How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live!

Microblogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year

Time has a terrific article on the future of twitter…go here to read it! Thanks to Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad for posting it on my Facebook wall..don't you just love this new language…? As  you know we are here to point you in the direction of what's hot, what's happening, and why it is useful for you to be in the know..now!

Reading from @time http://bit.ly/Vz7LG

Wall Street has come up with 10 ways that business will use Twitter-here are the first 2!

More to follow.

1.) Hyper-local marketing. Twitter is currently being used as a marketing tool for small businesses. At the same time the local outlets of some of the largest retailers in the world, which are often competing with local vendors, are turning to Twitter as well. As an example, Twitter users can follow the local pizzeria or the store's owner. Since Twitter is still mostly a person-to-person service and not a business-to-business service, it is likely that the Twitter relationship will be with the owners of small shops. With access to their Twitter addresses these small shop owners can send customers news about special offerings, sales, new merchandises, store hours, or events. International companies which operate through thousands of locations are beginning to use the same methods to gather their own lists of Twitter names. Recently, Starbucks launched a multi-million marketing program in which the company put up advertising posters in six major cities and attempted to "harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters on Tuesday and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter", the company said. The project seemed like a good way to get the company's brand in front of a large number of people online and encourage them to search for ad messages in their cities.

One of the by-products of Starbuck's marketing foray into the world of Twitter illustrates how social media can be used against a company. According to Alternet.org, filmmaker Robert Greenwald who has done a short video critical of the way that Starbucks treats employees, entered the Twitter contest as a way to get out news about his new film.

Twitter has the potential to drive substantial amounts of business to retailers as diverse as the local clothing store or the Gap (GPS), the local car repair shop or the Jiffy Lube franchise, and the local deli or the McDonald's (MCD) even though there may be adverse publicity from unhappy customers or disgruntled employees. The time may come when multinational oil companies with local gas stations can tweet people who want to save money on gas costs when the price at the pump drops a few cents, since Twitter users can follow local businesses and companies closely by zip code. The hyper-local marketing aspects of Twitter have the opportunity to move billions of dollars of business to and from retailers based on targeted marketing.

2) Outdoor ads are used almost everywhere in the world because of their simplicity and the relatively low cost of creating them. Current estimates are that global outdoor advertising sales will be a $30 billion business this year. One of the great weaknesses of older ad media, like outdoor billboard marketing and newspaper display, is that results have been nearly impossible to measure effectively. Twitter will change that. Up until recently, marketers could survey whether people remembered what they saw on outdoor ads and measure the number of cars that passed a sign on any given day. Using Twitter opens up the opportunity to make a very large and nearly unmeasurable medium measurable.

Marketers using outdoor ads will have to give Twitter users an incentive to report that they have seen a billboard. A Twitter user who sees an ad for a Toyota (TM) Corolla could be encouraged to send a tweet to the local dealer. In exchange he could get a pint of oil or a T-shirt. He will obviously have to come to the showroom in order to get that promotional item. The same principle will apply to newspaper display ads, a shrinking category which is disappearing so fast that it is helping to destroy the newspaper industry. Some display ads have coupons, but the ability of a newspaper advertiser to get reactions back from consumers though Twitter help make another hard-to-measure medium at least partially interactive.

If the use of Twitter to measure these categories of marketing are even modestly successful, it could completely change the marketing methodology and advertising investment that companies are willing to make in outdoor media. That category includes billboard, telephone, taxi, and public transportation. Because Twitter can be used on mobile devices as well as PCs and since Twitter allows messages of a maximum of 140 characters, the reactions to outdoor ad messages can be instantaneous. Conversely, relying on e-mail responses or postings on MySpace or Facebook requires a much longer and more complex process for both the end user as well as the company. Many people will not take the time to follow through if the incentives to do so are modest. It only takes a few seconds for a Twitter user to indicate that he has seen an outdoor ad or newspaper display message by texting.

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