It's grown to a reported 6million+ global users and with 10,000 new accounts a day, its arguably reached that magic point in its life called 'critical mass'. There are no doubt, some seriously concerned people at Google right now. Potentially Twitter could become the defacto web landing page.
So here we are, at the start of another gold rush, but this time its different.....
The global economy lies in tatters, traditional business sectors are seriously screwed, no-one's lending money and, I think its fair to say, its not going to get much better for many many months.
So what can businesses do to buck this depressing trend? Well, focusing on the client should always be a top priority, but during boom times, it's evident there's less need to do this. Why really invest in customer service and stuff like cross-sell when there are so many other potential customers out there? They say its 6 times as hard to find a new customer as it is to retain an existing one, but during boom times no-one really cares about this statistic. It's only when the going gets tough that companies start to re-discover the importance of customer service. That time is now.
But can Twitter really help a company to re-discover the importance of their customer? Conceptually the answer is yes. Twitter facilitates immediate, direct and well thought out interaction, the likes of which we have not seen before. In its vanilla form, however Twitter may too general to be used as an effective corporate communications tool. If messages could be sent to a more targeted selection of your followers then it could be a very powerful. Perhaps it's too early in the life of Twitter to consider leveraging it to provide service to existing customers, but as a cost effective way of delivering a message it's power should not be under estimated and companies need to think about clever ways of leveraging this tool (JUST received this link via Twitter - Top 10 Companies using Twitter!!! Maybe I'm wrong....)
It's clear that Twitter is already being thought of as a tool that can generate new business and in some cases, I have no doubt companies are making dollars from Twitter. But what would need to happen for this tool to be considered as THE way of finding new customers and generating business? Firstly and most importantly, the quality of the lead. There are 3rd party apps out there that help you develop your Twitter audience. But exactly how qualified are these leads? I can automate the following of a group of people based on a limited set of attributes, and hope the follow me back. That's about as complex as it gets. How about if I could say "Find me all the day traders in London, that follow Mr x, have 30+ followers themselves with a follow/following ratio of between 0.7 and 1.3" I'd say that was much more targeted. Taking that a step further, what about a search tool that indexed users web links and previous tweets in order to make that available to your search? Secondly, the User Interface needs work. Now I know apps like TweetDeck are dealing with this, but Twitter really needs a way of organising conversations (think iPhone text messaging). I read (again on Twitter) that a certain eBay founder (Pierre Omidyar) is working in a Twitter client called Ginx that looks have addressed this issue.
I've got many many ideas that could enhance both the usefulness and the user experience of Twitter, but, it's past midnight, I'm tired and I need some sleep!!
Please leave me your thoughts, I'd be interested to hear other views on how Twitter could really become the Killer App of the 2000's!!
Cheers
TheAtticMan
