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The author wasn't very good at communicating this, but the point of the article is NOT that twitter is useless to him. His point is that it's useless to most ot

by lmkg 17y ago

The author wasn't very good at communicating this, but the point of the article is NOT that twitter is useless to him. His point is that it's useless to most other users. He certainly doesn't mind the extra publicity. However, an expired contest being kept alive and well long enough for 5,000 people to enter it begs the question, what good is twitter as a content-delivery system? The individuals being fed information about this contest were not being fed useful information. Beyond the individual user-level, it's also indicative of the sheer amount of noise in the system (the wave analogy makes the claim that the lack of signal contributes even more to the noise). This assertion is easier to agree with, although I think it's generally a PEBKAC problem (on the community level) and not a problem with twitter as a tool per se, except insofar as it attracts people with 140-character attention spans.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
To be perfectly honest, I'd like to see more and more failures of this sort. In my opinion this sort of use (publicity seeking via encouraging retweets by offering a prize) is an abuse of the system. I hope it crashes and burns and dies. This sort of use pattern comes from looking at twitter through the lens of old media. "How can we get our brand out in front of lots of eyeballs?" "How can we artificially create brand recognition?" You may be able to abuse twitter to get your brand seen by more people than you could reach with a superbowl ad at much less cost, but that doesn't mean you should, or that that's helpful. It's much better to use twitter as a means to interact honestly and directly with your customers. People retweeting about some lame-ass contest will get your brand as much negative attention as positive (if not more). People organically retweeting about positive experiences with your company will be far more valuable. In short, don't spend your time pushing your brand on the public, spend your time making something awesome that people love, providing top quality service, and showing the world you are a company of real, honest people who believe in their product and care about their customers rather than a bunch of faceless attention seeking drones.

by lmkg 17y ago

InclinedPlane 17y ago

To be perfectly honest, I'd like to see more and more failures of this sort. In my opinion this sort of use (publicity seeking via encouraging retweets by offering a prize) is an abuse of the system. I hope it crashes and burns and dies. This sort of use pattern comes from looking at twitter through the lens of old media. "How can we get our brand out in front of lots of eyeballs?" "How can we artificially create brand recognition?" You may be able to abuse twitter to get your brand seen by more people than you could reach with a superbowl ad at much less cost, but that doesn't mean you should, or that that's helpful. It's much better to use twitter as a means to interact honestly and directly with your customers. People retweeting about some lame-ass contest will get your brand as much negative attention as positive (if not more). People organically retweeting about positive experiences with your company will be far more valuable. In short, don't spend your time pushing your brand on the public, spend your time making something awesome that people love, providing top quality service, and showing the world you are a company of real, honest people who believe in their product and care about their customers rather than a bunch of faceless attention seeking drones.