Twitter Teetering??

I've written a few posts about Twitter and can personally say that I'm not a huge fan of Twitter. I have used it for my company in the past and to be honest, it did a good job at what we were using it for. But we were using it to help spread political insight leading up to a provincial election as opposed to our day-to-day marketing of health plans. Twitter certainly has its share of success stories including this one that Marketing Magazine shares with us.

That being said, I think Twitter has peaked and is heading for a steady decline. Much like Second Life and a couple of other social networking sites that were big for a while. I read a FastCompany article a few weeks ago saying that 60% of new Twitter users were not logging on again after a month on the site. That's not a good sign. Then just yesterday I read Mitch Joel's post about Twitter and one of the telling quotes from it was this:

At the bare minimum 70% of the people on Twitter won't tell you who they are, where they are located or how to connect to them. That doesn't sound very "social" at all.

On top of that, over half of those people don't follow anyone, have never tweeted and how no followers. So, what's the point? Are most of these "people" not really "people" and simply bots? Or, do the majority of people who sign up for Twitter have no idea what they're getting themselves into, what the point is or how to really use it?

This makes it extremely hard for you to use Twitter as a targeted marketing effort. With 70% of the people not sharing their information your entire list of followers could, in effect, be completely wrong for your business. Take my company for example, we focus largely on British Columbia and sometimes all of Canada. Well anyone that would follow an account of ours in the States or elsewhere on the globe would not be any value to us, nor would we really be providing value to them.

I still don't really see the sustainability of Twitter and don't expect it to have the same buzz about it in the future. However, there clearly is some value for specific companies and individuals but I wouldn't bank my entire marketing efforts on it.

As you can tell, I can relate much more to the brownhaired guy in this video

Twitter Update

Earlier this week I wrote about Twitter and whether it would become too much for a lot of people in the near future.

While scanning my google reader today I came across this FastCompany, The Week that Twitter Tipped, talking about how there has been a huge boom in the notoriety of Twitter in recent months and especially this current week.

The one thing in the article I really found interesting was one company's attempt to create an ad format that will allow Twitterers to put advertising in their tweets

Web advertising company Adjix has announced that it's creating a new ad format that will allow individual Twitter users to embed ads in their tweets and monetize their popularity on the service.

Overall, it seems like advertising through these social networks has not been hugely beneficial for most companies or the network itself. Things such as display ads on Facebook have not been announced to pull huge numbers or huge revenues, and MySpace does well in terms of ad revenue but the effectiveness of it has never blown anyones socks off.

The real question is, will advertising in people's messages end up hurting Twitter in the long run? Twitter obviously needs some revenue because as the article points out they have had $55 million in venture capital invested and don't have much revenue to speak of. But at what cost? Will tweets with advertising included end up angering a large portion of the users and therefore pushing them to a newer and greater Twitter clone that has just risen?

I personally think that companies will get more value from using Twitter like they would a Facebook application, give the consumers something to do with it. In the article it mentioned Skittles and what they are doing with Twitter, but instead of them paying someone to include a skittles logo in their tweet, create a Twitter feed that allows people to "Tell us what your doing as you eat your skittles" or something along those lines. I'm sure consumers will get a kick out of some of the crazy shenanigans going on as people taste the rainbow.

Tweet Tweet Too Much

When does Twitter become too much?

I am a fairly new user of the much vaunted Twitter and it has made me think about a few things.

Firstly, what happens when every single company you know starts Tweeting? Remember that thing about why advertising is working as well, because everybody gets harassed by 8,000 messages a day or whatever the number was? Well with Twitter you could seemingly receive 8,000 messages in a matter of an hour depending on who you are following. Granted, Twitter offers consumers the power to select who they follow and don't follow but the majority of them probably won't pare down their list once they have added someone.

So what happens when everyone is on Twitter???? I think it will probably lose the a major chunk of its appeal because how do you cut through the clutter of the hundreds of messages you receive to find the good stuff? How do you follow hundreds if not thousands of people?

Twitter is definately still in the beginning stages of its adoption, but it is starting to go like fire. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next year or so and how long of a life it has as a result of its success.

The Idiocy of Man

We live in a world where you basically have eyes on you all the time whether you like it or not. Cell phone cameras, webcams, security cams, bloggers, twitterers, facebookers and all have the power to capture and spread something throughout the world in a matter of minutes if not seconds.

So why have people not caught on? Why are there so many morons out there that can't seem to get this through their thick skulls. How come every day when I watch the news or turn on my computer it seems another person has been caught in an act of idiocy. And its not like these people tend to be the unwashed/uneducated percentage of the population. Today it was police officers in Australia making a drunk aboriginal dance for them.....ON CAMERA. Okay mates, heres the deal:

a. You are morons
b. Why would you actually film your moronicness
c. Do you really think that in this digital age you will be able to control the spread of your video???
d. You are such morons
e. You are more than likely fired, congratulations.

Maybe this is a positive to take out of the digital age, morons will expose themselves and everyone will know who they are. They will end up paying for their uncaring, idiotic, racist tendencies and thats about the best result possible.