This is not Pick on Twitter month – I am just posing some questions to get the attention of those who see things for what they are, not how they should be.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the effects of Twitter’s popularity and just did a phone interview with Janice Magin of the Pacific Business News on how many local businesses are getting on Twitter. Twitter has become incredibly popular, and so that does by default lower the value proposition. I am thrilled that small business is embracing social media. Being on Twitter is becoming a new normal. However that also raises the challenge bar for how to use it innovatively. If everyone is offering a coupon, then a coupon is no big deal. Same is true of traditional coupons.
Dell was a leader in selling $1M worth of used computers on Twitter on 6 mos last year; they now offer exclusive discounts to their followers. When people have thousands of others in their stream, more of your messages will be filtered out. The people with the longest experience on Twitter know about these filtering tools, and many only respond to ”@” messages or “DM’s” ignoring the general stream from their followers.It’s not rudeness or snobbery; it’s just math.
My colleague, Robyn Levin, stated it well on her blog:
On a whole, I think this is a good thing, but here’s the problem: whenever technology becomes fashion, return-on-investment (ROI) tends to get lost in the excitement of the latest .com catwalk.
My traditional business mind says find out at least a little how it works before jumping off the cliff, that crowds can and often do spoil many things, and be careful what you ask for in terms of being popular.
My “here and now” mind says that this explosion of connectivity and creativity is producing “wins” from many unlikely sources – just like the story of Ed Morita’s Twitter Case Study at Social Media Club Hawaii we recently profiled. It says that people are able to filter themselves too and proactively signup for things that are if interest.
My consumer mind is sick of the automated robots, spammers, and auto-DM’s on Twitter. Please go away and join me in supporting #noAutoDM.
I do think there is a some incredible creativty to be tapped there. Just keep in mind that much tactical advice for “how to use Twitter” gets out-dated within 3-6 months at this current pace. The place just keeps morphing in new directions. One thing that seems to be a constant is the desire for authentic conversation. Getting one of those ”@” messages directly to you sure does get your attention now doesn’t it? It’s just not that practical for mass marketing.
If we look at the photo in this post, you might see lemmings jumping blindly to their death or you might see cliff jumpers taking the fast and exhilarating ride down into the sea. Much of social media is what you make of it.
If you are someone who uses filtered groups and keyword search notifications to manage your Twitter stream, I have a question for you:
What percent of your filtering is for friends vs. business competitors vs. tracking companies from whom you buy things?
If it all gets to be too much noise for you, you can do like Loic Le Meur did: unfollow everyone and start over.
Aloha,
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
“Twitter has become incredibly popular, and so that does by default lower the value proposition.”
I don’t see why it would. People only follow who they think are worthy.
“If everyone is offering a coupon, then a coupon is no big deal.”
I think coupons are cool as long as it’s a good coupon for something that I want to buy. The more coupons like that the better. Sometimes I’ll see a great coupon and buy an extra newspaper just so I can get a second one. All other coupons are invisible to me. I wish I could filter them out of the newspaper as easily as I can on Twitter.
If an offer is really compelling like when Oprah was posting a coupon for a free lunch at KFC, it went viral on Twitter, and it didn’t even originate on Twitter.
But yeah… anyone who believes in the philosophy of “Build it and they will come” when thinking about Twitter, might be disappointed. Even if you have a big brand, you still need to post stuff worth reading and promote something worthy of a RT once and a while.
Dave – Thanks for your comments. You’ve made a good point by using specifics on the coupon situation – thank you for that. I am sensitive to the energy – and that is hard to describe using words.
OTOH, you said “People only follow who they think are worthy.” Which I think is not really that accurate these days for many people. Many in this latest iteration of Twitter especially (and evidenced in the extreme by the CNN v Ashton Kutcher contest) seem to be wanting to amass as many followers as possible. The automation tools (thanks to the beautifully open API) have really stretched the meaning of “relationship” though.
All of this robotic “follow me and I’ll follow you; unfollow me and I’ll unfollow you” – just seems like the same type of thing as the old link farms. It didn’t take Google long to figure out there was no value or true relationship in all that reciprocal linking.
I love people. I love the internet. I have made some incredible friends via Twitter and great business connections too. Twitter has a high noise to signal ratio. Communicating a business proposition in a relationship-based, conversational medium is an art. Mass reproductions just don’t have the same energy or impact – for me – a the original. Twitter is proving itself to be incredibly facile for creativity, and that’s the good news here I think.
True… Its easy to ruin the experience of Twitter for yourself or just about anything else if you wanted to. Some people over eat, others drink too much etc…
However… Ashton Kutcher is only following 149 people. Lance Armstrong has over 800K followers and he’s only following 71 people. Oprah has over one Million followers but she’s only following 13 people.
I’m sure the signal to noise ratio for Ashton, Lance and Oprah is pretty strong.
I’m also pretty sure that almost all of the people who are following them are genuinely interested in what they have to say.
On the other hand… @MufiHannemann is now up to 200K followers! Almost none of them even have a profile picture. LOL!
One of these days, Mufi will “pull his head out” and get real. At least I hope so. (He’s publicly embarrassing himself)
IMO – Its somewhat self regulating. If people feel that they went too far, then they can pull back or use a tool like Tweet Deck so help them manage groups or assign priorities.
Unless you’re publicly embarrassing yourself, I don’t believe it’s much of a problem. I believe its more of a personal preference.
But – You’re right – It’s about quality, not quantity.
I see some people going overboard but most people I’m following are following only a few hundred people.
Here is a link to Janice’s front page feature on Twitter, as mentioned early in the above post.
For my newbie blog readers, it’s good blog etiquette to re-post the link when someone makes the effort to feature you.
Twitter ROI – Is it Too Popular? – http://shar.es/xBP9
This comment was originally posted on Twitter