If you see me, feel free wish me happy birthday. It’s not my real birthday, that I would like you to remember is 26th September, but this Saturday is my second Twitter birthday. It was then, during 2007’s SXSW that use of the service first exploded, as attendees of the Interactive festival used it to keep up to date on the gossip and more importantly, the hottest parties in Austin. I wasn’t in Texas unfortunately, but the buzz echoed round the tech blogs of the world and prompted me to issue my first, rather grumpy tweet about how unbelievably slow it was to load, as it strained under the festival traffic. A few weeks later James Cridland spread the service around the Golden Square staff as a way of keeping up with which pub to head to at the Virgin Radio weekend away in Dublin.
This year’s breakthrough moment in the UK provides a fascinating snapshot of how a single event can propel a niche trend into the mainstream. When, on 25th January, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross gave a fifteen minute eulogy about the service on BBC One its user numbers shot through the roof, as this graph from Google Trends shows.
This sort of phenomenon can pose both opportunities and pitfalls for traditional media such as ourselves. We can use it to form closer connections to our listeners and create even more two way communication, but by devoting airtime to discussion of it, we risk boring the large tranche of our audience that simply isn’t interested. We can revisit Google Trends though to see an interesting measure of the level of engagement the public have on various subjects. For Absolute Radio there isn’t a great deal of topics hotter than U2 at the moment, the new album, their recent interview with Christian, their astonishing gig for our counterparts at Radio 2 on the roof of Broadcasting House and the excitement around their stadium tour which goes on sale this Friday. Yet when we add U2 to the Trends graph the results are quite surprising, with Twitter beating the band in UK search volume by a factor of greater than two to one.
Much of this result will be skewed by the fact that we’re using a web measure to compare a web product with something else, but nevertheless it’s a powerful indicator of the level of Twitter activity. Mahalo boss Jason Calacanis seems to agree, as he this week offered to give Twitter $250,000 if they guarantee him a place on the list of 100 users that the social network suggests new users might want to follow.
So, are we right to highlight Twitter as we do in our broadcasts? Should we embrace it even further and put it on an even footing with SMS and email as a method of communication? Are we over excited about a very narrow service that is currently only used by a minority? Or rather than mattering whether we are talking about Twitter or not, is it what we are using it for and saying about it that counts?
Cheers
@tonymoorey
Notes
What is Twitter?
For the uninitiated, Twitter is a microblog; it’s Facebook distilled down to its status update and a blog reduced to an SMS friendly 140 characters. You can use that space to explain what you are doing, to express a short soundbite of opinion, or to ask if anyone is in Soho and fancies a drink. Twitter departs from many social networks in that your relationship to other users isn’t intended be on a basis of parity, while on Facebook or MySpace you befriend each other and share the connection on an equal status. On Twitter you ‘follow’ others, like subscribing to a blog, and others may follow you, but there’s no need for the relationship to be two-way.
Who at Absolute Radio Tweets?
@absoluteradio
@The_OC – Christian O’Connell
@Geoff Lloyd – Geoff Lloyd
@HometimeShow – The Hometime Show team
@iainlee – presenter
@benjones – presenter
@allanlake – presenter
@adambowie – the curator of this blog
@cdickens – the boss
If I’ve missed you out, feel free to share your username in the comments.
