It’s amazing to me that Twitter has grown from a (perceived) questionable platform of democratized reporting of breakfasts and cat activity around the world to a full blown news stream.
Well, not amazing… we saw it coming and we knew that Twitter or something like it, would eventually fill the place that RSS started carving out in the early 2000’s.
This is pretty solid testimony for what Twitter means to the news business:
How Twitter won the social media battle for journalism | The Wall Blog: “More telling is the comment from Joanna Carr, editor of BBC Radio 4′s news programme ‘PM’, who said she ‘wouldn’t hire anybody who doesn’t know how to use Twitter’.
From that you get all you need to know. Twitter has quickly made itself an essential modern journalism tool for news journalists.”
(Via Matthew Ingram on Twitter)
So what does this mean for marketers?
The same thing Twitter meant for marketers in 2007 when I wrote this on CostPerNews:
It really is amazing to see how these conversations have started to sprout up as more and more people in our sphere get involved with these micro-platforms. I took a great deal of heat for being a Twitter fan boy late last year, but those same people who gave the heat are now (for the most part) realizing the potential that these programs have for their marketing efforts.
After all, marketing is just the spread of information about an idea, service, program, theology, ideology, offer or emotion… what better way to do spread that information in an attention deficit world than through micro-chunks?
I still stand by that.
Just as it is no longer an option or convenience for press professionals to not use Twitter, it is not an option for performance marketers to continue to either ignore or just use Twitter as a broadcasting medium in 2013 (or 2007).