‘We’re, errr going to use twitter’…business confused

You hear this a lot nowadays. It’s usually accompanied by an admission that business doesn’t really understand the social networking phenomenon. The secret to grasping it may lie in evolutionary theory. Johanna Bennett reports…

Twitter is everywhere it seems now. Reports of the micro-blogging service losing popularity have proved groundless so far. Analyst comScore says traffic has flattened recently, but, according to the UK’s Guardian Technology, up to half of all users access Twitter via a third-party client and these visits aren’t recorded by comScore.

Not surprisingly, marketing has now got interested in Twitter, so much so that Twitter is threatening to shut down spammers, by letting users flag them.

But many people still struggle to understand the phenomenon, although this isn’t surprising considering it’s at technology’s bleeding edge. Much of the difficulty lies in the fact that Twitter is a social as well as technological phenomenon. It’s not like getting your head around, say, the iPhone, which is a more easily understandable as its really just a phone that does more stuff.

Basically, Twitter lets people send short 140 character long messages, or “tweets”, to a site where anyone can read them – in simple terms it’s texting to a website. However, people mainly send their tweets to “followers” who have chosen to follow them.

But what’s it for, you wail? The frustrating answer is: whatever you want. Its news and emergency notification value have already been proven. People fleeing California’s fires learnt what was happening faster tweeting than through the state government. And, recently, a tweet explosion blew the lid off the story of deathly toxic oil-sludge being dumped on the Ivory Coast, by oil company Trafigura, which its libel lawyers had been trying to shut down.

What use is it to business though, you ask? Well, it’s useful for following news and for corresponding with your peers, or with those with whom you share an interest. British comedy actor Stephen Fry has a huge following, for example. Twitter is becoming even more popular now it is available on mobile devices as well as on the web. It now has estimated million users.

Its business value seems to lie in its use as a marketing add-on, but followers need to be limited, as, according to Harvard evolutionary graph theorist Erez Lieberman, too big a network waters down the ties between people.

Lieberman is using evolutionary theory to help explain how social networks operate.

There is precedent: think of computer viruses.

He talks of networks as being “replicators”. The term comes from biology, but is now being applied to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which see people converse online, influencing each other in the process. This can lead to “pro-social behaviour”, if the networks aren’t too large, says Lieberman.

Interestingly, this “conversation” idea was touched on by our cover CEO Craig McKell of BeefEater Barbecues. “There’s value in conversation”, he said, speaking of updating the company’s website to make it more interactive with users, including adding Twitter.

You don’t want to just jump in with people. That’s rude. You have to develop a conversation, he says.

It’s early days, but McKell sees such interaction as starting off with simple things such as offering customers who visit the website recipes or special offers from business partners, benefitting both. Surely an example of pro-social behaviour: offering something to help maintain the “conversation”? The sharing idea is central to social networking.

Techies have long helped each other out with technical problems via webchat, on geek websites and blogs, and this sort of helpful conversation has now moved on to Twitter.

But chat can be social too. For example, Facebook is also about “conversation”.

Recently, there was a lot of Facebook chat about the explosive ending to NZ television series Outrageous Fortune. Outrageous now has a cult following in Australia too, which is where the social networking came in – following topics and people you’re interested in, conversing about them, and how this, in turn, influences others.

And don’t undervalue influence, the pollies don’t. Remember Obama leveraging social networking in his election campaign? Marketers too understand the value of influence and how having conversations with people is integral to this.

Lieberman believes marketing will make increasing use of social networking, the real issue is measuring what happens in such networks, he says. As we get better at doing so, marketing will make a lot more use of social networks like Twitter, as will those seeking to influence others.

The latter sounds rather worrying, but ideas can be straightforward too. Recipes, for example, get passed around the blogosphere, of which Twitter is part.

Trafigura found out the hard way that bad news travels fast via Twitter, but so might a hot recipe. If I were BeefEater I might be thinking of, say, tweeting to my customers about the aphrodisiac qualities of surf ’n turf recipes, using sexy oysters as the seafood to pair with your T-bone on the barbie.

Now that would be a pleasant way to influence people to buy your product.

9/11/18_ex_m_h_nl