Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (1)
Should Your Marketing Be All A-Twitter?
July 15, 2008
Last week, I was in New York at a “Reviewers Workshop” hosted by a software company which shall remain nameless (I could tell you but they’d have to kill me, as per a clause in the N.D.A. I signed). It was a valuable hands-on look at the next version of some key applications, and I was enjoying it. But there was a guy at the workstation next to me who was paying absolutely no attention to what the presenters were doing, and spending all his time on microblogging sites like
Twitter and about a half dozen others commenting about the imminent release of the new iPhone. The constant typing was really quite distracting but, as per Elvis Costello, “I try to be amused.”
As a subsequent
Newsweek article I read showed, this is not a unique—or even rude and boorish—phenomenon anymore.
Welcome to another buzzword to add to the growing Web 2.0 lexicon: microblogging. Here’s an example from the lede of the
Newsweek article:
The first thing Amanda Mooney, 22, does when she wakes up in the morning is fire up her laptop. She opens "a crazy amount of tabs" and checks in on her Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube friends. A self-described "digital native" who graduated from Emerson College in Boston this summer, Mooney contributes her thoughts to her new employer's blog at Edelmandigital.com, as well as at Americanshelflife.com. She chats on AIM, publicly bookmarks favorite posts on Digg and Del.icio.us. And, of course, she twitters. And twitters and twitters.
What is microblogging? Sites like Twitter are essentially a cross between a blog, social networking, and instant messaging. That is, they are public forums that let you post comments (called “tweets”) in blocks of 140 characters or less (the more verbose of us would be deeply hamstrung by such a limitation). People then jump in and comment. The goal, ultimately, is to build up a virtual community. No detail of a user’s life is too insignificant to go unblogged. (Twitter’s catch phrase is “What are you doing?” Perhaps I’m outside microblogging’s garget demographic because my answer is “None of your business.” But alas I suspect that’s just me.) Purportedly, the “hippest” microblog at the moment is
Tumblr, which “allows people to subscribe to—or follow—each other's ‘tumblelogs.’”
As with many aspects of Web 2.0, microblogging is evolving fast, and it is now several iterations and models old—even before many people have even heard of it. In fact, the idea of going to a Web site to microblog is, like,
so two hours ago. Now, there are microblogging applications, like
Posterous, that are e-mail based.
Despite the upstarts, the old, classic Twitter (bear in mind that “old, classic” in this context refers to something that is less than two years old—Twitter launched in October 2006) is still far and above the leader in the microblogging universe, at least for now. Says the
Newsweek article:
The service boasted an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors in May alone, and may be valued in the eye-popping neighborhood of $100 million. This all suggests that an instant 140-character "tweet" meets some communications needs better than a fleshed out blog post.
I also hasten to add that Twitter may actually have some very real benefits aside from being a time toilet: earlier this year,
a grad student was arrested in Egypt, Twittered from his jail cell, and his online social network got him released.
Still, microblogging is not without its perils, and it’s not hard to anticipate a critical mass of services and posts.
What does microblogging mean for marketing? As the guy who sat next to me at the workshop showed, Twitter, et al., are an increasingly important means by which new products are “buzzed” about. As you know, Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and community, and marketers who can successfully tap into a community can trigger viral marketing, or letting your engaged, enthusiastic customers do all the marketing legwork for you. There is no formula for success, and deliberately seeking that kind of online marketing support can leave a bad taste in the user’s mouth—in that “you’re not hip if you try to be hip” kind of way.
How to begin? As with anything on the Web, the best way to learn is to just dive in. It’s free (the only expenditure is time, which some of us have at a premium, admittedly) and even if you’re just a lurker, it can be eye-opening to see what may very well be the future of community and communication.
Posted by Richard Romano on July 15, 2008 | Comments (1)
