What Good is Twitter, Anyway?

 
I admit it. Of all the social networking endeavors, Twitter is the most difficult for me to understand. I mean, what can you say with 140 characters?

But a recent article in the New York Times has given me some additional insight; there actually may be more to Twitter than the absurd stream of consciousness I’ve seen so far.

According to the article, “By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment – and even help them shape it.”

And combined, the “tweets” – I still want to call them twits – appear to carry a lot of weight.

“…over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter.”

For any business, the potential for both positive and negative coverage is now at someone’s fingertips on a massive scale, even compared to the more mundane – and mainstream – blogs.

I wrote in an earlier post that e-newsletters are probably losing ground to blogs and other social media. Well, it appears that some of these old “new media” may already be losing ground to Twitter as well. It has an immediacy and speed that are astounding.

“…Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.” (Italics mine.)

One last spin on Twitter that made me sit up and take notice comes from Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist, quoted in the Times article, “Twitter reverses the notion of the group. Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

What texting was, just recently, to groups of friends; Twitter now is to the entire Internet world.

Of course, from a practical standpoint, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your business; Twitter still seems to be on the “bleeding edge.” But, I’m pretty confident that its move into the mainstream is inevitable. All we need now is some nice, simple, cheap software to allow us to monitor and assess every “tweet” and project how it might affect our businesses…