New IP Biz: Twitter: A Marketer's Duct Tape

12:20 PM Thursday April 9, 2009
Twitter: A Marketer's Duct Tape
John Sviokla

The Near Futurist

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap. Twitter shares all these attributes. Just like duct tape can be used to repair a chair or make an artificial flower, twitter is a means of communication that can be layered over anything and everything,

By now, most of us are familiar with Twitter and its 140-character long tweets. Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets for free. It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self-form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you. While some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help) over 28,000 tweets. As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience. By way of comparison, the Boston Globe had a circulation in 2008 of about 350,000 — which is falling at a rate of 8-9% per year.

But Twitter can do so much more. As Chris pointed out on his blog, the range of applications is spectacular, from providing truly instant online commentary for any off-line event, to the visualization of Super Bowl tweets developed by the New York Times, to Pepsi's integration of Twitter with geographic information at the spectacularly popular South by Southwest festival, to Whole Foods tweeting recipes. Almost every major media outlet is tweeting, the Apple App Store has over 100 Twitter applications, and there are over 100 other free tools that have already bubbled up.

How did this seemingly trivial application created in two weeks by Jack Dorsey back in March 2006 as a way for him to know what his friends were doing grow into this global phenomenon? We think it is because of three critical things: first, the design. Twitter's design is simple, modular, scalable and cross-platform. Instant messaging used to be a youth-dominated phenomenon, but just walk into any business meeting and think about how similar tweeting is to BlackBerry-ing. As social animals, we humans are addicted to communication and understanding how our social group is acting and thinking. In business this is very practical — and in social settings, it is very entertaining.

Second, Twitter has an open technical architecture. As Chris has pointed out, it is an example of an application that sits "in the cloud" and is available everywhere. The interfaces to the capability are simple and well defined in their Applications Programming Interface (API), which makes it easy to plug into their messaging capability.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is very easy for people to join, and to self-organize around topics, companies, individuals, and events. In this sense it is an incredibly "democratic" medium — with all the control at the ends of the network. Our Diamond Fellow David Reed wrote in the Harvard Business Review many years ago about the power of self-forming networks, so potent because of their innate flexibility.

Of course there are Twitter doubters, and everything goes through a hype cycle — but the idea of self-organized, peer-to-peer, persistent communication, at almost zero cost, is powerful for coordination and communication alike.

Twitter is (and can become) so many things, that we suggest three questions for marketers to think about — but they are only a start:

What are people saying about my brand? There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, customer complaints, or other issues your customers are thinking about.
How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets — on their phone, computer, or other device? There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product or service area, and target market?

We believe — as other pundits have pointed out — that this current iteration of the internet is becoming increasingly real-time, populated by many mini-applications like Twitter that we'll be able to cobble together to create functionality. Marketing and sales have always been about communication, references, and word of mouth, and Twitter turbo-charges that age-old human activity.

We believe that the new "links" that Twitter creates with its tweets, among and between people and groups, will someday be mined for superior search and attention management — just the way Google uses page links to power its search algorithm today. It is only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft buys Twitter and integrates the functionality into their platform, and tweeting becomes part of how every company communicates and markets. Starting now will give you a jump on your competition.

Chris Curran co-authored this post.

For an opposing view, see Tom Davenport's post, "Is Twitter for Serious Marketers?"

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