Website Reviews 28 Feb

Twitter
www.twitter.com

Thanks for checking out this issue of Digital Strategy Website Reviews. Only one site today - Twitter and not really a site review, more a few thoughts on some rather strange reports about Twitter that have recently appeared in the press.

The press seems to have suddenly gone all atwitter. Have you noticed the coverage recently? Twitter seems to have landed in the UK and the members of the press are paying attention. Boosted by the UK Twitter champion, Stephen Fry and his excellent tweets, the service has sky-rocketed recently. It’s a classic environment for network effects to drive adoption once critical mass has been attained and with annualised growth running at about 1000%, it’s safe to say critical mass has been reached.

Surprisingly, a lot of recent commentary has been negative, ranging from “I don’t get it” to “A waste of time” and even to “There’s something wrong with you if you follow people on Twitter”. We even have the rather odd situation of digital industry stalwart, New Media Age finding itself in Daily Mail territory reporting that Twitter is a “child safety and privacy disaster waiting to happen”. Really? Have the writers spent any time on t’interweb recently? Twitter is not opening up some new gateway to hell, a one-way ticket to a land of endless escort services, drug abuser, racists and pornographers. I am told that these people flourished perfectly well before Twitter came along.

For those that don’t get it, that’s OK, go somewhere else. For those that think it a waste of time, well apologies for distracting you from your contribution to more uplifting and worthy societal developments. For those that think we’re in some way damaged for “following” people online, I have a secret to share with you: It’s fun. We who tweet are not pestering or stalking, we’re sharing. Whilst you’re busy wringing your hands at the latest sign of the decline of standards, we Tweeters are in another place having fun. Is it OK if the open-minded among us indulge in some community chat that we enjoy? As Tom Petty sort of said, “You can’t hear us, but we’re laughing all the time”.

A good retort to those who want to rise up and save us from ourselves can be found on the Made By Many blog which recently addressed this very issue. As a side point, the Made by Many blog happens to be a tip top example of agency blogging – they pick topics, any topic that they find interesting really and write about it. Always well written and with many members of the team contributing, it’s produced to a high standard.

Anyway, back to Twittergate, I really can’t understand the fuss. It would, of course, be terrible if anyone came to serious harm as a result of a tweet, but how is sharing on Twitter that different to the internet in general, and the wider offline world we live in? Twitter did not invent the insult. Censorship is rarely merited and talk of such in reference to Twitter is ridiculous.

Update 2nd March: Doing a quick scan of Brand Republic shows a near daily update on Twitter articles. One caught my eye today - reference to an article from PR Week covering some research on the most prolific tweeting flacks. One was recorded as having tweeted 3,410 times in just 372 days. That does seem a lot and is perhaps newsworthy, but this is not a competition. Volume does not make value but it does seem to play to the point I'm making above - the media just discovering Twitter.

Update 4th March: Further evidence of the growing importance of Twitter - you know you've arrived when you're declaimed by Google, as reported in The Times. Pity the Google CEO got the number of characters in a tweet wrong! Again in today's Times a report on a failed attempt to rescue a lost skier using Twitter to spread the net.

Update 17th March: Read in NMA today that Debenhams had had their id squatted on Twitter: Brand identities at risk as fakers take their place on Twitter (can't deep link as you need a userid to read the full article on the site). Fortunately no-one seems to be publishing under the original Debenhams name, unlike South West Trains, where an unhappy SWT customer is recounting (poor) personal travel experiences on Twitter under the name of SWT. What action can a brand take? Not much it seems. Debenhams officially tweets under DebenhamsRetail. The brand protection part of a digital strategy just got harder - not just grabbing domain names in lots of markets but taking brand names out of circulation in all social media environments, across all markets - near impossible.