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See Me, Feel Me, Tweet Me…Retweet Me

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Michael Tchong in Internet

The discussion was heated. A few powerful new-media types belonging to the Old Timers discussion list were embroiled in a bitter argument about the merits of using Twitter to report on an industry conference. Among those advocating longer story lengths, the question was, how could Twitter with a 140-character limit per post ever provide insightful commentary?

It was an enlightening debate that showed just how much opinions differ on social networking’s latest darling, a “stripped down” version of Facebook with status updates and little else. But could that very 140-character limitation be Twitter’s secret weapon? After all, any site that helps reduce information clutter by forcing writers to be concise could well be a harbinger of our ADD future.

Twitter might be not as versatile as its big Facebook brother, but it’s rapidly gaining clout, and with remarkable results. On December 21, Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) made history by becoming the first person to Twitter about Continental Airlines flight 737, after it slid off the runway during take-off. Wilson was one of the passengers.

That was followed by another historic feat. The first eyewitness report of the US Airlines jet that crash landed in the Hudson river in January came from Jim Hanrahan (@Manolantern), who, four minutes after the crash, tweeted, “I just watched a plane crash into the hudson riv in manhattan.”

That both of these reports were first filed on Twitter, scooping all mainstream media, shows not only how much the world has once again changed due to the Internet, but also what role Twitter is already playing in the realtime dissemination of news.

While Janis Krums of Sarasota, Fla. was not the first person to tweet about US Airlines Flight 1549 after it landed in the Hudson river last month, he was the first to post a photograph of the floating plane, via Twitpic, a Twitter picture service.

According to ComScore, Twitter’s visitor traffic quintupled to 5.6 million in September 2008, compared to a year earlier. In the U.K., Hitwise reports, Twitter’s traffic soared 947% in 2008. Hitwise also notes that Twitter surged past popular bookmarking site Digg in January.

That traffic momentum has bolstered Twitter’s fundraising efforts, with the media reporting that the company hopes to close at a $250 million valuation. Word is that Twitter wants to raise $20 million, which should provide it with enough money to figure out how to make money.

The community that sprouted up around Twitter to support it is quite impressive. There are already more than 100 Twitter clients and related services (here they are ranked by bookmarking frequency).

Want to check out who’s twittering in your neighborhood, visit TwellowHood. Prefer a more visual 3D representation of the globe’s Twitter fever? Try Twittervision. Need to see a social graph on your followers, consult Tweepler. Want to see where you rank in the Twitter universe, try twitterrank.

To see if your follower growth is ramping up, use TwitterCounter. Automatically feed your Tweets via RSS: TwitterFeed (bad idea, actually). Need to keep track of click volume on posted links? Use TwitClicks. The latter is a micro-tracking service, providing micro-bloggers the same benefits a larger publisher enjoys.

Get the picture? No wonder that avant-garde marketers have already established big Twitter brands. Some, like online shoe store Zappos, have even created a “Twitter hall of fame” to spotlight their twittering employees. When Fortune published its “100 Best Companies To Work For” list, the magazine began and ended Zappos’ story with its use of Twitter.

Even celebrities have joined the fray, which brings up goodwill ROI. You can measure that via Twitterholic, which lists President Obama in the top position.

And if you’re concerned that you’re not doing a good marketing job on Twitter, here are seven tips on how not to use Twitter for business. It’s sage advice that the makers of Motrin wished they had heeded before pulling an ad campaign considered offensive by a group of Twitter users who banded together under the tag “MotrinMoms.”

You know how influential the Twitter universe is, when merchants begin offering necklaces that announce that you belong to the exclusive circle of the twitterati ($25).

Then there are a slew of applications and Web sites that allow you to post and track tweets. Find yourself copying other people’s Twitter messages and reposting them with such codes as “retweet” or “RT,” then you are a Retweetist, which happens to track the most popular retweets. Can’t follow all your tweetstreams? Get Filttr, which whittles them down to key ones.

Need to get a better handle on your twitter conversations, try Tweetree. And if you want to tweet via the iPhone, and who doesn’t, there are at least eight clients with our favorite being Tweetie. Need a slick desktop app that uses Adobe Air technology to provide ease of use, download Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck, which is the work of British programmer Iain Dodsworth, recently secured $500,000 in funding. And so the twitterverse grows. History has shown that those with the most grassroots support generally have promising futures ahead. Examples abound: dBase vs. Paradox; iPhone vs. BlackBerry; Drupal vs. Joomla, WordPress vs. Blogger, etc.

This buoyant infrastructure may well guarantee Twitter a major role in the future landscape of online media. To get an inkling of this future consider this, popular singer Erykah Badu is so in love with Twitter that even in the latter stages of giving birth a few days ago, “she tweeted while she squeezed,” as CNET reported.

Now that is what we call a twitteraholic. Given your increasingly shrinking disposable time, we’ve decided to move into Twitter full time, so please follow “ubercool” on Twitter, and you will be more up-to-date than ever before.

We’ve seen the future and it’s very tweet.

Additional Reading:
Executives & Notables on Twitter – Social Brand Index
How Freshbooks Built an Army of Passionate Evangelists on Twitter – Mr Tweet
‘Listening’ to Twitter is no longer merely optional – Econsultancy.com
Regain Control Over Your Twitter Social Graph With Tweepler – TechCrunch
Retweetist Discovers Most Valuable Users And Accounts From Twitter – TechCrunch
Some Twitter apps I use – Consort Partners (Kathy Johnson)
Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots – Wired
Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model – ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Power 150 – A Source of Inspiration
Twitter’s popularity trebles in wake of celebrity endorsements – Telegraph.co.uk
Twitter News – Alltop