Tuesday (05/1/07)
Twitter, A Marketing Wonder 1:18 pm
As a recent Twitter convert, the rapid adoption of the application has me intrigued. Unlike what basic marketing principles tell you to do, Twitter does not seem to market towards any need whatsoever and targets no one in particular. It’s just there.
There is no public mission statement, and there is really nothing to even tell you why you’d want use it. Their about page tells you basically nothing other than where they are located and when they launched. The homepage gives you two simple sentences:
“A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”
But where’s the draw? That tells me what it does, but not why. Up until now, nobody really had a need to constantly update the world on what they’re doing that instant. And if they did, there were phones, email, newsgroups, blogs, and IM for that. Furthermore, I don’t think anybody really cared what others were doing every minute of their life.
Yet regardless, it quickly caught on and spread rapidly, and something interesting happened: People saw the power of the technology and found needs themselves that it could fill. While many saw it simply as another way to waste time, John Edwards decided it was a good promotional tool, CNN thought they’d keep you posted, and Lifehacker sees it as a possible todo list/people manager/newsletter.
From what I can tell, rather than Obvious (the creators of Twitter) deciding what needs to fill then marketing to them (what is usually recommended when launching anything), they simply launched an amazing bit of technology and people latched onto it and created their own needs.
That’s not something that happens very often, and I’ll be interested to see how long it can last. 
I eat food. I listen to music. I sleep. Sometimes. I drink lots of coffee. I make pretty pictures. I talk to people. I believe in things. I write stuff. I take photographs. I have a laughing addiction. I am human. 
Twitter is fantastic because its uses are completely open to interpretation. For a while, I was using it as a mini-blog, displaying my “tweets” along-side my blog posts. Some have started using it to keep in touch with family and friends because of it’s fantastic SMS feature. I know a company that needed a simple and inexpensive way to get short messages to all their employees cell phones at once… They implemented Twitter!
Anyway, that’s what I love about the damn thing… What you do with it is up to YOU. Yay for imagination, right?
[…] Elliot calls Twitter a marketing wonder: Twitter does not seem to market towards any need whatsoever and targets no one in particular. It’s just there. […]
Yes, especially interesting to see how long it lasts before it either A. gets bought out. or B. Every other service creates a similar service. Facebook already has a ‘twitter’, bebo has it too. Maybe Twitter has the first mover advantage though and can stay number one with the initial rush and their brand. We will see…
Twitter can’t answer the question of “why.” I use it for silly reasons, other people allow it more control, and some people are wholly dependent on Twitter to get by in life. By not providing a reason to update your Twitter, Obvious leaves that end up open to whoever wants to fill it in.
And it’s not like the “why” matters; I love it even though I don’t really have an “important” purpose for doing so
It is pretty amazing how one, seemingly useless service can suddenly acquire thousands (I think they have at least that much by now) of users.
There wasn’t ever a need to tell people what you were doing. There still isn’t, aside from “because everyone else is doing it.” There are other uses to Twitter, of course (as that Lifehacker article points out), but most people use it how it is supposed to be used - telling people what you’re doing.
I didn’t really notice it before, but reading your article, I realize just how ingenious the site is. It isn’t very often that people create needs because of a service.