Twitter is a phenomenon sweeping the Internet. With subscriber numbers to this micro-blogging service “doubling every three to four weeks”, Twitter is receiving plenty of publicity. So just why is a service with such a self-deprecating name important and what does it mean to people interested in the future of the Internet? To answer these questions I will first review what Twitter is and how it is being used. I will then examine broader issues to provide context for the popularity of Twitter and micro-blogging generally. Finally I will point out some of the criticisms of Twitter and show how it presents opportunities for providing business differentiation, particularly in an Australian context.
While instant messaging (IM), blogging, and text messaging from mobile phones have all been around for some time now, Twitter is, relatively speaking, the new kid on the block. Twitter allows users to update their friends and acquaintances with small details about what is happening in their lives. Twitter messages – Tweets as they have become known – are restricted to a maximum of 140 characters and can be sent via IM, SMS, the Twitter website, or via a number of desktop applications, such as Twitterlicious, that both receive and publish tweets. The Twitter home page states that the system is a “global community of friends and strangers answering a single question: What are you doing?” It is this question that guides much of the interaction on Twitter. Whilst users can publish tweets about their own lives, they can also subscribe to – or “follow” – the tweets of their family, friends, and strangers as a way of staying in touch and keeping informed. However Twitter is more than just a social networking platform. It is also a micro-blogging platform, a news headline publishing platform, and a source of fascination for investors and commentators alike. To appreciate this fascination it is helpful to understand how people from all over the world are using Twitter.
Staying in touch with family and friends is a key reason for people to use Twitter. Twitter combines the functionality of email, bulletin boards, IM, and SMS. Whereas IM provides real-time interaction and a dynamic environment, Twitter creates near-synchronous communication through the system’s capability that allows users to receive SMS updates of their friends’ posts and respond instantly to these alerts via a variety of applications and platforms. The granular and ongoing nature of these Twitter updates provide groups of people with “social proprioception” – a sense that the group is a functional whole with coordinated parts. As a result, Twitter, and other “constant-contact media”, provides a richer, deeper context for real-life interaction, and a “sixth-sense” for what is happening in the lives of others.
Twitter is also being used extensively by reporters and news organisations to announce breaking news prior to the full story being available. For example, the death of United States Republican politician, Jennifer Dunn, was allegedly first reported on Twitter by @BreakingNewsOn just minutes after the event occurred. BreakingNewsOn is a micro-publishing news service delivering headline news via the Twitter website. Other well known news organisations such as CNN, the ABC, and Skynews, use Twitter to drive traffic to their websites by posting news headlines that contain hyperlinks to the main news story. In addition, bloggers regularly use Twitter as a micro-blogging tool, creating mini-blogs that serve to fill in the spaces between major blog posts and driving web traffic back to their main blog. Businesses of all shapes and sizes use Twitter to announce new products, changes to prices, and as an additional way to stay in touch with customers. As David Berlind suggests, Twitter is far more important as a disruptive business technology than it is as a way to stay in touch with friends. It is the advantage created by this disruption that is driving many businesses to use Twitter; however this only partially explains the popularity of the Twitter phenomenon.
Capturing and maintaining the attention of any audience is a complex and challenging task. Every day our world becomes ever more cluttered with new information, new messages, and new media, to the point where sorting the important from the insignificant, the mundane from the meaningful, can become an arduous burden. This overload of information has lead to what Beck and Davenport (2001) describe as the “attention economy” where, they contend, as the amount of available information increases, the amount of attention available to consume this information declines. Thus, as Steve Rubel (2007) asserts, growing demands on our time and attention cause us to seek out the shortest, fastest information solution – “brevity rules” he insists. However, as information saturates our world, we have chosen paradoxically to increase this saturation with a fascination for the trivial – witness the phenomenal growth of celebrity gossip sites such as Perez Hilton and E-online. The deficit of attention is not the only reason why the always-brief Twitter is popular. As the use of mobile telephones has grown, so too has the acceptance of self-publishing in the condensed format of text messaging (Rubel, 2007); a fact on which Twitter has cleverly capitalised. Along with this surge in mobile communications, social networking technologies bring even more information to people’s lives; however, this same technology also provides people the ability to switch off and control the various sources of information. Twitter, as a bare-bones social networking site, provides users with the choice to ‘follow’ or be ‘followed’ by any number of other users; and this provides people with the sought-after modulation to the noise created by incoming information.
Regardless of Twitter’s sociological and technological origins the system has attracted more than its share of critics. Technology writer and pundit, Andrew Kantor claims that Twitter is “a bad, bad thing” because participating in the Twitter experience is to admit that we are yet sufficiently connected, and secondly, we have gullibly bought into the idea that we need new technologies to be even more connected. Clearly, Kantor is not a fan; and neither is Dave Cote, an opinionated blogger regularly scathing of many new web technologies. Cote, in a tone laden with sarcasm, rails against Twitter claiming that “(t)witter is for twits” and is “pathetic and worthless.” Furthermore, Lev Grossman, of Time Technoculture, suggests that Twitter is “like the cocaine of blogging or email but refined into crack.” Clearly Grossman, too, is no fan. However, critics such as Kantor, Cote, and Grossman may well have missed the point of Twitter, suggests Clive Thompson who proposes that the only way to understand Twitter is to participate in the experience. “Scrolling through random Twitter messages”, he says, “can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it – and more important, do it with friends.” Whichever side of the debate people accept as accurate, there appears little doubt that Twitter is both controversial and popular; and with the intense scrutiny caused by these polar opinions, Twitter will no doubt be in the news for some time to come. How, though, is this important to people considering using Twitter for social media marketing, particularly in Australia?
Research shows that Twitter users are concentrated in North America, central Asia, and Western Europe. The city with the highest Twitter usage is Tokyo, followed by New York and San Francisco. Rounding out the top 10 cities by usage is Singapore and Madrid. It is worthwhile noting that Twitter usage in Australia is concentrated on the capital cities and just a few regional centres; and this represents an exciting opportunity for businesses and career-minded individuals. Those who can make sense of Twitter – just a small part of the web 2.0 jungle – prior to the technology becoming mainstream in Australia, give themselves and their business a clear, compelling, competitive advantage.
References
John Beck, & Davenport, T. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business: Harvard Business School Press.
Rubel, S. (2007). The case of the incredible shrinking blogosphere. Advertising Age, 78(31), 17. Retrieved September 3, 2007, from Proquest database.
