The Homa Files

Extracted from “Is Twitter for Serious Marketers?”,Tom Davenport The Next Big Thing, April 9, 2009

Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn’t cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company.

Let’s face it — Twitter is a fad. It has all the attributes of a fad, including the one that people like me don’t get its appeal. It has risen quickly and it will fall quickly. It’s this year’s Second Life — which, you may have noticed, nobody is talking much about anymore. One Daily Telegraph article that did talk about it noted, “While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward …  it has been virtually abandoned” by “normal” people and businesses.” Ouch!

I’m not as negative about the business and marketing potential of some other social media. For example, because Facebook offers the promise of monetizing social networks — though it hasn’t done so yet — they are not to be easily dismissed.

One conclusion I’ve come to is that we should unbundle the concept of “social media,” because some of its components are much more useful than others in a business and marketing context:

Facebook? I suspect it faces prosperity, over time. Second Life? On life support. Twitter? In the long run, not worth a tweet.

Full article:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/davenport/2009/04/is_twitter_for_serious_marketer.html

This entry was posted on July 3, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Internet - Soc Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.