Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you’d expect much discussed,
Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging ‘dying.’ His rationale was
that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise
services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.
Over the weekend, Tiphereth Gloria’s blog (the excellent ‘Digital Tip’) over in Australia alerted me to an incidence of Twitter madness from UK furniture retailer Habitat. The story has now extended to mainstream news outlets picking it up, for example see this piece by Sky’s Twitter correspondent Ruth Bartlett.
It’s received wisdom
that social networks make it possible to connect to people half way
around the world based purely on your similar interests and so
communities are no longer defined by where you live.
It’s a license for staff to waste time. There’s no control about what they say. What happens if a customer makes contact with them direct? Today’s arguments against allowing your staff to use social media at work? Actually they were pretty much the arguments used by companies to restrict email use in the mid 1990s.
That’s worth bearing in mind as the social media in the office debate rages.
Today it’s received wisdom that email is an essential business tool, and so it will be with social media before too long.
Especially with metrics firm Nielsen showing that in February, communication via social networks overtook communication via email. And from personal experience, I can now think of several instances of clients messaging me direct on Twitter as opposed to pinging me an email.
However just like with 90s email, the first stage of workplace social media acceptability is to publish dos and don’ts guidelines about what’s allowed. Even though a recent survey by Monster showed that 90% of workers are afraid of using Twitter for fear of getting in trouble, a number of firms have done just that.
As with all internal guidelines this ranges from the simple to the ones filled with corporate speak.
For example, Opera, the makers of the Internet browser of the same name, published a series of eight easy to understand rules: Share your thoughts, be active, “we’re not your mama”, don’t give away the farm, check your sources, our friends are your friends, for the squeamish post a disclaimer and use your common sense.
Australian telecoms giant Telstra publicly released guidelines revolving around the ‘three Rs’ – responsibility, respect and representation. And at the far end of the scale, Canadian broadcaster CBC published criteria that they backtracked on after it caused a fuss, saying that personal blogs couldn’t be used to espouse a partisan political opinion.
The bottom line is though social media isn’t going to go away, it’s part and parcel of today’s Internet environment and it’s what graduates in particular who join your organisations see as second nature.
As with so much of social media, you can either set out the parameters of your involvement now. Or stick your head in the sand and wait until it comes to you, when you are forced to react to it.
Back in 1996 when I was involved in the UK launch of MSN there was an all-singing, all dancing event at the Royal Commonwealth Institute here in London. Programme
makers trouped along to hear MSN tout the Web as the next best thing
for watching TV-like content. Bear in mind this was in the days of 28.8
dial-up…
Fellow Cow Ella forwarded me on this piece by Fuat Kircaali from Web 2.0 all about how PR people and consultancies are marketing dinosaurs due for extinction.
Sure, the guy was trying to push his Utilizer news publishing platform with a fairly up-front plug in the article. However, it’s this quote that caught my attention:
Think you have a marketing challenge? Consider then the task of marketing lingerie in Saudi Arabia. Not only is it strictest state in the Middle East when it comes to ‘morality’ laws, you have the odd situation of only men being allowed to sell underwear to women – something that has prompted a boycott campaign.
In the last post I knocked down the Twitter = the new Second Life comparison that has been doing the rounds.
In summary, I pointed out that the churn rate was nowhere near SL’s, that the numbers game was only part of the picture, and that Twitter’s entry barriers were lower making it much easier just to come and go.
Now here’s how Twitter IS like Second Life:
Just like Second Life was, it’s in danger of being at the start of a negative hype cycle, that plays into the hands of people who have been waiting for it to fail.
Case in point, Nielsen’s 60% churn rate that was reported far and wide was accepted as gospel. And there is almost certainly some truth in it. From the people I know, the drop off rate might not be 60%, but I would say half stick with it and half don’t.
One industry journalist however questioned the methodology, saying that if Nielsen looked at Twitter website hits then the figures would be flawed as a lot of people use third party applications like ‘Tweet Deck.’
Too late. Twitter = a load of hype had already gone far and wide
Here we have an article on Australian marketing website Mumbrella on how a lot of Australian newspapers had covered the story. Here we have the Business Week blog in the States talking about the Twitter bubble.
And here we have the Daily Mail, talking about how the “website sensation” is losing more than half its users every month.
What’s the bet that 99% of people will remember the ‘Twitter isn’t all that’ coverage in the mainstream press, and not the ifs and buts made in the trade press and on blogs such as this one.
Twitter needs to watch out that this isn’t the start of the bandwagon moving the other way.
A look back to 2007
In the first six months of 2007, according to a survey we did for a client, Second Life had 600+ media mentions in the UK alone. Come the summer though and things suddenly turned.
A lot of marketers realised that their brand efforts in the virtual world were abject failures. The less salubrious side of the world started to get a wider airing. And just like Twitter, the numbers started to be picked apart.
As with a lot of these things, the criticisms were a mixture of truth and exaggeration.
For example, the ‘Second Life is a virtual knocking shop’ claim was blown out of proportion. On the numbers, Second Life did grossly under-perform, but in a lot of cases the worst possible interpretation was pulled out to fit a conclusion that had been decided on in advance.
And on the Second Life is a marketing failure argument, I personally found a lot of that fairly disingenuous, as surely it’s our fault as agencies if the consumer doesn’t like what we’ve come up with?
No matter, the general consensus seemed to be that Second Life had had its day, and it was time to put it back into its virtual box.
The dissenting voices were ignored especially since a lot of the counter arguments were based on detail that tends to get lost beneath the “OK GUYS, IT’S OFFICIALLY OVER” headline.
Twitter won’t go the way of Second Life
Twitter is not going to go the way of Second Life, for starters because the user base is different.
If Twitter stays stable at 20 million worldwide users (which it has at the moment), it is still something that brands should at the very least keep track of.
That’s because Twitter’s user base is skewed towards people who often also write blogs, are active on other social networks, and in some cases are actually journalists. Twitter often only gives you a snap-shot of what they talk about elsewhere.
As a result, even a handful of committed users have the ability to make your life difficult….or to become your advocates.
Too much emphasis on celebrities?
There is however another Second Life echo – the reliance on celebrity users to drive traffic.
It makes sense, right? In the case of Second Life, it was, check out Suzanne Vega giving a concert. Hey, here’s Bono!
The problem is celebrities are often here today, gone tomorrow. And according to research by Columbia University, it’s questionable how far a strategy that relies in individual influencers actually gets you.
At the time, I wondered whether Second Life owners Linden Lab might have got much further had they been honest about what I imagine is the core appeal for a lot of people – that it’s an escape from the drudgery of the real world that gives you the chance to be whoever you want to be – what I’ve seen as being described as “the awesome you.”
In the same way, Oprah has been good for coverage, but there’s already back-chat about whether she’s lost interest (she hasn’t).
As a result, once Twitter does get around to doing proactive marketing, it might be an idea to avoid the Second Life reliance on celebs and instead look at the core benefits Twitter delivers.
Something Sydney digital strategist Mark Pollard summed up in a recent presentation – it’s down to conversation + information. Two benefits that it’s difficult to argue against.
Amongst all the stats showing Twitter’s amazing growth, comes another one showing something different – the fact that 60% of “newbies” are gone after the first month.
This Media Week article cites Nielsen figures as the source of the 60% churn rate. Media Week says that it demonstrates an ““I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.”
Just like Second Life?
Actually not quite, and here are three reasons why this parallel, which I’ve been hearing more and more lately, doesn’t apply.
1 – First of all, Second Life’s drop-off rate was much worse- not far off a whopping 90%, meaning that 20 million sign ups currently translates into 750k human beings in the virtual world (via their avatars), once you account for dormant and duplicate accounts.
2 – Secondly, the entry barriers for Twitter are far lower. Unlike Second Life you don’t need a super fast computer. You can enjoy it with most mobile phones on sale these days. That also means it’s much easier just to come and go.
3 – With Twitter the numbers aren’t the whole story.
Active Twitter users are heavily skewed towards media and tech types – people who can make things happen out of proportion to their numbers. Amazon is only one of many companies that found this out first hand.
And the service has arguably outflanked mainstream news services when it’s come to reporting real time events.
Still, as Nielsen VP David Martin says, even though it’s early days:
“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.”
Image -XOTOKO / Thanks to Katie Moffat for alerting me to the stat
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