Not a week goes by when I don’t read a post about Twitter. It’s a technology that’s soaked the panties of many web 2.0 aficionados – that’s probably the most succinct, crude way to put it.
I’ve been pretty hesitant to try it out, namely because I was dubious when I heard people shouting praise from all corners of the Internet. Well, they’d shout praise about the service only in between the hilarious Ruby-on-Rails scale=fail Twitter outages that would occur during any event that the Twitter community at large deemed remotely newsworthy.
However, after reading Marketing Sherpa’s recent article on Twitter as a legitimate marketing tool, I decided to give it a try – because I finally got it. I had read a number of other articles talking about how Twitter is a powerful networking tool and blah blah blah – basically a bunch of drivel pushed faux-marketers who should be flipping pizzas instead of pretending that they know anything about legitimate networking.
If you’ve ever read my blog before, you know that I think joining social networks exclusively for the sake of “networking,” i.e. trawling for business opportunities while offering nothing in return, is an activity done primarily by people with whom you should never considering doing business. When I read article after article on how “you can network your business by asking random people to follow your Twitter messages and this will somehow make you rich$$$$!!!!11!” I naturally came to the conclusion that Twitter had little-to-no merit on the behalf of serious businesses.
Marketing Sherpa’s article made it clear to me, however, that while there are a good number of idiots who would use Twitter in such an asinine manner, there is a legitimate business opportunity to be taken with Twitter: a self-selecting audience.
Rather than try to actively push your content onto a passive audience, proper use of Twitter will allow companies to have their content pulled by an active audience that has chosen to listen to your company’s message. Sure the actual publishing mechanism is a “server-push” technically, but it’s a push that’s completed with the full consent and awareness of the recipient so I’m going to call it a “pull” by the audience – deal with it.
So with this in mind, I’ve gone an signed up for my own Twitter account, which you can follow if you are so inclined:
Marketing Ninja’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/MarketingNinja
Much of what I’ve written just now may seem obvious to some of you long time Twitterer’s, but cut me some slack – I’m getting there.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.marketing-ninja.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big4.png){kind=icon}
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Comments 3
Good luck. Twitter is definitely a flash point of some kind. I don’t use the service and I comment on it more often than I ever would have thought I would.
Though in fairness a lot of that is because I’m covered on Techmeme. The Techmeme algorithm is based on how many people link to you and I’m about as opposed to the other people covered by the service as anyone so I suspect I’ll be cast out eventually. But while the opportunity exists I feel a certain responsibility to be the “voice of the opposition” on topics where no one else is giving the other side.
Since everyone loves Twitter unconditionally on Techmeme that means a lot of Twitter commenting.
Anyway, I hope it works out for you. My only concern would be the phrasing. It’s hard enough conveying what you actually mean when you have unlimited characters to work from. Sending messages of only 140 characters to professional contacts seems a little scary to me. Most people aren’t easy to offend but I’ve found those that are look just like those who aren’t. So you don’t discover them until they’re offended by something they thought you said.
Posted 22 May 2008 at 9:30 pm ¶Kudos for taking the leap–I was reluctant myself, but when I finally got on I (like so many others) fell in love.
The truly great thing about it is that it’s a very simple, basic “medium”, and how you use it is entirely up to you. Purely social, marketing/lead development, broadcasting (some folks do this–Seth Godin in particular. I don’t find it particularly “in tune” with the medium, but hey, there’s no rule against it).
It takes a while before it to make sense to you, as it’s basically whatever you make of it, but hopefully you’ll find your stride with it and enjoy it.
I created a little Twitter app for runners on my site: http://www.hellasound.com/GoRun Creating the app was dead simple, and how folks use it is one of the things I’m looking forward to finding out.
I’ll follow you as soon as I hit submit on this comment
Posted 27 May 2008 at 2:47 am ¶@Tom,
I think I accidentally invited you to Twitter when I was playing around with it the night I wrote this post – I was trying to see if you had a Twitter ID (I assumed you did given how much you’ve written about it) so sorry if you got an email from Twitter on my behalf.
Accidentally offending people with online communication has been a problem ever since AOL Instant Messenger – even back then you could correct the issue in real-time but the problem stems from the difficulty of communicating tone of voice. We don’t realize how big an impact tone has on our interpersonal communication until we have to do without a lot of it.
@John,
GoRun is an awesome idea – I just read over your description of it. The idea of aggregating subject-specific tweets makes it feasible to build a real twitter community around a specific area of interest. That’s a great concept!
I really enjoy the personal intercommunication on Twitter – one of my readers sent me a direct Tweet and I think it’s a good opportunity to get to know some of my own readers better. Blog comments are a good method too, but they’re not as personal as a Tweet is.
Posted 27 May 2008 at 10:48 am ¶Post a Comment