Love this piece as well as the comments attached. We all certainly need a dose of perspective around Twitter and any intelligent, independent-minded businessperson will see the spate of glowing testimonials from Naked Pizza and others as mostly malarky. I especially like how you call Southwest, Comcast Twitterers a SYMPTOM of a larger service problem and not a solution. As we know Twitter is absolutely terrible as two-way anything. As a broadcast or narrowcast tool, it’s great although the signal to noise ratio is the current death of it.

I just conducted 12 90 minute usability sessions and first asked common folk about Twitter. I’ll share live what negativity they had to say.

Of course, I’m a ‘new age’ guy myself so I use the new tools and try to use them in specific ways. I’m hopeful Twitter continues it’s evolution with third party developers into something more impactful and meaningful and my prediction is that it will fade into the background like blogs and become just another useful pipe like RSS to deliver information between parties.

Hey – I need to connect you with Marcy at Amex so you can repurpose this post. The Open Forum website has drunk deep of the Twitter KoolAid and needs a good counterbalancing force.

Thanks for sparking the discussion!

Anyhow- back at you.

http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/twitter-roi-exploration/

I’m calling bull on experimental practices (we agree) that are heralded as case studies proving ROI when, in fact, “ROI” is a meaningless term and has been since go.

Precisely, what’s ROI anyway? It’s defined as broadly as “branding” is — it means different things to different people and there is no standard definition. In this way, marketers have abused the term ROI IMHO… in that they use it as a ‘measure du jour’ when, in fact, Chief Officers see through it in about 10 seconds. Marketing, thus, remains fanciful wishes of how we’d like our customers to feel and think about us — not actually act or behave based on how we (the entire company) behave with them.

it is simply to nascent
Precisely. Re: ROI… this is precisely why I’m not discussing pursuit of it.

As Sam pointed with his link, much of its value can be measured by social contributions.
Excellent point and this is being well-documented.

I know, I know. Once again, I’m out of touch but this time nobody can say “because you don’t use it” so now they’re going to say “you’re out of touch you old fart — engage in more digital fantasy stuff and you’ll stand a chance.”

Thanks, junior

Thanks for the response.

Call it twitter, call it micro-chunking, call it social media (as I said I think it should be called personal media) whatever. It is here to stay and you are “calling bull” on it. The mania will subside, but for now it has invaded EVERYTHING and will eventually be ubiquitous.

On measuring value- chalk it up to R&D Jeff. Businesses will have to show-up and experiment and many will fail. You must go where the people are. I didn’t mean to say you said it was all about DM, but you continually harp on measuring ROI…it is simply to nascent.

As Sam pointed with his link, much of its value can be measured by social contributions. Witness Twitter- and the Iranian Elections. Measure the impact of that, because it will impact not only people’s lives, but business and trade- on epic scales.

On Business Week- as we have both done many interviews with magazines like Business Week, etc, etc I think we know most of it is patent bullshit… (Although my experiences with the New York Times and the Washington Post have always been positive and great talking to specialized reporters who have a clue, so I will exclude those two.)

If you want to understand where it is all going, I suggest you create a World of Warcraft character and talk to some tweens…

-wayne

If you really want to know what I consider to be total insanity — and a sign that marketers have completely lost touch w/ reality — look at last week’s Business Week article that claims the new promise of advertising to be cracking the nut of friendship. The big ‘marketing in a down economy opportunity’ for advertisers in the digital world is to decipher the essence of friendship (’the social graph’)… and find new ways to serve ads against friends behavioral patterns.

SERIOUSLY?! How offensive.

Twitter is not about direct marketing Jeff. Never was and never will be. Marketers want to use in new technology in old ways.

It is more about WOM, fan-building, and most importantly, if businesses need a concrete use, CRM!

Businesses want to easily quantify the use of new technologies, but it doesn’t work that way with nascent platforms. I am sure when T.V. hit the world they questioned its value too…(Of course we have to revisit TV’s value now )

In short, it is about communication, but more importantly- simply listening.

-W

http://www.twitter.com/wporter

This is all very evolutionary and what I’m pushing back on is all the hype — which you seem keen on. I’m also interested in exploring how Twitter’s successes are actually pointing at (”symptoms of”) failures — ie. “traditional” customer service. That’s a really interesting thought that should, IMO, lead organizations down a very important path of improving, as an example, call center quality or email text chat quality.

Hi Jeff,

I actually think you make a number of good points here and I do think there is a whole bunch of unfounded “mania” to Twitter as ushering in some new age of Customer Service(Experience, Loyalty, etc.). It’s classic Gartner’s Hype Cycle at work.

Having said that, I would not discount as much as you(seem to) the current(and, especially, future) relevance of Twitter as another tool in the toolbox for crafting Customer Experiences that, long story short, will lead to profits.

That the benefits can’t be determined by some neat, provable, formula in a spreadsheet isn’t a desirable thing, granted. But it isn’t a deal-breaker, either. After all, many would argue that much of traditional marketing’s benefits are hardly exactly quantifiable, either. Yet, that industry is quite alive-and-kicking(albeit evolving).

I don’t see Twitter as the revolutionary force for business that I read about so often — not yet, at least. And though the nuances of social media deserve attention, the basics are still the basics and they apply.

But millions of customers are Tweeting every day whether businesses like/believe/respect/etc it or not. It would behoove them to “show up” and try to make sense of this. Engage their customers. They’re talking about you, good and bad, whether you’re there or not. You can at least be part of the discussion. And, after all, it(micro-blogging) is a mechanism still in its relative infancy. We’re still figuring it out. But to ignore it until all the results come back(something that’ll never happen, anyway) will prove a regrettable decision for many businesses.

I appreciate the perspective. It’s a nice thought-provoking change from the Twitter-is-God stuff out there these days.

Russ A. Hatfield Jr.
Seattle, WA
http://www.twitter.com/russhatfield

Clearly, this proves Twitter’s worth for small and large enterprises (and any sort of human collective):

http://bit.ly/twitterworth

Hope that helps-

Sam