What’s the point of Twitter?
I was in NYC last week talking to a number of media-company marketers, and journalists covering the media industry. Inevitably the conversation turned to Twitter and its more recent, explosive growth outside of Silicon Valley.
Most interesting to me was that after glowing introductory comments, I was able to derail almost every conversation flow by asking: “What’s the point of Twitter? How are you using it, and what is the business objective you’re trying to achieve with it?” I wasn’t trying to be a jerk; I’m just legitimately interested in why people are using Twitter.
I knew I was on to something when one of the journalists sighed with obvious relief and said: “Oh good, we were thinking it was just us that couldn’t figure out the point. We figured you guys in Silicon Valley knew something we didn’t.”
Nope, sorry; we’re in this boat together.
So what are companies using Twitter for?
Fair disclosure, I Twitter. I see value in it. You can see Tweets about the CMSG business unit and the Cisco Eos platform here.
My use of Twitter is 2-fold:
1) As a distribution amplifier—it’s a content blipvert (minus the chance of explosion) you can use to draw people into an extended conversation if they’re interested.
2) As a monitoring system—what blipverts are other people putting out there, and what’s interesting to me as an individual or a business.
For me Twitter is then just a conversation starter, not an end to itself. That seemed to surprise the folks I was talking to.
I don’t know maybe; I’m missing something. Would love to hear from you: what’s the point of Twitter, and how do you use it?
Posted by Scott Brown at 03:18PM PST
Kaustav Bhattacharya Mar 13, 2009
Great post, Scott.
I’d like to add to the two points you shared with us about your uses of Twitter by adding two more of my own.
1) Using Twitter for collaboration and reaching out to specialists in their field on a global basis who might share in the causes I support and then network with them to make things happen very fast and almost spontaneously.
A great example of this is document at http://bit.ly/10ZB6g - the spontaneity of my Twitter of Twitter to network with amazing people is documented under the heading “Footnote: The Power of Twitter and the ’social web’”.
2) Using Twitter to bring about social change by using it to raise funds and connect with people to mobilize the power of the crowd.
Point two is particularly poignant for a social development project I recently participated in India. Through Twitter we continue to bind together the aspirations of 400+ individuals who took part in an amazing project to expose the youth of India to amazing role models in social entrepreneurship and inspire the youth to become future leaders of scalable, social enterprises.
I also agree with you that Twitter is one of the many tools available to monitor the buzz around a brand, product or service an monitor and therefore react to both positive and negative comments in a far more reactive way.