Canadian Marketing Blog

One way or two?

I was forwarded an article today from the BBC detailing some Harvard research titled Twitter hype punctured by study.

As detailed in the article, the Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and very, very few people listen consistently.

The research concludes that despite the hype, Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. That Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends.

The BBC posted a question I thought would be interesting to discuss here: Do you think that micro-blogging will play a big part in the future of the web? If so, are marketers going to use and allocate budget to this in the future? Is it happening now?

elizabeth
good question, but one that needs greater clarification if you are seeking a focused answer.

simple answer is that marketers follow the consumer anywhere there is access to them. yes micro blogging will be a channel just as skywriting is and street theater. But how exactly do you define micro-blogging, 140 characters?

as you know monies are being spent in twitter already - to push messages and to scrape the sentiment of messages, just as it is being done across other social media channels

i think once the hype settles a bit -we will need to clarify the extent of the interaction we/our customers require/desire and move from there to the most appropriate channels.

Many profess to want to have a 'conversation' with customers but are ill equipped to do so at an intimate (1:1) scalable level, so the reality is most brand communication is publish/broadcast by design or default.

with regards to twitter, what remains to be seen is the size of its stable user base and how it fares against the inevitable encroachment from less restrictive models (and more powerful distribution/tech platforms)such as google's wave.

I think the loss of twitter users is inevitable - and indeed as i have twitterd or is it tweeted - i think the unsatisfied twitter users (60% according to ACN)will create a pressure wave (if you pardon the pun) to propel the trial of (google) wave when it comes out -supposedly later this year

cheers
Miro