Social Media is a fast-growing and rapidly evolving beast, and the latest website to be the darling of the Google Generation is micro-blogging site Twitter. The idea is simple, you have 140 characters, including spaces, to answer the question- What are you doing now? This however, as with all things Web 2.0, doesn’t tell the full story. Twitter acts as a bulletin board as well, where titbits of information, via links, can be shared between users. UK Celebrities such as Jonathon Ross, Stephen Fry and John Cleese are all advocates, and Barack Obama used it during his election campaign to motivate the masses (he has over 144,000 followers). Twitter has seen its popularity grow 10-fold in the UK in the past year and traffic rise 750% in the US where it is know a more visited site than Digg. As I write this blog post just under 2 million tweets are being submitted worldwide every day!
Whilst to ‘outsiders’ it might seem a trivial and almost pointless service, only for users with high levels of deluded self-importance, but Twitter played notable roles during a several significant events in the past 4 months. The part Twitter played in providing break-neck speed updates on the Mumbai terror attacks in November led Forbes Magazine to write Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment. Before News services had broken the event on television Tweeps such as @rakesh314 posted “I'm hearing news of gun-firing in Mumbai. Can anyone confirm?”. Updates from people involved even led to an internet myth that the terrorists themselves were following events on Twitter itself to counter the actions of the forces sent in to stop them.
The much more recent plane crash into the Hudson River was another example of Tweeps providing a rapid reaction. One Twitterer, @jkrums, took a picture of the half-submerged aircraft with passengers standing on the wing from a passing-by ferry which quickly went viral and eventually landed him an interview on CNBC. Others tweeted about how they stood watching the drama from their office blocks. What was the most notable though was the integrity of the tweet-reporting which cited accurate numbers and stories relating to the event as information about what had happened disseminated among users.
As great as all this impartiality and interactivity sounds, how can Twitter serve the business community? And that’s exactly the point, this notion of impartial interactivity. Twitter provides a transparent window into an organisation for the consumer, a portal in which to directly interact. Several brands are using it as such a device to. @ScottMonty is the face of car manufacturer, Ford, on Twitter (who have multiple employee accounts) and says “It’s part of a larger social media strategy to humanize the Ford brand and put consumers in touch with Ford employees”. Lisa Kim @AmericanApparel is the Website Manager for American Apparel and is another advocate of Twitter as a way of increasing customer care, “We saw a tweet from someone who received less than stellar customer service at a store in Canada & we got in touch with them to sort it out.” Children’s Charity Barnardo’s used Twitter alongside their blog to engage the media storm around their controversial ‘Break the cycle’ ad campaign (managed by Chameleon Net) so successfully that Barnardo’s own staff kept abreast of the situation by following the charity’s own Twitter feed. Higher Education Institutions are now looking at using Twitter as a Personal Learning Network in which students can ask questions of their peers and teachers in order to increase feedback and accessibility.
Twitter is quickly evolving to become fundamental in the development of any digital strategy and with its thrust into the UK lime-light thanks to varying celebrity endorsements, its popularity is only set to grow. Businesses need to educate themselves and start twittering soon or risk being left behind by more media-savvy rivals.
CREDIT TO:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/Revolution/News/875017/Celebs-start-tweeting-Twitters-UK-popularity-rises-10-fold-year/
http://nielsen-online.com/blog/2009/01/16/tweeting-the-us-airways-flight-1549-plane-crash/
http://popacular.com/gigatweet/analytics.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/12/twitter_the_mumbai_myths.html
