Twitter Finding Its Legs As A Marketing Tool

Ad Age is reporting that Twitter is becoming a "killer app" for local businesses looking to communicate short-term deals and specials in order to drive feet into the store.

I can vouch for this localized aspect of Twitter myself, as I have subscribed to a few local-based feeds, such as cubsbaseball, tweetchi and getoutchicago, which provide the kind of real-time updates about important things that Twitter does best. I mean, aplusk might be entertaining, but he doesn't actually need Twitter to communicate the things he does. He could do the same in a regular ol' blog.

To all this, I say, "finally", and on two fronts:

- The value of Twitter as a marketing vehicle has been questioned in general. It looked like it might go the way of MySpace pages, which were used as not much more than extensions of marketers' websites. Such pages may have connected on some level with their target, but they didn't necessarily deliver anything that was valuable or essential. A real-time update service for local concerns does qualify as a valuable and essential tool, though.
- Local businesses have been struggling to harness the Internet as a marketing tool for well over a decade now, dabbling in local search, yellow pages apps, broad-based SEM and even couponing, with limited success at best. Using Twitter as an intrusive, push-based medium, particularly to phone apps, could be the game changer that finally gets local businesses online -- plus it's free, and will probably stay that way.

Potentially transformational stuff here, folks. This one has a good chance of catching on and sticking.

Social Networking Goes Niche

As titled in this Business Week article.

The gist is that more people are getting turned off at the overt openness of MySpace, where basically anyone can reach out to you (except if you're a teen, in which case you can put up a wall), so social networks that allow you to control exposure of your profiles to others are gaining traction. The article names Vox as an example of just such a niche network.

I see MySpace as filling a fundamentally different need than Vox. MySpace is all about widening your circle. It's a place where kids can connect with other kids from far-flung places, to help mitigate the isolation they feel as their parents place ever more restrictions on their mobility in response to our increasing media and news culture built on fear of strangers and of The Other. Young people, therefore, would like as many contacts as possible. It also makes them feel popular if they have 100,000 "friends" in their network.

People like the protagonist in this story, who fled MySpace for Vox, want to use social networks in a different way: to strengthen ties with the contacts they already have, and to broker, and have brokered, contacts with only those new people with whom they share common interests or purpose.

But there's another thing not being addressed by this article: is another reason people are fleeing MySpace that there's just too much advertising and storefonts being put up there? I can easily envision such backlash against this marketing tactic causing the sun to set on it in the next year or two. And if that happens, what would justify continued investment in broad network platforms like MySpace?