Website Branding for Small Businesses by Nathalie Nahai

Author:Nathalie Nahai
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

In terms of social rules and etiquette, Twitter seems to be the only self-policing ecosystem in which trolling (the neanderthalic art of inciting anger online) can expect to be met with 140 characters of unanimous condemnation.

Nevertheless, Twitter remains a polarized environment in which both the mundane and the incisively intelligent coexist side by side. When Beyoncé broke the news that she was pregnant on MTV’s Video Music Awards, Twitter recorded a massive surge of 8,868 Tweets per second30—enough to raise an eyebrow perhaps, but not earth-shattering stuff. Yet, when the tsunami hit Japan, record numbers of people used Twitter to mount huge humanitarian efforts and share vital information, saving countless lives in the process. When you look at the bigger picture, you get an idea as to the scope and power of this medium at its best.

Social media is not simply a tool for communication, though. Harnessed correctly, it can also be used as an accurate predictor of real-world trends and behaviors. In one experiment, two psychologists used the chatter from Twitter to accurately forecast box office revenues for films.31 Having developed a simple model that focused on the rate of tweets specific to particular topics, they found that this Twitter-based model outperformed existing market-based predictors.

While this holds incredible promise for trend forecasting across industries, you don’t need a sophisticated model to be able to use this yourself. In 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, #egypt rose to become the most-used hashtag on Twitter, providing an insight into the focus of millions of people worldwide and facilitating the coordination and live reporting of events where other channels failed. Twitter’s power as a platform for the people’s voice is reflected in the fact that governments (from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt) have repeatedly tried to block it. When Twitter looked as though it was starting to bow under foreign pressure, announcing that it might start censoring tweets from users in certain countries, the collective response from the Twitterverse was #sh*t.

It would seem that while many of us are heralding social media as the dawn of a new era, not everyone is happy with the state of things. You need only look at the vitriol that Twitter has attracted from some corners of the press to see the threat that it poses to traditional, one-directional forms of newscasting. It is clear that Twitter is only as useful as the information its users choose to share and its greatest assets are also its greatest liabilities. Yes, we can access any information online, but checking the validity of the information contained within a tweet can be tricky and rumours spread like wildfire. Moreover, the speed with which we now expect to communicate via Twitter means that customers expect their brands to respond to them instantaneously and failing to do so can have devastating results.

CASE STUDY Dell

Brand: Dell

URL: twitter.com/delloutlet

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The web was an ideal place for us to connect directly with customers. Social media brought that and something more—a way to listen, learn and engage with customers, with a clear emphasis on the engage part of the equation.

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