The Friday Factoid has been a regular feature at KI since the inception of the company.
It's almost become a standing joke by now: Twitter is the future of HCM, the future of news, the future of all media....and now Time magazine explaining how Twitter is the future of business. I'm admittedly still a skeptic. Is Twitter fun? Vaguely interesting? Addictive? Sure - So are video games. But whenever a product, idea, or concept receives this much hype, it is usually a huge warning sign. Anyone remember how the Segway was going to revolutionize pedestrian travel? That was almost 10 years ago.
Anyway...I digress. Time has several excellent articles related to Twitter this week. Below is a summary of one entitled 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business. It's worth a read. Listed in no particular order:
- Hyper-Local Marketing: Twitter will enable small local businesses to inexpensively market to a broad audience of followers. A lone business owner can alert their followers of specials, sales, etc... in ways that were once only available to business with sizeable advertising budgets.
- Making Old-World Advertising Work: It is estimated that revenue from outdoor advertising (billboards) this year will be $30 billion. Unfortunately, there is no way of measuring how effective this advertising is. Experts predict that by using Twitter, market research firms will be able to quickly assemble data regarding the impact of their ads.
- Turning Wall Street on Its Head: By enabling real-time en masse commentary regarding stocks, experts predict Twitter will replace stock message boards like those on Yahoo!. Measuring Twitter activity around a stock may even one day become a key measure along side other data regarding the company.
- Making Blogs Count: Twitter will give small media outlets and individual bloggers access to broad audiences once only available to major TV networks and other mainstream media
- New Ways to Get Consumer Data: Twitter is a nearly ideal platform for tapping opinions about customer views of products. Twitter users have the capacity to segment themselves into discrete demographic groups, if they have an incentive to do so.
- Helping TV and Print: Large media companies already use Twitter to alert people of breaking news. CNN is one of the largest users os Twitter with 1.5 million followers.
- Twitpay: One model that is being tested allows consumers to put cash into a Twitpay account through a payment service like PayPal and then send a tweet to another Twitpay member, structured like "@josh twitpay $10 for Burger King." The Twitpay operation takes a $0.05 commission. Its founders are hoping that eventually it can be used for charity and disaster-relief payments.
- Changing Telecommunications: Twitter may not replace the land line, the cell phone, or voice and texting communications, but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans. Tweeting inside a browser does not have the same data cost for the telecom user that texting does, which adds another huge nonmetered communications opportunity for businesses and consumers.
- A New Way for the Government to Reach You: Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs to distribute emergency notices to citizens quickly.
Hmmm...Food for thought...
Have a Great Weekend Everyone!
