Twitter Ramblings & Twéire

I haven’t posted anything in a while so I thought I would ramble a little about Twitter and how it is changing us and the World we’re living in.

Twitter Ramblings

Twitter has taken the World by storm with Michael Arrington speculating in a TechCrunch blog post that there are as many as 1.3 million users Worldwide*. We’ve come to know about many of the high profile members such as Britney Spears (@britneyspears), Barack Obama (@BarackObama), Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) and even Darth Vader (@darthvader). More and more people feel compelled to answer the question – “What are you doing?”. This simple question has led to hundreds of Twitter applications, clients and mash-ups.

The Marketplace is Changing

Just recently I made a small Twitter service called Twanslink in order to give people in Northern Ireland a forum to talk about their experience with the bus and rail services. The fragmentation of media and the focus from broadcast/mass media shifting towards the social web has meant that we all have a voice. The one-way dialogue between companies and their customers has changed. It was once enough to buy a 30 second slot during prime television and bombard us with information about a product but after decades of this type of marketing people have higher expectations and we are able to filter the boring advertising out of our minds.

Seth Godin says in Purple Cow that we have to rethink our approach to marketing. To gain attention we not only have to market a product in a remarkable manner, but also have a remarkable product to market. Twitter has allowed companies to get instantaneous feedback about their services/product and the companies that have embraced a strategic and thought out approach to how they interact online have prospered.

A few days ago on Twitter I tweeted ‘O2 surprises fail to surprise me anymore’. Within 3 minutes a representative from O2 tweeted me a personalised message asking if I had seen all the surprises that were up for grabs. You could think that Twitter is just another marketing platform for companies to intrude in our lives but now, more than ever, it is important how companies interact with their customers. If it is seen as a sales pitch or marketing ploy the customer will see right through it and this will do more harm to the company than good. The business model we’ve been long used to is changing… 140 characters at a time.

* – Forrester Research has estimated that Twitter has between 4-5 million users

Twéire

Well now that everything has been ‘twitterfied’ and we’ve been appending ‘tw’ to everything and anything I thought I’d do a little illustration of Ireland on Twitter. I have a few ideas in the pipelines for this to go a little further and I’ll keep you posted of any updates.