The piece has a really good guide to showing how it can really work. It uses the example of how during an interview at the SXSW festival in March, audience dissatisfaction with tech journalist and blogger Sarah Lacy's interviewing style with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg resulted in "silent but powerful" discourse among the audience: one calls it a "train wreck". I have been encouraging people to use it, but they have been ignoring me. One of the things the piece does is try to answer the question that people ask most often about Twitter. What is it for? It has a pretty good answer."As with any social network, the answer is the same: whatever you make of it. Some think that its immediacy makes it ideal for spreading news. Others find it useful to ask questions of their peers; still others, for following what people or topics they're interested in. The BBC and the Guardian, for example, already offer Twitter services for breaking news."Brand Republic uses it a bit like an RSS feed and I think that's something we need to look at, which we will.I really enjoy the conversations that it sparks, some of the comments that flow back and forth.It is certainly moving upwards with traffic rising steeply. Downing Street's Twitter feed for instance has several thousand followers now and rising. The piece estimates that there are now around 1.05m Twitter users -- up from 518,000 in October -- putting it on the edge of going mainstream and an exciting juncture in its development.There are several questions it now faces, chief among which is how will it make money? Will it take advertising or will it charge? The Japanese site has, as I wrote earlier, experimented with ads. So for a handy guide to get you Twittering, take a look at the Guardian piece. It suggests various bits of software you can use to make Twittering easier both on the web and from your phone.It also has help to work out how you should be following, with links to things like the directory Twitdir.com and a list of top Twitters.So get going.
*Follow me on Twitter*
and if you are not already you can follow Brand Repubic.
Gordon Macmillan
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 03 Dec 2008
Total Posts: 1,236
