Twitter Marketing
You've probably heard that Twitter experienced some serious downtime in early August due to a DOS attack. A "DOS" attack is a "denial of service" effort in which the malicious party or parties swamp the server with so many requests it grinds to, essentially, a halt, given that users will get extraordinarily slow, or no, service.
"Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream."
That Twitter was so vulnerable raised virtual eyebrows, given that business has taken to Twitter in a big - and some would say incomprehensible - way.
When it started, Twitter was sort of a Facebook lite.
Remember, Facebook started out as a Harvard student's hack into the student files, the idea being to create a "hot or not" sort of web app using the data for what is commonly know as "face books" (or in less flattering terms, "pig books"), those little booklets that are handed out at the start of each school year with the pictures, hometowns, and campus numbers of incoming freshmen. The idea behind it is benign: get to know your classmates. That it's more commonly used for dating and fraternity/sorority rushing is no secret, except perhaps to idealistic campus administration.
Facebook evolved into a way to keep in touch with friends, update them with photos, ideas, music, thoughts, activities, and so on. The addictive quality of this activity was clear, as people were posting everything from "I just got up" to breakup notices to less-than-flattering information about employers.
The designers of Twitter wanted to pare this down to the bone: how about, "my life in 140 characters." Limiting the input to 140 characters ostensibly made for more terse, more frequent updates.
But when people took to it in huge numbers, businesses could hardly fail to notice.
While many businesses created "fan pages," or pages on Facebook devoted to their business that users could "become a fan of," (which makes sense if you're, for example, Nike, a band, or a local bar, but maybe not so much if you're a funeral parlor...), the uses of Twitter were not so readily apparent.
Perhaps we have politics to thank for all that. Barack Obama was not above tweeting to his followers every move his campaign was making - with evidently good success.
That droves of pols twittered their way through the inauguration showed that we're nothing if not properly named "followers" when it comes to Twitter. (A "follower" in Twitter-talk is someone who has subscribed to your tweets, and will get an update on their Twitter interface whenever you tweet.)
A couple of months ago, I began to notice that I was being followed by people I'd never heard of, and who could not possibly have heard of me. Well, in order to find that out, I had to "follow" them in order to find out who they are. In true social programming fashion, these "spam" twitterers are relying on our instinct to follow someone who follows us.
I quickly learned that followers with obviously girly names (or downright provocative ones) are attempting to - er, um, drum up business.
Not so clear are those who, once you get their tweets, are all about selling a product, or simply getting followers.
Just recently, though, I heard something which just might signal the beginning of the end for Twitter. A friend told me that a company he does business with recently sent him an email announcing that it has now started tweeting, and that every day, it will be playing a game with its lucky followers. If you win the game, you get a prize.
Cyberfolk, if we can call them that, are a lot more canny and difficult than typical consumers. While they tend to be buyers - and significant online shoppers - they are also suspicious, particularly when a method of communication is co-opted by what they perceive to be excessive marketing. Eye-tracking studies demonstrate that random banner ads are studious avoided (though not necessarily relevant ones...as I said, cyberfolk are big on shopping and big on serendipitous information gathering). There is no reason to believe that this tendency won't carry over into the social networking world.
If I have to spend a lot of my time fighting off marketing messages rather than reading interesting (or even silly) communications from friends, what's in it for me to keep twittering?
Hand it to Google - it's done a remarkable job of making its messaging relevant. While in some ways I find it a little Big Brother when I see an ad in the right panel of my Gmail that relates to the topic of my mail (not even the subject line, necessarily, but something that makes it clear the entire message was parsed), on the other hand, I have more than once found these ads to be interesting and even useful because I've actually (by virtue of my email) exhibited some interest in the subject.
I'm not sure what the answer is for Twitter, or even Facebook, when it comes to its marketing potential. But it will be important that the essential experience not be interrupted for users.
Meanwhile, Twitter this article, won't you? Maybe you'll win a prize!
"Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream."
That Twitter was so vulnerable raised virtual eyebrows, given that business has taken to Twitter in a big - and some would say incomprehensible - way.
When it started, Twitter was sort of a Facebook lite.
Remember, Facebook started out as a Harvard student's hack into the student files, the idea being to create a "hot or not" sort of web app using the data for what is commonly know as "face books" (or in less flattering terms, "pig books"), those little booklets that are handed out at the start of each school year with the pictures, hometowns, and campus numbers of incoming freshmen. The idea behind it is benign: get to know your classmates. That it's more commonly used for dating and fraternity/sorority rushing is no secret, except perhaps to idealistic campus administration.
Facebook evolved into a way to keep in touch with friends, update them with photos, ideas, music, thoughts, activities, and so on. The addictive quality of this activity was clear, as people were posting everything from "I just got up" to breakup notices to less-than-flattering information about employers.
The designers of Twitter wanted to pare this down to the bone: how about, "my life in 140 characters." Limiting the input to 140 characters ostensibly made for more terse, more frequent updates.
But when people took to it in huge numbers, businesses could hardly fail to notice.
While many businesses created "fan pages," or pages on Facebook devoted to their business that users could "become a fan of," (which makes sense if you're, for example, Nike, a band, or a local bar, but maybe not so much if you're a funeral parlor...), the uses of Twitter were not so readily apparent.
Perhaps we have politics to thank for all that. Barack Obama was not above tweeting to his followers every move his campaign was making - with evidently good success.
That droves of pols twittered their way through the inauguration showed that we're nothing if not properly named "followers" when it comes to Twitter. (A "follower" in Twitter-talk is someone who has subscribed to your tweets, and will get an update on their Twitter interface whenever you tweet.)
A couple of months ago, I began to notice that I was being followed by people I'd never heard of, and who could not possibly have heard of me. Well, in order to find that out, I had to "follow" them in order to find out who they are. In true social programming fashion, these "spam" twitterers are relying on our instinct to follow someone who follows us.
I quickly learned that followers with obviously girly names (or downright provocative ones) are attempting to - er, um, drum up business.
Not so clear are those who, once you get their tweets, are all about selling a product, or simply getting followers.
Just recently, though, I heard something which just might signal the beginning of the end for Twitter. A friend told me that a company he does business with recently sent him an email announcing that it has now started tweeting, and that every day, it will be playing a game with its lucky followers. If you win the game, you get a prize.
Cyberfolk, if we can call them that, are a lot more canny and difficult than typical consumers. While they tend to be buyers - and significant online shoppers - they are also suspicious, particularly when a method of communication is co-opted by what they perceive to be excessive marketing. Eye-tracking studies demonstrate that random banner ads are studious avoided (though not necessarily relevant ones...as I said, cyberfolk are big on shopping and big on serendipitous information gathering). There is no reason to believe that this tendency won't carry over into the social networking world.
If I have to spend a lot of my time fighting off marketing messages rather than reading interesting (or even silly) communications from friends, what's in it for me to keep twittering?
Hand it to Google - it's done a remarkable job of making its messaging relevant. While in some ways I find it a little Big Brother when I see an ad in the right panel of my Gmail that relates to the topic of my mail (not even the subject line, necessarily, but something that makes it clear the entire message was parsed), on the other hand, I have more than once found these ads to be interesting and even useful because I've actually (by virtue of my email) exhibited some interest in the subject.
I'm not sure what the answer is for Twitter, or even Facebook, when it comes to its marketing potential. But it will be important that the essential experience not be interrupted for users.
Meanwhile, Twitter this article, won't you? Maybe you'll win a prize!
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