Sagalicious

There’s no doubting the fact that the web has come leaps and bounds over the last decade in particular the last few years.

Social media (socmed) sites abound and the take up of each has been astonishing.

At least every second person you know will have an account on facebook, gmail (in conjunction with google apps), plurk, a personal blog, and the list goes on.

A more recent socmed application twitter has burst into the mainstream scene. Twitter has been receiving a fair bit of media attention as more people begin to find out about it and talk about it. The list of “famous” and “infamous” ppl using it is very long; check out this forbes list printed recently.

But taking away the stars and the glitz of it what is twitter? Why is it so popular? I’ll try and break these questions down as I understand it and my experience of twitter.

Personally I’ve been tweeting for almost a year now. Twitter is an extremely useful tool for many reasons which I’ll try to explain.

What is twitter? In short twitter is what’s known as a micro blogging site. Users sign up to the service and post short messages (much like sms msg) up to 140 characters.

You can choose to follow people and people choose to follow you; you can see the public stream (which lists all tweets in chronological order) or you see the tweets as they occur for the people you’re following; ditto for the people that follow you.

Coupled with this you have the ability to reply to a person someone you follow or not, or you can send a direct message (dm) to someone you do follow. A dm is not on the public timeline and will only be seen by the person you dm. A reply is on the public timeline so the person you reply to is notified they have been sent a message as well as the tweet appearing on the public timeline.

It all seems pretty simple, right? But what’s the point.

Well it’s all to do with who you choose to follow and who chooses to follow you. There’s a usual trend that people you follow tend to follow u back.

Since tweeting, I’ve found that I have distinct groups of people I follow. These groups offer different “flavours” or “streams” of information that I’m interested in. I follow sharepoint people, SOA people, K2 people, socmed people, web/e 2.0 people, and just plain “fun” people, from all around the world.

When you increase your following (both who you follow and who follows you) patterns of information streams start emerging through the apparent chaotic clutter of twitter; and THAT’S where the real value starts coming out.

I’ve found many answers to some tech qns I’ve had, as well as good advice. The key point here is that the twitter community is fairly socialistic by nature so sourcing info is equally regarded as giving info. Help me / help you type of attitude.

Tagging – tweet trends.

Tweets can be “tagged” with a # symbol. This allows for topical information to be “grouped” and “searched”. This is a very powerful tool. As an example if I want to tweet something about my iphone I might say:

“Just upgraded my #iPhone software; not as stable as last upgrade”

This has the effect of tagging my tweet with “iPhone” so all searches on iPhone will pick this tweet up; also all iPhone trending topics will also pick this tweet up.

As I mentioned, tweets can be tagged and as such trends of conversations start emerging and searchability becomes a reality. Recent examples of popular trends have been:

• #inaug09 - barak obama’s inaugaration.
• #bushfires - tragic black saturday bushfires of victoria.
• #connex - trend topic coveric connex train service in melbourne (this should be a biz school case stategy in brand Mangament – amazing!)

During the fires in Victoria a couple of Saturdays ago, the first tweets with #bushfires started emerging early Sat morning. By mid afternoon, #bushfires was the number one trending topic on twitter. Worldwide!

Radio station 774 Melbourne, the CFA, and a few other news agancies all started streaming live updates of what was happening with respect to the bushfires and the tragedy was continuously unfolding like a live tv drama on twitter. It was amazing to watch. It was the most up to date, real time info you could get. Online News papers were lagging behind. It got to the point where TV networks were using twitter streams to get their updates, and then would use as updates themselves (Most, if not all, commercial free to air TV stations credited twitter as their source).

Now it doesn’t need to be coverage of disastrous events. The Barak Obama inauguration captured a massive audience online, and the tweets were flowing by the thousands from people who were actually at Lincoln Square. Again it featured as the number 1 trending topic.

I have many anecdotal stories that testify to the marketing strengths of twitter as a social media tool. There’s the case of a fellow twitterer tweeting the poor service he was getting from an ISP in the USA. After hours of getting nowhere on the phone he tweeted the situation, and within minutes the ISP company responded, on twitter, and the guy had his service restored within the hour.

Companies know that brand management is key to sales and twitter is the type of network where brands can be strengthened or worse, damaged. And if you think what I’m saying is simply text book rhetoric, jump on twitter and search for #connex. There’s no doubting the connex brand is severely damaged and it’s evident on tweets regarding their service.

Will twitter be a key component of companies’ brand management and marketing strategies? I think at minimum it needs to be considered. You have a grass roots view of the world, directly connected to your consumer market, all segments, and an opportunity to hear it from the horse’s mouth so to speak, not just sample focus groups representing your potential segments.

A close friend of mine described it as “a river of information continuously flowing”, an apt description.

Remember there will always be those narrow minded cynics, which will scoff at the idea of twitter; I just ignore these people. It’s more than likely they are the same strain people that said “what use is the internet?” 15 years ago.

To me one of the untapped and potential opportunities with twitter is to completely redefine the search landscape. Currently google searched static content, tagged and indexed based on algorithms, very static. Twitter offers search responses by people. Coupled with mashups (a completely separate post is required for this) that pulls topical information from a variety of sources, you really start getting peer-to-peer searching/answering. The possibilities are mind blowing (and Yes! I can hear the cynics in the bg).

My question is what do you see as the possibilities of services like twitter providing to you as an individual, and to you as a representative at Tatts Group? Now think of the question not in regards to twitter specifically, but services of this nature, behind the firewall!