I do not like Green Eggs and Ham. I tried them once. Twitter is the modern day version of this story. Twitter’s viral marketing buzz is like that crazy Dr. Seuss junky character Sam who keeps popping up to tell me to try it. Everyone from basketball stars to movie stars to astronauts in space has mentioned Twitter numerous times. (Even though our Prof. mentioned that someone else does the Twitterwork for some of them). I’m just tired of hearing about them tweeting in their tweetsphere with their tweetybird followers. Question, if you send out a tweet but no one is there to read it, does it really exist?
I know nothing about the technology, so like any MBA student would, I researched it. Yes you might ask why wouldn’t I just try it? Well, If 7 million twits tweeted off a cliff, would you? If I gave it a shot, I’d probably just try to start a twitterlution and see how many people I could piss off by my twitterrhea of the mouth. And yes, these are all approved twerminologies as approved in the official Twictionary. (http://mashable.com/2008/11/15/twitterspeak/). So you can see the contempt, can’t we just call it what it is? Mass text messaging!
The talk of the town is how to monetize Twitter’s 7 million subscriber base. “Twitter could sell a service to marketers who want daily or even hourly reports about topics discussed on Twitter,” says Ian Schafer, CEO of ad agency Deep Focus. There is talk about corporations wanting to aggregate user feeds to gather important branding data about products. Dell's recent success in sending coupons to its followers shows market potential, but advertising just isn’t the stated goal of the founders who have to- date secured $55 million in venture funding (yet).
The positive social networking impact beyond just knowing what your friends are doing is that breaking news has been tweeted on before traditional media channels, such as the landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson. Protesters have also found a new method to organize such as the coordinated war protests in San Francisco while China preemptively shut Twitter down in anticipation of Tiananmen Square protests.
These positives still rely on groups/organizations/people wanting to feed eager listeners information about their products/ideas/updates yet too much junk could alienate the listening base and Twitter might end up on a tweet to no-where. So yes, for the time being I am holding out for the next thing, (video “tweeting” on my friend’s site http://12seconds.tv/ ). I’ve yet to find someone that has talked up Twitter and told me that they love it and can’t live without it, until then, I won't try them Sam-I-Am.
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