Since some time I devote a lot of my attention to Twitter; a fast-paced (well at least if it’s online) update stream. It connects me to many people based on simple activity updates, links or short dia/multilogical exchanges. Together with RSS-feeds that’s my basic learning environment and more. It replaced - at least for now - what I got back from blogging. It accelerated the effects of conversations. Those effects result - in general - in action. Social Media is all about bringing people virtually together to trigger actions in reality. Although there isn’t too much of a difference between the real and the virtual increased density and frequency of conversations almost always bring people together to move from one space to the other - since we inhabite many (social) spaces.
Twitter - another early adopter tool you might say - is being increasingly adopted by marketing and pr people. They start listening to what is being said about the brands they represent; they interact and try to connect in order to build trusted relationships or conversational focus groups I might say. Getting your stakeholders into constant conversations guarantees early insights and the option to influence.
I remember the days when we talked of blogs as early warning systems and means of engaging with your customers - it’s quite clear that Twitter replaced (will replace) them. Now while one conversational tool follows the other and while frequency of speech acts increases at the same time the amount of content per utterance decreases. It seems to me that we are somehow moving towards an ant-like state where based on many but simple rules and conversations a lot of things can be achieved.
But don’t forget only a tiny fraction of the living even have a slight idea of what I’m talking about in this lengthy post. It’s quite clear that both forms of conversations (blogs, Twitter) are still avant-garde to many of us except the younger generation that grew up with social network applications like facebook, bebo, myspace etc. Now I wonder about the generational gap that is slowly emerging. Is it just another juvenile disruption or a more fundamental shift towards an ant-state.
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Update: if you are willing to wait and overcome the frequent outages of Twitter
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Tags: conversations, Marketing, twitter, Writing
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