When I started using Twitter, I was excited. I saw it as a great medium to share information with other people who share the same interests as you. My usage has since tapered off, and I started thinking about why this is. To me, it seems that there are problems with how users can measure their ’success on Twitter’. Users seem to measure their success based on their number of Tweets and their follower count. This leads to some incredibly annoying behavior, which has, in my opinion, significantly weakened the value of Twitter. Here are my biggest pet peeves with regards to Twitter usage:

Using it as a popularity contest

Who cares how many people follow you??…yet I always see messages like  ‘I’m about to get my 100th follower’ or ‘whoever is my 1000th follower I will RT you’ — really? This is just noise, and does nothing productive. To me, the value in people following you is that you get to see what they are up to. It is likely they followed you because you have some common interest, and when they follow you, you have the opportunity to see what their spin is on that common interest. I have seen other users talk about / try to boost their follower to following ratio. Clearly, you must be really awesome if a lot of people are listening to you, but you don’t listen to very many people…clearly..

Using it to generate noise

I cannot believe how much noise is on Twitter. I only follow ~50 people as of now, and there’s still too many Tweets to manage. I see Twitter as a great opportunity to share, but people need to use some restraint. This includes:  1. Not sharing what you have for dinner every day 2. Not sharing when you go to the store and what you bought 3. Not sharing when you woke up or went to bed, etc. etc.  As a general rule for restraint, ask yourself — if someone else sent this Tweet, would I care? — if the answer is no, maybe you should think twice. In my opinion, Tweeting about everything really degrades the value of Twitter.

I always see messages like ‘about to make my 1000th Tweet, how should I use it?’ To me, this is ridiculous — you are congratulating yourself on making more noise on Twitter. Unfortunately, follower count and number of tweets are the only real subjective measurements that Twitter has….so people tend to measure themselves based on it

Complaining That People Unfollow You

This is not middle school. If you get unfollowed, it just means that person doesn’t see value in what you’re saying. No big deal — if you were walking down the street, yelled out some random information, and no one turned to acknowledge you, would you be pissed? No, you wouldn’t…so don’t be pissed on Twitter. No joke, I read a Tweet where the user was debating not patronizing a store anymore because the owner unfollowed them. Wow…just wow.

Promoting your ‘new blog post’ or new website tons of times

Okay – We get it, you wrote a new blog post. I totally respect Tweeting about it once or twice (as I do as well when I make a new post). But making 10-20 Tweets about it is ridiculous. If people care what you’re saying, they will find a way to find your content….you do not have to spam them. Unfortunately, the reason why people do it is that there is so much noise in the first place

Having conversations that no one cares about

People getting into conversations (non DM) on Twitter that aren’t interesting to anyone besides the two involved users gets annoying very quickly. Take it somewhere else (that is, unless other people are likely to care about it)

Anyway, enough complaining for the day. I am sure that I am guilty of at least one behavior described above at one point or another — the problem is that seeing the behavior in other users will just reinforce the legitimacy of your behavior — a never-ending cycle.  There are numerous other problems I see, but I believe there are a few easy things that Twitter can do to help resolve the problems, and enable users to extract the most value out of their service. Don’t get me wrong — I believe Twitter is in the process of revolutionizing the sharing of information — I just think there’s a few kinks to iron out. Now that Twitter is really hitting a tipping point, these kinks are becoming more and more obvious. For my next post, I think I’ll talk about some ideas I have on how Twitter can solve some of these issues.

Thank you for your inquiry and apologize for any difficulties you are experiencing with your can. It sounds like you need a new hinge pin. We have changed the material of the hinge pin from plastic to metal to prevent future breakage. We will be glad to send you that part free of charge. Please allow 5-7 business days for the delivery of your replacement hinge pin. Your order will be shipped via USPS to the address you provided on the online form. You will also receive a confirmation email when your order has been processed and shipped.

At simplehuman, we stand behind our products 100% and are working to offer the best possible service. We hope that our products can continue to serve you well for the years ahead.

Is this for real? Yes it is, and it made me happy enough to take the time and write a blog post about it. Several things about this experience are interesting to me. For one, this is an incredibly cheap way for them to make their customers happy. The replacement part probably costs less than $5 to produce, and the postage to ship it to me was under $2. There are obviously other costs associated, but overall it is very cheap. This great service directly affected the opinions of only 1 person (myself) — however, I would argue that given the increasing reach and ease of adoption of social media tools (Twitter, etc.), customer service (both poor and great) can have dramatic effects on a large set of potential customers. It’s no secret that people like to complain about customer service when it is horrible — we’ve all heard our friend’s stories of 2-hour support calls, or being transferred to 8 different people in 6 different countries while just trying to get a simple question answered. But I believe it is so easy now to contribute content socially via Twitter and other tools, that consumers will actually be willing to rave about good customer service as well — and this will impact the purchasing behaviors of others.

Knowing this, some companies will be able to use top-notch customer service to their advantage and as a viable advertising alternative to flashy, expensive ads through normal media streams (my guess is that SimpleHuman doesn’t have a huge advertising budget). After only being on Twitter for a few weeks, I’ve seen my fair share of Tweets in the form of ‘Wow, X company is great because they did Y’ , or ‘Excited for my morning cup of coffee at Z, I love that place!’ — I think these types of social micro-advertisements generated by consumers will start to carry more weight, particularly as social media goes mainstream.

On the other hand, there are plenty of negative micro-rants out there (e.g. ‘<Insert Company Here> sucks because <Insert Reason>’ is a good template) — and companies will have to find a way to mitigate the risks of these attacks destroying their reputations. Some companies have already figured this out…

There are many companies on Twitter who actively respond to customer complaints and recommendations. In this BusinessWeek article, some companies noted as being on Twitter include Dell, GM, JetBlue, and Whole Foods.  There are also several documented examples of consumers receiving almost immediate customer service after posting negative comments on Twitter (one person notes being contacted immediately by a Customer Service representative after posting a comment about a software problem).  I did a quick search on Google and found many other intriguing avenues for consumers to get customer service in a relatively effortless and ’social’ way. One of the more interesting sites I came across was GetSatisfaction.com , a site that aims to remove the boundaries between people and companies to form a mutually beneficial relationship without the typical customer-service hula-hoops (’press 1 for help with your <X>)

This brings me to the three main points I want to make:

• Consumer-driven micro-advertising in social media is real – If you are a company and you haven’t started managing your online reputation in social media yet, do it now…before it’s too late. Twitter is hitting its Tipping Point – I challenge you to search Twitter for any major company name – Tweets will show up! (to test this theory, I just searched for CarMax, first entry I saw:  “bluedogexpress: Carmax offered way below KBB.com fair price.”  — See what I mean? You can use this media avenue to your advantage — or if you ignore it, it can explode in your face.
  
• Opportunities exist to help big companies deal with social media, and they will be profitable - This is new stuff, and it’s only going to get bigger. Companies will need help in getting this right, as managing online reputation can be a delicate challenge — I see ‘Social Media Consultant’ as a potentially popular and profitable job title in the next few years — so study up.
  
• You have the power to make companies better – When you call a company and complain, they don’t have a big incentive to respond. When you (constructively) criticize companies through social media outlets, and thousands of other people see it – companies have a huge incentive to respond. Use this to your advantage.

So whether you own a company, work in advertising / marketing, or are simply a consumer of goods — the game is changing all around. How will you use it to your advantage?

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After a few days of usage, I am starting to see why people use it — I am realizing that knowing what everyone else is doing (in 140 characters or less) is just scraping the surface of the power that Twitter can bring to the web.

In my eyes, Twitter has several very good things going for it:

• It does one thing, and it does that one thing well – The idea is simple, not overwhelming to users, and is sticky. I tend to lose interest in apps that just have too much stuff going. All I have to do with Twitter is post tweets, look at other people’s tweets, and find other people who have interesting things to say. Dead simple!
• It is easy to adopt and does not take a significant amount of time to set up. use. With twitter, I can create a login name, and start posting!
• The openness of the Twitter Search API gives it tremendous value as a platform for other interesting applications – At first inspection, it looks like you can search for basically anything (words, users, hashtags) in Twitter messages. My brain starts spinning with interesting applications you could build with this powerful API…

Here are some possible apps I could think of that you could build with the Twitter Search API. I didn’t really search around, so I have no idea if something similar to these apps has actually been implemented already:

• Build a service that can aggregate impromptu events. For example, a user interested in organizing a pick-up game of basketball in Milwaukee could Tweet ‘#impromptu basketball game 53202 6:30pm monday’ The service could organize these events, and provide a way for other users to show interest
• Use it to exchange tickets to events at the last minute. For example, a user could Tweet ‘#ticketsto Bucks/Pistons fourth row available for $20′
• Integrate with GasBuddy so that users can Tweet the latest Gas prices
• Use it as a Wii Finder (are those things still hard to find?) ‘#wii-found at target on bluemound 53202′
• Build an emotion aggregator (for example, tweet ‘#imfeeling awesome after watching the pistons win’). The aggreagator could aggregate by emotions, and show interesting views on the data.

How do the above benefits weigh against the potential issues with Twitter?

One of the potential issues I thought Twitter would have is user adoption. I am fairly tech-saavy, and it took me over a year and a half to sign up since Twitter was released. A lot of my friends, who are also tech-saavy, either have never used Twitter, or used it for a short time and lost interest. Is this indicative that Twitter only appeals to a small subset of techies? The data indicates otherwise, with Twitter reporting 752% growth this year in users (up from 500k to 4.43m). This rapid growth may indicate that Twitter is about to hit a major Tipping Point.

Another potential issue that seems to be one with every social networking site is data privacy-related concerns. With any social network, there seems to be a constant trade-off between building your Weak Ties and preserving your privacy. We often gain the most valuable information from people who are outside our close network of friends. It is very easy to expand your group of Weak Ties on Twitter. As a trade-off to this, it seems fairly easy for unwanted people to become your Weak Ties (and for you to propagate information to them) when you may rather not be tied to those people at all. It is arguably easier for this to happen on Twitter than on Facebook – but this is one of the main benefits I see of Twitter over something like Facebook – Twitter is designed in such a way to improve the quality of your weak ties. You make your decisions on which Weak Ties to connect to based on what the user is saying / thinking (e.g. through their Tweets), rather than who the user is connected to (which seems to be the normal case on Facebook).

I am excited to have seen the value in Twitter, and I plan to use it actively. I am also planning to start playing around with the Search API to see if I can build a simple application (possibly one of the ones I described above).

What does everyone think? What is the best utilization of the Twitter API in an application so far? It seems the possibilities are endless. What about use adoption? Do your non-techie friends use Twitter? And if so, do they continue to use it and see a value in the service? Looking forward to hearing any feedback you have.