Recently a contact of mine told me that she’d been to a conference where an exec from Mindshare claimed that Twitter would be face down in the gutter within two years.
She asked me what I thought and to be quite honest I fumbled a weak and rather unconvincing response.
I’m not sure why I was so taken aback. When others have declared similar things before I, like all people who live in the socialsphere realise that almost everything has it’s day in the sun before shrinking slowly into the shadows. But truthfully the thought of Twitter dying so soon after its explosion into the mainstream hadn’t actually crossed my mind.
In my weak and unconvincing response I tried promote the merits of twitter that make the likelihood of it dying within two years unlikely. I don’t think my answer fully satisfied her, and I left the meeting kicking myself that I hadn’t answered her query with more conviction.
This is what I should have said:
“Twitter very well may die one day, it’s definitely undergoing a major shift in the way people use it. But because of the connections made through twitter and the shear mass of information being shared; there’s still an enormous amount of value to be discovered”.
Twitter’s Strengths
Shear Mass
With hundreds of millions of users sharing 140 characters there’s a whole load of information being shared. With Google now on the case, real time search is closer than ever. This means you’ll be able to search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else; which means you’ll use Twitter to stay on top of the day’s events.
Valued Connections
Regardless of whether you’re broadcasting your message, sharing links, or engaging in conversation with other tweeps; if people are following you, you’re creating value. The value of these connections builds up through your interaction which makes Twitter harder and harder to leave.
Amazing Links
I’ve spent a large part of 2009 interrogating people about their blog reading habits. Whenever my interviewees have mentioned twitter they’ve all mentioned the great links that they’ve found and used to populate their RSS reader.
User-based improvements
Twitter’s involvement in ‘Get Satisfaction’ and it’s constant focus on user based improvements means that as our needs for instant communication change so will Twitter.
3rd Party Apps
You probably know that there are loads of third party Twitter applications, what this does is keep Twitter “open”. Open to change beyond their control. So even if @Ev and @Biz don’t see how our needs are changing other people will be able to adapt Twitter so that @Ev and @Biz don’t have to.
Why It won’t Matter if Twitter Does Die
If Twitter dies it means that something(s) far greater has taken it’s place. That real time search is being preformed better without our 140 character updates, we’re making more valuable connections elsewhere, and/or we’ve found a better way to discover links to help fill our RSS readers. It also means that all the user-based improvements and 3rd party apps weren’t able to keep up with new innovations in communication technologies.
If/when something new does all this I doubt too many of us will lament Twitter’s passing. We’ll all be too busy playing with the new geek toy.
Design Thinking” is now a global buzzword, which leads me to two conclusions. Firstly, that there is a lot rubbish out there on what this buzzword actually means (and more importantly, how it adds value to businesses). Secondly, that there is likely to be a good deal of value somewhere within whatever Design Thinking is, which has led it to becoming a buzzword in the first place.
So I want to briefly cover how I see Design Thinking adding value to businesses.
But firstly, please stop here and watch this presentation by one of the thought leaders in “Design Thinking” globally, Tim Brown of IDEO. He covers what Design Thinking actually is in a much better fashion that I could, so I won’t waste your time on anything less clarifying that his description:
The Design Thinking approach has a lot of potential for creating radical changes in a business, resulting in significant advances on the competition, and in some cases creating entire new industries.
Tim completed his talk with the statement on the application of Design Thinking that “the first step is to start asking the right questions”. Which is a small thing to say, but quite a challenge to work through. Because that little statement implies that a business leader must step back and look at the business in terms of the needs it exists to meet. This gives the scope of what Design Thinking questions are relevant to the specific business in question.
Stepping back is difficult, because it is such a gear change from the typical day-to-day work of optimising the business by increasing efficiencies, customers and financial returns. And the longer one is in this “optimising” mode, the more difficult it becomes to even consider that there might be an entire new solutions to the delivering meeting customer needs.
Businesses that manage to step back, look again at their core purpose, then ask the right questions and engage in the Design Thinking approach that Tim describes, get real value. And for the rest, “Design Thinking” remains a buzzword.
This is a guest post written by Matt Ayres, a Business Catalyst at Polson Higgs. Matt is a great proponent of design thinking and disruptive innovation. Contact him here.
Short-sighted corporate type #1: “Hey Bruce, you heard of that Twatter thing?”
Short-slighted corporate type #2: “Oh yea some of the new grads have been talking about it, I think it’s called Twitter.”
#1: “Whatever. Apparently some companies are using it to advertise.”
#2: “Really, how much does it cost?”
#1: “It doesn’t cost anything, that’s the best part.”
#2: “So we can use the Twitter to advertise for free?”
#1: “Yea sounds bloody great doesn’t it?”
#2: “Sounds fantastic, how do we use it?”
#1: “Well everyone is using the internet for everything these days so we just run one of our usual boring sales that we normally advertise on T.V, but now we can tell everyone about it on Twitter. They’ll love it because we are such a big important company…We’ll save thousands!”
#2: “Bruce this could be huge…. We can just constantly interrupt people now. Our ads will be everywhere, sales will go through the roof!”
#1 & #2: Pat each other on the back. “We will get a raise out of this”
Hopefully this type of conversation doesn’t take place around the marketing executive water cooler, but it is fathomable when you see how some companies use social media. I’m referring to the select few that see Twitter (and other online platforms) as a cheap way to cling to their current advertising model.
Over the next couple of weeks I will be attempting to start conversations with New Zealand businesses that have entered the Twittersphere. The purpose is to find who is engaging with their followers, who is taking steps in the right direction, and who has missed the point completely. Watch this space for the results of the first annual iThnk.com“Fail Whale Awards”…
There are loads of posts that describe the importance of corporate culture. But this isn’t one of those posts, this is merely about what we’re doing to build a connected corporate culture with social media.
Lately I’ve been meeting with managers, web designers, graphic designers and PR consultants to try and put together what will be an amazing social media project.
As you’d expect, we’ve mapped out both long term and short term strategic goals, but the sticking point for this entire plan is that it revolves around motivating a number of self interested individuals to work together.
When people are hired they typically stick to the confines of their job, and avoid further responsibility. All social media projects are hard work, which can make them hard to sell to the individuals involved in their day-to-day running.
Initially we tried to sell everyone on the strategic importance of what we’re trying to achieve, but selling strategy was never going to be enough. So we’re now attempting to build a culture around social media.
How are we doing this??? With education centred around connection.
For us education is where culture starts, if you can teach a team of diverse individuals to think along the same lines, and see similar value in their interactions then you’ve got a beautiful foundation to build upon.
We know that this is easier said than done. That’s why a crucial part of this education process is getting them to connect with one another using social media. This hands on experience in the ‘value of connection’ is the cornerstone of establishing a connected corporate culture.
This way the people in charge of the day-to-day social media interactions quite quickly unravel the fact that social media is a philosophical shift in mindset, where the main focus is not on the technology or on the sale, but on the people involved.
If we just sold strategy we’d have no hope of getting them to use social media to connect with one another, let alone with their interested public. But once they understand and value their own online connections they quickly see the long term value of social media.
I’ll be back with a more detailed follow-up on exactly what we’re doing to build this connected corporate culture in a couple of weeks. But for now this is a nice inspirational video about the value of culture….enjoy.
The Free phenomenon is scary because it suggests everything we know about business could be wrong. At its heart, it is counter-intuitive to what we have been taught as business people. It goes to the heart of our understanding of the world, it disrupts our cognitive map and that scares the crap out of us. So we reject its challenge to protect our paradigm, a reaction as old as the search for mans place in the universe (just ask Copernicus).
But do we need to be so afraid? Does Free mean less (or even) no revenue? As far as I can tell the answer is NO. Free doesn’t mean no one pays, it just shifts the revenue collection point. Public goods such as street lighting demonstrate how Free has been around longer than Google.
One of the loudest voices in the anti-free brigade has been the traditional content providers such as magazines and newspapers, their catch cry being who is going to pay our journalists and columnists. But realistically it has never been the subscribers anyway! Charging for magazines and newspapers has always been a double dip, a second income stream after the advertising! Conde Naste recent closure of titles was not related to falling readership but reduced advertising (and competition amongst its titles for the advertising).
At its simplest form, price is a barrier to entry for customers. It is the cost of trial and by charging an up front fee (purchase price) any organisation is creating a reason not to buy. Most of the time it is this barrier that marketing is trying to hurdle, providing the reasons why a customer should pay the price.
So if magazines and newspaper were free, the customer would have no reason not to pick them up off the shelf. Circulation up, and advertising becomes more valuable enabling increased charges to offset loss of subscription income!
Seeing price as a barrier to entry allows Free to become an opportunity. It is still your choice, but consider how you will compete once your competitor’s allow Free access. Now that’s something to be afraid of.
In a world where there are over 700million blogs and new web services are launched every day no one would deny that gaining a critical mass of users/viewers is vital to online success. But once you’ve got people tuned in how do you keep them involved? Google does it through the integration of a wide number of free services, while Facebook and Twitter lock you in through social value. There are great lessons to be to be learnt from both of these methods of eyeball imprisonment.
Locking You In With Free Services
All to aware that it operates in the attention economy, Google has built a suite of over fifty services that are seamlessly integrated around Google search. But these services themselves are not what keeps me tied to Google, it’s the value of the documents, links, emails and other forms of information that I’ve created by using those services.
Am I always going to be a Google prisoner?
Even if a more impressive search engine was to come along, the build up of products that a Google fan-boy like myself uses means it’d be incredibly tough for me to switch. With all it’s wonderful gadgets and links I’d struggle to get rid of my igoogle home page, while the shear hassle of migrating my data out of Gmail would be enough to keep at least part of my searches with Google.
So unless someone else offers me a better deal on all 18 Google services that I use I may just be a Google prisoner for life.
I’m Locked Into My Social Screens Too
Facebook and Twitter would be worthless without us, and they know it. What Facebook and Twitter have done is provided co-creative platforms for you and I to connect and share. It’s the ever-growing value our connections and the information being shared that keep me (and no doubt many of you) Facebook slaves.
It’s a self perpetuating cycle of captivity. The more I connect with people the more alluring those connections become and less likely I am to leave these networks. To cancel my Facebook account would be to commit social suicide. Likewise to terminate my Twitter account would be to cut myself off from my most valuable source of social news and provocative business insight, not to mention all the great tweeps.
Happily Enslaved
The beauty of providing these co-creative platforms is that I’m actually happy to be a captive. I love the synergy between the different Google products, and the value of the the information that is housed under the one password is immeasurable.
As for Twitter and Facebook, even though I’m obsessed with trying new things I’ve only got so much time and mental energy. Because the built-up value of my online personality and profile is greatest within Twitter and Facebook I’m reluctant to leave all my hard fought social reputation behind and start building friends connections and reputation all over again.
What’s to be learnt from this?
Getting me to create social value, connections and reputation is a time intensive process and it is therefore unlikely that I’ll want to replicate it. If you can create a platform which I am able to project myself onto, you’re more likely to captivate my attention.
Likewise, by making it easier for me to create content and information using your tools, your service becomes more valuable to me and I’ll be likely to stick around longer. I might just stick with you forever if you provide me with multiple platforms upon which I can use that information.
On the flip side, if you’re trying to break into someone else’s captive audience then giving them a reason to switch and making the transfer of their built up value to your service as smooth and painless as possible is a must (e.g. allow me to import my FB or Twitter contacts, photo’s and links).
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