that time thousands of small, medium, and large businesses have adopted twitter to help connect themselves with customers in a way that wasnt otherwise possible. Proctor & Gamble for instance can now track and respond to feedback about its latest line of shampoo in real time. Hasbro can anticipate Christmas demand by following the rising level of interest shown about its products in the weeks and months leading up to the holiday shopping season. Twitter’s core appeal to individuals is in its ability to provide real-time feedback for individual users but its strength to business is its ability to provide aggregated feedback on how hundreds of thousands feel about their products or services right now. Like google, Twitter is collecting and analyzing our collective data to provide insight into each and everyone of us.
Its amazing, when writing about the reach and distinct opportunities twitter provides humanity, to remember that Twitter was launched just 4 years ago and did not even come to the attention of those in the Technorati until SxSW three years ago. Just a little over one year ago, Twitter was averaging 100 million tweets every three months. Today that number is 75 million tweets per day. Twitter now has 190 million users who post 15 billion tweets a year, in over a hundred languages and across the globe. Twitter is transforming the way we communicate by making it instant, short, but bittersweet.
Despite its amazing promise, Twitter has several problems that limit its ability to play a larger role in the lives of people. #1 among these is that there is no way to prioritize which tweets from which followers show up in your feed, allowing those most active users to literally take over your feed. We all know the types of people I am speaking about, these are the guys that give twitter a bad name for egotistical maniacs (see video above) and annoy the crap out of me. Like Chatroulette, Twitter has a censorship problem that limits its ability to be a large scale source of news for people because one is not able to prioritize content. #2 is that twitter is glitchy. Twitter’s inability to keep itself running at pace with demand and serve its customers has spurred a new pop culture icon, the fail whale. Name one other business that had such a high rate of failure that it spawn a pop culture phenomenon? No other service in the world would be able to turn failure into publicity, twitter did. However, as twitter matures and its users grow older its users will grow less and less patient with the rising start up and will demand the death of the fail whale. Twitter must kill the Fail Whale if it wishes to move beyond its hobby status and into the real news business as its founder recently announced they would.
If twitter is able to overcome these problems, it may just be able to become the global news platform of the 21st century. A place where reporters spread information and blast the interwebs with enticing content and interviews along side mom’s new recipe for pumpkin bread and the latest high school football scores. CNN, WRAL, and the DTH all have equal footing on twitter and it is up to the next generation of social media marketers to figure out how to stand out in a crowd of 190,000,000 users. Any ideas?
