Twitter - The killer App???

Being a software developer in a previous life (when there was only 1 version of the web, and networking either meant CAT V cabling or getting drunk with you work friends!), I've become so excited by the possibilities of Twitter that I find myself spending considerable time researching this amazing new product. From an initial position of scepticism, I am now well and truly convinced that Twitter will change the way we communicate and do business with each other.

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

The power of Twitter

Last week I decided to investigate Twitter a bit more. I'd started to hear more and more about it and decided to have a play around. I have to say, from an initial position of scepticism I am now blown away by its possibilities!

It's not an easy concept to define so I'll paraphrase;

"Twittering is defined as micro blogging. Micro blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by members of a social group

These message can be submitted by a variety of means from mobile updates, instant messaging, email, mp3, video or the web"

Still confused? Let me tell explain my experiences last week. I'd read somewhere that when you 'followed' someone, it was twitter etiquette for them to 'follow' you back. So with this in mind, I decided to test out this theory.

I added a biog and a photo to my account AtticManTrader and set about trying to find some active stock traders. I used the find function to locate a couple of traders that I had met during a seminar in Oct 2007. Sure enough these guys had twitter accounts and were being followed by about 1,000 people, so I decided to 'follow' some of these people. After spending about 20 minutes carefully researching profiles and previous twitters, I decided on 20 people that I would be interested in following. I clicked the 'follow' button and, rather pleased with myself, nipped down and made myself a nice cup of coffee.

On my return 10 minutes later, I was amazed to see that 7 people who I now followed had decided to follow me! Excited by this new toy, I decided to follow a couple more. Sure enough, they followed me back and within a couple of hours I was now connected to nearly 20 people who were interested in trading stocks and futures. That was last Thursday, it's now Monday and I'm building up a very nice collection of new friends - 122 at the last count now follow my every word (well, they follow my tweets) and I'm following 152. As well as traders, I follow some 'life coaches', some Internet marketeers, a couple of sportsmen and a few celebrities!

Twitter really is an incredibly powerful tool. It lets you make contact with people that you would not connect with using something like linkedIn or Facebook - It is more informal and much more dynamic - and because of that, it has so many more possibilities. As a source of trading ideas, it's incredible - I'm following some of the top traders and educators in the markets today - and all for free! As a source of news, it's also pretty dam good. Yesterday there was talk that the Oscar winners list had been leaked, I'd did some research on Twitter and found quite quickly that it was a fake (otherwise I'd have been betting on it!).

My love affair with this incredible little tool is in the early stages, but as I spend more time researching and understanding its power it is clear that to me that Twitter is a "Killer App" and is set to fundamentally change the way we communicate with one another.

An experiment in business development

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my goals for 2009 is;

"To develop my trading business to a point where it can become my sole source of income"

In this post I'm going to discuss how I intend to hit this goal.

Developing the trading business beyond simply earning from the markets has been a goal for sometime. I developed equationIT.com in early 2008, primarily as a way of incentivising me to undertake my daily disciplines, the logic being, that if I had an audience following my postings, I would be compelled to continue posting. Two things happened that scuppered this plan.

1. The turmoil in the financial markets effectively rendered my strategy as ineffective.

2. No-one came to the website. Not entirely surprising, given I made no attempts to market it.

Well now is the time for me to work on promoting my business. And I figured if I was going to invest some time and energy in marketing the website, that I'd share on the blog how I was getting on. That way, I may be able to point other webmasters in the right direction. I'm keen to understand which web 2.0 networking products work the best. Can I direct traffic to the site simply by joining all my web 'assets' together?

Here's the outline plan.

1. Complete the re-design of the website - I need to increase the sites 'stickiness'. I'm considering a couple of options.

2. Streamline the business profile - I'm currently blogging as 'the atticman', posting in forums as 'equationTrader' or 'aidaweb01', I'm facebooking and linkingIn as my real name and I'm 'twittering' and 'deliciousing' without really understanding what the bloody hell I'm doing! It's clear that I need to come up with a single brand. I need to unify my message!

3. Identify all web 2.0 / social networking options that I can leverage - As well as the above, I can also think of YouTube - to post commentary, creating a FaceBook Business page, developing my Amazon and Ei42 stores (If you are going to buy a book, why not go through my store and earn me some commission - All earnings will be posted here and perhaps contribute to future get together's.

4. Ensure that I can work out where traffic is coming from - That way my results will be more meaningful.

5. Focus on certain aspects of the website and see what sort of content is more popular than others - I'm keen on developing a personal style trading website - nothing too corporate and presenting myself as the sort of guy that people know 'an honest question will get an honest answer' - I want to detach myself from the majority of trader type wa*nkers that belittle beginners and show little respect for people who are honestly trying to develop themselves and their businesses.

6. I'm happy to promote my competition - Not as silly as it sounds, especially in the trading game where ones mans successful strategy is another mans downfall - What I'm saying here is that if my website and advice doesn't work, then what is the harm in pointing people to other sources of information?

7. Discuss my other business interests - a small business club that I've set up with a couple of old friends. We try and meet once a month to discuss and share ideas around our respective businesses. Since we've been meeting all our businesses have taken huge leaps forward and we are keen to continue to develop a community around our business club.

First things first - I need to come up with a company name that I can then use across all my web assets. Initially I used equationIT, simply because this was the name of an old IT company I ran. To be honest its a sh*t name for a Trading business! I'm growing fond of The Atticman. I also need to ensure the word 'Trader' (or something similar) appears in the URL. So something like TheAtticTrader may work? I'm pondering ideas, I know I need to get an answer soon, but one thing I've learned about myself, is that sometimes there's no need to rush. A well thought out URL should last my business a lifetime and so it needs to be right.

Any thoughts welcome!!