What a time.
Four years ago, a BusinessWeek cover story said blogs will change your business and influence the course of civilization just like the invention of the printing press did more than five hundred years ago.
Now a Time Magazine cover story announces that Twitter will change the way we live .
At this rate we should expect another planet-altering social media tool by Labor Day.
That is, unless you don't think a free online short-message service rastes with our generation’s revolutionary information technologies: voice mail, cell phones, the Web.
You’re the people who think Twitter is the Internet-era version of the CB radio fad.
And you don’t believe that hot hype will take precedent over the cold realities of the marketplace.
In "Ten ways Twitter will change American business," Time’s writer predicts that the ability to send and selectively receive 140-character Tweets will give business, politicians, media, investors and other interests the ability to “engage” people like never before. For example:
“Twitter … will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter… having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.”
The problem with this vision is that it assumes consumers will do four things:
… One, that they'll stay fixed on reading and writing Tweets all day long, day after day.
… Two, that they’ll want to receive product announcements, promotions, surveys, celebrity restaurant orders, contests and other sponsored messages, at every turn of their day.
… Three, that they’ll overlook the intrusive advertising and spam that will increasingly pollute their legitimate news and conversation stream.
… And four, that they won’t mind how Twitter reserves all rights to sell any information it has on them so others can identify, locate or contact users.
Consumers don’t behave this way. They won’t for Twitter.
Twitter’s problem is that the Internet has no walls. There are no beachheads to dissipate the relentless waves of marketing and campaigning. We hear anecdotes like how a suitcase company responded to a customer who Tweeted about his broken handle. But take that scenario a few years from now – if that long – and that same customer will be inundated by followers, followees and interlopers Tweeting everything from luggage deals and discount travel to political fundraisers and pleas to help some secret princess transfer money.
Nobody says Twitter doesn’t have huge potential for mass communication. It does. The Iranian election aftermath shows how microblogging can facilitate real-time citizen-journalism. But the same holds true for misinformation and propaganda. The bad guys know how to use Twitter too.
That's one reason corporate America isn’t exactly clamoring to get on board. And Twitter's goofy dot-commish name itself alienates the service from thousands of CEOs already averse to social media.
In fact, big brands see less value and more risk in associating with any Internet free-for-alls.
Consider YouTube. Time Magazine reports that despite drawing 99.7 million viewers watching 5.9 billion videos, YouTube's content is overall so bad that marketers have become reluctant to embed their messages within it.
After paying $1.65 billion to own it, Google told investors that YouTube is "not material,” making the Web’s third-most popular destination also one of the ten biggest technology failures of the last decade.
It's a stretch to think Twitter will do better. It doesn’t even own the micro-blogging concept, and several competitors already offer more features and open-sourcing. RSS inventor Dave Winer, who PC World calls the father of modern-day content distribution, went so far as to predict that Twitter is the next Netscape.
As for the 29 million users, new research also suggests that Twittermania may have already peaked:
- 90 percent of all Tweets come from only 10 percent of all Twitter users. (Harvard University study of randomly selected sample of 300,000 Twitter users)
- Though 99 percent of Generation Y -- age 18 to 24 -- use social media, only 22 percent of them use Twitter. (Pace University study for Participatory Marketing Network)
- 55 percent of Twitter account holders have never posted a Tweet and 56 percent aren’t following anyone. 53 percent have no followers. (HubSpot analysis of 4.5 million Twitter accounts over nine-month period)
- 60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first month. (Tracking from Nielsen Online)
- Twitter’s growth came to a screeching stop in May, growing by only 1.5 percent. (Tracking by Mashable)
Then there’s the Oprah factor.
Well over a million people signed up for Twitter in the first 72 hours after Oprah featured the service on her show. But as Silicon Valley Insider reported, Oprah is already bored with it. Despite having 1.56 million followers, Oprah herself follows only 14 people and Tweeted just four times in June.
So what are we to make of all this? I agree with InternetNews columnist Mike Elgan, who thinks Twitter is simply leveling out to what it really is minus the hype.
“It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium,” he writes. “It's just a service for sending messages.”
And you can get mine at Twitter.com/StevenSilvers. Or at least until I move on to the next big thing.
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Also read: No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.
