About that 24/7 party going on in your computer: the social media timesuck
I came across this interesting analysis of Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace courtesy of boxcarmarketing (and here, if you’d like to follow on Twitter as well/instead).
While I don’t agree entirely with the analysis by Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester analyst, now Altimeter Group partner, I couldn’t agree with him more when he says Twitter is ‘being treated like a chat room’ by most marketers, ‘not a marketing platform.’ I do think the SWOT portion in particular is less than comprehensive, and I’d like to quibble about the line re ‘Usage by tech savvy, media, and celebs.’
Why quibble about that? (At this point something I’d written got lost between drafts; I’ve tried to reconstruct it in the rest of this paragraph. Just, you know, to make sense!) It’s not that I disagree that – I’m going to call them geeks, not the ‘tech savvy’ because if you own a computer for personal use you’re tech savvy, media and celebs have the largest number of followers, tweet the most and make the greatest use of Twitter. It’s just that I don’t necessarily think they make the best use of Twitter. Most media outlets still automate their tweets, don’t interact with their followers, and don’t get that it’s an interactive medium. Ditto many celebrities. And the geeks – well – again – there’s a lot of navel gazing and infighting amongst Twitter’s earliest adopters and most vehement proponents. And Twitter’s growth isn’t coming from these people; it’s coming from the non-geeks who are beginning to realize social media presents an opportunity. (That’s not quite what I said the first time but it’s what I was trying to say – and where did it go to anyway – between-draft limbo?)
Twitter’s greatest strength is actually the power it gives the user to customize her/his own experience with the medium. Trending topics notwithstanding (you don’t have to even glance at them), what makes it a brilliant platform is the fact that it allows you to listen to and connect with only the interesting people at the party and pay no attention whatsoever to the egregious bores, the time wasters, the hysterics, the gawkers and the ambulance-chasers (no, I don’t mean personal injury lawyers, I mean the people who thrive on fomenting controversy/scandal/gossip). Read more »
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