OOooooh what does that do?!

So about a year ago when Eric on the dev team first introduced us all to twitter, I really didn’t get it. “What’s it for?” I asked, “You update people on what you are doing.” he replied as if I should have just KNOWN this. I still didn’t get it. I still really don’t. The only time I would use it was to annoy him with twitters like “Twittering about twittering.” and “Twittering about twittering about twittering.” and “Twittering about twittering about twittering about twittering about twittering….” yeah you get the picture. My twitterstream was pretty much used to annoy Eric. That died off shortly and I left it alone. And then Ted started twittering on the Blog America Tour and I started to see the potential. It’s really great if you are on a trip or doing something. Twittering has almost replaced “I’m gonna blog about this”. It’s almost a quick bookmark in time for you to maybe come back and revisit later to write a post about or a discussion. It’s a conversation starter. It’s also a hell of a marketing tool. There’s lots “twits” out there advertising products and services as well as keeping people in the loop on what their favorite companies are up to. The Izea company twitter is a good example of this. Whenever an event is coming up, Ash is good about shooting out reminders and posts to build excitement around it. He announces things like the upcoming Izeafest and Lunch with Ash and V(which is going to be HUGE by the way you should check it out on Wednesdays at 12pm EST.). And when we launched SocialSpark, we ALL used twitter to get the word out.

It is a bit dangerous in the sense that it could easily turn into spam. I’ve had a lot of random followers join up and curiosity leads me to click on the link and BAM!, I’m inundated with a page full of links to viagra etc. There are, however some REALLY creative ones out there that get the information out about their product, but keep their twitstream interesting enough to have people follow them. Take the Zappos twitter for instance. They do all kinds of cool contests and give away shoes. Sure there’s a certain amount of “This sale going on” or “Check out our new X” twits but for the most part it’s a pretty cool little community built around this company. I’m not a huge shoe person but I have to say they’re doing a good job bringing something as commonplace as shoes into the world of social media.

Overall I think twitter has a lot of potential for good AND evil. It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.