An article published in eMarketer poses the question:


In sports, if you hit .360 with 30 HR's and 100 RBI's (and you're lucky enough to be a free agent) you will get several very lucrative offers from several teams.  In business, if you do what Twitter is doing you (reportedly) get offered a very lucrative $700 million for the company. 

In baseball, if you don't immediately take the big contract, (as negotiating ploy)  in order to try and get more from another team...and subsequently, during negotiations with other teams, it comes out that you were taking steroids, you can kiss the big contract goodbye. 

So...is Twitter a fad, running on performance enhancing media stories and fueled by celebrity twits, or is it the real deal?  Only Time will tell.  (not the magazine)  I say they shoulda taken the $700 million...

Here's the eMarketer story.

Twitter made the June 15, 2009, cover of TIME magazine.  In a lead article, the publication predicted the microblogging site, consisting of tiny 140-character messages, would have a huge impact on businesses:

“As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers,
conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some
industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter—both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations
like Wal-Mart.”

The Washington Post ran an article, “Living on Twitter Time,” that covered the public’s fascination with tweets running the gamut of subjects from celebrities to politics.

MSNBC ran an article about how the phenomenon was invading Sunday services—“Holy Twitter! They’re Tweeting from the Pews.”

Of course, the fact that Twitter is now the subject of attention from the mass media has many in online media pronouncing its death and busily scratching out obituaries.

“Twitter’s fame and glory is not going to last,” wrote Jason Clark in an iMedia Connection article entitled “Why Twitter Will Soon Become Obsolete.” “I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”

In “Twitter at the Vanishing Point,” InformationWeek listed the site’s many technical flaws and noted, “Twitter isn't exactly catching fire with Generation Y.”

The latter criticism appears to be true. A survey by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) found that only 22% of Gen Yers used Twitter, a surprisingly low percentage since the survey found that 99% claimed to have an active profile on at least one social networking site.

But, criticism notwithstanding, Twitter is showing little sign of a slowdown in growth. In May, Compete estimated that Twitter had 19.7 million unique visitors, far short of MySpace and Facebook. But it is growing much faster than the
more-established social networking sites—more than 1,000% over the previous year.

But what is the verdict on Twitter: hot as in a flash in the pan, or hot as in the fiery eruption of a new medium?

The New York Times reported that since 2007 Dell had earned $3 million in revenues directly from Twitter postings, mainly through coupons and word-of-mouth.  In interviews with online marketers, eMarketer found many of them enthusiastic about the business possibilities of Twitter. “Twitter can be used as a form of permission-based marketing to
encourage two-way conversation, and brands can use it to create relevant, authentic and transparent communications,” said Stephanie Busak of Bob Evans Farms. “It can be used to build brand recency, loyalty and is a traffic
generation tool in which links within profiles and tweets can direct people to specific areas of a site, microsites and blogs.” “We have over 6,000 followers now on Twitter,” said David Tryder of Dunkin’ Donuts. “It’s another place where customers who really care about the brand can have a conversation with us.”

If marketers can master (or develop) ways to use the conversational aspects of Twitter to strengthen customer relationships, and sell like Dell, make no mistake, Twitter will be around for a long, long time—if Twitter CEO Evan Williams and company can work out the matter of a viable business model. Note: No matter which side of the Twitter debate you are on, the power, scope and possibilities of the social medium are vividly on display in Tehran, where Iranians are using Twitter to not only communicate—bypassing censors—but posting photos of demonstrations and
bloodied protestors (see Social Networks Spread Defiance Online, from The New York Times).

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