What’s the point of Twitter?

Why do I need to use Twitter?

Why do you use Twitter?

What am I missing by not using Twitter?

What do you want to do with your life Twitter?

The reason so many people are having trouble figuring out the value of Twitter is that they haven’t chosen to use Twitter with a particular goal in mind. They have chosen to use it out of curiosity, or because they wonder what they must be missing.  Some of my friends and colleagues resemble that remark, and given the recent mainstream media attention thrust upon Twitter, I expect the number of curious people trying to figure out what the fuss is about will continue to skyrocket.

So they create an account, follow some of their favorite celebrities, follow some of the news sources they already read elsewhere, follow the friends they already talk to on a regular basis, and sit back to wait for the magic.

In order to score, you need a goal

Other commenters on the aforementioned LinkedIn discussion (and elsewhere) mentioned some great goals that you might set for yourself as you start using Twitter:

• market research
• brand monitoring
• customer community building & interaction
• personal “brand” building
• subject-matter networking

If none of these activities are things you are already trying to do well, or are embarking upon as something you want to do well (with or without Twitter), then perhaps Twitter is not a tool you will find valuable. If you’re not trying to bid on merchandise that you’re going to buy sight-unseen and have shipped to you, then eBay probably isn’t for you either.

Goal-oriented Participation Creates Value

With Twitter, the reason knowing your goals is so directly related to the value you derive from using Twitter is that those goals influence your own activity and participation. Those goals will also influence the tools you choose (there are many different Twitter applications available, both free and paid).

The crux of Twitter is that it is a conduit for infinite conversation. Think of it as a giant ball of millions of strands of yarn. Some of those strands are people, some are topics, some are companies. It takes a little while to:

1. build your own strand for people to follow if they choose to, and
2. tease out the strands that you’d like to follow.

But ultimately, you need to do both: contribute value through constant development of your own strand, and derive value from the strands of others.

As it turns out, Day 1 of the campaign couldn’t have picked a better social media property to feature as it’s homepage. Nobody loves to gossip and spread the wildfire word more passionately than Twitterers. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that they maximized their Day 1 exposure by featuring Twitter first, instead of Facebook or Digg or YouTube or _______.

The brilliance of the strategy starts to become a little more obvious now that the flash-in-the-pan craze so common on Twitter has faded, and Skittles.com Day 2 is featuring the less frantic Facebook page as its homepage. A little less rapid-fire, a little more dialogue (with ‘Skittles’ posting responses to comments on its own wall). They’ve used the 24-hour Twitter stampede as kindling for a fire that is now burning bigger today than it was yesterday.

This is the inverse of peeling back the layers of the onion. They’ve recognized the lifespan of buzz on various social media outlets, and are chaining properties together in the campaign to leverage one property as a build into the next.  This is a great example of leveraging the Snowball Effect of social media to make the overall impact of the campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitterverse, don’t be so quick to evaluate the merits of this campaign. You are merely the first pawn to be moved in a much longer, more strategic game of chess.

Clearly this is a valuable tool for brand marketers from a couple of angles.

• Working on a new brand, and want to see what existing brands have been tagged with brand attributes you want to convey?  Search the attributes on Brand Tags.
• Working on an existing brand, and want to see which brand attributes are most commonly (or least commonly) attributed to the brand?  Search the brand on Brand Tags.
• Testing new brand designs?  Perhaps if you ask Noah nicely, he’ll throw them into the rotation for you (or split off another ‘focus group’ branch to his tree if there’s enough interest).

Clearly this is a tool that increases in value as more and more people tag more brands more often.  So take 60 seconds to head over to www.brandtags.net and tag a few brands for the Greater Marketing Good, will ya?

I was only in hiatus for 6 weeks and I missed all sorts of celeb gossip.  Thankfully I’m not all that big on celeb gossip so there’s not a ton of catching up to be done.

For example, I couldn’t care less about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes getting married.  (I do however love the stupid immature shit that celebrities do though, like JLo saving seats for her friends on the private jet and John Travolta not going because Oprah wasn’t invited.  Gotta love role models.) I wrote sweet Katie off as soon as I heard she was kanoodling with that twit.  I was over her long before she even got knocked up.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be there to catch her when she falls from grace and is forced to do another semi-nude scene (like in The Gift and Thank You for Smoking) to save her nosediving career.

But speaking of doing audacious things to save a nosediving career, my favorite trailer-trash hottie is back on the singles scene after ditching Fed-Ex (the freeloader, not the courier).  What better way to announce that your school girl kilt is being tossed back into the ring than to show off your new body on David Letterman, paint Vegas red with Mario Lopez (amazing she didn’t get married again), and head out on the town partying with both Paris Hilton AND Lindsay Lohan?  This article was the inspiration for my post title since there’s nothing more fun than witnessing the British press coining of a new celebrity duo nickname.

It wasn’t so long ago (only two kids and two marriages since) that Britney was passed the baton as the new rock sex symbol of the ages when she and Madonna made Christina Aguillera jealous with an extra-long, extra-tonguey french kiss before the world’s eyes.  Not to be outdone in the competition for Brit’s BFF status, of course, Madonna wants Britney to sleep over for Christmas this year.

Imagine the hell of being Britney Spears’ publicist right now.  What a grand orchestration this all is.

Microsoft Zune or Apple iPod? 

Coke or Pepsi? 

David Miller or Jane Pitfield? 

Iraq or Afghanistan? 

Liberal or Conservative?

Where is the intelligent media?  Where are all the shades of grey?  Why is everything being pre-digested and simplified into A-or-B choices for us these days? 

We’re worried about social problems like obesity and smoking because you’re either fat or skinny, a smoker or a non-smoker.  We’ve become so binary in our thought processes.  We should really be worried about our brains going soft on us. 

We should demand more from our media.  And we should demand more from ourselves.  Read, research, listen, observe.  There are more multiple-choice and short-answer questions in life than there are True/False.

Can you tell I’m pissed at the Sunday newspaper today?  Stupid black-and-white.

I came across this great little collection of notable bloggers’ posts on the topic.  What strikes me is that so many people who get technology still seem hung up on the whole copyright lawsuit thing.  Clearly more of them need to read posts like the one I wrote back on September 18.  I’m not exactly in a position to say “I told you so!” because I didn’t explicitly predict a Google acquisition, although it is certainly along the lines of what I was alluding to when I said it was the most significant portion of their press release.

I’ll restate what I said then in light of the “in the dark” comments of bloggers like Mark Cuban and Jupiter Analyst Joseph Laszlo (who, by the way, even strikes a kinship with his fellow naysayer Cuban in this post): copyright infringement will not be an issue.  Read my lips.  Copyright infrigement will NOT be an issue.  If it was, do you think the major record labels would be standing in line to sign up for the new YouTube copyright screening revenue generator service? 

Copyright owners are drooling over an opportunity to instantly monetize a massive consumer audience without the costs, both monetary and relationship-wise, of suing every 14 year old who posts a homemade karaoke video on YouTube done to the new Justin Timberlake song.

And that’s exactly what Google gets out of this deal.  Of course the boys have to say things like “we have found some opportunities to leverage Google technology in the YouTube offering.”  But at the end of the day, this is a stock-for-stock deal that leaves YouTube operating independently as its own company in its own office.  This is Google building its media monetization empire, not cramming its intelligent search-based ad network into another online property. 

Google is not buying an audience.  Google is buying innovative technology that can identify copyrighted audio and video content within a user-created amateur video, calculate the royalties owed to the copyright owner based on ad revenue generated from the video’s traffic on YouTube, and deliver payment to the copyright owner with full back office reporting.  Google is buying a business, and they’re buying it with Google stock.

Joseph Laszlo asks, “Will Yahoo follow suit?”  I say good luck to Yahoo.

It’s viral marketing (sort of), but it wasn’t created by anybody affiliated with Stephen Colbert or his show.
Whoever built this puppy has done Stephen Colbert a massive favor from a viral marketing perspective.  Simple, funny, and incredibly well done.  (p.s. to the creator, thanks for not littering it with tacky advertising that nobody ever clicks on.)

You can create your own "On Notice" board for free on this fun little website. 

I imagine it’s only a matter of days before the folks at Colbert Nation license this to put it on Colbert’s fan site.

Thanks to Jacquie for pointing me to this from her blog.

He has garnered an incredible amount of media attention on an international scale with next to no outbound PR activity.  Just goes to show how an honest, original, compelling story is still natural news.  Refreshing in this day and age when PR propoganda rules the news media roost.