Twitter - the Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
14th April 09
The crescendo of noise around Twitter grows by the second. Yet while for many this delivers a symphony of Web 2.0 magnificence, crafted by millions of tweeting voices (Aaron Koblin managed only 2000, though it was far from symphonic), others hear nothing more than deafening silence. I’ve been trying to think through this paradox. Two events of the last week illustrate this tension well.
I had a message from my brother Tim (@malbonster), co-Founder of social media agency Made By Many in London, when I woke up here in NY. Tim is ‘into Twitter’. His message was subject titled: ‘I hope it’s not, but the fun bit feels like it’s almost over’. He was lamenting a tweet he’d read this morning from a friend (@netgrrl) which read: ‘Ah… I’ve mentioned coffee too many times now, I’m being inundated with follows from coffee marketers.’ Yes, I found myself nodding subconsciously, it’s being ruined. The crazy experimental bit with no rules, where no one has any idea how to monetize, or even whether it will be successful, and where marketing has been wrong-footed; that’s all gone . . .
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Yet almost immediately I recalled a blog post by John Winsor (@jtwinsor), Exec Director Strategy & Innovation at Crispin, from last week. In the post, ‘Does Twitter Really Matter?’ John was recounting how only 1 in 70 (yes, one in seventy) students in a senior class he was teaching at Boulder was using Twitter, and only one-third had even heard of it. This raises the question, as John puts it, are we just talking to ourselves? Or to the early adopters, ahead of the curve? He’s almost certainly right - a very small group of people are far more ahead of the majority than they would imagine.
But given this echo-chamber reality, is it possible Twitter can already be on the verge of being ruined by marketing (and what would that really mean, in any case?). Or is it more likely we’ve just seen the end of the ‘launch’ period?
The swirling winds of change continue to pummel us, there’s no doubt about it. The departure of social media pin-up children to more grown-up & well-funded companies where ’social technology … can transform businesses, not just be used for viral marketing & word of mouth’ (see David Armano’s move to Dachis Corp), and the arrival on the scene of new ventures such as Twitter Partners, a company that helps big brands manage their identities on Twitter, confirms some structure is starting to be baked into the chaos.
Twitter has always had structure, but it’s been the awesomely simple internal discipline of 140 characters. These emerging and more external structures, and the organization of something that was previously wonderfully loose and liberating are undoubtedly going to transform Twitter and may indeed make it both better and worse, depending upon who you are and for what you use it. It’s certainly the case that Twitter skews older than many might have expected, and maybe this will impact the way it develops and is eventually monetized. It’s also certainly the case that there are some perception issues from which certain heavy users suffer. The most common of these being the disconnect between the frantic activity on one’s Tweetdeck or Tweetie app and the much less frantic readership of the tweets one actually puts there; it’s easy to mistakenly believe that one’s participating in a gigantic conversation featuring half the entire world when in fact only a tiny handful of people see most things posted (see Mike Brown’s comments under Winsor’s post for more on this). This might be creating the illusion of importance and/or Twitter overload in small numbers of hyper-connected people. And finally, it’s certainly true that just about everyone seems to be experimenting with how dollars might be squeezed out of Twitter; to some extent the tentacles of marketing are beginning to make themselves felt to everyday users. All true.
So where does this leave us, three years in? Steve Rubel (in today’s AdAge) boldly asserts that Twitter is now peaking and will soon be abandoned - by the geeks at least - for something newer, shinier and more edgy. I’m not so sure, I think the best is yet to come. This still feels like the start of something that has many iterations and plenty of nuances still being worked on in tiny start-ups or gestating in people’s brains (premium versions, groups, mobile functionality, ad models, video Twitter, family Twitter). It may simply turn out to be microblogging 1.0.
Whoever ends up being right about Twitter, the reality is probably relatively simple, and is most economically summarized by Sir Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
30 comments on “Twitter - the Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?”
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Ben Malbon
Hey BBH, still soliciting spec work? Asshats.
oh please. spec work is bullshit, we all know this, and as the crowdspring fiasco has proven it produces bullshit. no need to toss around insults under a fake name.
if you’re reading this you have facebook so man up (or woman up) and get your FBC on and say that shit under your own name.
Another great post Ben.
Agree with your optimistic views on the future of Twitter/microblogging. Early adopters will always find new and shiny somewhere else (and frankly we need them to). Focus now should be on all of the new uses and ways of making Twitter and microblogging better. And by better, I mean useful. Look at @twestival…they got thousands of people globally to rally around a cause using Twitter. These are the kinds of things that will keep me on [new tool here]. For now, its Twitter.
You mentioned John Winsor’s comments on relevancy…that’s what no one is talking about. Why? Because we’re all on Twitter talking about Twitter.
i have a friend that worked at myspace for years, through the boom and into what i viewed as a decline. however when cracking a joke one day to her she reminded me that even though us industry types have moved on and picked up with what we can do with facebook and “the future”, dollar for dollar myspace still gives the best ROI in the social web.
just because WE move onto something shiny and fresh and cutting edge doesnt change the vast amount of users that were generated by our spearhead. early adopters are expected to take flight when the commoners come around. but by that point you have millions upon millions of users that arent looking to get onto the next big thing. lots of people with a myspace account even right now have no interest in a facebook account, because the work was already done. it takes longer for them to port themselves over.
twitter matters. a lot. it’s the next wave of customer engagement, and it’s going to split the chaff when it comes to advertising, the good concepts will involve getting these customers to invite you in. the bad will result in being blocked. customer service is being taken to a new eschalon where one rep can field hundreds of requests in the same time they would have been lucky to get through dozens on the phone. it’s real time without needing to deliver one on one.
i deal with people everyday that talk about how engagement and deliverable service doesnt matter, it’s a “fad” but these are the same people that were saying the web wasnt going to make a dent in print and broadcast, they still dont get it. f’n dinosaurs.
we’ll walk away from twitter and treat it as a burden when our clients ask us to set up these measures for them, but can you blame us? imagine being a ramone playing blitzkrieg bop for years on end, you just get bored. but it’s a special instrument with a long lifespan in our little ad world, so get comfy with it, learn to exploit it, and understand that the customer is in charge of what they want to hear and see nowadays. you need to up your game a little bit.
XO
I think it’s easier to say beginning of the end, but I’ll go with end of the beginning as well.
The randomness of your next twitter follower can be part of the fun, even though the coffee story is a little depressing.
And check out Kelly Eidson’s adage blog post about twitter and Gen Y (http://ow.ly/2MQo) to help explain the 1 in 70. Her argument - twitter takes patience, whereas Gen Y is used to immediate gratification. Yet many are starting to come around.
Very interesting to see where it all goes.
Very interesting. I think it’s really one of the biggest challenges that we have in the ad industry, how do we use and not destroy the new tools. We’ve seen it over & over again, where our desires to get our message out takes over until we stomp things into the ground. Paraphrasing Herb Simon — “What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention.” So, the more information we create, the less people pay attention, making it more important for us to create more information, which then creates a death spiral.
I’ve started to experience a little of what your brother’s friend talked about. But, I guess that happens in everything, doesn’t it? And I’ve gotten the same response about Twitter (and Second Life) when I speak to college students. We, the ad industry, tend to talk a whole lot more about these things sometimes then real people do.
Given the explosion of texting, twitter & other short form messaging systems, I don’t think it’s going to go away, but if we’re not careful, we’ll chase people away.
I have to say - I think it’s more likely that the “new tools” will ‘disrupt’ advertising than the other way around.
T
so true!
it’s not about twitter. what is it with the ad and marketing biz.. propping new bright and shiny things on a pedestal like the second coming only to club it mercelessly? we’ve seen it over and over, branded entertainment, iphone apps, virtual worlds, microsites, myspace, facebook apps etc.
they are losing the larger point. the way people connect is drastically changing. and instead of thinking of how to use social tools to craft with other pieces into an experience.. they are acting like the greeting card biz.. they keep manufacturing one dimensional”greetings” that are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Ben -
Great post. And, thanks for the nice comments. I agree we’re at the end of the beginning. It feels a bit like Twitter (or maybe just the Twitterati) is getting ahead of itself. But that’s cool. It always happens with the cool new thing. I agree with Darrell that many early adopters will walk away, over burdened by the fact that another rough edge of marketing and communications is getting smoothed out to become more acceptable to the masses.
Whether it’s Twitter or something else the really cool thing is that culture keeps moving. And, that’s what gets me stoked.
I don’t think it’s either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. If i were to look at twitter as a standalone component within the social media forest I’d say we are at stage 2 of 4 of the business phase. I typically look at trends in 4 stages. Stage 1 is the seeding or early adopter stage, where the community (or users) are grouped within advanced niche such as marketing or technology, Stage 2 is what i call critical mass. It’s not mainstream yet, but it’s picked up a huge amount of growth momentum and nothing short of turning off the servers can stop it from ascending atop its category. Another characteristics is what i call how are we going to make money questions popping all over and experimentation. Stage 3 is the mainstream stage characterized by a mature revenue model as well as flatter user and interaction growth. Stage 4 is rather abrupt and the end, where user growth flatlines and starts decreasing. Think exodus in mass.
Twitter as I’ve said is definitely at stage 2. When you get folks from ESPN analyst to MSNBC commentators pimping their twitter username then yeah you’ve hit critical mass.
Another reason i disagree is that i also think that as advertisers we keep making the same mistake of being short-sighted. Whether twitter is here for another 3 or 20 years to be is irrelevant. What is relevant to me and to our clients is what various audiences are on twitter today and into the next 6 to 12 months, what are their behaviors and depending on how we approach the relationship is this the best social platform to do it in?
2006/7 - Second Life
2007/8 - Facebook
2008/9 - Twitter?
It seems all these new social media platforms have about a year before they lose their ‘cool’ to the early adopters (normally when marketing becomes a little spam like). The questions is will twitter go the way of second life or facebook and build mass appeal. I bet on the latter - as libby put it, there is something about it’s random nature and sense of ‘what’ being posted next’ that appeals to human nature.
Great post Ben. I hope it’s only the end of the beginning. Early adopters can bemoan their shiny, new thing being overrun by marketing messages and the mainstream. But really there’s no fun in hanging out with a bunch of people who only talk about social media thinking they are on the cutting edge. These things are only ever fun when there are fun, engaging people taking part. Take a bow Stephen Fry. Skype only got interesting when I could get my mum to download. Second Life was a heck of a lot more interesting when brands started investing in interesting, interactive experiences. Facebook got interesting when my 16 year old niece commented on my status. Brands will find their useful place on Twitter and spammers will go on to spam the next new, shiny thing.
Twitter will probably endure because of it’s skew towards an older demographic who will stick with the format. It’s interesting that this is a form of social media that younger people find harder to grasp. Maybe with age we grow to enjoy the sound of our own voice and listening only selectively.
Great article, Ben.
Let’s forget about monetization for a minute.
What’s the social utility of Twitter? Aside from the what-my-3-year-old-ate-for-breakfast crowd, most “heavy users” use it as a content discovery engine powered by a tight word-of-mouth mechanism. Essentially, it’s information curation — ideally, you only follow people whose opinions you see as valuable, who share content you find compelling, who help you discover things you may not have come across through your usual browsing habits and RSS subscriptions. In a lot of ways, it replicates your real-life social circle in people you’ve (mostly) never actually met, and it replicates your “real-life” curiosity for information, inspiration and just “stuff to talk about.”
So it really boils down to two things: Credibility (manifested in your curation of people to follow) and curiosity (the very reason why you’d be interested in what others have to say or share in the first place). These are human needs that are very primal, there’s no beginning or end to them. Twitter is just another medium for their manifestation.
Now, back to the business question. (Because, let’s face it, we’re “in advertising,” we care.) Monetization is never anything more than taking something people need away from them and selling it back to them at the price of the product or service. For Twitter, the two fundamental currencies are the aforementioned credibility and curiosity. Clearly, companies – coffee spammers, I’m looking at you – are yet to figure out how to. But whatever model emerges, it will have to do with credibility (seen in @JasonCalacanis’ $250,000 bid to get on the Twitter suggested users list) and curiosity (Magpie tried to do this through paid word-of-mouth, unfortunately in a rather misguided way, and the various startups toying with using Twitter as a real-time search engine may well be on to something.)
So the only beginning here is that of the quest of a sensible model to make it work – for users, for companies, and for Twitter as a social content discovery ecosystem.
Twitter has definitely become more mainstream than it was. It’s no longer just the early adopters, it’s the bulk of the bell curve that’s using Twitter now. It’s like before it was an elitist group in the sense that it was mostly tech/media people using it, and now there’s more of the general public. That means there’s more noise, and there are people trying to use it to make money where earlier they didn’t exist. So in addition to someone from Carphone Warehouse helping me sort out a problem I had, I also get random people following me, like coffee marketers who pick up anything I say about coffee. I think Twitter’s passed the stage where you can control that - in the sense you don’t need to follow users back, but they can follow you, and the only way to get out of that conundrum is to have protected updates which completely dilutes the purpose and value of Twitter.
It’s not the beginning, and it’s not the end. We’ve even passed the stage of it being the end of the beginning. But it’s still morphing, and it has some time yet to go. Just as Facebook is still morphing. No product can expect to be static and think minor changes here and there will enable them to keep pace with technological and sociological change. So either Twitter goes on morphing towards an unknown end, or it dies. It’s taking the former path. But it’s not alone - think of any of your clients - companies have to keep pace with the change as well.
I think it doesn’t really matter where Twitter is at right now as long as it’s changing for the positive - which is questionable, I agree. But then it’s all subjective, isn’t it? It’s probably HELPING those coffee marketers do their job, much as we hate them.
I’m with you, Ben. In fact, we may not have even reached the end of the beginning, yet!
What’s fascinating to me is not Twitter the site, or even Twitter the service. It’s the type of communication that Twitter has enabled. The kind of conversation we have on twitter is unique in its combination of networked properties, blurred time frame between synchronous and asynchronous, and open public discussion.
There’s never been anything quite like it before, and it’s not going away (whether it happens via Twitter or not is beside the point).
Saw this post, thought oh no, more boring Twitter introspection! But good points here.
I say, enough about beginings & ends & monetization - let’s work on the utility model. Find the best way to use Twitter.
Maria’s specific point about curation of information is where it’s at for me. I’ve been dumping the broadcast networks, Scoble, Calacanis, etc., and focusing on people who I can talk to and people who lead me to compelling information off Twitter.
Our job is not to define a fad in the middle of a fad but to use new tools effectively.
I agree with Steve (& Maria). Twitter is a powerful human search engine, mashed up with a permanent virtual coffee morning.
Facebook friends: compelling Twitter discussion here.
Steve Rubel, the social media guru at Edelman PR in NYC (himself no light user of Twitter), writes today on his blog about what he sees as a sustainable future for the platform. In essence, he warns against ‘chasing Madison Avenue’ and proposes the solution lies in working with developers to inspire innovation, with Twitter positioned as ‘the web’s first major social operating system’.
Good punchy read - http://bit.ly/Akbt
I think there are two lenses to have this conversation from: a personal lens and a business lens.
On the personal front, I think Maria phrased it the best. Curiosity and Credibility -also lets not forget instant gratification that this medium allows us. From a theoretical POV, I can also argue, vanity and a kind of cultural megalomania (look how funny my tweets are, or how cool the links I share are)
Whatever the reasons, they pander to the very basic human instinct and we respond to them. I think these responses are also quite evident on Facebook (rememeber how everyone had the ‘Places I have visited’ and the ‘Books I have read’ applications installed when the aps first premiered? ) However, on Twitter - the gratification is on steroids! The speed, the quickness, the instant-ness…
I think what Twitter has done, is made us as human beings incredibly self-aware. We have come to realize the power of our words, our curatorial abilities and our personalities - and because it is so easily manifested on Twitter, I think this is just the beginning. As Twitter evolves, we too, will evolve how we use it.
On the business front, I personally think the answer has never been clearer or simpler. I believe that brands and entrepreneurs are coming to accept that perhaps, the only value with investing time and resources on Twitter is that of a direct connection with the customers. Cliched, but I cannot think of a single social technology that has made customer service so incredibly simple or relevant.
As a collective Twitter community, we have also evolved from the obsessive need to gain ‘followers’ and ‘follow’ people back. Infact, now if I see someone following everyone that follows them - they lose a little bit of credibility with me. It goes to show that they are not curating the information they receive - only paying attention to the information they send out.
It is OK for brands to follow / harness only their audiences. They don’t and shouldn’t feel obligated anymore to follow everyone back. The barriers to entry on Twitter are only diminishing - So in that respect - I believe for brands and businesses, this is just the beginning.
No. I don’t think this is the end of the beginning. Early-adopters such as ourselves may move on to some other technology, but that does not mean Twitter has peaked. We early adopters moved on from Hi5 and Friendster - but those networks continue to thrive. Albeit, with a different audience, but they are successful.
Early adopters like us are never the sole/ target audience of any new technology. Also, any new technology takes atleast a few years before it finds who the ‘monetiziable’ audience is and eventually, it evolves into pandering to that audience. More often than not, early adopters are not that audience.
About monetizing Twitter itself - that’s a question I think everyone is interested in watching how and when that will happen.
Really great comments, and good thought-provoking stuff. Cheers Jinal.
Twitter is just the beginning. Tumblr is the next step.
http://blog.tippingpointlabs.com/2009/04/twitter-is-done-tumblr-is-next/
Awesome discussion. Glad to connect into the ideas being shared here.
The power I see in Twitter is the multitude of connections and, therefore, personal (what I mean is discovered and selected by me) applications that emerge. The main Twitter timeline feed helps me dive into the mass dialogue (in spurts, short or longer), but filters allow sorting and layers of friendship/interaction (a la Mike Arauz’ recent post) organized by interests or individuals or groups or other motives, etc. So… texting lets me talk “privately” to my friends. Facebook let’s me broadly post my life to my friends and see theirs. Twitter has elements of both–quickly broadcast my thoughts, ideas, actions, interests, great finds thinking to my friends and the world.
This one to many to one dynamic now fueled by a large enough user base fosters experimentation. To me, this means clearly we’re at the end of the beginning.
Those experiments are happening at multiple levels: (1) how I use my (or my company’s) tweets / account / followers / who I follow, (2) how I sort/access the tweets I’m interested in for my use, (3) how to aggregate the mass timeline for analysis / insight / connections, (4) how to build on top of Twitter for new uses. And I’m sure there are more.
Sadly… marketers solely seeking quick cash will mess this up… but I think only for themselves. Why? With Twitter you and I, every user, has more control than ever before. And, with that control, authenticity is king. You auto respond to me with crappy sales pitch–you’re gone in 1/2 a second. You have something relevant, you’re staying around… until you don’t!
Again, great commentary and ideas here.
[...] BBHLabs: Twitter, the end of the Beginning. [...]
Todays times magazine section, “Let Them Eat Tweets,” by Virginia Heffernan, explores Tweeting as a form of “connectivity for the poor and needy.” An excellent read on the collective twitter pysche.
It seems 3 years in we are still grappling with the same questions we had from the start: why do we subscribe? is it collective consciousness at is most impoverished or most enlightening: as a new mapping of the minds? Is it just too selfish? too driven by the PR of each tweeter’s avatar existence?
see article here: http://tinyurl.com/c5gz37
thoughts?
There’s an excellent discussion to be found about the potential ways twitter may unfold as celebrities get involved on Jeremiah Owyang’s excellent blog, Web Strategy - http://bit.ly/72fjb; never more timely given last week’s Oprah PTR explosion.
As a marketer and a Twperson, the more useful conversation would be around balancing the two. Rather than ends, starts, and money…how should marketers use it, or not? And why? and how do you sell it to clients that barely understand gif banners?
Whether or not Twitter endures, there clearly is a desire or need for people to receive “headlines” on what people or things they are interested in are doing. The microblogging medium, or whatever you want to call it, when you take twitter, the “is” box in Facebook, a similar thing in LinkedIn and increasingly other sites, ultimately are offering a similar service. While not yet universal in its adoption like the phone, it is becoming a widespread form of communication. Though like the telephone, the carriers can and do vary, each offering slightly different angles on the same service.
The Twitter brand of this service may fade but the activity of micro updates presumably is here to stay and will presumably continue to be used in ways we can’t imagine today. And that’s dang exciting.
Great post and comments.
A few thoughts on why I think we’re “at the end of the beginning.”
As Nick said, Twitter skews older, and an older audience is less fickle, less likely to jump on the bandwagon when the new cool thing comes out.
I also don’t really see Twitter as a singular social network, but as multiple overlapping social networks underneath a large umbrella.
Just like Ning or any other social network out there, you’re able to customize your network any way you want - you can follow/unfollow/block as you see fit.
This is why even as Twitter grows, I don’t see the noise issue as an issue. Information overload isn’t a problem, the problem is understanding how to effectively filter what’s important to you.
Just as Gareth posted recently, it’s not about social NETWORKS, it’s about social IDEAS, and Twitter’s proven a stable platform for idea exchange, especially with the plethora of new applications coming out.
I’m following about 250 people on Twitter right now who I know very little about other than what their profile bios say. These are distant relationships that I’ve been cultivating over several months.
When will I leave Twitter?
Maybe when we know each other on a more personal level (cell, email, IM), but until then, we’ll all be tweeting.
[...] Malbon and team of BBH Labs has an amazing, thought-provoking discussion on Twitter and the future of [...]