Brand Fluidity and Brand Loyalty
Yesterday I attended a lunch presentation on Social Media one of the speakers, Kevin Urie of Social Media Club Seattle, said something that rubs me the wrong way.
“I don’t follow people [on Twitter] that don’t have an @-reply on the first page of their account. Twitter isn’t supposed to be a broadcast medium.”
(For those that don’t know you use the @ symbol and the persons username to indicate you are responding to someone. So, @userdriven is you want to talk to us)
I perked up immediately when I hear this. What do you mean Twitter isn’t a broadcast medium? Twitter description of itself from its home page implies broadcast:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
What am I doing? “I am writing a blog about how Twitter’s brand has been taken over by people that have reinterpreted it’s function.” That sounds like broadcast to me. Even if I am sending a high signal tweet that includes the link of a blog I am reading or music that I am listening to I am still broadcasting.
Well, these days the rampant use hashtags (e.g. #journchat) and replies (e.g. @inflatemouse) have pushed the concept of conversation so far that anyone that uses Twitter for the services explicit function is considered noise.
Twitter is now like a piecemeal BBS or a public IM session. The “conversation” is multi-part, free flowing and if you aren’t using @ and # many people feel you are doing wrong. It is now surprise that Twitter has a low retention rate. The most successful accounts on Twitter by conversation standards are not even people, they are robots and co-tweet brands. There are now meta-accounts that rebroadcast compartmentalized information to compensate for the change from personal circle following to the following of 1000’s to see the conversation. These meta-accounts scrape search and retweet tweets that contain buzzwords. For example I tweeted that I was looking for a party on Cinco de Mayo and Seattle City Search responded–that is great but I was only interested in the responses from the people I know. These types of accounts have a high signal metric because they @ frequently and send links but they are turning Twitter into an echo chamber.
Accelerating the echo effect are sites like ReTweetist that actually spur competition for who is most retweeted. Can you imagine this kind of behavior of high response high retweeting counts if everyone was using Twitter for its intended purpose?
I am making a nacho mountain.
RT@someone I am making a nacho mountain.
RT@someone_else RT@someone I am making a nacho mountain.
Many social media marketers are taking the stance that this new phenomenon is great for your business because it is putting you in the conversion. But, where is the conversation?
The reason that Twitter has grown so well is that they have let people use the service in the way they want, A+ for flexibility. But, the mob-ocracy that they have created leaves many people feeling unhappy with the social pressure that is created. Twitter’s brand has been taken over by the users. Like Digg and Reddit Twitter will probably drown in its culture as their unspoken motto shifts from: “What are you doing” to “Do what the mob wants.”
Carlos,
Thanks for the out of the “echo chamber” response. It’s great to have conversations with people like you, who have a different take on social media than myself.
As with any social network, they are what you make of it. If you want it to be a broadcast medium, but all means broadcast.
As for businesses that want to broadcast with social media however, they are never going to achieve the “following” or connection with their audience that social media can provide them.
We can already get these messages from their website and advertising. To develop loyal customers you must let them connect with your brand, the people behind the brand, and you must show them they are valued.
In other words the best thing brands can do is to treat their customers as friends, and I don’t want a friend that doesn’t listen or interact.
I agree that conversation is valid goal in social media, but I don’t think that Twitter really hits that mark. It is so disjointed and limited in structurally to be anything other than a launching pad.
Answering a customer query in a Tweet seems more about showing the world that you respond rather than actually about addressing the issue–like when companies spend millions of dollars advertising that they are giving a hundred thousand dollars to a charity.
I think that Twitter was better before it was flooded companies. Micro-blogging seems too restrictive a field for real conversation even if its value for sentiment monitoring and information transfer is high.
Yeah,going back and forth is hard on Twitter,I agree. It goes back to my 60-30-10 idea. It’s all about adding value to the community, and conversations are one way to add value.
But you can add value in a lot of ways.
BTW, when I choose who to follow the @ is just part of how I make that decision. I love when people RT people or link to others blogs as well.