It goes without saying that Twitter is the social media application du jour, if not the century.
Ellen DeGeneres talked about Twitter on her show recently, and the day she launched her own Twitter handle, @theellenshow, she had 9,000 followers. By day two, she had 80,000.
There are companies, like Etsy, an online exchange for handmade products, that get a large amount of traffic from Twitter -- @etsy.
In a relaunch for its website, Skittles.com turned its homepage into a live feed of any mention of the Skittle brand taking place over the web or through Twitter. By day two, it had turned into a Skittles complaint free-for-all, and the Twitter feed was disconnected from the page.
There's a lot of debate about Twitter these days, not just surrounding its use as a marketing tool, but also its use as an information relay, a threat to language, and a method for exhibitionism.
As a marketing tool, doubt about its use is starting to wane. While the Skittle.com experiment demonstrates what is at risk for a brand that uses it, it also demonstrates the kind of power Twitter has and the potential yield for a marketer should its scale and the enthusiasm of its current user base be properly directed.
Twitter enables a level of rapid, concise articulation of thoughts or information (the level of articulation is up for debate) that is stunning even to those of who embraced the power of the blog and the user-generated content movement.
News of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai spread faster than wild fire. Transferring data or points of fact quickly and with a kind of "viscera" is among Twitter's best use. Unfortunately, disparaging remarks about a candy can be spread equally fast.
My friend and colleague Tom Hespos has said that the Skittles.com Twitter experiment was "like throwing a bullhorn into a crowd of teenagers and acting surprised when it's used not to sing the praises of the bullhorn provider, but instead to lead the crowd in a succession of dirty limericks."
What marketers need to come to terms with if they are going to benefit from a tool like Twitter (and I believe this is true for social networking and user-generated content in general) is a tolerance for mischief that is at least as high as their hope for success.
Not all brands can benefit from this kind of uncertainty and amorphous media. Some brands could suffer irreparably from its use. This is why marketers need to be reminded, yet again, when faced with another popular means by which people communicate, that the medium might not be right for them.
Penetration and pluralism isn't a good enough reason to use a vehicle as a marketing tool. After all, just because everyone looks up at the sky doesn't mean skywriting is the marketing tool for you.
Skittles, or anything targeting young people, probably has more to gain from allowing the mischief borne of their Twitter experiment than not allowing it. But Gerber baby food probably does not.
As a marketer, there are ways you can benefit from Twitter without turning over the keys of the asylum to the inmates.
- Search.twitter.com is a great way to find out what's being said about your brand, or to do research on the "conversation" people might be having about your category or marketplace
- Get a Twitter account with your brand's name as the user, and get a human being behind it to start conversing with the marketplace.
- Get a Twitter account and start sniping your advertising messaging with it (www.twitter.com/YOURNAMEHERE). You'll start collecting a community that will start talking to you. You may not always have to talk back, but you'd better find some way to demonstrate you're listening.
- As in any conversation, if you do communicate, be sure that your communication takes your fellow interlocutors into account. If you want to have a monologue, stick with TV.
Twitter in all of its uses isn't always useful. While I find myself often doing the kind of Twittering that falls into the category of what a friend calls "Shi_er," (i.e., you Twitter every action you take, including those actions taken in the restroom), that's not the kind of micro-blogging that manifests the best use of the vehicle.
Engaging in a conversation can be risky, particularly now. The internet's ability to promote "thuggish anonymity" on the one hand, while providing a forum for an unprecedented degree of personal public display on the other, has created the conditions for behaving in public as if we were private. This is not always beneficial to a brand (or each other). Twitter can be the perfect microphone for these kinds of utterances. The question is this: Is that the kind of thing we want to hear?
It is up to agencies to schematize for their clients the scenarios and their possible outcomes before moving ahead with a Twitter-driven social media play.
I myself am a Twitterer. And I do wonder what it will do to our definitions of communication, of identity, of intelligence, and of discourse. But it is powerful, it is now, and it is in use. Marketing has been a conversation for a long time. In the modern western world, we have forgotten that. Over the last 10 years, we've rediscovered it. Twitter is a big mouth. Used the right way, you can have a great conversation.
My crumbs of wisdom and snapshots of life's little moments can be found in 140 characters or less, at twitter.com/mediadarwin.
Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.
