What is, and what is not Twitter?

I'm not sure how many of my readers listen to Howard Stern these days but last week Howard went on one of his rants and this time it was about Twitter. It seems that management of satellite radio wants Howard to start using Twitter to stay connected to fans. Howard's response of course was that he stays connected through the phones and the radio but if we look at his reasons for not using Twitter they are, at a basic level, sound and logical and may explain why only 1 in 20 people use Twitter here in the U.S.



The people who own Twitter don't need a PR agency to do much. Every business trade magazine and newspaper is abuzz with stories on Twitter and its growth. The fact that very few marketers have learned to leverage Twitter is indicative of the problems of trying to take consumer centered media and convert it for promotional business use. Marketers that have tried to interrupt users on Twitter have been slapped down because they don't understand that to join any conversation you first have to listen than determine how you can add value to the engagement.

Twitter, if you don't know by now, is a microblogging site limited to 140 character posts. While a lot of people use Twitter to tell others that they just woke up and are going shopping smart people are using Twitter to sort through the wealth of information on the Web. Information is a powerful asset to decision makers and businesses but what is even more important is to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Twitter is great at doing this if you know who to follow and how to react to information.

I have a little over 450 followers on Twitter and I follow 30 people who are connected to areas like branding and the pharma industry. Ed Silverman, for example, updates us all on breaking news via Twitter as do people like the publisher of Med Ad News, Jim Edwards and John Mack. Throughout the day we are able to stay connected and stay on top of news as it happens and that is the advantage and power of Twitter. As Twitter moves through its lifecycle I believe more and more people are going to use it as a tool to stay on top of important industry news of their choice.

Many companies have tried to sell via Twitter and frankly they have been unsuccessful. Coke has over 2.5 million people following their Facebook page but their sales are flat and one has to ask "do consumers really want to interact with a soda brand?" With the current state of the economy a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands thus there isn't an issue to use social media to keep others updated on the last time we had a latte. But as recent research showed there is a high dropout rate on Twitter and I would suspect that the a lot of people who have Facebook pages don't update them nor go to Facebook when they are on the Web.

I really don't like the term social media because everything on the Web could be social if they have tools for feedback and interaction. Social media is a conversation that is controlled by users, plain and simple. Pharma could bring people together to talk about products, treatments and other health issues but right now that path is a long one because people just don't trust pharma companies. What pharma needs to think about is how they would talk to people one on one and what value they could bring to the conversation. That too is going to take time but more than that it's going to take new thinking of DTC marketing.