Twitter … you either get it, or you don’t. Those who don’t tend to be sniffy about it. But the Labour party has appointed a “Twitter Tzarina”, Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy, to improve the party’s use of social networking sites in the run-up to the next election. And Gordon and Sarah Brown recently pitched into a Twitter debate about the NHS, so they’re taking it pretty seriously in the corridors of power.
Celebrities and media moguls have signed up for it too – in droves. Go to celebritytweet.com and you’ll be able to see what Lilly Allen, Eddie Izzard, Sir Richard Branson, John Cleese, Yoko Ono, Bjork and Arnold Schwarzeneger are “tweeting” about these days – along with hundreds of other famous names.
Magazines and newspapers have been quick to spot the marketing potential in Twitter, and send out regular news updates that often leave the printed versions standing.
At the same time, Twitter has generated its own stories – remember Stephen Fry tweeting about being stuck in a lift – and it has beaten traditional news media at its own game: the first image of the US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River, New York, for instance, was a Twitpic taken before other news media had arrived at the scene.
As a result, Twitter has become a recognised source of news, plundered – one imagines – by the same hapless hacks who have to watch Big Brother for a living.
So, how does it work?
Once you’ve set up your home page, which takes only a few moments, you can search for family, friends, newspapers, TV shows, celebrities, scientists and politicians to “follow”. . In effect, you subscribe to their home page. You can even follow the World Economic Forum in Davos
When you do, they get an email (unless they’ve turned off this service) saying that you are following them. They can then either choose to let you, to follow you too, or to block you.
Celebrities don’t usually block followers, although they may choose not to follow them in return (Stephen Fry has more than 715,000 followers). Friends follow each other. And, depending on your taste and morals, it is usual to block those who you think are either weird or selling something you’re not interested in – like sex. It happens.
There is also a direct messaging option that allows you to communicate privately with your followers and those you follow. The final “rule” is that tweets – Twitter text messages – have a maximum length of 140 characters, which concentrates the mind and prevents essays being thrown around the system.
These controls are simple, but surprisingly effective. What Twitter’s creator Jack Dorsey has done is to have created a genuinely self-organising system – and a brilliant viral marketing tool.
The best Mayfair tweeter I know of was Fred Sirieix, general manager of Galvin at Windows in the Park Lane Hilton, who would send Tweetpics of chef André Garrett cooking, run a how-many-covers today competition and generally dish up marketing information about his restaurant in an amusing and palatable way. He’s fallen quiet recently. Peter Wetherell, the Mayfair estate agent, is also on Twitter.
The truth is that you’re more likely to get a tweet from a besuited marketing executive who knows a good thing when he or she sees it than from a bored teenager talking about computer games. Teens don’t tweet, apparently, they text.
Facebook is ponderous in comparison to the rapid fire and open access of Twitter. Properly used, it has potential for massive levels of viral networking. Oh, and quite a lot of it really is just babble. You have to make it work for you.
Twitter
