Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

The question of ROI from ’social media’ tools or ‘Web 2.0′ style implementations is never far from any debate about the business worth of the new technology.

Twitter is a perfect example of a tool that is seeing huge uptake among both individuals and corporates but which has no obvious revenue model itself and lets its users determine how to monetize its use, should they wish.

The Industry Standard just published a piece on Twitter that reveals that PC manufacturer Dell reckons it can attribute $1 million in revenue directly to its use of the service. That is a solid enough number to change the game for many companies, I think. Will it change Twitter?

Hat tip to Neville Hobson for pointing me to this post - via Twitter!

There was a lot of tweeting on twitter today about twiddict. (Try saying that after a late and liquid night celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday.) The premise of twiddict is that it saves your tweets when twitter is down and then posts them when twitter resurfaces. On the face of it, this sounds helpful.

I won’t be using it, however. When twitter is down I get frustrated, like most people. But for me, one of the joys of twitter is the truly ephemeral nature of it. I don’t scroll back through pages of tweets to discover what I’ve missed while I’ve been away from my desk. And I don’t try to make sure everyone I know has seen a tweet of mine by sending them a direct message instead. On top of that, the beauty of tweets are surely their spontaneity. If I’m having to sit and think about a tweet, the only honest tweet I can add to twitter is: “sitting and thinking about a tweet”. And when twitter comes back up, the last thing I want to do is to catch up on reams of tweets that are no longer current.

Twiddict is obviously a bit of fun on the part of its team of Belgian creators. Basing its service offering on the continuing failure of twitter to scale successfully is probably not a long-term business plan. If Twidict becomes an essential tool for twitter users, I suspect that twitter will no longer need to worry about scaling and Twiddict may have to evolve into FriendFeedict instead.

For a slightly more positive spin on twiddict, take a look at Stan Schroeder’s post at Mashable.

Over the last week I’ve been immersing myself in Twitter. It can become addictive but for all the right reasons: there is a lot of valuable information and insight to be had. One of the guys I follow - Igor Poltavskiy (known to his Twitter friends as Scabr) - just tweeted a link to this BBC article from Bill Thompson, which makes some great points about Twitter. At the same time, Bill shares my own disappointment about missing SXSW - next year, definitely! - but points out how following the tweets on Twitter were a fairly good second best.

Last year I waited for people to blog about SXSW: this year I was following them ‘in action’.

What are you doing? It’s a simple question and often the perfect start to a conversation, for Twitter though, that is the conversation. in 140 characters or less.

Twitter helps build social networks for sending relevant, up-to-date and quick updates to your connections. The peeps at Commoncraft have done a great job in explaining how it works:

You can follow Graham and myself on Twitter and stay up-to-date with what we’re doing (You lucky, lucky things!). You can also see what we’re doing from our new widget on the right of this very blog. We’ll share our Twitter findings and experiences back here, along with a future post looking at how Twitter can benefit you (Quick tip: Does your resident industry expert have an active network on Twitter, commenting on industry updates?).

Do your customers care what you’re doing? Twitter.com