What I Know About Twitter…So Far Posted on March 27, 2009 6 Comments

I opened my Twitter account at 9:22 a.m., October 22, 2008. I was sitting in the audience at Webby Connect, a gathering of Internet minds held each year.  We were encouraged to tweet during the presentations. Up to that point, I had avoided Twitter, seeing it as just another black hole, sucking my time and attention. But in the spirit of the day, I logged on, became @chiefrouser, and was on my way. Or so I thought. I didn’t find the interface intuitive and I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. I abandoned the experiment at 9:26 a.m., October 22, 2008.

Then in January, for reasons I can’t clearly recall, I took another shot at it. I logged on and tried again. This time I figured out how to post a tweet, how to search for topics (again, not so intuitive), and how to feel my way around the Twittersphere. After posting a couple of random thoughts, followers started following, like it or not. I played around with topics and tone, interested in what people responded to, kind of like putting a wooly bugger or a damselfly on the end of the line. All the time I felt silly. It felt silly. I mean, did I really need to know that you were watching Oprah and eating strawberries? Even so, I was curious, so I kept at it. Soon a few friends discovered me and I discovered their friends, and I found people who were talking about more interesting things than the length of their toenails.

Then I began to follow Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, and was struck by an interesting phenomenon. Transparency. @Zappos, tweets about sappy musings, leaving shirts in the hotel room closet, meeting Ivana Trump, what he’s reading, and the conferences he’s attending. Part business. Part personal. A side of CEO life you don’t often see.

Tony has more than 311,000 followers on Twitter. I’d be interested to know how sales spike when he tweets, because it always makes me think about buying another pair of shoes--not because he tells me to, but because he shows up and reminds me of Zappos.

And that gets me back to what I’ve learned about Twitter so far…

1. People read tweets, not target markets. Be real. No one wants to read tweets from a robot. They want to connect with real people. Yet at the same time, this isn’t an online diary. Don’t spiel. A little humanness can go a long way to balance your business objectives.

2. Big fat ads are annoying everywhere, Twitterland included. On second thought, maybe more so. People choose to follow you in Twitter. Try to push a ShamWow, and your outta there. Remember that content isn’t king. High-value content is king.

3. Brands are welcomed—if they are well behaved. Again, people want to connect with people, so be on your best behavior. Think of your audience. Twitter is like being at a cocktail party with millions of people you don’t know. Back off on the hard sell if you don’t want to be the kid everyone avoids.

4. Use common sense. The same rules of privacy exist in Twitter as anywhere else. Case in point: Skittles. They had an idea—a brilliant, yet flawed idea—to put the brand at the center of the conversation that is naturally occurring online. So they began to feed all tweets about Skittles into their Web site. But they forgot one important thing—to get permission from the people tweeting. As a result, people who make a random comment about Skittles are sometimes shocked and embarrassed when it shows up on the Skittles Web site—and they are tweeting about being annoyed. So while Twitterers may be broadcasting, they may not be ready to broadcast outside the Twittersphere. Skittles would have been better off inviting people to tweet from their site than feeding the tweets into their site.

5. No one has figured out what Twitter is—quite yet. By nature, Twitter evolves with each tweet. People are experimenting with it, seeing if it is for them, what it has to offer, and what’s compelling about it. In order for it to succeed, it will have to add value to people’s lives, not just be a curiosity. Everyone who is involved right now is helping shape that future, one tweet at a time.

6. Twitter itself is not as interesting as what is happening around Twitter. It’s quite possible that Twitter is a flash in the pan, the Second Life or Friendster of the day. But chalking it all up to that, I think, is missing the point. Like it or hate it, you have to pay attention to it. It signals a change in social behavior. We’re becoming more transparent. We’re exposing ourselves in ways we’ve never done before. That’s a little frightening, but also somehow humanizing and unifying.

7. What I know about Twitter, is that I don’t know about Twitter.