With the growth of Twitter usage, more and more marketers are feeling the pressure to adopt. People are now seriously asking, what’s the utility of Twitter to a marketer, and how should I use the technology?

When I first started using Twitter, I was not entirely sure of its utility. However, I’ve been actively blogging since 2003, and using other social media technologies for longer. From that time I’ve come to understand that a new social media technology has a utility that you don’t always fully understand yet; you have to spend some time learning the technology to find that utility.

I had a better understanding of the particular advantages of Twitter once I attended a conference and was able to connect with people in the conference room more quickly than I’d been able to do so previously with writing a live conference blog post.

While participation is important when adopting a new social media technology, I think a good observer can learn about how social media works by asking questions. I did this in my early days of blogging, when I talked to a lot of companies about their use of blogs for marketing, product management and customer service. Many of the corporate social media engagers told me their success in social media came from active monitoring and engagement.

At first glance, social media appears to be all about content. And, though it is, it is with a different type of writing than traditional marketers have experienced when writing a thought leadership piece for a column. Social media writing is an opportunity to engage with other people. If you blog, tweet or reside in a social media community, writing content is not just about being a columnist or host, rather, you have to be an active engager. If you don’t actively engage your community you will not truly be able to gain the opportunity that comes from speaking with, and learning from, the community. If there’s no give and take, there’s no relationship building, and you’re not getting the maximum utility out of the social media technology.

To engage a community requires time—time to observe, filter and engage.

I recall that not so long ago, many business people made fun of Twitter, and when they did, I had to think about Twitter’s utility; I thought, surely so many people criticizing the technology had to be right? However, I remembered in the early days of my adoption of other social media technologies I had to go through a learning curve, and in the end the fundamental of engagement was the opportunity. I just had to determine, either through observation or participation, what the social interaction design for engagement was from Twitter. I did.

Now the tide has turned for Twitter, and some naysayers are becoming active enthusiasts.

The story of Twitter growth is to me yet another example of the Technology Life cycle model in action, where the model developed by the authors Bohlen, Beal & Rogers for hybrid seed corn adoption by farmers describes the different stages of technology adoption, almost like a 12-step program for addicts, though in this case there are 5 steps.

1. Innovators : Had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented.
2. Early adopters: Younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders.
3. Early majority: More conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbors.
4. Late majority: Older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active.
5. Laggards: Very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated.

I wasn’t an innovator with Twitter; I’d put myself in the early adopter category. Where would you put yourself?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.