Couple of videos in which Twitter users are asked why they use Twitter.
Thanks to Hans for bringing this one to my attention.
FriendOrFollow.com – fletchthemaven’s Contact Results
People I’m following who aren’t following me.
Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen | Feeds | ZDNet.com
Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen | Feeds | ZDNet.com: “These are hard times and we have businesses making critical decisions to stay afloat. At the same time we have social media marketers and software developers breathing down these decision-makers necks saying that social media can help them save money and improve their sales. In some cases, this is true. Social media presence could help some companies during this time (more consumer than enterprise, in my humble opinion). On both sides of the coin, however, it depends on the company. Those company leaders will then have to determine who to trust to help them lead this social media charge, and it’s my estimation that trusting someone to help you because of a Twitter follower count or blog subscriber list is a gigantic mistake.”
Ways to use Twitter
Love it or hate it, Twitter is getting the buzz, and as usual, there are any number of ways to use the service as a marketing tool.
MediaShift . Point of Presence::Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter | PBS: “Media companies such as the BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. The campaigns for presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama also have Twitter profiles, with thousands of “friends” and “followers” who check out updates.”
Despite that I’m doing Internet studies, there are very few of my friends and associates on Twitter or Jaiku. I wonder if it’s a cultural thing or will Australia catch on to this technology in time.
How main stream media is about to be Twitterized
If you can’t write your story in 140 words or less, you better think about what you want to say again. As David Berlind, from ZD|Net suggests, mainstream media is about to be ‘twitterized.’ In the same way that blogs have disrupted print media (show me a decent newspaper that isn’t at least planning to have a blog), Twitter and other micro-blogging sites are turning business logic on its head. So if you have a message for the world, think about how you could write it in the 140 or less characters of a Twitter tweet. In so doing you open up your business to many other opportunities for relationships with your customers that you’ve probably not yet considered.
If you’ve already been using Twitter for your business, how has it been working for you?
Twitter – why it’s here and what to do about it
Introduction
What is Twitter?
It’s a world-wide phenomenon that lets people post short messages of a maximum of 140 characters in response to a simple question – “what are you doing?”. Users can send these messages via IM, mobile phone, from the Twitter web site, or via a number of applications that feed and publish tweets.
demo
How is Twitter being used?
- Staying in touch with family and friends. A hybrid between email, IM, and text. Provides a rich context for offline interaction and a sixth sense for what’s happening in peoples lives.
- Reporters use it to break news, to announce headlines that may be reported in more detail on the Internet, radio, TV and print.
- Bloggers and businesses use it to promote themselves and create a dialogue with their followers. See Barack Obama and author and tech guru Robert Scoble. Drives traffic to their sites.
Why does Twitter exist?
Reasons for Twitter’s popularity.
- Attention crash, brevity rules – people want the attention of others – the quicker the better
So having attention is very, very desirable, in some ways infinitely so, since the larger the audience, the better. And, yet, attention is also difficult to achieve owing to its intrinsic scarcity. That combination makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy.
- Growth of mobile technologies requiring shorter messages – shorter but more often
- Rise in social networking – we filter what we want and don’t want
- Fascination with the trivial – Perez Hilton
- The speed of life is increasing exponentially with the growth in population. This includes the felt need to stay in touch.
- Stimulation addiction with a twist. Twittering is like the cocaine of blogging or e-mail but refined into crack.
Substance abuse is something visible. Psychological addictions are caused by wanting to hang onto or enhance positive feelings and stimuli, like winning in gambling, playing computer games or projecting whatever personality you like in chat rooms.
Not everyone’s a fan
Some criticisms may be the result of a lack of understanding of the way Twitter works:
dezzychick – hopefully finding something to do tonight. (Good luck! Hopefully one of your friends will Twit “hopefully finding something to do tonight” and then the two of you can see each other Twits and put 1 and 1 together to realize that goodness, the two of you might be able to hang out!)
and
Twitter is a bad, bad thing — not just because of what it does, but because of what it says about all of us and our need to be connected. Twitter’s whole existence is based on the premise that we aren’t yet in touch with one another quite enough.
And that may be because critics haven’t immersed themselves in the technology:
So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.)
So what?
- Very low penetration in Australia compared to US – opportunity for students to become an expert in blogging and micro-blogging before the wave hits.
- Once the hype dies down it may simply become useful.
- New features such as grouping (friends, family, colleagues) may make Twitter more usable
- How will Twitter respond to competitors such as Pownce, Dodgeball, and Tumblr
- Another part of the confusing web 2.0 jungle – making sense of it all
Twitter is experiential
If you, like me, have visited the Twitter home page and read the dozens of seemingly meaningless messages about the fragments of peoples lives, you’re probably thinking that it’s a load of rubbish. Why would anyone want to be so self-obsessed to write “gone to lunch with John. Will probably have sushi” and think that someone, anyone would care? Well, as it turns out there’s lots of good reasons, but it’s a bit like sky-diving or sex – you won’t understand it until you do it. As
Clive Thompson points out, Twitter is an experiential thing. Far from being something that’s self-obsession creating, it can become a way for people to have a much fuller and richer understanding of their world; and this comes about through a more granular view of the people around us. Give it a go (or try Jaiku)and see if what I’m saying has any truth.