A busy week on Twitter. As brands start to realise they can no longer afford to ignore it, they are slowly starting to realise its potential.
Most of the big stuff relates to hashtags and the trending topics list. As the search is realtime, trending topics list what everyone is talking about NOW!
Obviously last week was Michael Jackson week with some reports claiming 85% of all tweets were about him. A staggering number but it gives a perfect insight into what we care about. Interestingly though, MJ's tweets dwindled fairly quickly. Sure he's still there today because of the funeral but just a couple of days after his death there were times when he wasn't on the list. What's interesting is that while the BBC and national newspapers the world over were continuing their blanket coverage, believing, as they do, that the story was enough to satiate our appetite for longer, we simply moved on. Decided we knew enough, paid our respects, heard some jokes and started talking about the next topic. It shows how traditional media is second guessing, incorrectly about what we want to consume. Before Twitter, blogs, facebook et al, we had to cope with this and just moan, or stop buying the paper and watching the tv but now we can do something else and be proactive. No longer are we forced to live in a world where media is scarce and spoonfed to us, now we live in the world of abundance and have infinite choice as to what we consume.
Anyway, newspapers won't be around for much longer so we'll have to find another industry to lament.
Back to Twitter then. Some bright spark at Habitat decided to have a go at using the trending topics in order to leverage Twitter's massive audience. But instead of coming up with something so great that it created a trending topic, it hijacked one instead. Simply adding #iranelection onto the end of their post, meant it would appear if someone searched for iranelection, or clicked on the trending topic. They immediately apologised and claimed they knew nothing about it and were investigating but I wonder if it was all a cynical, no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity effort? Where they went wrong was to pick a trending topic which was so fast moving. For example, if you wrote something about iran it would be gone in a flash as hundreds and even thousands of new tweets pushed it further and further down the river or feed or whatever they call it.
Much, much better is to be the trending topic yourself and if you can be the top of the list, even better.
Moonfruit is a website creation tool and announced on its website for users to simply mention #moonfruit when they tweet and they'll give a random twitter user a Mac Book Pro every day for 10 days to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Genius. They went to number one on the trending topics list and stayed there for 4 days, more than MJ. I clicked it and now own a moonfruit website for my photography hobby. They will have got millions of hits and it probably cost them $30,000 in Apple products. Think how much it would have cost in money and time to reach an audience of that size using any traditional method.
The Twitter revolution continues apace, what I like is that its owners never realised its potential until the audience got hold of it. A classic case of building something and admitting that the crowd will decide its best use far better than they ever could.
