Twitter and the Micro-Messaging
Revolution
Communication,
Connections, and Immediacy - 140 Characters at a Time
Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution
©2008 OíReilly Media, Inc. OíReilly logo is a registered trademark
of OíReilly Media, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of
their respective owners. 80812
** Foreword
By Tim OíReilly
Like a lot of people, I didn't think much of Twitter at first. I signed
up to check it out,
but didn't find much there for me. I wasn't interested in hearing about
where people
were having coffee, what they had for dinner, or who they were hanging
out with. It
seemed like a great application for people with too much time on their
hands. But some
months later I was back.
Because Twitter lets anyone 'follow' any other user, rather than
requesting a formal
declaration of 'friendship', and because I'm a well known person, one
day I realized that
I had about 5000 people following me on Twitter, waiting to hear from
me.
Huh? I'd better give them something to follow, I thought. So I started
posting. But
because I'm a serious guy, I tended to post links to what I was reading
or writing, not
what I was eating or drinking. And I noticed that lots of other people
were doing that too.
Before long, I found myself using Twitter as my principal source of
news, forgoing my
RSS reader for the more varied and stimulating flow that comes from
people sharing the
very best things that they've read lately. And because I was using
Twhirl, a Twitter client
that has an easy button for 'retweeting' (that is, passing on the best
tweets from someone
you're following), I soon found that I had a great opportunity to bring
attention to insights
from people who had fewer followers than I did.
All those pieces I read that I couldn't get around to writing a full
blog post about could
be retweeted in an instant. I've now got about 12,000 direct followers,
but calculations
by some of the Twitter influence measurement sites project that that
means I have
potential access to millions of Twitter users, as others retweet my
most relevant comments.
What's more, the network is still young. At the same time as I found
Twitter a great tool
in my role as an information switchboard for people who care about new
trends in
technology, I also came to appreciate its original promise, as a tool
for keeping in touch
with people's ordinary lives. I learn from my brother's tweets that my
niece has a new
boyfriend, that his other daughter is home visiting from college.
I gain a new kind of ambient intimacy with members of my own family.
And before long,
I'm tweeting personal bits too. It's been a long day, I'm relaxing and
making raspberry jam.
"How much sugar do you use?" asks one follower. "However much you like,
if you use
Pomona's Universal Pectin," I reply. And so, through the minutia of
casual interaction, we
see the power of conversational marketing, as ordinary people share
what they do and what
they care about. And of course, from there, I learn to post
teasers about my own company's
products.
I share product announcements, ask for advice about what questions to
ask panelists I'm
interviewing on stage at my conferences, confident that I can reach
thousands of my best
customers with a tool so lightweight that it enables conversations that
I would never
have been able to have otherwise.
So, if you wonder whether Twitter matters for business, remember, if
you will, when people
new to cell phones used to call each other to report the most trivial
details of where they
were and what they were doing; remember how blogs at first were thought
of merely as
personal diaries of no interest to anyone in business, and how they
grew up to become the
heart of a new media paradigm. For that matter, remember how the
personal computer was
dismissed by the titans of the computer industry as nothing but a toy.
The future often comes to us in disguise, with toys that grow up to
spark a business revolution.
Twitter is like that. Ignore it at your peril. It is already a powerful
tool of competitive
advantage for companies like O'Reilly Media, Forrester Research,
Comcast, and Zappos.
This report introduces Twitter, tells war stories from its early
practitioners, outlines best
practices and the rapidly evolving landscape of third party
applications and other tools that
help you make use of the Twitter platform.
P.S. I'm @timoreilly on Twitter, just like I'm tim@oreilly. com on
email. If your name and
brand matters to you, there are advantages to getting on a platform
early.
Read the rest of the report here... The 54 page pdf really explores
twitter from front to back
and churns out a thought provoking and comprehensive report...
Download the
Excerpt here:
http://rumblesfromthejungle.com/dl/TwitterReport_excerpt.html
