A few weeks ago was the anniversary of my seventh year tweeting. You can bet that is a sentence I never thought I’d write.
I'm seeing how this thing works.
— Jeff Turner 📷 (@jeffturner) March 11, 2007
I'm going to bed. Still not sure I "get" this.
— Jeff Turner 📷 (@jeffturner) March 20, 2007
Had lunch with a group of bloggers today, none of us get Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ytycts
— Jeff Turner 📷 (@jeffturner) March 22, 2007
Ah, the good old days. I first wrote about my experiences with Twitter somewhere other than on Twitter on March 31, 2007. It was on ActiveRain in a post titled, “What Is Everyone Twittering About.” It wasn’t even called “tweeting” back then. This portion of the post makes me laugh:
“Twitter does not give me access to information older than 24 hours in my friends stream. These are just a few tidbits from the past 24 hours. Where is this going? I don’t know for sure. The point is, I don’t need to know for sure. It has already provided value and a way to connect with people and ideas I certainly would not have otherwise. Heck, CNN started streaming breaking news there, so who knows what’s coming next.”
It’s humorous to me because just a six months later, in another post about a now defunct site called SuckyStatups.com, I wrote the following:
“Twitter.com: SuckyStartups.com’s post, Why Twitter Sucks, is more of a rant, but it gets at some of what I have felt all along. I wrote about Twitter on March 31, 2007. I said at that time, “Can I guarantee you’ll get it? No. I’m not sure I do.” Here I am almost 6 months later and I still don’t get it. I know this throws me out of favor with all the cool geek kids, but it’s true. In fact, I don’t get it to the point that I’m not going to use it even more than I’m not using it now. I’m going to follow the advice I gave to NP Dodge Real Estate Agents and quit doing one thing that isn’t bringing a return on my investment (time) and do something else instead.
If that post isn’t funny enough for you, the comment stream might do the trick. Of course, less than a month later, I was back again. Why? Because a whole slew of people who were going to attend the NAR Annual Convention in 2007 began using it to communicate. I believe it was Dustin Luther who called me back. It suddenly had a purpose and group of people I was interested in speaking with. A year later I was conducting a “social media experiment” from the floor of the NAR Conference in 2008 that involved three other companies, two of which went out of business long ago. The lone survivor from that test was Tatango, an SMS marketing provider. And Twitter, of course.
It’s safe to say I have a fickle relationship with social media. I swore off Foursquare for a year a while ago. I came back though. And now I’m just enjoy using it, with no real objective except to let my friends know where I’m at. If you’re wondering, most days I’m at the same three places. Would I miss it if it were gone. Probably not. I dropped off of Path and likely won’t go back… too much looking at my phone. I liked it though. But I don’t miss it either, because everyone I was talking to there I still talk to elsewhere. I stopped posting to my Instagram account in December of 2012 to make some kind of statement that is loosely captured in my last photo there. I haven’t gone back because I don’t miss it
And that brings me to here. Seven years on Twitter, punctuated by just one month – October of 2007 – with no tweets. I could reminisce about the “old days” on Twitter that were dominated by longer conversations, the place where I got to know, from a distance, many people who are now some of my dearest friends. Instead I’m going to celebrate the one social media site that, despite my moments of doubt, I’ve never given up on. I think I’d miss it if it were gone.
How much revenue have you obtained that you can directly attribute to Twitter? How many connections have you made through Twitter that have resulted in business that you could not have obtained any way other than Twitter? How much added client satisfaction have you been able to deliver thru Twitter that you would not otherwise have been able to deliver?
And finally, how many Tweets would you Tweet if you had to pay $1 per tweet? $5 per tweet?
Bill, you should already know this, but I’m one of the people who can point to many business relationships that have turned into significant revenue as a result of initial connections created via Twitter. One relationship resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in business.
Added customer satisfaction? Yesterday a strategy meeting around a improvement to a product came as a result of a client tweet. A meeting with that client to discuss the ideas is already scheduled for Monday evening. That’s just one example from yesterday.
Would I tweet less if I had to pay $1. You bet. But mainly because very few others would. It would completely change the dynamics of the network and make it less valuable.
Bill, all of my revenue for the last five years is largely a result of my participation in social media. The connection I made to staff at NAR through Twitter gave me an inside track to a first interview back in 2008. The connections I made through social media led to Trulia recruiting me, and my online blogging efforts definitely contributed to NAR approaching me about a return to the organization. So $1 a tweet for 19,000 tweets is a drop in the bucket. $5 a tweet at 19,000 tweets, or $100,000 would still, easily be be worth it.
However, the true cost of tweeting would still be the time commitment involved, not a fee for publication. In the end, social media has been an amazing revenue vehicle for me, but I’d like to think it was due to what I had to say, and not just that social made it easier to say it.
Congratulations on your success with Twitter.
Personally, I still don’t get it. 🙂
I gave it a serious try for awhile but I came way late to the party and never really felt connected.
And like a lot of social media, it seems to work a lot better for B2B.
The question probably is, What would you be doing if you weren’t tweeting or tweet-thinking? Maybe nothing – or maybe something else. Is it life or is it noise?
Todd and Jeff,
This is exactly the kind of dialog I was hoping for when I posted my comments.
What I hear both of you saying is that the medium is NOT the message, the CONTENT is. Intelligent, relevant content, appropriately directed will yield positive results – if you let it. Given the nature of social media, one must expect the unexpected. And that means being open to receiving things and people you didn’t anticipate, being aware enough to recognize opportunity when it arrives disguised as something else – something that catches you off guard.
What both of you deliver is relevant content, written in an engaging manner – and that engaging relevance is part of what you deliver. It is part of the Brand experience that you deliver, and experience that has people sitting up, taking notice, finding value in your words and responding.
When one uses social media in that way, it becomes, as Todd said a way to say it better – it becomes a valuable tool. So it’s not the medium – it’s the content and it’s you guys who create that content. You are not allowing Twitter to use you, you are using Twitter.
That is, in my mind, a critical distinction and one that you both have mastered.