TwitterTown USA – Is It Worth The Trip?

Imagine traveling across the plains in a Conestoga Wagon, en route to the imaginary settlement of  TwitterTown USA, circa 1860.  You’re heading off into unknown territory so you have no way of knowing what to expect, but you are optimistic about the future and excited about the new adventure.

Such is the experience of many of Jericho’s clients as they take the trip to Twitter for the first time.

We are often asked questions like “What will it be like when we get there?  Is it worth the trip?

There are two schools of thought, both of which have some truth in them.

The first suggests that Twitter is the entrance to a whole new world, filled with fellow travelers, opportunities to start a new or better business, and promising unlimited potential.

A second opinion, however, argues that it is a waste of time and that when you arrive there will be few fellow travelers, little opportunity for business, and meager potential.

What is the real story?

Since our primary concern is available business opportunities for our clients, here are two radically different points of view published this year, from no lesser an authority than the Harvard Business Review.

We have quoted them both in there entirety, highlighting the key points.

Also, please review Jericho’s take on all of this.

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap. Twitter shares all these attributes. Just like duct tape can be used to repair a chair or make an artificial flower, twitter is a means of communication that can be layered over anything and everything.

By now, most of us are familiar with Twitter and its 140-character long tweets. Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets for free. It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self-form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you. While some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help) over 28,000 tweets. As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience. By way of comparison, the Boston Globe had a circulation in 2008 of about 350,000 — which is falling at a rate of 8-9% per year.

But Twitter can do so much more. As Chris pointed out on his blog, the range of applications is spectacular, from providing truly instant online commentary for any off-line event, to the visualization of Super Bowl tweets developed by the New York Times, to Pepsi’s integration of Twitter with geographic information at the spectacularly popular South by Southwest festival, to Whole Foods tweeting recipes. Almost every major media outlet is tweeting, the Apple App Store has over 100 Twitter applications, and there are over 100 other free tools that have already bubbled up.

How did this seemingly trivial application created in two weeks by Jack Dorsey back in March 2006 as a way for him to know what his friends were doing grow into this global phenomenon? We think it is because of three critical things: first, the design. Twitter’s design is simple, modular, scalable and cross-platform. Instant messaging used to be a youth-dominated phenomenon, but just walk into any business meeting and think about how similar tweeting is to BlackBerry-ing. As social animals, we humans are addicted to communication and understanding how our social group is acting and thinking. In business this is very practical — and in social settings, it is very entertaining.

Second, Twitter has an open technical architecture. As Chris has pointed out, it is an example of an application that sits “in the cloud” and is available everywhere. The interfaces to the capability are simple and well defined in their Applications Programming Interface (API), which makes it easy to plug into their messaging capability.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is very easy for people to join, and to self-organize around topics, companies, individuals, and events. In this sense it is an incredibly “democratic” medium — with all the control at the ends of the network. Our Diamond Fellow David Reed wrote in the Harvard Business Review many years ago about the power of self-forming networks, so potent because of their innate flexibility.

Of course there are Twitter doubters, and everything goes through a hype cycle — but the idea of self-organized, peer-to-peer, persistent communication, at almost zero cost, is powerful for coordination and communication alike.

Twitter is (and can become) so many things, that we suggest three questions for marketers to think about — but they are only a start:

1. What are people saying about my brand? There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, customer complaints, or other issues your customers are thinking about.
2. How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets — on their phone, computer, or other device? There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
3. What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product or service area, and target market?

We believe — as other pundits have pointed out — that this current iteration of the internet is becoming increasingly real-time, populated by many mini-applications like Twitter that we’ll be able to cobble together to create functionality. Marketing and sales have always been about communication, references, and word of mouth, and Twitter turbo-charges that age-old human activity.

We believe that the new “links” that Twitter creates with its tweets, among and between people and groups, will someday be mined for superior search and attention management — just the way Google uses page links to power its search algorithm today. It is only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft buys Twitter and integrates the functionality into their platform, and tweeting becomes part of how every company communicates and markets. Starting now will give you a jump on your competition.

A few months ago I was speaking at a marketing conference, and after I spoke on marketing analytics, there was a panel on social media. Larry Weber, who started and then sold a very successful PR firm (and who is on Babson’s Board of Trustees), was asked whether there was a role for analytics in social media.

“Frankly, I’m tired of analytics,” he said. “I got into social media in part to get away from analytics.” Well, honesty is good, but I didn’t see then — and don’t now — how you can do serious marketing through any medium without metrics and analysis. Twitter and other social media may be fun, but are they really serious marketing tools?

I thought of this again recently while grading some of my MBA students’ papers about an IT strategy for Welch’s, the grape juice people. A couple of the student groups suggested that Welch’s should embark upon a Twitter initiative. Okay, they get a point or two for being au courant. And to the students’ credit, most suggested that it was a low-risk, low-return marketing approach. Still, I couldn’t imagine which customers would decide to follow Welch’s tweets about its grape juice and other associated products. The busy moms who form Welch’s core customers? I don’t think so.

Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn’t cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company.

Let’s face it — Twitter is a fad. It has all the attributes of a fad, including the one that people like me don’t get its appeal. It has risen quickly and it will fall quickly. It’s this year’s Second Life — which, you may have noticed, nobody is talking much about anymore. One Daily Telegraph article that did talk about it noted, “While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte’s director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been “virtually abandoned” by “normal” people and businesses.” Ouch!

I had a conversation with an influential business editor the other day that confirmed some of my predilections about Twitter. He said he was “unfollowing” (defollowing?) those who tweet a lot — “It’s just become a burden to read them,” he said. I, who issue nary a tweet, am clearly sitting in the catbird seat. You have to wonder about a technology when those who use it aggressively are shunned.

I‘m not as negative about the business and marketing potential of some other social media. For example, because Facebook and MySpace offer the promise of monetizing social networks — though they haven’t done so yet, to my mind — they are not to be easily dismissed. And wikis clearly have some value, or Wikipedia wouldn’t be so useful. Yet I haven’t seen too many wiki success stories within firms, and the ones that do have value don’t involve marketing. One smart knowledge manager, Sukumar Rajagopal at Cognizant, told me that he thought successful wikis within companies required that participants in them have strong network ties, and that’s not always easy to orchestrate. Another pharma executive who had experimented with them suggested that they require substantial human curation (facilitation and editing) to be successful — which, come to think of it, Wikipedia does too.

One conclusion I’ve come to is that we should unbundle the concept of “social media,” because some of its components are much more useful than others in a business and marketing context. Facebook? I suspect it faces prosperity, over time. Second Life? On life support. Twitter? In the long run, not worth a tweet.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts, but please restrict them to more than 140 characters.

Click here to read Jericho’s take on Twitter.