mentalblock.gr – Πάνος Κοντόπουλος

Zap and Tweet

Panos Kontopoulos - 05/05/08

I was ready to go to bed after trying for some time to setup a new WordPress blog for my sailing club - BTW, if you are aware of any good WP themes – preferably free – targeted to host a more classic web site, let me know - and I noticed a tweet from Zappos CEO coming to my twhirl window.

And then it hit me !

The biggest argument so far is that twitter is only for early adopters, mainly geeks. It’s nothing more than the good old BBSs where we used to talk late in the evening. Only now we have fancy interfaces and sexy social networking stuff. However twitter population is mainly male technical people, exchanging links, information and hints.

And we are waiting for the time when mainstream business people such as doctors, marketers, salesmen, traders will enter twitter, sharing and exchanging business information like marketing hints, financial tips, insurance insights. Only then we will be able to say that twitter has hit the tipping point. And only then such services will become really valuable in our everyday live.

However it seems that we can use twitter for mainstream business needs using the existing geek, technical population.

Look at Zappos’ CEO request: He is running a contest, limited to twitters only, to suggest an alternative confirmation email for his e-business.

We love Twitter contests! So here’s another one:

We think our order confirmation emails lack pizzazz. They just aren’t fun, weird and “Zappos-ish” enough. So who better to help us make them better than you (since you’re the ones who read them!)? …

A pure marketing activity

Ok, I know that twitter is not populated only by technical people, many people working in marketing and PR are using it, but again Zappos CEO is not targeting the professional marketing guys, is trying to get new ideas from his ~3.500 followers who in a large extend are technical people.

And it feels good to understand that we don’t have to wait for the mainstream guys to enter the game.

We can play it all by ourselves.

And soon they will join us.

twitter: micro-blogging service allowing users to exchange 140 chars messages

Zappos : US e-commerce service selling shoes and many more, leveraging social media in a large extend

twhirl : desktop client for reading twitter posts

BBS : bulletin board system

Διαβάστε ακόμη :