Broadcasting to your Social Graph

I was listening to an interesting discussion on the Gilmore Gang the other day were two points of view where raised in regards to the use of Twitter. One point of view was that the people that follow you on Twitter are valuable and therefore the content you put into your Twitter stream should be focused around the conversations you want to have. The other point of view was focused on using Twitter as a broadcasting tool for marketing of what ever you want to promote, either that being yourself, your business or anything else you see fit to promote.

The discussion arose from the recent events centred around Twitter were Ashton Kutcher and CNN where competing against each other to see who could reach the million follower mark first. Supposedly Ashton used some methods that seemed a little low on the morale totem pole to some people in that he offered to donate 20 thousand mosquito nets to Africa if people followed him and helped him win the race.

The point was that using the service in this fashion left a bad taste in some peoples mouths and that it could be considered objectionable that he did this. The other side of the coin and the side that I fall on is that if you didn’t like his approach of leveraging who he is for his own gains, then you can always un-follow and not talk about the incident so as to not give it any air and therefore not help it grow.

The advent of these technologies and the integration of them into how we communicate and the reach they provide, ensures that mediocrity will be exposed and not tolerated at a much faster pace than has ever been seen in our history before. So with greater power comes greater responsibility or does it just expose us sooner?

This got me to thinking about my use of Twitter and my view of its value. When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was brilliant, I thought I got it and immediately signed up. However once I signed up I hit a wall, what the hell do I want to say? So as you can see from my Tweets on the right hand side of the page in the side bar, not a lot by the looks of it. I started to think that as an instant messenger replacement, Twitter certainly isn’t, even though millions of people use it in such a fashion.

To me the value proposition was in the ability to use it as a broadcasting tool. A way of reaching those that have similar interests and are happy to listen to you broadcast your message, whatever it may be. I mean if they don’t like it then they can un-follow you right? Also using it as a broadcasting tool does not equal spamming products and services you want to sell. Doing so will mean you will soon have no one to broadcast too.

Therefore using Twitter to broadcast to your disciples means you need to be judicious in what you put into your Twitter stream. Balancing information of value and blatant advertising will be a skill acquired over time. Also I believe this will force those that are doing the advertising to evolve how they get their message out and ensure it is far more targeted to the audience than we have ever seen. The meta data that we leek and the ability for communities to swarm around things of interest will help shape the way advertising is crafted and delivered in the future. The face of advertising will change.

I myself am thinking about these issues as I have integrated Twitter into a new business I have started. In my previous post I talk about how the ability to gather, correlate and deliver timely valuable information will be a business vertical of the future. As part of that business I have three Twitter accounts so far, that I broadcast information of value into. It is focused information of interest that a segment of the community enjoys. I do blast blatant advertising into those streams in a limited fashion. The advertising is focused and less intrusive because its context aware and relevant to the audience.

Part of the business model is to put together a service of value that helps define the audience, this as I believe and I will be able to speak with more authority about as time goes on, allows me to advertise in a limited yet highly targeted fashion without turning the audience away. The challenge is to ensure the advertising is not SPAM and does not out weigh the value proposition the service provides. As the business model becomes evident and more successful, the tolerance for advertising may diminish as the choices of service providers increases. The winner will have the balance of advertising to content just right.

When that tipping point arrives, the other aspects of the service will need to be highly tuned so they are compelling enough to stop your audience from leaving. This means the value proposition will need to be loud, clear and obvious if the service is to survive. The closer you are to the top, the more accurate that last statement will be.