"Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe..."
Having seen the user base of Twitter quadruple over a period of inactivity from 8mn to 32mn, I gave a final attempt at tweeting or microblogging, as the phenomenon urges to be described by its creators Biz Stone, Ewan Williams and Jack Dorsey. And whoa! I am addicted... to reading random articles on random topics... posted by people, bots, companies and everything possible.
A few months back while registering on Twitter, repelled by the its GUI, I'd thought who would every want this... typing 140 characters to describe what track you're listening to, or on which road you're stuck in a jam... Do we really need this kind of information traversing through the space?
From an article I read online: "Are we really becoming a nation of people who reflexively share information with everyone the minute we have it? We might be. Twitter has no choice but to hope so. They might be right."
With a forceful attempt, I welcomed the social media that is supposed to change the way organizations think, breathe, talk! And gradually, I learnt the art and science of leaving a strand of your thought into the universe, and processing zillion other bits that I receive as a consequence of following others.
Where does all this lead to? How does a platform such as Twitter earn its revenues? Would selling of official users to organizations such as Coca Cola and Starbucks give it the leverage to be what its hyped to be?
Being a novice in this domain, I am obviously not as well read as a zillion other people on the planet... but I feel the players are already in motion... the stage for the fantabulous domino effect is already set... the revolution would come the day local marketing doesn't remain local in this transmission of messages, but via Twitter... to the consumer base "following" the organizations... When consumer research is conducted on the followers of the brand (the demographic aspects of Twitter are already built in)... When a huge mass of users would look forward to tweeted news (I, in the past few days, have already started doing that!)...
Its almost like the scenario in Matrix, when Neo is caught between the two worlds at the mercy of the Trainmaster. You need to be on this Twitter train to get to the other world... the future of marketing and communication that lies ahead!
This is what the power of "what are you upto" can lead to in the next 2-3 years... which will be, no doubt, very exciting times for marketers and consumers alike.
The following is an image I came across in an ebook on social media and marketing. Just pondering at the expanse of the platforms available for a single purpose: to talk! Such is the innate desire of us homo sapiens to communicate :)
2 comments:
Please post a bigger pic. Nice thought abt the test marketing but most ppl on twitter are ppl frm PR, Marketing, branding, Media or Techies. So its a small world out there. The main stream people/consumer usually do not tweet much and usually opt out after a few days. Secondly, I did not see any info on demographics, profession etc being collected by twitter.
Click on the pic.. this is the highest resolution I could post.
There have been researches done by Sprint for a few US retail clients, one of them for Bath and Body Works for new essences.
The phenomenon of mainstream people dropping out is of today. Just 3 days back squarespace came out with a campaign for giving out free iphones. Such and other promotional activities are going to encourage the activity for sure. Starbucks has already started marketing officially through twitter... which, if you see, is a medium requiring very less effort. Only that is required is that your brand has certain leverage as of now to attract "followers". How companies would go about "building brands from the scratch" is something that is to be seen.
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