Greg Verdino, who has done, and is doing, a lot of great work, recently posted "Ten reasons why Twitter is like Second Life." While I agree that the hype is at similar levels, I think there are key reasons Twitter will succeed, and they more than outweigh Greg's concerns.
1. The concept is sound. I was skeptical of Second Life hype from the start, because at its heart, "immersion" requires inconvenience. To get from one place to another requires some perception of space to cover, which means time. On the web, I can go from experience to experience in a click, which is still faster than if, I "teleport" or zip around in a flying car with a guy in a bunny suit. Twitter brings the convenience of digital to real life. I can query my followers for information, share pictures, and organize events more easily than with standard email, wherever I am. Which brings me to...
2. Device portability. A user can engage with Twitter anywhere they have an Internet connection -- the ability to update from their phone, IM, or iPhone app in addition to their computer which immediately increases the amount of usage occasions, which increases utility, which increases relevance, and so on.
3. Ease of use. The constraint of 140 characters relieves many users of the burden, for good or ill, of having to proclaim something momentous, which makes participation easy. Finding interesting people to follow is becoming simpler with recommended users, allowing for a shallow learning curve. And unlike Second Life, your settings and the application is very lightweight, which means that most IT departments and users don’t get a migraine trying to make it work in the first place.
4. Time commitment. You can dip in and out of Twitter in less than a minute, and get a sense about what is going on, and contribute if necessary. Compared with the in-depth participation required to “produce” anything in Second Life, it’s the difference between channel surfing and seeing a full-length film. This is not a flaw of 2L, but rather a fact of “life” in virtual worlds, which is that the main benefit, immersion, takes time, which goes back to #1. The fact that you can easily pop-in/pop-out of Twitter also leads to...
5. Celebs. This is the point that Greg makes that I take the most issue with -- that geeks are the only ones on Twitter, and the social media echo-chamber has deceived us once again. While there are plenty of “geek” stars like John Hodgman and Rainn Wilson, there is also a growing list of celebs that, by no definition, are digerati. Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ), Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk), Dave Navarro (@davenavarro6767), and Christian Siriano (@csiriano) are a small sampling of the real-life celebrities that are using Twitter on their own, without a publicist filter. I excluded the mass of politicians, reporters, and authors that are also on, but a list can be found at www.valebrity.com. These are mainstream personalities, but there is little general awareness by their fans that they can be tracked, followed, and even conversed with. Compare this with the one-off/novelty concerts in Second Life. Twitter provides celebrity/fan access with little filter (as Shaq has demonstrated frequently) -- 2L basically added another layer between them. Once the MySpace hordes figure this out, it will lead to...
6. Critical Mass. There is a case to be made that once even John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) has adopted a technology, that it can be considered mainstream. Not only has the growth been staggering, but it has been across the demographic spectrum, which shows a base that is not reliant on fickle teen or the even more fickle digerati. The growth is undeniable, and it becomes much more sustainable with a broad swath of users engaging in any number of ways. Greg’s point about Jaiku and Lively is a bit of a canard – by that logic Google Latitude should have never launched based on their acquisition of Dodgeball back in the day. Not that I can’t play mind reader, but companies kill products for a host of different reasons, and Lively being an offering for a non-starting category is different than Jaiku not providing compelling competition.
7. Brands. Dell’s twitter sales are real. Comcast’s customer service impact is significant. Zappo’s engagement with consumers has improved loyalty. The answer to Greg’s question “Is it any different than spending resources (and money) to allow a few hundred or thousand Second Lifers to wander around your virtual hotel or test drive your virtual concept car?" is a pretty resounding yes. You don’t need to spend $15,000 a month for virtual real estate (and however much more for an “island”) and another $50k+ in digital production, plus however much in paid media to drive someone there in the first place. The financial commitment is $0 for a handle, and the time spent is what you make of it -- you’re not locked in, and if there is zero return or limited interest, it’s easy to evaluate and shift gears, without having to re-architect and scrap produced assets. We never recommend Twitter as a stand-alone strategy, and view it as a potential tactic that can reinforce and supplement other efforts. What get us jazzed it that when executed well, Twitter can shine a light on the benefits on conversational marketing that can then translate into all the other areas of a business.
8. Control/Griefing. The ability for one user to disrupt another user’s experience in Second Life significantly is much, much easier than in Twitter. It’s a safer and lower profile environment for users and especially brands, and blocking or un-following users couldn’t be easier. And profile-jacking is actually a much bigger problem on Facebook, though no one really covers it.
9. API. The interface of Second Life was terrible, and the control over the user experience was entirely in the hands of Linden Labs. Contrast this with Twitter, where more updates come through the API than through twitter.com. This has allowed for numerous usability enhancements and device portability, which will continue to improve over time. There are over 20 Twitter apps for the iPhone alone, and the ability to connect and update via IM, SMS, BlackBerry, email, and a ton of desktop clients makes the core service relevant to many different types of users and occasions.
10. Best is yet to come. When others were over-hyping Second Life, with business card avatars and such, I was quixotically pushing my own game changer -- social search. Search results that were human indexed had the promise to make finding information cleaner, more accurate, and more trustworthy. Search Wikia and Mahalo has struggled to find their stride, but TechCrunch’s speculation about the evolution of Twitter is enough to rekindle my old flame. Being able to query what real people have said on a topic, and the ability to ask a crowd if you still can’t find an answer, versus trying to crack a keyword code is a pretty powerful proposition. The potential for social shopping for brands, and location-based services are also post worthy, but that might be contributing to the hype. The point is that while it’s certainly not a lock that Twitter will absolutely succeed, there are more ways they “win” than “lose”.
The biggest irony for me in writing this is that the people who forced me to pay serious attention to Twitter were... Greg Verdino and Joseph Jaffe. Eighteen months ago, they were consulting a client that we were pitching and they quizzed us on our POV on a bunch of topics. I thought I did well, but the one I flubbed was their question on whether “presence applications”, which I needed to have defined for me as Jaiku and Twitter, were relevant for the CPG client. “Too geeky, and reach is too limited, but worth a look if they continue to develop and become mainstream,” I said, which was my cover for “I hadn’t thought about that yet.” While I agree with Greg that no one should focus solely on a Twitter strategy, I do think that it is an important beachhead for social marketing, and an important shift in user behavior. A year from now, we can tell who was right, but until then I would follow the conversation.
