Twitter adoption
Twitter has seen an immense rise in popularity and relevance ever since Ashton Kutcher and Oprah joined the social media service. While the landing of a plane in the Hudson river has changed the perception of what breaking news means, we in the social media and web community have known what an unbelievable tool Twitter is. Unfortunately its usefulness can be explained easily only in “consumption” mode. People do “get-it” when it comes to following and consuming the content produced by Oprah, Charlie Sheen and the Kutcher’s, but when it comes to contributing content or curating the stream – most users are at a loss. Few dare to retweet or reply and initiate the most important part of the Twitter experience – conversation. This is where value is really created.
To really make use of this new social media and journalism phenomenon people must embrace curation and do their part. The importance of everyone pitching in is increasing with the increasing amount of crap coming into our timelines. I don’t want to follow everyone on Twitter but I do want to get the most interesting tweets. These will only then surface if my social graph on Twitter – the people I am following in this case – retweets or quotes it. So please don’t be selfish and share. In addition a lot of users suffer from the fact that they follow new organizations and celebrities – there the interaction potential is rather limited. Where it really starts to become interesting is when people they know, whether from work or personal life, join as well and start discussing and contributing content.
Today I realized that a lot of my colleagues in the Vlerick MBA program are not on Twitter at all and often have no clue what its purpose is. I did help 2 of them on to the service today but they were quite perplexed by what it’s good for. I always tried to comment on what is going on in the world from my perspective as an MBA student but I always lacked potential partners for the discussion on Twitter. Today I hope to have gained 2 and let us see how many more I can sway.
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