Twitter-pated

An intelligent associate of mine posed a few questions about the usefulness of Twitter, especially vis-a-vis its potential ROI. I've discussed my frustration with the vaporous nature of the ROI of various social media before.

He was responding to this post from a marketing website about why people Twitter.

His comments are (roughly) as follows:

It still seems like just another channel for more unchecked bull shiitake, which is already overabundant...

...Mass texting on a subscription basis...

..."What's the ROI of social media? Well, what's the I, exactly?" Your frickin time, that's what, only one of the most important resources you possess...

...digital gossip. You feel like you're connected, but you're really not in any meaningful way...

He bounced the gripes to a colleague of ours in journalism. Since the comments are articulate and useful - I'll credit our friend in the fifth estate: Kavan Peterson.

Kavan's response goes like this:

...it's insane how rapidly Twitter has been integrated by mainstream media and I definitely think it will be central in defining how mass media operates in a Web 2.0 (or whatever's next) world. But there are a couple of major points...that illustrate the power of Twitter:

1) Obama's campaign: At every mega-rally, the campaign asked everyone there to take out their cell phones and send a text to the campaign, and in return the campaign would send exclusive updates to its followers. That was all done on Twitter. What did the campaign get? About 10 million cell phone numbers from devout followers -- essentially FOR FREE. It was a massive fundraising, organizing asset. I'll let you ruminate what the ROI was on that.

2) Twitter's rapid growth: as someone who currently practices PR almost exclusively through social and new media, I find explaining the value of Twitter to be frustratingly difficult and tedious. But the point I always make is Twitter's explosive growth -- it went from zero to millions in one year, which completely eclipses the growth of Facebook, MySpace, Napster or any other new media phenomenon, and it's unbelievable how rapidly the mainstream media is adapting to it. It took years and years for blogs to make a dent in the flow of mainstream news but less than a year for Twitter to become the breaking-news platform.

The question isn't how long will the trend last, but how ubiquitous will social communication tools like Twitter become? I have no idea, but to deny that our culture is moving en masse towards a more public, participatory, social way of communicating is like denying global warming....the most remarkable aspect of social media has been the phenomenon of people marshaling massive amounts of human capital around activities in which making money is not the goal. In economic terms, the cost of forming groups of like-minded individuals around common interests or goals has dropped at an almost unimaginable rate -- I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, just think about how you would go about doing the things that Facebook does without Facebook. Twitter is doing the same thing for mobilizing and organizing people in real time.

Thanks to Kavan's insightful remarks, Henslowe's Diary will now Twitter you whenever I create a new post. Assuming you're hooked up to Twitter...and following me...I think...the internet has a lot of buttons...