Robert Scoble, social media observer and blogger, is continuing his Twitter explorations in a post titled “Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars” he published this morning. He’s starting to realize, like I did a few months ago, that Twitter has created a media vehicle for businesses large and small with great potential.
Here’s what he’s seen so far that makes him think Twitter’s adoption by businesses will only accelerate:
- Books are starting to be published about the phenomenon (for example, TrustAgents, co-written by Montrealer Julien Smith, TwitterVille written by Shel Israel and Six Pixels of Separation, written by Montrealer Mitch Joel)
- “Businesses are seeing real ROI but aren’t sharing that publicly and, really, they don’t have much else that is working to reach the richest and most educated customers.”
- ” In each city there are a core group of Twitter evangelists that aren’t pushing anything else to their businesses.”
- “Facebook wants into this market (and so do others) but they aren’t understanding what makes Twitter attractive to businesses.”
He also suggests a revenue model for Twitter: “Charge for business services. I know businesses would pay for better analytics. Better hooks into their lead generation engines. Better team collaboration services (…). And more features. How much would they pay? Many businesses would pay a hundred a month, maybe even more.”
He offers an explanation why Twitter is better than Facebook for businesses:
- “Facebook doesn’t have a way for you to track all mentions of your business.”
- “Facebook has even less permanence than Twitter does” (content is difficult to access on Facebook once it rolls off the newsfeed page)
- Facebook is mostly used for private and personal stuff
What it means: the “Twitter” model for real-time conversation seems to be winning (open, asynchronous). As I’ve mentioned before, It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Twitter will become a serious threat to local media publishers in the near future. Twitter needs to be studied and embraced both from a media and a user pattern point of view.
Seb Provencher's Blog 
Good summary + insights Seb (as usual).
So here’s a good example… I read this post on Facebook, something I rarely do BTW, and wanted to go to the original post here on the Praized blog to comment… and I couldn’t get out of FB to get here! I’m sure there’s a way, but it wasn’t obvious. That to me is galling. I am truly vexed. FUFB.
Great thoughts Seb, I’ve been thinking about how to tap into this for YPG and I think I almost have all the pieces. One thing I think I need to further explore this concept is how to integrate SMB info into a barcode mechanism that can be taken using mobile phones and then posted to twitter as a lead to “promo’s” or “your friends have found a great deal to tweet about” check it out..
He was the same guy who, after months of non-stop Twittering posted why Twitter is useless..
Link bait is his food, his drug..can’t help it.