A new study says 99% of US Online Retailers are planning to have Facebook Fan Pages, and 91% are planning to have Twitter accounts. Theoretically this is to both build a fan base and keep in touch with their customers about upcoming products and sales.
I've always seen the attempt to build "fans" around a retail outlet rather disingenuous. Consumers generally shop at one retailer or another because of low prices and convenience. I imagine there is generally no one who are actual fans of retailers, outside of Sharper Image/Brookstone gadget enthusiasts. I'm sure this massive move to online representation will separate retailers along those two lines: those who see this as a real opportunity to give their customers the information they need, and those who use this to attempt building an imaginary retailer fan base.
Showing posts with label messaging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label messaging. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
All Aboard the Twitter Train...
...But where is it going?
An article on Rotorblog today points out exponential growth in Twitter's ComScore web traffic ranking and that the social communication tool has become the third most popular social networking destination aside from Facebook and MySpace. This is interesting because most articles I see about Twitter nowadays point out the celebrity rush to jump on the bandwagon, how many corporations and celebrities jump on it in the hopes of driving traffic back to their site, it's ghastly "replacement" of regular blogging (which people have been conjecturing and complaining about since it popped up on the Social Media radar), and the other long-standing gripe about how meaningful is a 140 character form of communication?
These two opposites seem to suggest to me that Twitter's not going away anytime soon and the grumbling is really just anxiety about where it will go next. Which is a good question: what's the next logical step from here? As social communication becomes more truncated I think Twitter fills a desire to say something terse but meaningful. No Tweet can be longer than 140 characters so there's little room for a spectrum of worth. When I Tweet about the turkey sandwich I ate for lunch and Neil Gaiman Tweets about his book winning a Newberry Award, they're limited to the same amount of information, are both easily digestible. I would argue this is a function filled by Facebook's Status too.
So if short social messaging fills such a cozy niche, what could people possibly want more?
An article on Rotorblog today points out exponential growth in Twitter's ComScore web traffic ranking and that the social communication tool has become the third most popular social networking destination aside from Facebook and MySpace. This is interesting because most articles I see about Twitter nowadays point out the celebrity rush to jump on the bandwagon, how many corporations and celebrities jump on it in the hopes of driving traffic back to their site, it's ghastly "replacement" of regular blogging (which people have been conjecturing and complaining about since it popped up on the Social Media radar), and the other long-standing gripe about how meaningful is a 140 character form of communication?
These two opposites seem to suggest to me that Twitter's not going away anytime soon and the grumbling is really just anxiety about where it will go next. Which is a good question: what's the next logical step from here? As social communication becomes more truncated I think Twitter fills a desire to say something terse but meaningful. No Tweet can be longer than 140 characters so there's little room for a spectrum of worth. When I Tweet about the turkey sandwich I ate for lunch and Neil Gaiman Tweets about his book winning a Newberry Award, they're limited to the same amount of information, are both easily digestible. I would argue this is a function filled by Facebook's Status too.
So if short social messaging fills such a cozy niche, what could people possibly want more?
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